Classified as a thriller, Anatomy of a Fall is as thrilling a courtroom drama as ever reached a verdict.
Or did it? From the opening scene of a ball bouncing down a flight of stairs to the denoument of a woman collapsing on a couch, truth is never certain and, as one critic puts it, “the power is granted to the audience to determine [the film’s] true outcome.”
Or as one woman quipped while leaving the Screening Room, “I knew that the ending would be inconclusive.” I could read that reaction on most faces as two audiences filed out on Wednesday, as well as the reaction summed up by another patron’s declaration, “That was powerful!”
Powerful describes both the writing and acting, which combined to win the Palme d’Or at this year’s 76th Cannes Film Festival. Don’t be surprised if Sandra Huller’s can’t-take-your-eyes-off-her performance gains an Oscar nomination–a turn sure to amaze patrons of the Screening Room and other arts cinemas who recall her impish performance in the eccentric 2016 German film, Toni Erdmann.
Another Canne award went to Messi playing Snoop, the dog who chased the ball down the stairs and joined Huller on that couch. Like the donkey and the dog in The Banshees of Inisherin, a film with metaphorical intent much like Fall, Snoopplays a vital part in the story–as well as serving as a recurring focal point for 11-year-old Daniel (a riveting performance by Milo Machado Graner) to find out what happened to his father.
Or to decide what happened, as his caretaker hopes to convince him when he begs for her help in what might be the film’s climax. Daniel’s visual impairment adds an odd, Oedipal twist. His father takes the blame for it; his mother casts it. Did dad fall, jump, or get pushed? Accident, suicide, or murder? And since Mom was the only one home, she automatically becomes a suspect, and the anatomies of a fall and death become what could well be called “Anatomy of a Marriage.”
The intensity never ends, which is why I hedge with the verb, might be. As the caretaker tells the boy, when the truth is unknowable, you have to decide what’s true. She could have been talking about half the things we find on any newspaper’s front page.
Co-writer and Director Justine Triet’s title is a nod to Otto Preminger’s 1959 classic, Anatomy of a Murder, often ranked as the best courtroom drama of all time, and her film is as thoughtful, intricate, and emotional.
More than Murder, and far more than Banshees, this film this most resembles 2009’s Doubt which gained four Oscar nominations in the acting categories for Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Viola Davis, and Amy Adams. The theme is similar and the acting just as intense.
At 150 minutes and with the language split about evenly between English and French, this is far from any cinematic equivalent of a burger and fries with a bottle of light beer. But if you have an appetite for a gourmet feast of the complexities and nuances of relationships–between truth and fiction as well as between all kinds of people–Anatomy of a Fall plays at the Screening Room in Newburyport through Thursday, Nov. 16.
Time to speculate about Time. Just who will be the magazine’s choice for the most anticipated annual designation in America today?
Many still think it the most prestigious honor no matter how many times Time‘s editors spell-out their purpose as not one of promoting what might be called good, but of recognizing what is most influential for better or worse.
So it is that Hitler and Stalin are among the recipients along with Martin Luther King and Pope Francis, and how Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama could both be named twice. So it is that the first pick in 1927, aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, retained the designation despite turning into a Nazi apologist a few years later.
At times they have stretched the word “person” to apply to an innovation that influences all of us, such as “The Computer” in 1982. Or to make a statement about what threatens us, such as “Endangered Earth” in 1988. In 2006, the magazine appeared with a reflective cover to name “You.”
Yes, you. And me, too, which reminds me of times Time turned “person” into its plural, most recently in 2017 when it named “The Silence Breakers” just months before the term MeToo was coined and adopted.
Seems obvious to me that in 2023 there’s a group that deserves the same recognition. In fact, it would be a cumulative recognition of successes it has scored repeatedly across America since 1999 when two high school boys found rifles that enabled their pursuit of liberty and happiness in Columbine, Colorado, after they got bored bowling.
From Orlando, Florida, to Burlington, Washington, and from San Bernardino, California, to, most recently, Lewiston, Maine, the National Rifle Association is a proven winner. No matter the place–elementary schools or colleges, churches or synagogues, supermarkets or shopping malls, concerts or now even bowling alleys–no one is beyond the reach of the NRA and its insistence on protecting the right of anyone, no matter how unhinged, to own weapons capable of turning anyone else into yet another bloody corpse.
Tombstones are trophies to the NRA. What other group has so many to show for its litigation and public relations over the years? For its million dollar donations to pro-gun candidates each and every year, including this year when the USA has already had 35 mass killings with two months yet to go.
That’s like a baseball team scoring 35 runs by the end of the seventh inning.
Americans should admire NRA efforts to block background checks, red flag laws, and any attempts a registration; as well as PR campaigns and sloganeering that has convinced enough voters in the right places that the second half of the Second Amendment is the entire thing. Conditions? What conditions? What well-regulated militia? Whole thing might as well say “anything goes.”
Consider what just happened in Lewiston. Warnings from the gunman’s own family and from fellow members of the National Guard were telephoned and emailed to law enforcement as early as February. But no one acted. Why? For fear of an NRA lawsuit. In effect, the NRA made sure that this man retained his Second Amendment right to own assault rifles just like the AK-47s that Washington and Monroe took across the Delaware. And the AK-15s that Jefferson and Madison had in mind when they wrote, “Anything Goes!” God bless those Virginians!
Now that is victory! And what in this sports-crazed, polarized, lottery-loving, viva Las Vegas country is more important than winning? Yes, Las Vegas! Sixty trophies all at once, a record identical to Babe Ruth’s 60 home runs in 1927! And over 800 injured, well more than Barry Bonds’ career homerun record!
As they say in the world of sports, the NRA puts up big numbers.
As the new speaker of the US House of Representatives said when asked about mass shootings, “It’s not guns. We have to look at the human heart.” In 2016–following the massacre at an Orlando night club that gained 54 trophies for the NRA–he blamed “no-fault divorce laws, feminism, and Roe v. Wade.” That 54, by the way, is second only to Vegas, and it matches the Boston Red Sox single-year homerun record set by David Ortiz in 2006.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Dark Ages) is to be praised as a good student of the NRA, as it isn’t what he blames, but what he absolves that wins the day. Not what he says, but what he doesn’t say: Of course it’s not the guns. It’s the access to them.
Winning the day no matter the cost is as American as it gets. No person and no group of any size or description represents 21st Century America so completely and so to-the-core than the NRA:
In a country bent on ignoring anything upsetting or out of a “comfort zone,” the NRA is deft at dismissing such annoyances as the parents at Sandy Hook and the students at Parkland as “crisis actors” in “false flag operations”
In a country that favors private enterprise and disdains community organizing, the NRA harps on personal rights and laughs at public initiatives.
In a country saturated with the simple-minded bromides of Madison Ave., the Gospel according to the NRA tells us that “Guns don’t kill people…” and “Only a good guy with a gun…” And pay no attention to those snowflake parents in Uvalde, Texas, who still wonder why the police stood down while their children were blown away.
In a country that equates driving a car with freedom, the NRA successfully links guns to cars as a reason there should never be any restrictions. No matter that cars require not just registration, but annual inspection, a license to drive, and rules of the road that fill booklets used as texts in auto schools. And who ever mentions that there are many places where cars cannot go?
Name one person or any other group of any size as American as that. If this time Time should pick the NRA, it won’t be for mere recognition of influence, but to honor it for its flag-waving, God-loving American values.
And it will be a tribute to one of its faithful members who passed away in August, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, of cancer, at age 49. Better know as “Joe the Plumber” who confronted Barack Obama with a question about taxes at a televised 2012 campaign event in Indiana, he became a hero of conservative causes that launched him into hosting a talk-radio show. But his foremost contribution to America, his most patriotic act was his open letter to the parents of victims who died in the 2014 shootings in Isla Vista, near the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Citing his right to “protect my family,” he put those whiners in their place: “As harsh as this sounds—your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights … We still have the Right to Bear Arms … Any feelings you have toward my rights being taken away from me, lose those.”
With a patriotic resolve like that, he’d be you-know-who’s choice for a VP running mate next year had he not died.
But it’s not too late to pay tribute to him. If Time chooses the NRA for Persons of the Year, the editors may choose to put a single face on the cover. Forget that it turned out that he was not a fully certified plumber, and forget that he owed $1,200 in back taxes before the McCain-Palin campaign bailed him out of oblivion. In 21st Century America, fraud is an asset. Just ask George Santos. Just ask Don the Con. Or Clarence Thomas. Just ask, well, the NRA.
No matter how the editors define it, only Time will tell.
What to do with evenings now that baseball is gone? A What-If rant on what I’d do as Commissioner of Major League Baseball:
No more trades during the season, no more start times that have outfielders facing a setting sun for innings at a time, no more playing through pouring rain, no active players in commercials aired during games, no more corporate names for stadiums, and no more “Trop.” Move the Rays to Nashville or Buffalo and dynamite that damned dome to the Moon!
Outside of southern Florida, I’d have near unanimous consent on that last one. In fact, sports writers and broadcasters were bemoaning the low attendance at Rays’ playoff games. In the last week of the season, meaningless games in places such as Kansas City drew more fans than went to Tampa Bay’s round one games vs. the floundering (at that time) Texas Rangers. Through the season, most seats are empty, and when they host northern teams, their few fans are far outnumbered by tourists and retirees rooting for the Red Sox, the Yankees, and even the laughable Mets.
But that’s secondary to the reason that I’d insist on an immediate relocation to a city that already has a stadium fit for major league baseball. Tropicana Field is a disgrace to the game, as numerous broadcasters openly ridicule it during games when flyballs slam into catwalks or the ball gets lost in the off-white ceiling. Catwalks! There are no catwalks in baseball! And what is the IQ of anyone who thought that off-white should be the color of a backdrop for a fielder hoping to catch a sky-high white ball no bigger than a fist?
The Trop is no more fit for baseball than my Nissan Versa is for the Indianapolis 500. But my car serves many other purposes, which that architectural abomination, that waste of space, that hideous eyesore, that insult to the very idea of sports, that oversized toilet bowl is not.
Nashville, Las Vegas, and Charlotte are clamoring for a franchise, but may not yet have enough of a venue; ditto Montreal, but the dome deserted by the Expos on their way to Washington in 2004 may be as intolerable as Tropicana Field. The minor league Buffalo Bisons, meanwhile, play in a stadium that was the model for the first old-timey parks built in the 90s in Baltimore and Cleveland.
Put the Rays in Buffalo. Now. Change the name to the Blizzards, the Tugboats, the Locks, or the Walleyes for the sake of relevance. Fan support could not possibly be worse than it is in St. Pete, and if revenues fall, consider it an investment, a couple years time for Nashville or some other city to get its act together.
After that, my objectives would be met with considerable resistance. Trades, start-times, moonsoon innings, and commercials all have to do with financial transaction, and so what I have in mind would likely be deemed illegal, perhaps unconstitutional, even unAmerican.
How far we have come in the full century since MLB answered the scandal of a thrown World Series in 1919 with the creation of the office of Commisioner! Heed the word. Today we think it just another term for CEO, a business leader who balances production costs with profit. But the whole concept of a commisioner was–and should still be–one who rules in the best interests of the game itself, the game as played, free of any monetary influence.
Only reason games start between 3:00 and 5:00 pm is to accommodate television networks, ditto the reluctance of umpires to delay, much less call off a game. Hey, viewers at home ain’t getting wet, nor are they blinded by the sun trying to catch 100-mile-per-hour line drives, and we have lots of ads to show them. Players in ads? Now which teams would the sponsors rather have in the games chosen for national broadcast, the ones with or without their shills? At the end of a season, that same conflict of interest might include making the playoffs.
That last is why in-season trades are antithetical to sport. By mid-June, good and coveted players on bad teams are playing against contending teams rumored to be wanting them. This is textbook conflict of interest. And as anyone who has read of the 1919 Chicago White Sox or seen the film, Eight Men Out, can tell you, there are ways to throw a game without making it obvious. Oh, I can’t quite get to that grounder… Oh, that throw was a bit wide…
Moreover, at the end of every July, contracts and deals rather than double plays and stolen bases are what MLB is really all about.
Another change I’d like to make: Getting rid of the designated hitter and bringing back the chess-like strategies of pinch-hitting in late innings, along with sacrifice bunts and what we now call “small ball.” But I know I’m way outnumbered on that.
However, I might have considerable support for changes in official scoring. For starters–really, for starters–the winning pitcher should be the one who was most effective for the most innings, not the vulture who comes in late, gives up a tying run, blows a save, but then gets credit for the win when his team comes back in the bottom of the inning.
Also, there are way too many errors being scored as hits. Time to take official scoring out of the hands of the home team.
Granted, those last items are negligible to the ones with money attached, but they all have a common goal:
To restore the integrity of the game. That’s a term that MLB higher ups have frequently used in recent years regarding the use of performance enhancing drugs and substances that pitchers were using to doctor the ball. They also invoked it in the aftermath of the Houston Astros’ trash can scandal in 2017.
As they should have. But what is the word for an organization that will police itself for foreign substances while turning a blind eye to the influence of outside money?
I’d look it up for you, but I see tonight marked on my calendar for Game Seven of the World Series. Time for a good, night-long cry.
-30-
Outside Wrigley Field on a long weekend in Chicago, May 2003. That’s my road-tripping friend, Michael Boer who usually takes the photos, but he gladly handed his camera over to one of two guys who were cleaning the statue when we happened by. They could barely contain themselves talking about how lifelike and well done it was. The face does look much like the legendary shortstop; the uniform has the texture of cloth; and you can read the label on the bat. The two them told us of what to look for when we walked around Wrigley Field. Two guys who loved their jobs, possibly more memorable than a game would have been were the Cubs not in Los Angeles at the time.
2013, the Year of Koji Uehara. When the game began, all the seats were full, and we were surrounded by Minnesota Twins fans.
At a time when the Beatles release a new single and the Rolling Stones a new album, I shouldn’t hesitate to review a Jethro Tull concert.
But I do. Heard them at Hampton Beach Casino a week ago, and their only remaining North American date is tonight in Albany, N.Y. But that’s not the reason for procrastination, nor is the performance, thrilling as always since the first time I heard them live at the same HB Casino 53 years ago. “Aqualung,” in particular, has aged quite well with play between flute and bass guitar that I’ve never heard in the 35-or-so Tull concerts I’ve attended since 1970.
Nor would I hold against any musicians on a stage the constant din of an audience, I’d say half of it, that never stopped talking–all of them loud enough to be heard over the amplifiers. ‘Tis the way of a wayward world. Softened somewhat for “Bouree,” and I can’t help but wonder if that’s because it’s one of the few songs that a casual fan would recognize.
Maybe I was put off by the tour’s title when I saw the billboard on US 1 with the same handle, “The Seven Decades,” for another blast from the past now making the rounds: Paul Anka.
Last week Tull opened with “Nothing Is Easy,” a hit from the 1969 album, Stand Up. True to the title, they played at least one cut from each decade, right up to a taste of Norse mythology from this year’s Rokflot and the title track of last year’s The Zealot Gene:
Carrying the Zealot gene Right or left, no in between Beware, beware the Zealot gene Naked flame near gasoline
A year ago, I wrote an enthuiastic review of that album (link below), the first from Tull to make Britain’s top ten chart since Thick as a Brick and a compilation titled Living in the Past made it in 1972. Today, that chorus may hint at my reluctance to tell you about the concert. Don’t we already know that irrational zeal runs rampant all over the world? One stanza from “Zealot Gene” could be next year’s Republican Party platform:
The populist with dark appeal The pandering to hate Which xenophobic scaremongers Deliver on a plate To tame the pangs of hunger And satisfy the lust Slave to ideology Moderation bites the dust
Ian Anderson–composer, founder, frontman, flautist, and lead vocalist (with what remains of his ravaged vocal chords) of Jethro Tull–knows this, knows that we know it, and makes music of it as comparable to Bach and Faure (we heard both last week) as to the Beatles and Stones. To address it, his songs, surprisingly, have emphasized not politics, but nature and agriculture. Who else would ever write a song titled “A Raft of Penguins”?
Comes as no surprise if you know that the name of the group is taken from an English agriculturist and inventor who helped to bring about the British Agricultural Revolution with his seed drill. According to James Michener’s epic 1976 novel, Centennial, the original Tull’s methods of dry-land farming made the settlement of eastern Colorado possible.
Anderson paid tribute to his group’s namesake with a tour called “Jethro Tull: The Rock Opera” in 2015. Not at all an opera as we know it–“when a guy get stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings”–but an imagination of the famed 18th Century farmer as a modern day geneticist looking to insure an adequate food supply for a rapidly and exponentially growing world population. As I recall, we heard between 15 and 20 songs, all but five of which were from past albums. One has a title that summarized the point: “The Browning of the Green.”
We didn’t hear that one last week, but Tull favorites with the same aim filled the set, including two that critics have called “musical essays,” both with sizzling instrumental passages offsetting the weighty lyrics: The title track of Heavy Horses (1978) and “Farm on the Freeway” from Crest of the Knave (1987), the album that won the first Grammy for Heavy Metal–“through no fault of our own,” as Anderson joked.*
In the past, all this food for thought was balanced by the whimsy of such treats as “Fat Man,” “Mother Goose,” and “Too Old to Rock and Roll” sprinkled throughout, but last week whimsy disappeared after the second song, “We Used to Know,” to reappear but briefly a few songs later with a “Holly Herald,” a combination of two carols from the band’s 2003 Christmas compilation. Overall, the entire set was musically potent, but I kept waiting for them to take the foot off the accelerator and downshift here and there. From the Dot Com album, who would not rather have heard “Bends Like a Willow,” “A Gift of Roses,” or even “Far Alaska” than the menacing “Hunt by Numbers”?
Where were the penguins? How about a “Jump Start”? When do we hit “The Turnpike Inn” for “Pastime in Good Company”? Why not “Boris Dancing”? If there’s to be two from Zealot Gene, shouldn’t the other be the inviting “Mrs. Tibbets” or the Dylanesque “Jacob’s Tale” rather than the ominous “Mine Is the Mountain”?
But that appears to have been Anderson’s point. Judging by his choice of “Dark Ages” from Stormwatch (1979) for the last song before the obligatory “Aqualung” and encore of “Locomotive Breath,” the whole concert was a commentary on the menacing world in which we live–perhaps a reminder that he has been warning of this for a half century and, given his recent output, counting.
Nice to hear a few tracks the other day from the Stones’ Hackneyed Diamonds–an English slang expression, a la Thick as a Brick, by the by–all of which have their unmistakable stamp and could well be from Let It Bleed or Sticky Fingers. Also very nice to hear another Lennon & McCartney love song, silly or not, a full sixty years since waking up to “She Loves You, Ya, Ya, Ya.”
And, yes, I am eager to hear the recently surfaced jingle that Steely Dan made for a beer company that got canned–not the beer, but the ad–in 1971. No Schlitz!
But there is plenty of entertainment for our pure enjoyment from which to choose (says this 23-year veteran renfaire performer), that leaves a need for those who confront us with harsh realities. That they do it with how-in-hell-is-this-group-not-in-the-Rock-Hall music as raucous as the best of the Sixties should be enough to make us willing to consider it.
-30-
Dark Ages
Darlings are you ready
For the long winter’s fall? Said the lady in her parlor Said the butler in the hall. Is there time for another? Cried the drunkard in his sleep. Not likely said the little child.
What’s done, the Lord can keep. And the vicar stands a-praying. And the television dies As the white dot flickers and is gone And no-one stops to cry. The big jet rumbles over That scar the patchwork green Where slick tycoons and rich buffoons Have opened up the seam Of golden nights and champagne flights Ad-man overkill And in the haze Consumer crazed We take the sugar pill. Jagged fires mark the picket lines The politicians weep And mealy-mouthed Through corridors of power on tip-toe creep. Come and see bureaucracy Make its final heave And let the new disorder through While senses take their leave. Families screaming line the streets And put the windows through In corner shops Where keepers kept The country’s life-blood blue. Take their pick And try the trick With loaves and fishes shared And the vicar shouts As the lights go out, And no-one really cares.
Dark Ages Shaking the dead Closed pages Better not read Cold rages Burn in your head.
*The backstory to Tull’s Grammy for Heavy Metal, a brand new category in 1988: Everyone assumed it was a toss-up between Metallica (…And Justice for All) and AC/DC (Blow Up YourVideo), that Jane’s Addiction (Nothing’s Shocking) and Iggy Pop (Cold Metal) were nominated as honorable mention, and Tull was recognized for lifetime achievement. No one considered Tull as part of the heavy metal genre, although each album had three or four tracks that qualified, and Crest of the Knave may be the group’s most kick-ass album. One theory has it that Tull was chosen as a compromise in order not to alienate either side of the Metallica v. AC/DC debate–which was quite bitter as I recall from my freshman students on two campuses that year. Of course, they alienated both. And, oh, did I have a field day–stretched through over a week–of lording it over all of them! Another theory is that National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences was simply out of touch with current tastes. Ya think???
The current lineup, L2R: John O’Hara, keyboards; David Goodier, bass; Anderson; Joe Parrish, guitar; Scott Hammond, drums.
Tull’s second album, released in 1969, include “Nothing is Easy” and “Bouree,” both of which gained ample airtime on FM radio and are on this tour’s setlist. Today, the cover is a prized collectors’ item for both it’s wood-carving image and its inside “stand up” of the band.L2R: Anderson; Martin Barre, guitar; Glen Cornick, bass; Barriemore Barlow, drums.
“Abuse” is too weak a word for their case, as they intend the charge me with “cruel and unusual punishment.” I tell them to save the expense, as I know I’m guilty. So guilty that, if brought to court, I will testify against myself.
Wasn’t enough for me to play at a Renaissance faire weekends in September and October as I have since 1999. Oh no, I had to join a theater troupe that put me in the middle of downtown Salem, Mass., piping up an audience for a re-enactment of a witch trial twice a week during the same two months.
These are long days, and with a job title that reads “strolling minstrel,” I am by definition on my feet for most of them. And those Puritan shoes with the wooden heels aren’t exactly New Balance.
Thankfully, I was able to sit and catch my breath during Bridget Bishop’s trial. Unthankfully, my non-playing time included a few trips up and down the long staircase at Salem’s Old Town Hall, as well as checks on the restrooms, yet another long flight into a basement.
To be clear, I’m not complaining about the odd assignment during idle time. But my feet sure are.
Carver, Mass., October 22:
In the final hours of the last day of King Richard’s Faire, I play, as always, some fifty feet outside the gate facing patrons as they leave. Tipwise, this is always by far the best part of my day, though I’m sure much of what I gain might be called “cumulative” from patrons who see and hear me in various places during the day.
I divide a wide path to the parking lot, on one side of which, just in front of a row of bushes, is a long bench. When there are lulls in the numbers leaving, I steal five or so minutes sitting down.
With shows inside the fair always scheduled at the top or bottom of hours, those lulls come at the quarters-past and quarters-of. In turn, that makes the straight-ups and halves-past quite busy. Since the final joust ends a half-hour before our 6:00 close, those of us working the gate have a name for 5:30: Armageddon.
Right about 5:15 this last day, I’m about to brace for Armageddon, starting with a trip to the bench when I notice that a young man has taken a seat there. Well, I’m wide, but not that wide, so, yes, plenty of room, except that he is lighting a cigar.
Can’t sit next to that, so I settle for a lean on a nearby post. When departing patrons start to reappear, I retake my spot only to find myself in the path of cigar smoke carried by the light breeze.
As is true of busking, the trick is to be in the way and out of the way at the same time, and I’m reluctant to compromise on either side of the equation. But the smoke interferes with my focus as much or more than it does my breathing, and I just can’t get into any rhythm or beat. I can play, but not playfully. I cannot improvise. Nor do I have anyplace to sit. Meanwhile, the fellow seems nailed to the bench, a mobile device in hand, his eyes locked on it, smoke swirling upward and in my direction.
Seems like forever, but here’s another rush of people, so I launch into a rapid standard as if on auto-pilot. Before long, a woman with two girls about 10 and 12 join the man who (finally!) gets up. Just as I notice, he’s reaching for his back pocket as I look back to patrons coming at me.
Moments later, the taller of the two girls stands right before me holding up a five-dollar bill.
Plum Island, Mass., October 28:
Six days later, on my first free Saturday since August, New England is blessed with temps in the 80s. At the end of October, this is likely our last beach day, so I hope to appease my nagging feet with a full day sitting on the shore, sipping water, eating apples and cashews, reading Harper’s, neither walking or standing up.
Of course, they complain during the five minute walk to get to and from the beach, preferring to stay right here. But there will be plenty of winter days to do exactly that, and the rest of me looks forward to them as much as do the malcontents at the ends of my legs.
Luckily, high tide has just peaked, and so I have a spot on a ridge overlooking the five- to ten-footers pounding the surf down below. I read for a while, nap for a while, and awaken to the sound of newcomers who place a blanket perhaps 30 feet away.
In most cases, that distance is enough, and given how many people have come to Plum Island this day, it’s about right. What makes it wrong, at least for me, is the non-stop screech of one or two of the several small children that two young moms are watching over but doing absolutely nothing to quiet.
Every year I encounter this a few times and am almost always able to wait it out, but at least one of those four-year-olds is preparing for the Moby-Dick Marathon Reading and will need no microphone no matter how many chapters he or she is assigned. Seems like forever that I tried to withstand it, but now my ears are complaining as painfully as my feet a week ago.
Younger readers may need to bear with me. I’m from an era when parents never hesitated to quiet, to at least lower the volume of their kids in public places. So in addition to the physical discomfort of the noise, there is a generational irritation of feeling cheated. Put another way, the right to peace and quiet is trumped–yes, in both senses of the word–by the right not to give a shit about other people.
Likely about 20 minutes before I bolt upright out of my low-slung chair, hurriedly pack my tote-bag, pick up my cooler and sandals, fold the chair, and storm about 200 feet down the ridge. Stop and stand still to be sure the screech is beyond hearing. My ears say “Thank you!” My feet put another word before the “you!”
Sit and somehow soon fall asleep. That, too, seems like forever, and when I awake and look around I see most everyone has left. I sip water and take out Harper’s, but can’t find my glasses. No place they could be but in the sand, dropped during my hurried relocation.
So I walk back, praying that I find them before reaching the spot I left, as Screech and company are still there. No luck. Keeping my eyes down, I look around the markings left by my chair, and soon hear, “Mister? Mister?” I look up.
One woman calls out: “Are you looking for your glasses?”
“Yes.”
She gets up, walks over, and hands them to me. Sheepishly, I say “Thank you.”
Salem, Mass., October 29:
Next day, I’m in the Front Street Coffeehouse for a dark roast and bagel before suiting up for a day as Goodman Piper in downtown Salem.
Usually, I’m early enough to finish it all, but running late today has me take the unfinished cup into the Old Town Hall. It’s empty before cast call, and I just leave it aside. A few hours later, we have a break, and I recall FSC’s Mission One sandwiches, and crave another coffee. I bring the empty cup.
I have a history with FSC that may go back into the 80s if it was already there when I began busking Salem. Not sure when it first opened, but it soon became my favorite spot to unwind after playing a couple hours on the Essex Street Mall. In my book, Pay the Piper!, several scenes are set in FSC, along with the frequent joke I made to friends: They should have charged me rent.
Quit busking Salem about seven years ago, and FSC appears to have changed hands, though not its character or atmosphere at all. Another job has sent me into Salem now and then, including one visit where, for old time’s sake, I bought myself and one friend an FSC t-shirt. After just my second morning of the Old Town Hall gig, at least one woman was addressing me by my first name.
What I didn’t know is that they close early on Sundays, which is quite a surprise. That surprise reaches another dimension in Salem, Massachusetts, on a weekend just two days before Halloween. Whatever business model resulted in that lunacy, I find myself in a line to the counter of a nearly packed place in time to hear a woman announce:
“No more sandwiches. Coffee and tea only.”
So my apples and energy bars would have to make do, but I am suddenly second in line for coffee. To get dollars out of my wallet, I put the empty cup on the counter, but when I ask for the coffee, she says she doesn’t think there’s any left.
In a previous life, I’d remind her that she just said it’s all they have, but I’m too old to try reasoning with people oblivious to contradiction. So I turn to leave, only to hear her voice again:
“Sir! Take your garbage with you!”
Takes me a moment to realize she is referring to the cup. Also a moment to realize that I can not allow myself to have the word “garbage” hang over me–and since I’m in garb, over the theater troupe next door. Everyone in the place is looking at me.
As soon as I pick up the cup, I hold it high in the air, the recognizable sleeve still on it:
“This is your own cup. You are calling your own cup ‘garbage’.” My hand waves from side to side, as if showing off a trophy: “Front Street Coffeehouse calls their own cup ‘garbage’.”
As I leave, the woman who announced for all to hear that I had left “garbage” on the counter says with indignation, “You don’t have to be rude.”
That may also indicate a generational difference. So many experiences of my own and accounts I’ve heard of others my age suggest that this generation now in their twenties cannot and/or will not handle disagreement that is not softened by a smile, a nervous giggle, a rise in the inflection of the voice. At times, mere questions are taken as personal attacks unless asked in the tone of a happy-face emoji. Still somewhat stunned, I speak matter-of-factly when I announce the irony of the word “garbage.”
All I get back is the irony of “rude.”
Salem, October 30:
Next morning, I fish my FSC t-shirt out of the laundry and take it to them. “You want garbage on your counter,” I prepare to say before doing a 180 and stomping right back out, “here it is.”
But once inside, I’m greeted by the (also youthful) morning crew, and the bagel is crisp, the cream cheese generous, the coffee delicious, the place as comfortable as it ever was after those two-hour busks back in the Clinton, Bush, and early Obama years. Plus, the gig next door has another four days to go. I hold my tongue, say my thank yous, leave the usual tip which draws their thank yous.
As always, I leave before the doors open next door so I can sit a while on an outdoor bench. Perhaps my conflict–Gotta be another way to do this. Maybe write it up and send it to them. Besides, that’s a really nice shirt–made me forget we had a night of rain.
The bench is soaked, but before I can curse under my breath, I recall that I have a dirty t-shirt in my duffle bag.
How lucky I am! It shuts my feet up for a good 15 minutes before I resume their cruel and unusual punishment by climbing a flight of stairs and stuffing them into those damned Puritan shoes.
-30-
In this photo, I’m wearing it backwards to show the logo placed on the top of a small tap tastefully placed up toward the left shoulder on the front, as you see in the photo below. None of it shows when under a shirt with an open collar, another reason to reconsider my plan of vengence. The cup, BTW, is a classic Gary Larson cartoon. I trust you can make out the action in the center, but maybe not the sign in the lower right corner:All photos by Lenovo.
King Richard’s 2023 season ended with the most unusual weekend in my 23 years of piping and strolling the shire.
Nothing unusual about a rainy Saturday followed by a sunny Sunday, whether we play through the rain or call a day off. Covered by a canopy of tall trees, we often play in precipitation less than a torrential downpour. Cancellations tend to be made only when hurricanes threaten direct hits or when their winds reach us from off-shore. Those trees are old, their branches creaky.
This year, in the seven weekends before the finale, we cancelled two days and played through four that were wet to varying degrees. This is about double the impact of weather on an average season, which may be why the show went on last Saturday: After so many lost opportunities, it offered a second-to-last chance for ticket-holding patrons to spend a day in the Renaissance.
At the final cast-call before we opened Sunday, co-producer Aimee Shapiro thanked us profusely for performing so well through what she more than once called “challenging” conditions. Challenging, of course, is a euphemism which administrators in all professions–politics, education, health, business, sports, entertainment, and the arts–are wired to use rather than admit that anything is in any way bad, unpleasant, or just outright f-ing sucks.
Whereas I’m not administrator, or even a denizen of the royal court, but a lowly minstrel, I’m free to tell you that bad and unpleasant are gross understatements for what happened Saturday.
To be fair to the faire, after the cancellation of two of our 18 scheduled days, ten of the remaining 16 were unhampered by wind or rain. Surprisingly, the final Sunday proved as fully enjoyable as any of them, most every patron leaving the faire smiling and laughing. This I know because I’m at the gate in the last hours of every day.
Now that we have gotten over the surprise–as well as the emotion of a last day at the faire and all that that implies–let’s credit the people who made that last day possible.
No secret that King Richard’s Faire has a reliable, competent grounds crew. We’ve seen the proof twice or thrice every season on days that follow rain. We’ve walked in an hour before opening and seen the pumps and hoses taking out the puddles; wood chips and dirt mixed into mud; mops wiping stages; motorized carts zigzagging equipment and material over rough terrain laced with interminable roots of trees.
But last Saturday did not end with just puddles. More like ponds, around which we tip-toed up to twenty yards to go a distance of five feet. We say that mud shows are a staple of renfaires everywhere, but by the end of Saturday, the entire faire was a mud show. Some of it bordered on quick sand, and I trust no one dared slog through without boots buckled or shoes tightly laced.
And rain continued to fall.
On Sunday morning, little evidence remained of anything more than a slight shower. Small puddles and a patch of mud here and there, but easily avoidable. Walking in before cast-call, we may have been more focussed on the fact and feel of a finale to notice. The amazement we hoped to create eclipsed the amazement already in front of our noses and beneath our feet. Nor were there any pumps still chugging, mops still slopping, carts still darting about to remind us.
What King Richard’s grounds crew did last weekend was way beyond expectation, if not possibility. Whether they worked round the clock under klieg lights, or went at it at the first hint of dawn full-force, they were done before the rest of us began.
Here’s hoping they receive a rousing tribute at cast-call on opening day next year for making this year’s last day possible.
-30-
The show, despite the shower, must go on. Photo by Paul Shaughnessy.
No sooner were the Houston Astros eliminated from Major League Baseball’s playoffs Monday night than an internal memo surfaced revealing the team’s intent to change its name this offseason.
Names on the document are redacted, but the frequent use of quotation marks suggests that numerous top level Astros administrators are down with the plan.
According to one, the move is necessary because “we are all sick of ‘Astros,’ a name that implies high standards.”
To which another added, “Hell, yeah! Standards are for suckers and losers! We are winners!”
Yet another chimed in, “Stars???? Space???? Ha! We’re more about the gutter! Break out the trash cans!”
While a new name has yet to be chosen, the memo includes those under consideration:
1 — Houston Trash Cans: This refers to the scandal of the 2017 playoffs and World Series, which the Astros won by cheating. Over a year later, a few players revealed that the team was stealing opponents’ signals and relaying them to each other on the field by banging a trash can in the dugout. Stealing signals is a time-honored part of the game. Banging cans is not.
MLB responded by suspending the team manager and a bench coach who had since become manager of the Boston Red Sox, the team that “coincidentally” won the WS in 2018. But the team kept its claim to a championship, much to the disgust of fans of teams all over the country who believe in fair play.
Since then, the team has played in three more World Series, winning one, making it MLB’s most successful as well as reviled team in recent years.
2 — HoustonBarrels: See above. This makes that a triple-entendre if you consider guns. See below.
3 — HoustonGougers: As in Price Gougers. No doubt, Houston’s success owes to the huge player contracts it has been able to afford with money from oil company sponsors. We all know what flows deep in the banks of Texas, and if we’re paying attention, we know that recent inflation for all of us at the pumps coincides with overwhelming record profits for the few who own those pumps.
This year the team became the first in the sport to sport an unsporting corporate logo on the sleeve that faced the camera when a player was at bat. In effect, Occidental Petroleum had an ad on screen for at least one-half of every broadcast
4 — Houston Traders: As if to rub it in, OXY, in letters large enough to be read on the smallest of screens, is the company’s ID on the New York Stock Exchange.
5 — HoustonOilers: This covers 3 above with the added advantage of nostalgia. “Oilers” was the name of a pro football team that left the city in the 1990s to become the Tennessee Titans. To cash in, the team would adopt the colors, the designs, and the font of the former NFL team. For a logo, however, the memo suggests superimposing an S on the oil derrick “for a more honest, in-your-face dollar sign.”
6 — Lone StarMAGA: The team’s success is coincidental with that of the equally oily Donald Trump, and its prominence in MLB continues to run parallel to his presence in the nightmarely news. The OXY logo is as ominpresent as the Trump brand, and the trash can scam is baseball’s version of real estate fraud in Queens and Manhattan. For a logo, the memo suggests using the gold toilet from Trump Tower and “promoting the running game.” No telling what the mascot might look like or do with that.
7 — HoustonColt-45s: Another bid for nostalgia. When granted an expansion franchise in 1962, they entered the league as the Houston Colt-45s. The change just two years later had nothing to do with any disdain for guns, but with the sudden exponential growth of the space program, much of it centered in the city. Now that there is a disdain for guns, the team might help counter it in the very red state of Texas with its NRA-friendly fan-base by reclaiming the name of a gun.
8 — HoustonAK-15s: Or updating it to the name of a gun familiar to all Americans today.
9 — HoustonRustlers: Might be defined as pirates on land, and MLB already has a team called the Pirates, so this is a nice fit. Those “who round up and steal cattle, horses, or sheep,” says my dictionary. This name seemed to have the most support among those who were quoted in the memo, a simulateous romantic nod to Texas history and, thanks to the element of theft, the team’s present.
The memo ends with the suggestion that the nine names be put on a ballot and published in the Houston Chronicle so that fans can cast votes. While no one in the Astros’ offices would comment on the memo or acknowledge its existence, an editor at the Chronicle says the paper would gladly run such a ballot on the condition that the paper, and not the team, keep and count the returns.
Asked why, he paused a moment: “We are talking about the Astros, right?”
-30-
My mother, bless her, was a huge fan of Saturday night bingo at a church that offered doorprizes, many of which, I suspect, were unwanted gifts to people who used bingo nights as a way to get rid of them. How a Houston Oilers cap wound up in a church in Plaistow, New Hampshire, is anyone’s guess, but it’s mine now, as is a rather attractive San Francisco 49ers sweatshirt that is now way too small for me but will look good on her greatgrandson before too long. Photos by Lenovo.
As the credits rolled after Killers of a Flower Moon, I offered a comparison to one Screening Room patron as she left:
“We just saw The Godfather set in 1920s Oklahoma.”
She looked up quizzically and thought for a moment before saying, “Yes, I can see that.”
Not sure just what she saw, but I saw Robert De Niro in the Brando role, and Leonardo DiCaprio in the Pacino role–although there’s an interrogation scene late in the film with lighting that makes DiCaprio look like Brando, and his mumbling at times needed subtitles.
Admittedly, my analogy does not go much further than that, as Italians were easily more established in New York by the mid-20th Century than any Native Americans anywhere are to this day. The Osage were one of several tribes forced out of southern states into Oklahoma territory.
Director Martin Scorsese covers that (relatively) known history with archival footage, adding details that may come as a surprise. Whites created Oklahoma because the land seemed worthless, but the Osage struck oil and became the richest, per capita, people on earth.
Only a matter of time before the whites figured out how to undo that, all of this just down the road from Tulsa where, at the same time, a thriving neighborhood dubbed “Black Wall Street” was wiped out by white gangs aided and abetted by law enforcement.
All this is background in a film that keeps sharp focus on the ill-conceived marriage of a white man (DiCaprio) and a red woman (Lily Gladstone, a revelation). Her family is murdered one by one. His is ruled by a land-grabbing patriarch posing as a philanthropist dressed in religion while ordering murders as if he was ordering burgers and fries.
All of it is true, based on a book of the same title that will never be assigned in Florida schools or made available on the shelves of its school libraries. Ditto communities in Massachusetts if book-banning groups–with Orwellian names such as “Citizens for Responsible Education” that fool well-intentioned but gullible parents–get their way.
I may not know exactly what that woman saw or how much of my analogy she’d accept, but I’m sure that the historical revelations–in the face of so many attempts to whitewash American history today–are why she called the film one that every American should see.
One more analogy:
At the close of Killers of a Flower Moon, we look straight down at the top of a drum as several drummers keep the beat for a powwow. Camera rises slowly, and we gradually see more and more dancers circling around it in an open field.
We hear that the sense of smell offers the strongest memories, but the sound of a drum at a powwow puts me right back into the summer of 1977 when I first walked into a powwow on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
Over fifty feet away from the drum, I stopped in my tracks and stood perfectly still. I could feel the vibration in my bones. This was new.
By that time I had been to many rock-and-roll concerts, all of them far louder. At times I’d put my hands to my ears to prevent so much sound from coming in. At the powwow the sound was already in, head to toe. This was frightening.
But only for the moment. Once I understood it–there is a reason that the musical term “clavical” is the medical term for collar bone–it was exhilarating, and I’ve decibed it in conversation all these years.
There’s much about Killers of the Flower Moon, even in the promos, that may frighten or intimidate a would-be viewer: the possibility of it turning into a lecture (it never does), of it being violent (at times it is), of it being over three hours (and no intermission).
Again, only for the moment. There are reasons why the comment most frequently heard in the lobby when the film ends goes something like: “That didn’t seem long at all.”
Have you ever gone on vacation, fallen in love with the place, and then moved there?
Posing the question is a college friend of mine, a fellow Massachusetts boy, though from a very different part of the state. Past the age of sixty, he dared to do what most all of us at some time consider but dismiss as unrealistic, too risky, or outright irresponsible.
If that wasn’t enough, he did it again past the age of seventy.
Keep in mind here that the word “vacation” implies long distance. There are dozens of people living in Newburyport originally from the suburbs of Boston who decided to move here after a day trip or a weekend getaway. One woman from Medford told me that the sight of the high school on High Street before she arrived downtown or saw the waterfront was all it took.
This is not about those whose move is but an hour or two away. This is about crossing state lines or national borders, living where people speak with another accent if not another language, where they eat food you never heard of and play music you never heard.
For my friend it was across a continent. If my memory serves, it was about a dozen years ago he visited Portland, Oregon, and decided not to leave. Except for an occasional vacation, one of which, to San Diego, must have made impression because he moved there about three years ago.
Before Portland, I know that he was in Oakland, a city for which he still has high praise, and that back in the 80s he lived in Vero Beach, Florida, but that’s when I lost track of him. Whether Oakland and Vero Beach were vacation spots he couldn’t leave or something else caused him to move, I know not. Nor do I know if he lived elsewhere out west. I am fairly certain that Somerville and Lowell, Mass., do not qualify as vacation spots.
But twice is more than enough. This is an adventure that very few dare take once, as we all crave knowing that we have some place to land.
I’ve been tempted to stay in places while vacationing or passing through. Key West, Florida, during a college spring break comes to mind, but I was already on a five-year plan and rather addicted to writing for the student newspaper. Plus, it was my Dodge Dart on which four friends were counting to take them back to Massachusetts.
Did I fall in love with Hamburg, Germany? The architecture was mesmerizing–even more so further north up by the Danish border in the quaint medieval town of Lubeck. But the foremost temptation was monetary. I was able to busk in Hamburg’s Ganzemarkt on five of the nine days I was there and returned to America with exactly one dollar more than I had exchanged into Deutschmarks before going over. And that was in the slight chill and intermittent drizzle of November. What would a spring, summer, and early fall be like?
Plus, in 1979, anywhere in Europe offered an escape from the right-wing backlash that most Americans saw coming in the next year’s election.
Still in my twenties at the time, I thought I could make a living in Hamburg and considered not getting on the plane home. Language barrier? Many Germans–and I hear this is true in other European countries–are tri-lingual, and English is always one of the three. I did take German in high school and college, and figured that knowing the basic rules and outlines of grammar and verb declensions would allow me to pick it up in a few months.
But practicality, not to mention claims of family, overruled the temptation of risk.
Unlike my friend, my penchant has been to move to places I’ve never seen, and I can think of two theories that might explain this difference between us:
First is geographic. My friend hails from a seaside town spread out over a vast expanse of what we call “the upper Cape,” where Cape Cod joins broad shoulder of southeast Massachusetts. Wareham includes inlets of the Atlantic with names such as Buzzards Bay while also boasting pine forests and cranberry bogs.
While he grew up with plenty of sights to fall in love with, Yours Unruly was born and raised 25 miles inland in Lawrence, a burned-out, brick mill town along a river that served quite frankly as an industrial sewer for several such towns up near our state’s New Hampshire border. While my friend thrived in places that invite love at first sight, I was wired to get out, ASAP, just give me a place to land and a map to get there.
For an idea of Wareham in the 50s and 60s, you could read Thoreau’s essay on Cape Cod. For Lawrence, you might as well read Dickens’ Hard Times.
The other theory attributes the difference to age. While he may have done it decades ago, my friend’s last two moves have been made past the age of 60, gambling on finding ways to get by. All of my escapist moves were in my twenties with some guarantee of income awaiting me.
Landed my first newspaper job after answering a classified ad in Editor & Publisher magazine. That sent me to Fort Kent at the very top of the state of Maine, 200 miles north of Bar Harbor, or 300 by car to avoid the Allagash, the farthest I’d ever gone in that general direction. A small, yet unassuming college town on the elegant St. John River, Fort Kent was a most comfortable place to live despite my being there just three months in the dead of its five-month winter. So I saw the town and the lovely valley always covered in white, the river with ice.
When that fell through–not the ice, but the job–I aimed for a commune outside Machias, Maine, another place I’d never seen along the coast and also close to New Brunswick’s border. But that was briefly to buy time, mostly to again scour classifieds in Editor & Publisher at the state university library for another gig. How about a graduate assistantship at South Dakota State University? Why not? I was on a bus to Brookings, S.D., just ten months after the move to Fort Kent.
South Dakota unseen? Everything west of Cleveland was new to me: the land turning flat, the endless cornfields, the roads all perfectly straight, parallel and perpendicular, the industrial mess of Gary, Indiana, and then the jaw-dropping, knee-wobbling beauty of the Mississippi River bluffs. Brookings, another small college town, has all its streets lined by trees, an ocean of birdsong at dawn and dusk. I made friends quickly, no doubt because I was a curiosity object who couldn’t pronounce the letter R and made the letter A sound funny. Except for foreign students, I was the only one with black hair and a (relatively) dark complexion, something that a young fellow in that part of the country can get a lot of mileage out of.
Luckily, I was quick to find a trailer to rent on the very western edge of town, overlooking alfalfa fields where mares and their newborn colts sometimes played. So it was easy to settle it. In fact, I left Brookings twice only to move back both times. First time was a hitchhike to Seattle thinking I’d get some job on a ferry to Alaska or a cargo ship to Japan.
Halfway there, however, I caught a ride from a fellow my age from Missouri who said his brother was working some oilfield in the Yukon and the company was hiring anyone who could get there. The deal was a few months of no days off and nothing else to do, and then more money than I’d make in a year anywhere else and all the time I wanted to spend it wherever I wanted to go. I was game, but Canadian customs were not. The agent reasoned that the letter applied only to the driver, and this guy with the SDSU ID and expired Massachusetts drivers license appeared to have no credible connection to the guy with Missouri IDs and “Show Me” plates on his car. As the two of us debated him, at some point I let the word “hitchhiker” slip. With a roll of his eyes, my new friend turned into my ex-friend and continued north while I stuck out my thumb to the west.
So there’s an attempt at a sight unseen that stayed unseen. So, too, would my plans for Alaska or Japan, or Hawaii or China, or wherever a boat out of Seattle might go. Card-carrying Merchant Marines were lined up on the docks of Elliot Bay waiting for jobs to open up. A busking duo awaiting a ferry to Alaska told me they left jobs at a state hosital in northern California, Eureka if I recall, and I was sure to land one, possibly as a music therapist.
Before sundown, I was on I-5 south with a cardboard sign that read CALIF. By nightfall I had a ride with a fellow my age, a guitarist, who told me that Salem, Oregon, was the place I wanted to be after I played a tune or two and told him of jam sessions back in Brookings. He could give me a place to stay a few days, knew for sure that the YMCA right downtown had cheap rooms, and–most convincing of all–his wife worked at a day care center where they were desperate to find and hire a male would would work (i.e. throw a football around outdoors) with the older boys.
Salem O, lush with grass and shrubs, plants and flowers, trees of pine and cherry, and the ever-burbling Willamette (rhymes with “Don’t dam it!”) River running through it, became home for a few months before I thought I’d better get back to SDSU and finish what I started. Coincidentally, that very week, as if sent by a higher power if not the college itself, an Dakota friend pulled up in an 18-wheeler thinking we’d have a couple beers. In no more time than it would have taken us to settle in at Jokers Wild next door, we were climbing into his cab, throwing my duffle bag and typewriter into its back compartment. We were on our way to South Dakota via Kansas City–a city I might yet move to had I a job offer.
I’d have gladly stayed in Brookings the next two years to finish grad school, but after one year, I missed a deadline for a student loan. To bail myself out of that mess, I applied to VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, or “the domestic Peace Corps” born in the Kennedy-Johnson years that was wiped out by Ronald Reagan as soon as he took office after campaigning all through 1980 on “a spirit of volunteerism in this great country.”
Through the 70s, VISTA had a huge commitment to the Native American tribes in the Dakotas where one dozen reservations spread across the two states. After a few months busking in Denver, a place I had seen more than once, I was quickly placed with the United Tribes of North Dakota, not to any of the reservations, but to an educational center they had in Bismarck. Another move sight unseen.
Like Salem O, Bismarck is state capital which always offers intrigue, and there was plenty of it in the bar on the ground floor of the Patterson Hotel in the heart of downtown. I quickly made friends with reporters for the Bismarck Tribune which let me in on some of it–to them, a grant-writer for a state-wide organization was a “source,” after all. Atop bluffs overlooking the Missouri River, Bismarck is a pleasant place to live apart from its unforgiving, nostril-freezing winters that last a solid five months.
Eventually, I’d return to Brookings–my third move there–to finish grad school, and then, like the Prodigal Son, back to Massachusetts, washing ashore on Plum Island where I’ve stayed put these past 41 years. You might think that the two settings, the Prairie and the Coast, could not be more different, but I chose Plum Island over, say, Newburyport or Salem because here I overlook a marsh covered by grass that sways in the wind much like the alfalfa fields outside my perch in the Easy Livin’ Trailer Court–not to mention sunsets on a distant horizon.
Might have been sight unseen when I went there, but I see it everyday now.
Have I ever gone on vacation, fallen in love with the place, and then moved there?
No, but I’ve moved to and then fallen in love with unknown places that I’ve remembered all my life here on an island where many come to take vacations.
-30-
Ottawa, Ontario, is another place I passed through (1976 I think) where I’d gladly have stayed had I a dependable gig–and to where I’d now gladly return for other reasons. Showing this photo because I was in my mid-20s, the decade when I made all of the moves described in the narrative–and because it includes the late and seriously-missed John Yammerino of Sisseton, South Dakota, the friend who showed up in Salem, Oregon, in the 18-wheeler to return me to SD. This trip was a visit to New England with yet another South Dakotan, Michael Boer, who took the photo.
At Salem State College circa 1973 with Buddy Cushman, native of Wareham, Mass. and former resident of Encinitas, California; Portland, Oregon; Oakland, California; Vero Beach, Florida; Lowell and Somerville, Massachusetts; and who knows where else? Now living in San Diego and asking questions that have never-ending answers. Photo by Steve Salvo.
My life in Fort Kent and Bismarck is described in two blogs:
Life in Oregon is a chapter in my book, Pay the Piper!, titled “In Need of No Microphone.” Scenes from South Dakota appear in several early chapters in Piper.
My ’68 Ford Falcon and I aside the Missouri River, Standing Rock Reservation, not far south of Bismarck, North Dakota, 1979. Photo by Michael Boer.
Any documentary of a career that peaked in 1960s America is bound to include footage of the Civil Rights and Anti-war movements, if simply as background for subjects not directly involved.
Timely? When early-60s Chevys and Fords flying Confederate flags rush past demonstrators, try to not look for Trump and MAGA stickers on their back bumpers.
As if to defy that, I Am a Noise opens with a vocal coach on piano making a 79-year-old Joan Baez reach for notes. She gets most of them, and so does her white lab, snout pointed upward, much to the delight of the movie audience.
Back in the day when many in the audience were her fans, Baez was deeply involved in politics, and so she appears in much of the archival footage of I Am a Noise. We see her marching alongside Martin Luther King and James Baldwin, getting arrested and sitting in with David Harris, a leading organizer of draft resistance, and eventually her husband.
In what may be the films’s most delightful moment, she dances barefoot beside a broadly smiling Harry Belafonte who claps to keep time while marching on Washington.
But the film, like time, moves on, and we find Baez thirty years later at Democratic fundraisers laughing it up with luminaries such as the Clintons and the ageless Belafonte.
Belafonte, as far as I can tell, may have never stopped smiling, may be smiling down upon us yet, but Baez grew up with demons that had her in therapy when she was still in high school, and that she never completely shook. She kept a daily journal that co-directors Miri Navasky, Maeve O’Boyle, and Karen O’Conner use sparingly yet so precisely that a single sentence is worth a full picture.
One gives us the film’s title when young Joan writes that she is not a saint, “I Am a Noise.”
After the huge success of Diamonds and Rust in 1975, generally acknowledged as among the finest albums of the era, Baez sank into quaaludes. Two years later, her Blowing Away bombed, not at all helped when she sported an aviator’s suit with skullcap and goggles for what she now laughingly calls, “the worst album cover of all time.”
The first three-quarters of I Am a Noise offer a fascinating and enlightening look into the life, music, a politics of a singer/activists that many women my age wanted to be. (Carole King & Janis Joplin were others.) This includes her relationship with the enigmatic, impish Bob Dylan who many young men wanted to be before John & Paul hit the scene.
Painful, yes, but as a septuagenarian speaking to the camera, Baez interrupts herself to laugh and wave, “Hi, Bob!”
On a personal note, I wonder how many of my generation felt a twinge of lament when she says in a voiceover during footage of an anti-war demonstration, that after the war in Vietnam ended, activists didn’t know what to do with themselves, feeling lost and disoriented.
That line helps describe my life as much as the quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez which starts the film describes hers: “Everyone leads three lives: the public, the private, and the secret.”
The last quarter of I Am a Noise turns dark. Fans my age will recall the duet of Joan’s sister Mimi and her husband Richard Farina that seemed to take the folk music world by storm. That tragedy is but a part of it, and I’ll leave the rest to the film–except to say that, if you are surprised by an opening credit listing Patti Smith as the film’s producer, you won’t be surprised when it’s over.
Dark as it may be, light persists with a scene of Baez, well into her seventies strolling in Paris when she happens into a square where a dozen drummers have drawn a crowd. Baez cuts dance moves as agile as the twenty-year-old alongside Harry Belafonte.
In the last scene, she’s dancing in a field outside her California retreat, slowed down a bit, with her white lab her only company, the same dog who sang with her aside the piano. She is serene, eyes closed; the dog is silent, head down. Her voiceover describes “one day” when she realized that she “was no longer the person I was.”
Talk about hitting close to home! Talk about my generation. Then again, Baez has made at least one appearance on stage with now touring Taylor Swift.
Following her farewell tour in 2018, Joan Baez has devoted much of her time to painting. Here she is with Black is the Color, an acrylic self-portrait. Other portraits include Nelson Mandela, Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Kamala Harris, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Photo by Marina Chavez. https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/joan-baez-turns-80-with-new-art-exhibit-live-streamed/
Mouth of the River 