There’s her five, sometimes six-piece ensemble Be Bread in which she plays harmonium (she traveled to India to study the instrument) as well as piano. Knock On the Sky, a project premiered at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2006, combined architectural set design, Japanese butoh choreography, video, and Melford’s compositions inspired by jazz and Asian folk tunes. Happy Whistlings, featuring ensemble works inspired by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s  Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, a history of indigenous America’s fall to the old world, has morphed to include dance, film and a broader array of music. The effort’s name has changed, too; it’s now Snowy Egret. Currently, her most visible collaboration, the one making an appearance Wednesday [MARCH 28] at the Gig, is Trio M with the bassist Mark Dresser and the drummer Matt Wilson. Excluding her infrequent solo work and duos with free-thinking saxophonist-clarinetist Marty Ehrlich, it’s the most modest of her projects in size. And it focuses exclusively on music, though music inspired by everything from classical Middle Eastern poetry to bit-part, comic actors.

Trio M was conceived when Melford moved to California in 2004 to teach improvisation and jazz at UC Berkeley and discovered that bassist Dresser, whom she knew from the New York music scene, had relocated to San Diego. “We used to live across from one another in Prospect Park in Brooklyn and had played together in other people’s bands,” Medford told Pasatiempo in a phone call from her campus office. “But we had never worked together just the two of us. Mark suggested, ‘now that we’re both in California, we have to play together.’ So we started playing duos and trios and we talked about who should be the drummer and we both thought of Matt (Wilson). We played a concert in La Jolla at the Athenaeum Arts and Music Library and it was such a great first concert we started brainstorming about how we could keep this going.’

The threesome released their first recording Big Picture on the Cryptogramophone label in 2007. Their most recent came late last year from the German Enja label and takes its name, The Guest House, from a poem by the 13the century Persian poet and mystic Rumi. “Basically, the poem says you should welcome everything that comes into your life whether sadness or pleasure or firestorm; that you’re like a guest house and whatever comes into your life should be welcomed. I’ve titled a number of pieces after poems from Rumi.”

The Guest House is a diverse collection of rhythms, moods and attitudes. All three members contribute compositions which explains why there’s so much varied personality on display. Melford’s pensive chamber piece “Even Birds Have Homes (To Return To)” has impressionistic qualities. Drummer Wilson’s bouncy, comedic “Don Knotts” is a smile-inducing jazz portrait. Bassist Dresser’s “Tele Mojo” begins as a free-form exchange between piano and bowed bass before becoming something of a twisted samba. Their approach, Melford said, is democratic. “We’re a trio, yes, but not a piano trio in the traditional sense. We’ve taken off from the place where (pianists) Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett took the trio is the last half of the 20^th century. We really think of it as less of a piano-led group and more of it as three individual instruments finding common ground. There’s no hierarchy. Anyone can solo at any time. It’s a three-way conversation between friends.”

Melford grew up in Evanston, Illinois and shows the influence of Chicago’s Association For the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the free jazz organization that’s included such stalwart improvisers as saxophonist Joseph Jarman, trumpeter Lester Bowie, composer-saxophonist Anthony Braxton, saxophonist Henry Threadgill, violinist LeRoy Jenkins and composer-pianist Muhal Richard Abrams. She attended the Cornish College of Arts in Seattle and The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington where she studied with pianist Art Lande. Early on, she worked in the bands of Threadgill, Jarman, Jenkins and cornetist Butch Morris, experimenters all. Along the way she took lessons from respected improvisors Don Pullen and Jacki Byard, both of whom had ties to jazz legend Charles Mingus.

“Even after taking a few lessons from Don [Pullen] and Jacki Byard, people who were huge heroes to me, I still consider myself something of an autodidact,” Melford said. “At the time I took a few lessons from them, I was still trying to be a jazz pianist, learning standards and the jazz lexicon. Both of them had found their own way out of jazz stricture through working with Mingus, found their own means of breaking through those conventions that I was dealing with. When I started to do that for myself and looking for guidance, I asked [Pullen] about it and he said, ‘that’s a great problem and I know you’ll find a good solution.’ He knew it was something I had to find for myself.”

She cites Art Ensemble of Chicago saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell as being highly influential to her compositional style. She didn’t meet Mitchell until a tour of Europe on which she shared the bill with Mitchell’s large ensemble. “His approach to playing and composing, the way he develops this enormous palette of sound and color, the way he uses space, it was all terribly inspiring. It’s not that I want to sound like [Mitchell, Jarmen, Pullen, Byard] but they showed me how to find my own voice and why I should be willing to consider any idea, any art form as material for the music.”

Is that why she takes on so many projects? Does she ever feel like she’s taken on too much? “I ask myself the same thing when I’m overwhelmed with everything. Every project I do, every different person I work with brings out a different aspect of my musical expression. It puts the music in a new context for me. I’m always looking for fresh approaches and fresh ways of working. But why I take on so many [projects]? It’s just my personality, I guess.”

Wilson and Dresser have had equally distinguished and unique careers. The drummer, who’s recently gained accolades for  the recording An Attitude For Gratitude from his Arts & Crafts ensemble, is a first-call percussionist who’s worked with guitarist John Scofield, saxophonists Joe Lovano and Lee Konitz, bassist Charlie Haden and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. Dresser, who’s resume includes recordings with saxophonist’s John Zorn, Jane Ira Bloom, and Time Berne; trumpeter Dave Douglas and composer Braxton’s large ensemble, is also known for his multi-discipline projects, having teamed with sculptor Robert Taplin, experimental film maker Sarah Jane Lapp and, like Melford, San Francisco celebrity chef Paul Canales (“Like jazz, there’s a lot of improvisation involved in cooking,” Melford said.) Melford has also been involved in Dresser’s “telematic” concerts, collaborations between musicians in different locations who communicate through wireless and various computer technologies. His first such concert in 2007 featured 30 musicians split between Stanford University, the University of California-San Diego and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. Melford said she was skeptical of the concept at first but the results have made her a convert. “It’s more than recreating a venue at the virtual level,” she explained. “We have to ask, what is this venue, what role does the space between us play, how can we make music in the same way we communicate? It’s a fantastic project to be engaged in.”

Melford said her teaching duties have become a necessary part of her creative process as well as her career (Trio M will conduct a workshop at the Gig the afternoon before the concert). “It’s a lot to juggle but I have a really wonderful synergistic relationship with my students. I’ve become more aware of my process, more reflective and inspired by my students. Teaching is time consuming, of course, but also very nourishing to my work.”–Cabbage Rabbit

Are artists creating symbols and new representations of our technologically-enhanced culture? Certainly they’re employing technology to make art, in the form of computer generated images, synthesized audio and enhanced videos. But where are the symbols, even if made using traditional methods, for the way contemporary society shares, relates and communicates? Consider cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum’s four-part suite Apparent Distance, commissioned through the Doris Duke Charitable Foundations’ Chamber Music America’s New Jazz Works Program. Despite its mostly acoustic instrumentation, it’s all here to be heard: inter-connectedness, flashing images, viral content, the rants and alienation, the unexpected crash. And it’s all done in clashingly brilliant style with old-school cornet, tuba or bass trombone, saxophone, drums, acoustic bass and one electric instrument: guitar. What’s different from all the other avant garde music produced in the last 60 years is the relationship—you might say interface—between instruments, how one speaks its mind while another, or several,  comment in real time. Tempos range from hyper to dial-up.  Mary Halvorson’s guitar provides all the static, feedback and raw power that the suite needs, even as saxophonist John Hobbs wails in human frustration. Bynum’s function is to malfunction. His cornet stutters and short-circuits before it comes up with things truly amazing. In its abbreviated-way, Apparent Distance is as distracting as texting. Ironically, the only section not available as an MP3 is titled “Source.”

When Gil Scott-Heron died last May at the age of 62 nearly all the obituaries saluted him as “the Godfather of Rap.” It was a title he modestly denied when I interviewed him in 1995, shortly after his recording Spirits had come out. Poet, novelist, R&B musician and social activist, Scott-Heron had influenced the rhyme and rhythms of what would become the rap movement. But the content of his message, contained in “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” “Save the Children,” and dozens of other socially-conscious songs and politically-contrary lyrics, seemed largely ignored by the commercially-intent rap movement he supposedly had inspired.

The interview was a difficult endeavor that saw him cancel an arranged face-to-face, postpone a handful of phone appointments and eventually make contact as he drove around New York’s west side. At key moments in the conversation, the connection would break up and I was left wondering what exactly he had said. I suspected the man was occupied with a mission I could only guess at. By the time he died, it was well known that the suspicions I harbored were well founded.

That someone of such achievement, someone of such compassion and determination would succumb to the very evils he had sung about in “The Bottle” and “Angel Dust” is the unspoken heart of The Last Holiday, Scott-Heron’s recently released memoir. By the time he passed, Scott-Heron had spent a fair portion of his last years in jail for cocaine possession, had confessed to battles with addiction and had revealed he was HIV positive. As a young man, he was talented, ambitious (despite “a complete dedication to marijuana”) and fearless in pursuing his goals. What happened?

The omission of any hint of Scott-Heron’s lifestyle struggles puts a huge hole in the memoir, especially considering that the book was written during those last years and that drug use may have even influenced its writing. It’s especially disappointing considering the honesty and excellence of the book’s first half.

The stand-out tune from Spirits was “Message To the Messengers,” a plea for that generation’s rap stars to show some respect for their elders and what had gone down before. ““[Rappers] have to know they’re not going through anything new” he told me, “it’s the same stuff I went through back then. They’ve got to remember it’s not about them. It’s about community and the people.”

That’s exactly what the book’s first several fascinating chapters are about, community and people. It addresses the years between his childhood in small-town Tennessee to his signing with Clive Davis’ Arista Records. This journey makes for a compelling, even inspiring story. Scott-Heron acknowledges the help he had along the way, including that from a young white English teacher named Nettie Leaf who challenged him to read John Knowles A Separate Peace, a book he thought was “white noise about white people.”  Leaf recognized his promise as a writer and helped him get into a private school that would challenge both his intellect and his social skills. He credits his mother with helping him develop his style and reveals that it was she who, “provided the punch line” for his classic complaint against misplaced priorities,  “Whitey On the Moon.” She also suggested mimicking Langston Hughes by repeating the opening line of the poem—” a rat done bit my sister Nell…”

And he worked hard. Presidential candidates who have suggested there’s no work ethic in America’s underclass should read Scott-Heron’s description of employment at age 14 as a dishwasher in a steaming restaurant kitchen and how he sometimes held down multiple jobs to keep himself in school books. It’s thrilling to read how success –not always the case–follows his hard work.

The early sections devoted to his upbringing by his grandmother in Jackson, Tennessee, his eventual move to New York to join his mother, his hot-bloodied pursuit of an education and his eventual recording success even as he coveted a career as a novelist are strong stuff, written with the kind of rhythm and word play expected of someone whose seen as a spiritual inspiration of the rap movement. But then the book changes purpose as its focus shifts to Stevie Wonder and the effort to establish a holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King. It’s as if Scott-Heron has gone into denial and lost his abilities for self-examination. While the sections on Wonder are worthy in that they establish his important role in securing the King holiday –remember Wonder’s joyful 1981 song “Happy Birthday”?—we didn’t come this far with Scott-Heron to see him disappear.

Not only is the focus lost, the writing deteriorates and the book’s construction suddenly seems haphazard.  An excerpt from a long-held Scott-Heron project called “The Artist” seem to fall in as if from the moon. Chapters lurch from story to story without connection. Sprinkled throughout the text are poems, written in rhyming couplets, some deserving a backbeat and a melody line to carry their worthy message forward, clumsy others just waiting to be forgotten. When one of these poems expressing  the hope that morning coffee, “Will hit the right spot and somehow make it clear/What the hell’s going on? What am I doing here?”  we can’t help wonder right along with him.

The unevenness of the text is probably due to the start-and-stop way it was written over his last decade or so.  The book seems to be of two minds and of the two the first is better. Even as the narrative starts to skip like a damaged recording, there are some great moments as Scott-Heron jumps ahead and out of his life to consider the election of Ronald Reagan, and his feelings on joining the Wonderlove tour. We feel the innocent excitement of the book’s first half when Scott-Heron stands on stage next to a child-like Michael Jackson and when he recalls Jesse Jackson giving an election speech at the San Diego Convention Center in 1984. But largely in the book’s second half, the narrative flow, the thing that made so many of his musical verses strong, is missing.

It’s strange to realize once finishing the book that despite all the talk of “spirits” who helped him along the way he completely avoids addressing the devils that did him in. What a disappointment it is – and telling– to know that someone who wrote so honestly about his early life, who penned lyrics that touched a generation with their biting commentary and hopeful resolution, would ignore the struggle that consumed the last years of his life. The Last Holiday seems to stray from its intended themes and leave us with one that’s unintended: the messenger losing sight of the message. It’s as if he wants to tell us, as he does about his early years, but as during that long ago interview, the connection is always breaking up.–Cabbage Rabbit

Jonathan Lethem’s last novel, Chronic City, is about an aging, self-conscious child star and pop culture icon, Chase Insteadman, who befriends a faded pop culture critic, Perkus Tooth. Tooth once wrote for Rolling Stone but now issues his judgments on paste-up broadside collages that range across genres and generations. He smokes copious amounts of high-grade marijuana while chasing the meaning-of-it-all through obscure films, celebrity conspiracies and forgotten music.

That there’s something of Lethem in both characters is apparent reading his collection of essays, The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. The author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, those slow-to-fade glories of nearly a decade and more ago, once wrote a feature for Rolling Stone comparing James Brown to Kurt Vonnegut’s time-lost Billy Pilgrim from Slaughterhouse-Five. In that act, he joined Brown’s band members in a hazy cloud of hemp. His collected non-fictions, much like Tooth’s broadsides, are collages that considers everything from G.K. Chesterton’s detective fantasy The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare to Donald Sutherland’s buttocks. Along the way, not coincidentally, we learn quite a bit about Jonathan Lethem.

Like Tooth, the 47-year-old Lethem spends a lot of time looking back. In a 2007 piece reprinted from The New York Times Magazine, he marvels at Keith Carradine’s death scene in Robert Altman’s 1971 film McCabe & Mrs. Miller. In a 2009 piece for ultra-trendy literary monthly The Believer, he compares characters in Nathaniel West’s 1933 novella Miss Lonelyhearts  to the brick-chucking Ignatz Mouse in George Herriman’s long-running comic strip Krazy Kat (1913-1944). In each case, to quote a hipster friend, his insight is “totally now.”

The most thoughtful pieces are the mostly previously-unpublished ones that consider his presence inside the essays. He worries that these, “so-called ‘non-fictions’ were themselves artful imposters…” His voice, he says, is a matter of conscious invention: “I’ve never managed a routine book review, let alone an essay I thought worth reprinting, without first having to invent a character who’d be issuing the remarks…” This confession comes on the book’s very first and second pages under the clever heading of “Undressing ‘Me,’ Addressing ‘You’.” Readers have to wonder:  Who or what is really of interest here?

The answer, of course, is everything; Lethem included. Many of the essays, even when considering Italo Calvino or Marlin Brando, are self-reflecting. These bits of absorption facilitate Lethem’s ability to link everything. The things we learn about him —  his difficulties as a book store clerk, that at the age of 12 he joined his father drawing nude models,  that he’d “sooner drown in books than die in space where I can hear only myself scream” — are never presented as stand-alone, fun facts, like which dessert a Kardashian sister favors, but in a context relevant to larger cultural issues.

In the title essay reprinted from Harper’s, subtitled “A plagiarism,” Lethem makes an argument that art inspires art, sometimes word for word. Along the way he cites examples from Nabokov, Bob Dylan, The Flintstones, Leonard Bernstein and Muddy Waters. It’s fascinating to explore culture with one who knows so much of it, someone who travels easily between genres and generations. Sample at random from the book, as he suggests, and be rewarded. But his broad knowledge, while impressive, isn’t the point. With Lethem, it’s the thought that counts.–Cabbage Rabbit

Poetry, in its way, seeks omniscience. And that, unless done without humbleness, is why some poetry, especially the academic sort, makes such dull company. Who wants to spend time with a know-it-all? That’s why the folksy, plain-spoken verse of Ted Kooser, Billy Collins, Mary Oliver and their comrades is so popular. They don’t pretend to know everything. Just this little bit.

Indeed, poetry may be more about breaking the small thing from the whole than about considering the big picture. The big picture, in other words, is best displayed by the small things. You know, no ideas but in things.

Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa knows how to take it all in. He snaps off little pieces of experience and then tries to make it all Humpty-Dumpty again. You don’t need to part the weed (see “no ideas” above) to find the metaphor, often extended, often leading quickly to another, in his lines. And, through cleverness, multiple meaning and sheer force of will he makes them bind.  “Each bud is a nose pressed against a windowpane,/a breast gazing through thin cotton. The cold stings,/& a shiver goes from crown to feet, leaf tip and taproot.”

This new volume proves Komunyakaa a traveler with an acute eye, an aroused imagination and interests as wide as a river’s flood. His compassion is deep and sometimes floating on anger. His insight is equal parts window and mirror. His dedication to music goes beyond swing; rhythmic, yes and harmonically audible. But seldom, except for a quatrain here and there, does it follow lyric form.

And the images, like the hits on Top 40 radio, just keep on comin’. The poems in The Chameleon Couch are dense with metaphor, a dripping, fecund jungle of ideas all tying vine and blossom. There’s nothing plastic, technical or two-dimensionally digital. They create a place where the natural world meets the urban, stretching the idea of environment. What moves through this landscape is at once alive and imagined. Take the opening lines from the poem that offers a single word of its title to the book’s, “Ode To the Chameleon”:

Little shape shifter, lingering

 

there on your quotidian twig

 

of indifference, you are a glimpse

 

of a rainbow, your eyes and iota

 

of amber. If nature is mind,

 

it knows you are always

 

true, daring the human eye

 

to see deeper. You are envy

 

& solace approaching green,

 

no more than an eyeblink

 

in a corner of the Old World.

It’s as if Komunyakaa has answered the chameleon’s call to see deeper. Follow the “glimpse” and the “eyes” and the “eye” and the ”eyeblink,” the “rainbow” colors of “amber” and “green” and how the green leads so easily to “envy.” If Komunyakaa wrote about Humpty Dumpty, surely there’d be egg shell fusion.

He’s also spans time with cultural references, bringing the past and the far past together in the space of a few lines. “Surrender” drops the names of Ma Rainey, Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Ishtar and Caliban in it first verse.(Bud Powell and Sam Cooke show up later). There’s more than musical name-dropping going on here. “Ode To the Guitar” makes the instrument — and the act of playing it — something of the flesh, the notes calling up “blame/& beauty, into the scent of a garden…”

Even in the most technological setting, he can’t escape the past or the natural world. Encased inside an MRI cylinder he sees a galloping black horse and marching trees. Billie Holiday pays a visit, Marguerite Duras beckons and Ornette Coleman buzzes in his conscious sleep.

Political and racial scenarios play out in the same litany of color and culture. “I’ve known billy club, tear gas, & cattle prod,/but not Black Sheep killing White Sheep” begins “Green.” Before long, he he travels back to hear 14^th century Persian poet “Hafez’s litany balanced on Tamerlane’s saber” and then he returns, underground, to declare “no, let’s come back first to now,/to a surge of voices shouting,/Death to the government of potato!”

Komunyakaa is in the moment even when he is lost in time. He awakes to now, in his apartment, in “Gone”:

Somebody is screaming. I spring to my feet,

 

half stumbling out of the brain’s cloudy weather.

 

Where am I, what year of the Rat, Horse, Dragon,

 

or Snake is it. I’m out the door. In the hallway.

 

Damn. I’m pulling on my See No Evil T-shirt.

We can’t be sure, he seems to say. Am I here? Is someone in need? Or are they fulfilling a need? Is it sex? Or a beating?  What one hears on the other side of the wall is all things, good and bad. Eavesdropping is guilty pleasure or not pleasant at all.

…Where am I? What year of the Hare

 

or Ox is this? I walk through the city, hurting

 

for a clue, but I can’t find laughter because

 

I was listening to the wind when their baby

 

swallowed a little lead bird from China

 

& flew away.

It’s no surprise that Komunyakaa emphasizes listening, an act which comes of silence, and music which, in the form of language, generates its own ideas. His lines are all flow and ampersand, there’s not an “and” in the book. And that’s a musical thing, in shape and sound and image, a sign standing in for words.–Cabbage Rabbit

Just what the nemesis is in Philip Roth’s latest novel,  if there’s to be only one, isn’t clear. Polio? Certainly. But maybe it’s God. Or even our superstition and ignorance. Or life, as in mortal,  itself.

Or maybe it’s just playground instructor Bucky Cantor’s proclivity to take things too seriously, particularly when it comes to what his grandfather preached: “to stand up for himself as a man and to stand for himself as a Jew.” All this standing, complicates Bucky’s life. He cannot, like his friends, serve in the big European war because of his poor vision, a fact used later as metaphor for what Bucky can and can’t see. Standing up like a man means knowing better than those who love you, and doing things they would not have you do. Failing this once is a hard lesson. Failing it twice isn’t allowed, even when it precludes a better decision.

Nemesis is Roth’s The Plague. The inexplicable existentialism of the disease’s spread challenges the easy notion of standing up no matter the circumstances. Like Camus, Roth keeps his narrator hidden for a good part of the book, giving the story an omniscient depth that seems to sink and surface as the story progresses. Like Camus, Roth has Bucky pose questions, not to, but about God.  As in Camus, God comes up terribly cruel or missing altogether.

Bucky’s sense of duty is a source of guilt. But it is also the source of his pride. When Italian teenagers invade the playground from their neighborhood where the disease has taken up residence, Bucky stands up to their threats and washes away their spit. His need to pass on his Grandfather’s advice to the boys on the playground makes him a hero to the boys and a champion in the neighborhood. When his love seeks to draw him away to the safety of the country he first refuses.

But not for long. His fear gets the better of him and he takes a job at an upstate summer camp away from the “equatorial” heat and disease of Newark.  The experience give him both a false sense of security and new reason for fear.  He’s bothered that his  girlfriend’s younger sisters cling to him and kiss him on the mouth.  When he and his beloved take a canoe and go to an island where they can be alone, storm clouds rumble in the distance. Despite this overplay, the moments of foreshadowing are chilling against the supposed blue-skies future.

Ethnic issues  — the Italian neighborhood that the disease first over runs while the Jewish neighborhood seems, as if by God, protected — are underplayed, serving as little more than setting to the action. Placed in a time when the Holocaust was reaching its horrific zenith in Europe, the  story seems designed to contrast human and natural suffering. But despite grandpa’s urging for Bucky to stand like a Jew, the comparisons are, like God, missing.

This is some of the genius of Roth’s story and keys to a short novel. He doesn’t need to connect the dots. The reader is entirely capable. Suggestion is more than enough to make the horrors of spreading death part of the tone, part of the setting.

In other ways, Roth seems to telegraph what’s coming. Bucky’s two buddies serving bravely in Europe? Don’t ask. His frequent declarations of happiness — that memory of eating a peach with his fiance’s father  –  suggest unhappiness looms. And don’t forget those thunder clouds advancing as the two make love.

Because of these clues, when the end comes Roth is largely able to skip over it and get right to the denouement. Now Grandpa’s advice works against Bucky. He can no longer stand like a man. His own strength and beauty gone, he relies on pride to carry him forward into a future he didn’t imagine. His narrator, during a chance encounter, hears the whole story. And he, like us, can’t quite figure it out.

Roth’s tale is at once a reminder of how our fears and superstitions color our most immediate reactions and important decisions. There’s hints that an ignorance of science,  in this case, how polio is transmitted, leads to misguided anger and judgment. The ethnic and racial prejudice of the time (not so unlike the prejudice of current time) clouds understanding. There are so many of these intervening factors in the book that it’s easy to believe its title should be plural if the series didn’t already carry that name.

Despite the obvious clues where all of it is leading, Nemesis is absorbing and propulsive reading, the kind of book you want to consume in a sitting (but it will take two). Much of this is due to Roth’s craft, the smoothly consumed rhythms and phrasing as natural as a jump-rope rhyme. It’s lesson isn’t so much not to get comfortable because life has something else in store for us but, instead,  not to be so forthright and resolute because, again, life has something else in store for us.–Cabbage Rabbit

For many of us, the 1960s never ended. Tom Hayden takes that belief a step further. The ’60s continue…for everyone.

Hayden’s book, The Long Sixties, takes the political history of the ’60s and finds its legacy alive today in the social movement that brought Barack Obama to the presidency. He sees Obama as a reflection of the movement politics of that decade. Movement politics –the actions of groups sharing similar visions or issue positions– can be found  in the emerging progressive- populist, anti-finance and anti-corporate movements and in the ignored but tangible anti-war movement. These movements, anchored in their correctness, grow in reaction to the resistance they meet. Without the ’60s, Hayden suggests, hope would go missing from our politics.

Despite the tired joke that memory of that special decade implies absence, Hayden was there. He was a founding member of the Students For a Democratic Society and led the drafting of the student manifesto The Port Huron Statement. He was indicted as a co-conspirator of the Chicago 8, charged with inciting riot at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 (his conviction was overturned in 1972).  He traveled to North Vietnam during the war with Jane Fonda (in 1973), an act that still inspires outrage from his adversaries, before going on to spend time in California politics in the 1980s and ’90s. He has not only been controversial among his enemies on the right, but with radical progressives who, at times, saw him compromising to join the political system.

Hayden describes his political and social beliefs with “the M/M model,” progressive movements in opposition to the Machiavellians “power technicians” who represent the various power institutions of government, business and the military. He places the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and the anti-corporate movements of the ’60s in this model. The movements  grow, as he says, “when sufficient rage and frustration lead to a perception that all peaceful, legal means have been exhausted.”

The majority of the book frames many of the seminal radical events of the decade inside the model. In the process, Hayden paints a history of the times that counters attempts at whitewash and demonization.  His “Promoting Amnesia” section warns, “The general approach is to reduce the whole sixties to a blurred story of violence, sex drugs, and rock-and-roll signifying nothing. This requires a difficult removal of civil rights, feminist and farmworker movements…” The most visible example of rewriting history from the era, he says,  is the effort to “wrap Vietnam in triumphalism…”

Hayden declares that while the political successes of the era were compromised in the following decades, the ’60s counterculture revolution succeeded in taking over the culture at large. “Sixties music and artists still retain a dominant influence. The general public is supportive of the decriminalization of marijuana and a treatment-centered approach to drugs. Things organic, foods and medicines, hold vast sway. Above all, environmental programs  such as renewable energy and conservation derive from approaches that were considered part of the extreme fringe thirty years ago.”

Hayden is quick to point out that the sixties did not hold onto its political victories. War, repression, racisim and exploitation of workers continues and, indeed expands. The movement was absorbed and co-opted, he states, and parts of it were separated from the whole. “Green politics still remain white politics,” he says, echoing Van Jones. The Machiavellians, ascendant during the first several years of the new century firmly control the agenda.

It’s when Hayden ties the movement lessons of the ’60s to more recent events that his book speaks the loudest. And nowhere is this most apparent than on sections devoted to Obama. Hayden, along with Barbara Ehrenreich and others, famously endorsed Obama in a March, 2007 piece for The Huffington Post (published in the book). Yet Hayden has not relented any of his positions to support the president, taking him to task for his extension  of the war in Afghanistan and calling out the media as well as the White House for ignoring its casualties.  “…one hard lesson has become clear to me from experience:” he writes with added emphasis, Domestic progress has been continually derailed by dubious wars.” Though he has not addressed class struggle and the financial crisis as thoroughly, he has, in true Hayden style, linked the two to the actions and philosophies of the Obama administration.

“Obama is trying to navigate between Machivavellians he has either inherited or appointed–the generals, military contractors, national security elites, Wall Street bankers, and hedge fund speculators–and a public opinion of high hopes and growing anger…” he writes in the book, which was published in 2009. “To permanently shift the American balance of power in a progressive direction, the Obama administration needs to encourage both structural shifts and cultural ones, not policy change alone…” But even some of Obama’s recent policy, despite its achievements, must unsettle Hayden.

The book’s last sentence addresses both the president and ourselves. “What he needs, then, and what we need is a New Left.” In other words, what’s needed is a return to the movement politics of the sixties, founded on unclouded understanding of the issues, cast in current terms and propelled by contemporary technology. We’ll be looking to see if Hayden’s take on Obama and the current state of America has changed in the last two years when the paperback edition of The Long Sixties, hopefully updated, is published in April.–Cabbage Rabbit

In the beginning, Robert Crumb’s work was all parody and cartoonish variation. Over the decades, he has breathed form into his illustration, bringing detail and something, at times, approaching realism while maintaining his characteristic style prickly-male legs and ponderous female thighs. The Book of Genesis Illustrated is his longest, most ambitious creation and, despite the subject matter, his most real, though realism is relative to his style (see “A Short History of America“). As the cover declares, it contains “ALL 50 CHAPTERS” and “NOTHING LEFT OUT!” Indeed, not only does Crumb include, as he declares in his introduction “every word of the original text” (derived from “several sources”, mostly Robert Alter’s 2004 translation The Five Books of Moses and the King James Version) but something of his own interpretation, no matter how innocent, via his drawing.

Something of Crumb’s approach to the project can be found in Todd Hignite’s interview from his 2006 publication In the Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists. At the time of the interview, Crumb had finished all of  four pages but much of his thinking on how he would approach it was complete. Commenting on an old 1946 EC comic Picture Stories From the Bible, with its blond Eve and red-headed Adam, he complains about its sloppy drawing and the fact that, “they just make shit up to gloss over and fill in whole passages. They have Eve  saying, ‘Mmm, this apple tastes really good.’ If I’m going to be doing this and don’t want some fucking Christian fanatics to kill me, I’ve got to say, ‘Look, it’s all there, I didn’t change a single word, I just illustrated it as it’s told.’”

No doubt, some fanatical Christians will want to kill him anyway simply because he does illustrate what’s told. We’re shown Onan spilling his seed on the ground when “he would come to bed with his brother’s wife” as well as the cruel consequence of the act. We see a drunken Lot having sex with his daughters, the older in missionary position, the younger girl-on-top. Crumb does not shy away from the murder, incest, adultery, lies and God-driven war that make the Old Testament the more human of the two scriptures. Nor does he exaggerate or parody the acts as he might have in the days of Zap. That’s Genesis‘ greatest accomplishment: bringing humanity and reality to the cruelties and taboos that are so often glossed over.

This may also be the text’s one weakness (though we Crumb fans will see it as a plus). In humanizing the events, Crumb draws in his own interpretation of his subjects’ reactions and feelings. Did Issac actually sit by dejectedly when Esau took Hittite wives? We can imagine that Noah’s reaction to hearing of the Lord’s plan to kill every living thing on earth is as bug-eyed as portrayed but would his eyes bulge again when there’s a hint of the end? There’s a touch of homo-eroticism when Jacob wrestles “until the break of dawn” with a nameless divine being. Would the handmaid look so sleepily satisfied after sex with the elderly Abram? Occasionally, character expression adds comedic touches as when Abraham takes all the males among his household to be circumcised. The looks on their faces shows they know what awaits!

Most interpretively expressive is God himself. The look of  satisfaction when He smells the aroma of Noah’s burnt offering of cattle and fowl after the flood is divinely human. But mostly He’s shown in various stages of anger (Crumb modeled the Lord after his father), allowing only his messengers to appear relaxed and serene.  Crumb’s is an angry God indeed.

One of the greatest achievements here are the dozens of thumb-sized portraits of all the begotten and begatters, the minor sons and daughters, all meticulously drawn. No Aryan looking Middle-Eastern ancients for Crumb! We can  see the different tribal characteristics as the sons of Abraham spread out to fill the known corners of the world. Where Crumb found all these faces can only be guessed. Scholars may take exception with Crumb’s models for the architecture and costumes of the time, many derived from Hollywood. But there’s no arguing against the fact that Crumb has made one of the world’s greatest archetypal and symbolic sagas, from Adam to Joseph, enjoyable in its humanly purest form.–Cabbage Rabbit

Disfarmer is Bill Frisell’s Pictures At An Exhibition, a series of 26 short, impressionistic pieces inspired by the photos of Mike Disfarmer (1884-1959), an Arkansas photographer who captured both place and time in his starkly-lit portraits.  Disfarmer’s revealing black-and-white portraits of country and small-town folk, posed without background, are perfectly reflected in the Frisell quartet’s fuzz and twang. Much like the timeless statements made by Disfarmer’s  70-some-year-old photos, Frisell’s music sounds both period and contemporary.

The Rabbit has previously compared Frisell’s brand of plugged-in Americana to the rolling impressionism of  Grant Wood’s paintings and that sound is played to maximum effect here.  The sound is reminiscent of Frisell’s Music For the Films of Buster Keaton done some 15 years ago, with horse-and-buggy rhythms sharing space with country waltzes and laments. Not only does Frisell’s own compositions mirror the moods and faces in the portraits, he’s chosen a handful of classics that fit the bill: Hank Williams’ “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love with You)” and a giddy-up version of Arthur Crudup‘s “That’s Alright, Mama.” Greg Leisz ‘ steel guitars and mandolin color the music with backwoods sweetness,  and the omnipresent Jenny Scheinman makes both melancholy and whoopie with her violin. Who know what it was like to live in rural Arkansas in the 1930 and ’40s? Disfarmers photos–and Frisell’s music–gives us a dusty sense of hardscrabble life and small joys. –Cabbage Rabbit

There’s a comic quality and grounds for parody in even the most classic literature. In Masterpiece Comics, R. Sikoryak proves himself  adept at discovering and exploiting these  cartoonish characteristics. But while the laughs in his collection are literate, what he parodies are the comics, everything from  Peanuts to Superman.

Masterpiece Comics would be a one-joke wonder if it weren’t so clever. Sikoryak has taken works from Shakespeare, Emily Bronte, Oscar Wilde, Franz Kafka and a host of others and fitted them with familiar comic characters (or in the case of Bronte, familiar comic formats). Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne becomes Little Lulu’s mother. Batman becomes Crime and Punishment‘s  Raskolnikov.  Ziggy is Candide. This, of course, is something different than the Classics Illustrated comics we all suffered when young.

Sikoryak’s method isn’t so much about presenting literary classics in comic form. Instead, he takes comic characters and inserts them into classic literature. So instead of illustrating the Genesis creation as a cartoon (as has Robert Crumb), he’s plopped Dagwood and Blondie into Eden as Mr. Dithers takes on the role of God. There’s no (or little) attempt at quoting or being absolutely true to the original. Dialogue and character traits are drawn with the emphasis on comic content rather than any literary consistency. Past and present high school students who’ve used the Illustrated Classics series as an easy way to bone up on MacBeth or Wuthering Heights would flunk the pop quiz after reading the condensations here.

The casting of  comic characters as literary characters (Mary Worth as Lady MacBeth?) is a big part of Masterpiece‘s genius. Little Nemo is a brilliant Dorian Gray and who better to visit Dante’s hell than Bazooka Joe? Sikoryak mixes up his approach, using the Bazooka Bubble Gum, three panel comic for “Inferno Joe,” complete with special offer (“Ice scraper…ideal for when hell freezes over…”) and fortune (“A winged beast will take you for a ride.”) Garfield stands in for Mephistopheles with Jon as Faustus in three-panel comic strip construction. A series of “Action Camus” covers portray Superman in various stages of Camus’ The Stranger (“So much for the harmony of the day!”).The Bronte chapter is told, cover and all, in the style of Tales From the Crypt. Throughout, Sikoryak is true to style and format of the original comics, whether it be Bob Kane’s early Batman orJerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman circa 1942. He adds familiar comic book touches like letters pages and parodies of special offers …”Lit” as “Grit.” Reading these parodies is as much an education in comic history as it is in literature. And the final installment featuring Beavis and Butthead as Estragon and Vladimir from Beckett’s  Waiting For Godot, well, we just had to laugh…heh.–Cabbage Rabbit

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