1.29.2007
THE ORDINARY WAR
A friend gave me a book once titled WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING. It was written by a seasoned correspondent who'd seen much bloodshed and conflict in his day. The book came to me two days before the beginning of the current war in Iraq, and, two days before I'd board a schooner for a couple months at sea. The black and red cover cut into me with its title sentence. Hedges, the correspondent, was a scholar and former divinity student, quoting Homer and Napoleon. I thought no better witness and documentarian of war. And, I thought, no better gift for me, one who'd be surrounded by water on the eve of such changing times.
I never read it. Hemingway instead. The Hedges' book fell through some hatch in the ship, but it had left a mark with only its title.
It was four years before something struck me like that again. What hit me this second time was a photograph, taken by another good friend, Cary Norton. He spent a couple months in wartime Iraq, likely around the same season as mine working sails and studying stars. He got this shot somewhere over the desert, a helicopter carrying supplies or food, maybe ammo, to some other sundown desert place. To me, the mystery is what is in the box.
I wonder what the pilot of that helicopter would say about Hedges' title.
For more photographs from Cary Norton, visit www.theordinary.org.
1.13.2007
A friend gave me a book once titled WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING. It was written by a seasoned correspondent who'd seen much bloodshed and conflict in his day. The book came to me two days before the beginning of the current war in Iraq, and, two days before I'd board a schooner for a couple months at sea. The black and red cover cut into me with its title sentence. Hedges, the correspondent, was a scholar and former divinity student, quoting Homer and Napoleon. I thought no better witness and documentarian of war. And, I thought, no better gift for me, one who'd be surrounded by water on the eve of such changing times.
I never read it. Hemingway instead. The Hedges' book fell through some hatch in the ship, but it had left a mark with only its title.
It was four years before something struck me like that again. What hit me this second time was a photograph, taken by another good friend, Cary Norton. He spent a couple months in wartime Iraq, likely around the same season as mine working sails and studying stars. He got this shot somewhere over the desert, a helicopter carrying supplies or food, maybe ammo, to some other sundown desert place. To me, the mystery is what is in the box.
I wonder what the pilot of that helicopter would say about Hedges' title.
For more photographs from Cary Norton, visit www.theordinary.org.
posted by TB at 09:10
BELA
Met with Bela Fleck in San Sebastian, Spain in the hotel lounge. He and the Flecktones played a jazz festival with Herbie Hancock, Eryka Badu, and others last July. Drinking tea, Bela wore a John Deere tee shirt and jeans. We sat and talked for an hour before Victor Wooten came down to go to a late lunch. Some of his words.
TB: "When did you first hear the banjo?"
BF: I first heard the banjo on the Beverly Hillbillies television show. I didn't know what it was. I was just a kid. But I loved it. It struck me. We were living in New York City. I was at my grandparents house. They had a tv in their bedroom, and my brother and I were watching a rerun during the day. I just flipped out.
It was a long, long time before I heard a banjo again. But then "Dueling Banjos" came out, that movie DELIVERANCE - I was about 14 - and it reawakened the whole mammuring, that sound I heard as a child. It was like a dream state. That banjo thing, it struck me in such a deep way. And then it receeded back into my head, waiting for the right time to come forward. And I remember going to see the movie, me and my friends, and I was so into that song, that "Dueling Banjos" song, I had everyone singing their parts, running home. 'Don't forget that part, don't forget that part.' I'd be singing it to them. And back at the house we had an old organ, and we tried to figure out - dah dah dah dah dah dah dah dah dah - on the organ. I mean it just hit me so strong. Which is embarrassing that the two most influential banjo pieces are the two most hackneyed, stereotypical pieces. But the truth is that they are powerful. They are still the instrument. Earl Scruggs.
Still when I hear it, it makes my blood run. It is fantastic. I have to listen.
Coincidently, right around that period, right when I was getting ready to start high school, my grandfather bought a banjo at a flea market. I went up to see him on the weekend before school.
TB: "Did he know-"
BF: He didn't know anything. He knew I was playing a half-assed guitar. One of those kids, the summer songs, some Beatles stuff. But the fire hadn't lit. But that banjo - I just flipped put. I could not believe it. And it wasn't even for me. It was for my brother. On the ride home, a guy on the train tuned it up for me. Then, the fire was lit. I could not put it down. It was the most important thing in my life. I even took it to school with me on my back.
TB: How do you relate to an audience?
BF: I actually like it when I get lost in the music and forget about an audience. And yet, I want their reaction to change the way we play. That's the great thing about playing live - a whole new room every night.
TB: What is the difference in a Carnegie Hall atmosphere and a Station Inn atmosphere?
BF: Sometimes we play a smalltown place, rock clubs, a standup place where people are drinking, breaking stuff, standing in front of the stage. And it can be fun, there's a feeling of abandon. As long as the crowd is not making too much noise. Still respecting the music, still involved in it. I like rowdy when the crowd is still connected to what we are doing. You know, I feel like I am standing on stage with some of the best musicians in the world.
TB: Where does inspiration come from for an instrumental song? Is it different than lyrical songs?
BF: Yeah, I think it is. It's a different craft. You have to be so good with words to write a good song. Because ambiguity is so important with lyrics. Some people are poets, some people are truckdrivers. When I hear a good song, I know it. For someone who doesn't write lyrics, I am kind of critical. Fairly recently, I've loved Radiohead. The way [Radiohead's music] all works together, it is so good. Some of Dylan's stuff. It can mean a lot of things. Joni Mitchell. She's probably one of my favorites.
I would never tell anyone what a song is about though. I think people should find out what a song means to them. Not my image for it. Remember before videos, when you had a great song, Mitchell or Dylan, even if you watched them live, you mind went sailing while they sang. Then the video age came. Videos told you things. A guy leaving a girl, a war, a girl with her hair done up nice. And it was difficult to have your own imagination. It robs some mystery. The eye of the beholder. It would be like putting music to Picasso and that music playing whenever anyone saw that painting. With a good song, you come back ten, twenty years later, it means something new.
TB: Do you usually know when a song will connect with listeners?
BF: I usually get very fond of certain pieces. Like sitting on a gold mine. Usually they turn out pretty good.
TB: Do you think geography affects an area's music?
BF: This is my latest little thought: I think isolation breeds great music. Communities that are cut off. The ones where the music is pure, unpolluted. And bluegrass, a traditonally Southern music, and fiddle music, you know, the shuffle - dang da da dang da da dang - Kentucky music. Kentucky, horse country.
When I got to go to Mongolia, north of China, they were playing music very similar - ding dada ding dada ding. Still the shuffle, only straight eighths instead of dotted eighths.
It was horse-riding music. It was written to imitate the sound of a horse's gallop. And the Mongolians called them horse cellos. Because every bit of [the cello] was made from a horse, the bones and skin. I think it is very interesting that these two rural areas on different sides of the world have the same rhythm. The rhythm of an animal.
TB: You recently funded a month-long trip to Africa to spend time with string musicians. Your brother filmed and you recorded. Good month?
BF: Most worthwhile money I ever spent on anything. That was a huge investment. The banjo comes from Africa originally. Gourd and skin. Claw hammer, the old-time style, which came over with the slaves. We recorded local musicians everyday. Just incredible.
1.04.2007
Met with Bela Fleck in San Sebastian, Spain in the hotel lounge. He and the Flecktones played a jazz festival with Herbie Hancock, Eryka Badu, and others last July. Drinking tea, Bela wore a John Deere tee shirt and jeans. We sat and talked for an hour before Victor Wooten came down to go to a late lunch. Some of his words.
TB: "When did you first hear the banjo?"
BF: I first heard the banjo on the Beverly Hillbillies television show. I didn't know what it was. I was just a kid. But I loved it. It struck me. We were living in New York City. I was at my grandparents house. They had a tv in their bedroom, and my brother and I were watching a rerun during the day. I just flipped out.
It was a long, long time before I heard a banjo again. But then "Dueling Banjos" came out, that movie DELIVERANCE - I was about 14 - and it reawakened the whole mammuring, that sound I heard as a child. It was like a dream state. That banjo thing, it struck me in such a deep way. And then it receeded back into my head, waiting for the right time to come forward. And I remember going to see the movie, me and my friends, and I was so into that song, that "Dueling Banjos" song, I had everyone singing their parts, running home. 'Don't forget that part, don't forget that part.' I'd be singing it to them. And back at the house we had an old organ, and we tried to figure out - dah dah dah dah dah dah dah dah dah - on the organ. I mean it just hit me so strong. Which is embarrassing that the two most influential banjo pieces are the two most hackneyed, stereotypical pieces. But the truth is that they are powerful. They are still the instrument. Earl Scruggs.
Still when I hear it, it makes my blood run. It is fantastic. I have to listen.
Coincidently, right around that period, right when I was getting ready to start high school, my grandfather bought a banjo at a flea market. I went up to see him on the weekend before school.
TB: "Did he know-"
BF: He didn't know anything. He knew I was playing a half-assed guitar. One of those kids, the summer songs, some Beatles stuff. But the fire hadn't lit. But that banjo - I just flipped put. I could not believe it. And it wasn't even for me. It was for my brother. On the ride home, a guy on the train tuned it up for me. Then, the fire was lit. I could not put it down. It was the most important thing in my life. I even took it to school with me on my back.
TB: How do you relate to an audience?
BF: I actually like it when I get lost in the music and forget about an audience. And yet, I want their reaction to change the way we play. That's the great thing about playing live - a whole new room every night.
TB: What is the difference in a Carnegie Hall atmosphere and a Station Inn atmosphere?
BF: Sometimes we play a smalltown place, rock clubs, a standup place where people are drinking, breaking stuff, standing in front of the stage. And it can be fun, there's a feeling of abandon. As long as the crowd is not making too much noise. Still respecting the music, still involved in it. I like rowdy when the crowd is still connected to what we are doing. You know, I feel like I am standing on stage with some of the best musicians in the world.
TB: Where does inspiration come from for an instrumental song? Is it different than lyrical songs?
BF: Yeah, I think it is. It's a different craft. You have to be so good with words to write a good song. Because ambiguity is so important with lyrics. Some people are poets, some people are truckdrivers. When I hear a good song, I know it. For someone who doesn't write lyrics, I am kind of critical. Fairly recently, I've loved Radiohead. The way [Radiohead's music] all works together, it is so good. Some of Dylan's stuff. It can mean a lot of things. Joni Mitchell. She's probably one of my favorites.
I would never tell anyone what a song is about though. I think people should find out what a song means to them. Not my image for it. Remember before videos, when you had a great song, Mitchell or Dylan, even if you watched them live, you mind went sailing while they sang. Then the video age came. Videos told you things. A guy leaving a girl, a war, a girl with her hair done up nice. And it was difficult to have your own imagination. It robs some mystery. The eye of the beholder. It would be like putting music to Picasso and that music playing whenever anyone saw that painting. With a good song, you come back ten, twenty years later, it means something new.
TB: Do you usually know when a song will connect with listeners?
BF: I usually get very fond of certain pieces. Like sitting on a gold mine. Usually they turn out pretty good.
TB: Do you think geography affects an area's music?
BF: This is my latest little thought: I think isolation breeds great music. Communities that are cut off. The ones where the music is pure, unpolluted. And bluegrass, a traditonally Southern music, and fiddle music, you know, the shuffle - dang da da dang da da dang - Kentucky music. Kentucky, horse country.
When I got to go to Mongolia, north of China, they were playing music very similar - ding dada ding dada ding. Still the shuffle, only straight eighths instead of dotted eighths.
It was horse-riding music. It was written to imitate the sound of a horse's gallop. And the Mongolians called them horse cellos. Because every bit of [the cello] was made from a horse, the bones and skin. I think it is very interesting that these two rural areas on different sides of the world have the same rhythm. The rhythm of an animal.
TB: You recently funded a month-long trip to Africa to spend time with string musicians. Your brother filmed and you recorded. Good month?
BF: Most worthwhile money I ever spent on anything. That was a huge investment. The banjo comes from Africa originally. Gourd and skin. Claw hammer, the old-time style, which came over with the slaves. We recorded local musicians everyday. Just incredible.
posted by TB at 14:09
MAGGIORE
The rain paused me, a softening, lulling rain like a whisper. I saw its shadows on the pages before I felt it wet on my face. And I stopped. A sudden rain, the one of buckets, brings laughs and yip's and glee's, hopping over curbs and ducking under newspapers. Downpours, ones dreaded and seen from the dry lineup the window-watchers, becomes a mean dash to the car, a soaked, sometimes ruinous run.
So this rain, this misty thing, spotted the airless, ending pages of my book. It sparkled the red-brown square stones in the street. It invited the umbrellas out. And it made me pause.
[Florence's true name is Firenza, which creates a bird of fire in my mind. Poof! The ruby, all flames, glorious. Can you hear the sound the firenza must bring out. It would perch on churches, the high reaches.]
This Toscana city is a river city of seven stone bridges. One, Porte Vecchio, an extension of plastered square rooms, an extension, like generations on the river framed new bedrooms, parlors, and porches outward until those families whom centuries ago were waving their stitched insignias from windows, now share a wall. Those rooms, the ancient, stained shutters and folding doors, now are mostly jewelry sellers. Their stalls so valuable Mussolini once phoned Hitler to request his sky fleet avoid it.
[Don't burn the Vecchio. Or The Duomo.]
The Duomo is one of four hundred churches in Firenza. It is a giant, marbled in colors I did not know rocks became. Languages, upon seeing this wild cousin of Notre Dame, came up with snipped phrases like Oh my. Nonetheless, my favorite church of the four hundred is not the Duomo. My favorite is a lemon crate in comparison. Her name escapes me. She might not even have a name.
I am in this spot. I am under the grey Roman arch, backed by the great wooden doors, guarded by the six figures of robed witness. They stand carved in the doors of the stacked stone church. It's Piazza San Maggiore. Rain darkens my page, barely, and I must decide to finish the last twenty pages here, in the rain, with the droplets signaling like some silver mine canary. Or go somewhere else. Shelter.
Across the street, two beige awnings cover the front of a leather shoe shop. Women's shoes dance in the window display. They are knee-high, patterned, beaded, and fine. A proud pair of black boots costs 259,00 euros. Some brown ones remind me of slippers. One shoe, zippered and woven in a velvet, looks like an expensive foreign candy, and surely would be the nice-nice shoes to turn all rain into the dashing, ruining kind. The shoe store, Italo Balestri, conjures up an important opera or some Byzantine sea explorer and shares the small piazza with a news kiosk, an African art vender, a bottle-green traffic signal, and three bicycles, two maroon one white.
I just watched a woman walk by. She held the arm of another woman, friends clasped tight under the blue umbrella in the slightest of rains. Italy tricks me, blurs, hands me a glance, and continues on. Her shiny hair was silk; it smelled like the mint-lined path I peddle down in the mornings.
Oh my.
The sellers on Vecchio are brilliant like diamonds. The woman is a red jewel. And this spot, the limestone steps and the double doors built from a small forest, whom bear the six witnesses, whose crescent halos raise from the wood and whose robes bend in an ancient breeze, invites me in. I'm touching the lady's feet, the bottom saint, and they are smooth as creekbed skipping stones. Her feet are almost white from the rubbing. Begger’s fingers pleading for a fair day under the small cover of the church. Travellers seeing the dreams walk by. Mussolini in the war. A seller with canvases.
The rain paused me, a softening, lulling rain like a whisper. I saw its shadows on the pages before I felt it wet on my face. And I stopped. A sudden rain, the one of buckets, brings laughs and yip's and glee's, hopping over curbs and ducking under newspapers. Downpours, ones dreaded and seen from the dry lineup the window-watchers, becomes a mean dash to the car, a soaked, sometimes ruinous run.
So this rain, this misty thing, spotted the airless, ending pages of my book. It sparkled the red-brown square stones in the street. It invited the umbrellas out. And it made me pause.
[Florence's true name is Firenza, which creates a bird of fire in my mind. Poof! The ruby, all flames, glorious. Can you hear the sound the firenza must bring out. It would perch on churches, the high reaches.]
This Toscana city is a river city of seven stone bridges. One, Porte Vecchio, an extension of plastered square rooms, an extension, like generations on the river framed new bedrooms, parlors, and porches outward until those families whom centuries ago were waving their stitched insignias from windows, now share a wall. Those rooms, the ancient, stained shutters and folding doors, now are mostly jewelry sellers. Their stalls so valuable Mussolini once phoned Hitler to request his sky fleet avoid it.
[Don't burn the Vecchio. Or The Duomo.]
The Duomo is one of four hundred churches in Firenza. It is a giant, marbled in colors I did not know rocks became. Languages, upon seeing this wild cousin of Notre Dame, came up with snipped phrases like Oh my. Nonetheless, my favorite church of the four hundred is not the Duomo. My favorite is a lemon crate in comparison. Her name escapes me. She might not even have a name.
I am in this spot. I am under the grey Roman arch, backed by the great wooden doors, guarded by the six figures of robed witness. They stand carved in the doors of the stacked stone church. It's Piazza San Maggiore. Rain darkens my page, barely, and I must decide to finish the last twenty pages here, in the rain, with the droplets signaling like some silver mine canary. Or go somewhere else. Shelter.
Across the street, two beige awnings cover the front of a leather shoe shop. Women's shoes dance in the window display. They are knee-high, patterned, beaded, and fine. A proud pair of black boots costs 259,00 euros. Some brown ones remind me of slippers. One shoe, zippered and woven in a velvet, looks like an expensive foreign candy, and surely would be the nice-nice shoes to turn all rain into the dashing, ruining kind. The shoe store, Italo Balestri, conjures up an important opera or some Byzantine sea explorer and shares the small piazza with a news kiosk, an African art vender, a bottle-green traffic signal, and three bicycles, two maroon one white.
I just watched a woman walk by. She held the arm of another woman, friends clasped tight under the blue umbrella in the slightest of rains. Italy tricks me, blurs, hands me a glance, and continues on. Her shiny hair was silk; it smelled like the mint-lined path I peddle down in the mornings.
Oh my.
The sellers on Vecchio are brilliant like diamonds. The woman is a red jewel. And this spot, the limestone steps and the double doors built from a small forest, whom bear the six witnesses, whose crescent halos raise from the wood and whose robes bend in an ancient breeze, invites me in. I'm touching the lady's feet, the bottom saint, and they are smooth as creekbed skipping stones. Her feet are almost white from the rubbing. Begger’s fingers pleading for a fair day under the small cover of the church. Travellers seeing the dreams walk by. Mussolini in the war. A seller with canvases.
posted by TB at 10:55
