Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method

One of the great pleasures in my life is having gone to grad school but having not pursued an academic career. I would love to be sure an academic gig, but only if I could jump the ten years plus that I’m striving for tenure (or however long it might be, less or more) and go straight to the part where I’m so tenured I only have to worry about showing up for the few classes I’m asked to teach. That way, I could read whatever I want and have a ton of time to do it. As it stands, I have summer vacations, and for my entire teaching career I have read what I pleased, as I pleased to. No need to keep up with ever little detail in my field.

That said, I studied history in school because I liked it, and I can say that I like reading academic history more than histories intended for the general public, most of the time. I say this not to sound elitist, but because the best academic history operates on a much greater level of detail than popular histories, and I find that detail interesting. One of my big questions as a person is that of the relationship between general and specific.

A number of years ago a friend TA’d for a course in which the prof had assigned Carlo Ginzburg‘s The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries, which on my friend’s recommendation I purchased. I began reading it, liked it, got distracted, and gave it away with the rest of my library when I moved to Senegal. In the intervening years, however, I’ve thought about it quite a bit, and for my birthday I asked my parents each to get me some Ginsburg books. This one, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, I actually bought myself to round out the set, breaking my rule about not buying books any more. The library didn’t have it, I say in my defense.

The book is a series of articles, the contents of which I checked out before buying it, which seemed most interesting to me when they focus on what Ginsburg is justly famous for: documenting popular culture, witchcraft particularly, using sources hostile to the subject. One title explains the basic point: “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist.” We might actually as a general rule reverse the two and note the Anthropologist as Inquisitor, had not Vine Deloria already done so so beautifully. Ginzburg, however, is dealing with an extreme example of the basic methodological question in history, which is that of source material. Ginsburg uses inquisitorial records of heresy to examine popular religious belief. To do this, he needs to compensate for the inherent bias of the source material, in particular the tendency of inquisitors to understand statements of the accused as recitations of the Church’s notions of heresy–everything leads up to the Witches’ Sabbat–rather than as statements in and of themselves. Nor are the accused speaking freely. Everything the accused says is an attempt to on the one hand be credible to the inquisitor and at the same time innocent of capital crime.

This to me is a fascinating inquiry. As such, the most interesting–and without question, my primary concern to me in reading anything is whether or not I happen to find it interesting–articles in the book are the ones that deal with popular religion and methodology. Codification of eros in Titian is of abstract interest to me, but I’d rather have been told the point in conversation with someone over pints than have taken the time to read the article. I did so as a point of principle, having paid for the book.

Definitely not a starting point for Ginzburg’s work. The Night Battles or, I am told, The Worms and the Cheese are certainly worth anyone’s time. I have those both waiting near my bed to finish by summer’s end.

Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

My wife had raved about Edwidge Danticat‘s writing for years, and finally, on a couch on Maui, I read Krik? Krak! in a couple days.  Again, I am confirmed in my decision not to do a doctorate: the freedom to read widely is a real help to my understanding of the world and one which I would not have were I a specialist.  The book is a collection of short stories, most of which take place in Haiti, the country of Danticat’s birth.  She emigrated to New York City (a city about which I have had numerous dreams recently, for some reason), and writes in English, interestingly.  I had assumed, picking up the book, that I would read a translation.

All of Danticat’s subjects are working-class.  I have a feeling–forgive the lack of citations: this piece is not that kind of project–that much of the critical response to this book in the United States viewed the stories in an essentially, if veiled, racialized view of the developing world and patterns of immigration.  I myself have been guilty of seeing some fundamental unity among people in developing countries: somehow, before moving to Senegal, I had felt like “the Senegalese” was actually a meaningful concept.  When I lived there, I came to realize that we had a) the Senegalese people, and b) the Senegalese elite, and possibly a c) Senegalese trying to enter the elite.  I had never been in such a classist society, or at least not for a long enough time to really notice.

Danticat focuses to my memory (I finished the book nearly a month ago now) almost no attention on race, despite the fact, of which she is certainly aware, that her work in this country is categorized racially.  I suppose this helps one understand the destructive absurdity of race in the United States.  Almost entirely focused on class (and gender, one could suggest, though I wouldn’t), she inevitably is categorized racially.  This isn’t to suggest that her book is not fundamentally reflective of a particular aspect of the Black diaspora–Haitian revolutionary consciousness plays a fairly significant role in at least one of the stories–but that white critical types tend to think that the Black diaspora is always about race.

The back cover stresses that Danticat’s protagonists tend to be woman, and in the last, longest story she covers one woman’s marriage, a rite of passage to be sure, from a sister’s perspective.  All this is marketing.  In my writing I tend toward male protagonists, and this is certainly a flaw.  I do this because I’m male and in my life I live as a man.  It’s not a surprise that I tend to write male characters.  Danticat tends to write about women.  None of this is to suggest that Danticat is not entirely conscious of the political implications of writing about women: she obviously is.  That said, were I to point to a particular theme throughout the stories, their class analysis comes to the fore, not at the expense of anything else to be sure.  I am sure, however, that Danticat gets very little attention for documenting the lives of working-class Haitians, and quite a lot for documenting the lives of Haitian women.  The two of course are the same people, just complex as all people are.

There are two points.  The first is that Danticat, because of who she is, cannot avoid in the market place the various labels that are inevitably applied to her.  Given the context, I assume that she embraces them as well she should.  A corollary to this point is that, just as sure as Danticat can’t avoid labels, they won’t be applied to me in terms of my identity.  Rather, I am labeled by what I do: “singer-songwriter,” which is basically factual.  That said, the second point: neither Danticat nor myself can avoid the political implications of who and what we write about.  Writing about anything has political consequences, and the start to dealing with this well is to be conscious of it.

New Tune, “High Finance”

“High Finance,” from “Garageband Demos 2009-2010.”

Sometimes I feel the need to fall down from high finance
I call sick and start driving until I hit Baton Rouge
Where the hotels are cheap and the liquor is cheaper
I’ve never been a sound sleeper so I might as well cut loose

I got a pint of rye through my arteries pulsing
Soon my stomach’s convulsing in the bushes outside
I hit it again and that seller keeps selling
There’s no telling how many that stream down my throat

I’m gonna burn through every one of my father’s connections
And I’ll burn through my subordinates on call
As no prep school could hold me
There’s no point should one scold me
I’ll have it my way or no way at all

The parking lot’s all but empty and the insects are singing
With the moonlight ringing as it lights up the clouds
But I’m too drunk to deal.  I put my head on the wheel.
I’m surrounded by steel and the radio‘s too loud

Someday I’ll get transferred back to New York City
And when that call comes I don’t know what I will do
I might accept it politely or I might lose it completely
And cash out my trust fund until my trust fund runs through

I’m gonna burn through every one of my father’s connections
And I’ll burn through my subordinates on call
As no prep school could hold me
There’s no point should one scold me
I’ll have it my way or no way at all

I put on my rubber gloves and I light me a cigarette
I flick the butt on the bedsheets and I whisper my name
I burn down the highway.  There’s the radio reporting:
Half a city block in Baton Rouge gone this morning in flames.

This is one of four tunes I wrote in Autichamp, France, in draft form, in Summer 2008.  I then let them all sit on the shelf for a year as I worked on Adieu, False, Heart in 2009.  Following that, I began revisions as the spirit moved me, which as it turned out was nearly two years later.

This is probably the least sympathetic protagonist I’ve had in a tune for some time, which all the more necessitates the need for a sweet melody in a tune, which this one has.  One of the advantages of song is that a writer works with two media rather than one, which for example a prose writer works with.  Instrumental music operates, because it is non-verbal, at a deep level with people.  I play instrumental music in my classroom when I am not directly teaching (exclusively good jazz from Ellington and Basie at the earliest through Dexter Gordon‘s Blue Note recordings from the 1960′s–basically, if Rudy Van Gelder engineered it, I want to play it) and despite the number of students who scream that they want a song with words, the music does the trick.

The fundamental experience a listerner has to a song comes from the instrumental music.  Indeed, as many people have observed, at some basic level what the lyrics themselves are saying doesn’t matter: people respond the the sound of the words rather than their literal meaning.  This leads to an obvious problem: because people can have a wonderful musical experience listening to a song with words that are of little literary value but which are unobtrusive, writers don’t invest much attention in writing their words well.

I would qualify the observation above that other people have made (I can’t remember where most recently I read someone who made the point) that the actual meaning of words doesn’t matter in song, but rather the musicality of the words.  What I would say is that the meaning doesn’t immediately matter.  This is the trick.  In an industry that wants to sell a lot of stuff and quickly, the goal of the product is immediate impact.  Immediately, the words don’t matter, as long as you have them so people don’t confuse your product for something like, God forbid, instrumental jazz.  What happens, though, is that at some point, if you have words, people are going to start to think about them.  At that point, if they mean something, it gives another layer of meaning to the song, people stick with the song, and the song in its turn sticks with people.  Writing good lyrics is an investment in a song’s future rather than its immediate present.

As usual, I don’t make any particular claims about this particular tune at this point.  It’s still fresh.  That said, I’m pretty pleased about it.  Any tune that deals with the fundamental anti-social criminality of financial capitalism is OK in my book, even for just trying.

A note on my musical progress as I close: I’m off today (in three hours’ time) to Riverside for over a month.  I’m bringing my guitar, mandola, and laptop on which I record demos.  I expect to have few distractions and am cautiously optimistic I’ll be able to devote some serious time to writing.  I haven’t made any decisions about a next record, but depending on circumstances it will be either recorded in a semi-live setting with other musicians (that is to say, we’ll record basic live tracks to ProTools and then overdub) or I’ll do the one-man-band thing.  The tunes I have so far seem pretty good so I’m optimistic.

C.L.R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution

Get to a good library, get this book, and read it.

I was at a friend’s house and by my habit was looking at his bookshelf.  I grabbed  Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution as well as a copy of Nkrumah’s autobiography, and he told me to take them home, on the condition that I report back to him on the quality of the books: he had bought them but not yet read them, as many bookworms will do.  C.L.R. James passes the test.  The book is out of print, unfortumately, so get right and get a library card, which is my new modus vivendi as I’ve noted before.

Very briefly, the edition I read was originally published in 1977, the bulk of which was published as a fairly lengthy pamphlet in (according to the copyright) 1962, while Nkrumah was still in power, with additions from the period as he was, in James’ analysis, losing his footing.  James’ dedication of the text, to Nkrumah, whom he called Francis, is quite beautiful:

To FRANCIS

in never-to-be forgotten memory.  Like Cromwell and Lenin, he initiated the destruction of a régime in decay — a tremendous achievement; but like them, he failed to create the new society.

James is among other things one of a tiny few of true stylists of 20th century English prose.  He is most famous for The Black Jacobins for perfectly good reasons–i.e., you won’t read a better book–but, truly, should be required reading for anyone trying to get their prose in shape, myself included.  He’s also one of those examples of the colonially educated who mastered the language of the oppressor to a greater extent than any of the oppressors themselves.  I can’t imagine too many writers today, again including myself, who would bother using the correctly-accented “régime” rather than the lazy man’s “regime,” much less know that there is actually a difference.  James, of course knows that both history and language matter, and thus could not but acknowledge the history of the word as he wrote it.

James writes against an entire literature that posits decolonization as something that Europeans did.  Put so, it’s, I hope, obvious how idiotic an idea that is.  I’d note, however, that there is an analogous trend in US historiography that sees the end of slavery as the work of white people (witness California History Standard 10.3.4, which places the end of the slave trade in the unit on the industrial revolution) or the Civil Rights Act as Johnson’s achievment (witness Hillary Clinton’s campaign).  James begins his text with a discussion of “the Myth,” capitalized.  That is, the notion that there’s no way that Black people could actually make history for themselves.  His book, in addition to an analysis of revolutionary process and a very convincing defense from a Marxist perspective of non-violence, is an illustration of the truth that Black people and indeed all people make their own history, even if as Marx famously noted in the Eighteenth Brumaire that

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

In any event, James amply demonstrates that it was the mass movement in Ghana that required the British to leave.  Nkrumah’s role was to understand this and give it focus.  James’ dedication above places Nkrumah on par with Cromwell (interesting choice, and certainly not one expected by this US-educated reader) and Lenin, and his book absolutely justifies that assessment.  Truly, Ghana’s independence movement was in fact a revolution–not a term one finds in American textbooks in this context–and Nkrumah both a theoretician and practitioner of revolution on par with a Lenin.

I have to think that the broad denial of the term “revolution” to Ghana in our textbooks is part of a general tendency of the propertied classes to erase the idea of revolutionary change from the list of possible futures we face.  The materials we as teachers get to work with, textbooks and such, subtly categorize “revolutions” into two categories: the good and the bad.  The “good” ones are those of anglophonic whites: those of England such as it was and the United States.  Reports of revolutionary violence are minimized in textbook treatments of these subjects or dismissed as aberrations.  That both merely confirmed already-existing elites rather than replaced them exposes the agenda of the textbook writers: convince young people, the ones who might actually change things, that change is at minimum not desirable, more likely not actually possible.  The “bad” revolutions are portrayed as inevitable descents into bloodbaths: we see the French and Russian examples at their worst.  Students who because of their decent nature–that is to say, the very people who under capitalism are most likely to want to overthrow it–would gravitate toward thoroughgoing social revolutions are instead taught to revile the very notion of revolution, because they are taught to mistake revolutionary violence for revolution itself.  Ghana’s counter-example gives lie to this.

A worthwhile video, in two parts:

Part One:

Part Two:

As a postscript, I would note that I will get back to blogging about music on my next post.  Summer started, I relaxed and read quite a bit (have three more book blog posts to go until I’m caught up), and only just put the finishing touches on a new tune I hope to record tomorrow.  I’ll be in Riverside for over a month, and the focus there will be songwriting, as well as getting back into shape.

Jorge Amado, Sea of Death (Mar Morto)

In my post on the book I read on capoeira I mentioned the comic Daytripper that I’ve been reading, and its referencing of Yemanja.  I noted that I’d found reference to a novel in which Yemanja loomed large on Wikipedia and that I’d gone to the library to find it, and it was there that I stumbled on the capoeira book.  This is that novel: I finished it on Sunday, June 14.

Jorge Amado‘s Sea of Death–I assume the title works better in Portuguese–did what I wanted, which was to get some better feel for Yemanja and learn something about a part of the world I know nothing about.  The novel takes form in a way I like: the plot to the extent that there is one is simple to the point of obviousness, and the ending completely predictable.  A structure such as this allows one to focus on what is happening in a given episode for what it is rather than as it relates to a larger plot.  Plot to me is about the least interesting device a writer can have, even if it is a useful one.  There was a Simpsons episode at the end of which the family tried to derive some meaning from the night’s events.  I can’t remember if it was Bart or Lisa who ended the discussion by saying “it was just a bunch of stuff that happened.”  I like my literature and song this way.

That said, the book was absolutely racially problematic.  I am not terribly familiar with Brazilian society or history, but I recall something of a dust-up a few years ago about affirmative action policies put in place in Brazil.  My impression was that white Brazilians, in of course a specific way but not at all differently than white Americans, found it almost totally impossible to acknowledge anything but the most obvious and explicit racism.  Amado is considered a leftist, and with good reason.  He was part of the Communist Party, though he left it, and certainly in this book the focus is on working-class people.

That said, the book absolutely is based on familiar racial categories.  The main character–male, too, as the novel, even when focusing on female characters has a palpably male point of view–is white.  There is an oversexed “mulatto girl” who aggressively seduces that male character to have a child and therefore “improve” her lineage, racially.  I can hear the post-racialists now: “but that is realistic–that’s how things were.  Amado was just showing it for what it was.”  #1: how the hell do you know unless you’ve somehow gained a deep insight into the Brazil of the 1930′s?  #2: while surely there were people who made such considerations, they are normalized or even naturalized unless the author somehow throws them into critical relief.  While there’s definitely no excuse for the oversexed mulatta–not my word, obviously–stereotype, the desire to “improve” her racial lineage could be disarmed and contextualized, and above counterbalanced by a non-white character who embraces blackness, however defined.  Then, instead of the only option being the desire to lighten, we see that that might be a historical choice.  And in any event, I would point out that I don’t know any people of color who want to be white.  In my experience–take it as you will–people want to be who they are but want racism to end.  It’s white people’s fantasy that people of color want to be like them.

Separated into a paragraph of its own, for emphasis: a) I don’t know any people of color who advocate for a post-racial society and b) every person of color that I know advocates for a post-racist society.  The only people I have ever met who advocate for a post-racial society have been white people.  A post-racial society: or, a society without black and brown people.

Jon Krakauer: Into the Wild

Image via Wikipedia

I took on a new student for home instruction, and asked her what she wanted to read for English. She told me she didn’t like to read. I responded that that was nuts, and if indeed she was planning on going to college next year she was going to need to learn to love reading. She then said that, well, she had started this book her sister had, Jon Krakauer‘s Into the Wild. Fair enough, I said, and read it I did.

I was predisposed after a few pages to be unsympathetic to the protagonist, Chris McCandless. McCandless, for those who have neither read the book nor seen the film, was a well-off surburban white kid who went to good schools (Emory, no less, for college), who decided that society sucked and took off rambling on his own, eventually going to Alaska with few provisions, where he met his end.

The read was interesting, not so much for the subject matter–the most interesting parts of the book dealt with the people McCandless met on his way rather than any of the ostensibly primary figures–but my reaction to it. I started off with a great antipathy toward McCandless. As I read, that antipathy diminished noticeably, replaced by an increasingly intense antipathy toward the author, Krakauer. Never had this experience with a book before.

It’s probably not good to speak ill of the dead, but I need to begin with McCandless for my critique to make any sense. Interestingly, fairly early on in the book Krakauer, who had first wrote about McCandless in a piece for Outside magazine, details negative reactions to the subject of that piece. Fairly uniformly, they come from Alaskans who feel McCandless was nuts, stupid, or disrespectful at some level of the “wild” he went into, underestimating the difficulty of living more or less off the land in rural Alaska. None of these critiques is without merit at some level, particularly, I’d think the third.

McCandless thought that modern consumer capitalist (my words, not his) society is bunk, and he was right. He seems to have had some awareness–as far as I can tell from what Krakauer includes an intellectual awareness but awareness nonetheless–of racism, and intellectually, this is at Emory, he put himself on the right side of that discussion. The problem is that well-off, well-educated white people who think that the system is bunk have no right–read that, no right whatsoever–to do anything but get their asses right inside the system and try to help the people whom the system is screwing most egregiously. McCandless’ case is compounded that he was from a Washington, DC suburb and his father worked for NASA. McCandless very likely could have mobilized a lot of personal connections to get involved on the inside.

Krakauer suggests, based on some of McCandless’ last diary entries, that he had decided that his rambling days were through. It’s entirely possible, then, that he would have returned to the lower 48 and gotten down to the real work of trying to fix things. That said, it is a typically but no less unacceptably white (and upper/upper-middle class white) reaction to injustice to take off from discomfort and feel oneself free. That is to say, the typically white response (not exclusively white by any means) is a selfish one. Anyone studying race critically will tell you that while our racial system is obviously unequal, the privilege it doles out to whites is not freedom. White people think that they can be free by running away. We can’t, and that more than anything was McCandless’ mistake, aside from up and dying of it.

The villain of the story, however, is not McCandless, but Krakauer. His metier, part outdoor/part travel narrative journalist, is ripe for willful ignorance about all kinds of social relationships. Without doubt, his trade could be done well: I know a travel writer, but he thinks critically about his own position vis-a-vis his destinations and more importantly the people who live in those destinations. Going far away is, like everything else human, a social relationship. Krakauer has no clue about this. I knew this when I read the following lines, worth quoting:

McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the cosmos itself (66).

Those are the words of a lonely, lonely man. Which “women,” Krakauer? This is a man who can’t distinguish woman from woman. His choice of words in this case is way, way too revealing, not so much for the words themselves, but because he reserves archaic language for the points at which sex comes up. You don’t in his book, get “succor” from a well-earned beer after a hike or something, or get together with the gang for some “congress.” Why the change in tone, Krakauer? Uncomfortable? Jackass. There is, indeed, a pattern in the book. It gets better (i.e., worse) on 156:

The hint of what was concealed in those shadows terrified me, but I caught sight of something in the glimpse, some forbidden and elemental riddle that was no less compelling than the sweet, hidden petals of a woman’s sex.

I honestly don’t know who to despise more: Krakauer or the editor who let that sentence get through. Regardless, these are not the words of a man who gets laid with any consistency, or at all. Women’s bodies–and this underlies the whole book–are in Krakauer’s mental universe, foreign. Just like the “wild,” so-called.

This is the thing. Getting out of a city is well and good, very good as a matter of fact, because as a species we did not develop to live with concrete and cars. Smarter people than me–or, at least, people with more time on their hands to cover it at length–have, however, amply documented the patriarchal tendencies of certain (large) swaths of the get back to nature movement, in addition to the white supremacist/colonialist tendencies, in the United States (my country and therefore my problem), all the way back to Muir, whatever else you will say about the man. You may be pleased that Teddy Roosevelt set up the park system, but you’d be wrong to imagine that his motives were pure, because they weren’t.

To Krakauer, “the wild” is away, somewhere to where one goes. It’s mysterious, forbidding, and other, just like a woman’s body (in his obviously screwed-up psyche). The problem is, any of these places that well-off white people drive their 4WD Subaru station wagons to for some communing with nature are, to some peoples, home.

“The wild” isn’t wild. It’s a system like any other, and as historians have demonstrated–as if this needed any proving if you paid attention to indigenous people–human beings peopled the entire globe by not later than 1000 years ago, and that’s a very, very late date. Some peoples lived more densely on the land than others. When Europeans from a relatively densely populated society come to places that are more sparsely populated, they see “empty space.” Ask the people to whom that land belongs (or vice versa, one might more properly say), and they’ll tell you that the land is not empty, not other, and certainly not wild. There are specific ways in any environment that human beings can survive without carrying their food or using rifle. To Krakauer, though, the land is everything minus the people. Very simply, this is to totally misunderstand everything one needs to understand.

A last gripe: Krakauer explains McCandless partially through the use of a long, autobiographical sketch. This is when I knew he was even more selfish than McCandless, by a longshot.

Drumming

I don’t daydream any less than I did when I was younger, but I do so differently.  At this point, I tend to work out solutions or resolutions to concrete situations in my life mentally.  Of all my recent daydreams, this one has gotten the most laughs: having won the lottery, I do not quit my job immediately, as I had thought I would in my early thirties.  Rather, I wait until the next faculty meeting.  At the end of the meeting, the Principal opens the floor to any additions, comments, or random notes.  I stand, walk toward the podium at the front of the room but not to it, say “f**k you,” hurl my keys, and gracefully walk out the door.  That’s a daydream, but one which reflect a concrete resolution to a concrete problem.

In my teens and twenties I indulged in fantasy.  Above all, I fantasized about a musical world which did not exist: one in which my aesthetic choices were widely shared.  I wrote a paper, in the ninth or tenth grade if I remember correctly, a what do you want to be when you grow up paper.  I combined a few of my musical heroes’ lives: like Fela Kuti, I owned my own club in which I hosted musicians as I pleased and made my own music when I wanted.  Like Kraftwerk, it was in Dusseldorf, which at the time to me seemed to be the center of musical experimentation in the world at that time.  I was young, obviously, with limited information.  Interestingly, I wrote in the paper that I had a partner in the venture, a good friend and brilliant drummer with whom I had gone to elementary school and with whom I had often set up my drum kit, to play improvisational duets.  I did a lot of that kind of thing in the eighth and ninth grades.  The key is that I imagined a life in which my music was widely-enough appreciated to fund my existence, a common fantasy among young musicians.  Obviously, real life has not turned out at all like that paper, in the one critical variable I had imagined.  I make my money in a day job, and make music when I can for whomever will listen.

Young people fantasize about a point in life where whatever it is they are doing ends.  Young musicians fantasize about “making it.”  This making it is more or less analagous to the (popular) Christian concept of Heaven.  You have no more problems, you feel no pain, and your whole existence such as it is is characterized by what is not there, as opposed to what is present: no negative things in Heaven.  So it is with the imaginary making it.  You don’t have to keep struggling to get people to show up to the gigs.  You have buzz.  This is a first level of making it.  Then, you don’t have to print up your own CDs (it was cassettes when I started doing it): some label asks, or even begs, you to sign on the dotted line so they can handle all the practical things involved with making and promoting your CD.  Better than the offer to sign is the “bidding war.”  Here, you’re the belle of the ball, and everyone wants to dance with you.  There’s a psychological trope in which the neurotic (or psychotic—I reject both concepts but the point here is useful) seeks some symbolic return to the womb.  The adolescent notion of making it is precisely this.  One imagines a future in which one is totally passive.  When one has made it in music, as it would be, there’s everyone else who has something to do.  The musician just sucks on an umbilical cord.

The problem with this fantasy is that it’s fantasy.  It’s entirely true that certain musicians’ careers take on a life of their own, so to speak.  We know that Bruce Springsteen does not have to work at his job, musician, anymore, if he doesn’t want to, from a financial perspective.  He does not have to call up his friends to get a sufficient number of people at the gig to avoid a nasty glare from the club or café owner.  It sounds great to me, but I’m not sure that this situation makes for great music-making.  It came up in our reading group last night—we are in a Marx reading group and are currently on the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844—that one of Marx’s critiques of capitalism is that it removes any sense of process from people’s consciousness.  He elucidated this idea best in the justly famous section on commodity fetishism in Capital, v. 1, but it can be seen as a developing line of thought even in his early writings.  It’s the process, of production of any sort, of imprinting ourselves through our labor onto the world, that makes things human.  The more we dissociate ourselves from process the more we dissociate ourselves from ourselves.  Indeed, I can’t think of any big-name musician whose work got better after she or he truly and finally “made it” to the point that never again would the musician have to sully hands with organizational details of production.  Those of us who haven’t made it in this sense tend to imagine that if only we could rid ourselves of the crap that goes along with making music in the industry, we could get down to making masterpiece after masterpiece, but in reality it shuts a musician out of precisely that process.

All of this said, every musician I know who does not have a career in music, that is, whose income derives from some other source, has done some sort of auto-autopsy to discover why he or she did not make it—so to speak—when others did.  Of course I have myself, and I’ve alluded to my train of thought on this blog.  The big reason that I don’t have a musical career is that I never worked at getting one.  I will confess that after I cut my first demo, still respectable after 20 years in its way, I couldn’t imagine that record execs would fail to see the quality of the tunes even if the performances were a little rough and the singing not ready for prime time.  That said, not once did I even send it off to a record label, as if that would have had some positive effect in any event.  Hence, no career.

The other reason I don’t have a career is my drumming.  Drums were my first instrument and even though I can’t play drums in my current home I still am more technically accomplished as a drummer than as a guitarist.  I have been told by more than one professional musician that I’m the best drummer they’ve ever played with.

I do not lack confidence in my drumming.  As soon as I started playing, in the seventh grade, I knew I had a unique, if by no means unprecedented, approach to the instrument.  When I started playing, Bill Bruford was my hero, obviously for good reason.  I listened to the second side of King Crimson’s Beat yesterday on my walk home from the station and was reminded again why I fell so in love with his playing.

From the start, I approached the kit not in terms of this or that beat or pattern, but as a musical instrument.  I would, as I noted above, often get together with other musicians and improvise in those first years I played drums.  I did so in the seventh grade with a flautist named Dion, who would run his flute through an amplifier.  In the eighth grade it was with a pianist named Jeff.  Playing in a duo, rather than a band, gave me the opportunity or perhaps responsibility to provide musical color in addition to timekeeping.  To this day, I feel like I color music with my drums as well as anyone.

Much of the credit for my playing goes to my drum teacher, Will.  He quickly realized that as a student I would have strengths and weaknesses, and to be sure as a drummer I have some serious liabilities.  What I did well was to approach the kit musically and without any sense of limitations about what should and should not be played except what I felt to be right.  My faults were that I refused to deal with reading except minimally, and that I rarely practiced rudiments.  He told me once, and told my mother, that I would have a very difficult time making a living as a drummer unless I took care of these problems.  I didn’t want to, and he didn’t insist that I did, for which I’m grateful.

Once I started playing jazz, I found players that were better than Bruford.  I was quickly drawn to Elvin Jones, possibly because the type of playing he did with Coltrane appealed to the wound-up eighth grader that I was.  I can actually approximate a lot of Elvin’s playing, up to I might say about 85% of it.  The thing is, and I found this out fairly quickly, it’s that last 15% that separates the truly phenomenal from people like me, at least in jazz.  I might be able to develop my chops close to the level of an Elvin, but doing so would require that I copy Elvin.  That was never my purpose.

I read an interview with Jack DeJohnette in the 10th or 11th grade–something like that–that really made an impression on me and set me free in a way.  He commented on Billy Higgins’ playing.  The interviewer if I recall had asked DeJohnette to name-check some of his favorite players and he mentioned Higgins.  It was as if the interviewer was a bit surprised.  Jack DeJohnette is among other things quite a technician and Billy Higgins most certainly was not, at least by jazz standards.  DeJohnette made a very, very deep point in response: Billy Higgins, he said, had absolutely enough technique to play what he heard.  That became my goal as a drummer, and once I developed enough technique to play what I hear–I was about 22 when I did–I stopped learning new technical tricks, with absolutely no regrets.  I can play what I hear.

Where I thought and still think I have something to contribute as a drummer is applying the musicality I have, developed in jazz combos, to rock music.  I say this, and it sounds much more cliched than it actually is with my playing.  What I’ve never wanted to do was play jazz licks in a rock context.  Much more interesting, to me, is

• using the drum kit for its musical color rather than just to keep time
• having a light touch on the kit, like drummers used to have
• listening to other players and responding to their cues in the moment
• playing a feel rather than a predetermined beat

All of these things endear me to other musicians when we play.  I tend to make the making of music exciting.  The music is less stiff when I’m on the kit.  We don’t repeat ourselves as musicians, even if we maintain consistency.

All this, and I’ve been dropped in the past few years from two separate bands as a drummer.  In the more distant past, I’ve been pointed out as simultaneously a fantastic player and a liability by industry types–a situation in which I was vigorously defended by the band leader (to my everlasting gratitude).  I have been called “too good,” though I reject the label to this day, given my very real limitations as a player and how good even a second-rate working jazz drummer actually is.

The problem is that I play like it’s 1967, or maybe 1968.  Even though Mitch Mitchell was never my favorite player, I suppose he’s the closest analogue to my own playing, which I’m absolutely happy about.  Terrible things happened–godawful, as far as I’m concerned–when people started close-miking drum kits.  The best miked kits by far can be heard on Rudy Van Gelder recordings.  Interestingly, I have been asked by any number of people how I get my drum sound, even before I had a ProTools setup.  I would tell them–this is for all my recordings, up through (not to) Chevy w/Balding Tires–”one SM57, placed above a well-tuned drum kit.”  Overhead miking means that the dynamics come not from volume knobs but from the drummer’s touch.  It’s vastly more effective than electronics.

Once people started relying on a mixing board to balance out the different parts of a drum kit, drummers started hitting everything harder, in the mistaken belief that a drum hit hard sounds better.  I don’t play this way.  I use light drumsticks, Regal or Regal Tip 7A’s, and I rarely break sticks because I don’t hit the drum too hard.  I leave some room to raise the volume should I need to emphasize it.  This is totally out of step with how people expect a drummer to sound today.

I play like an older drummer, which above all means I do not hit the kit on the mathematical center of a beat.  This is a huge problem in the era of drum machines and quantization.  There is an expectation that “one” will fall precisely on the center of “one” rather than a little before or after, to push or pull things, for feel’s sake.  As a result, the drumming one hears on record these days–and live, generally, because this is the expectation–is all beat and no feel.  A drummer with a lot of feel sounds foreign at this point, if wonderful to those who will listen.  I’ve always liked players with a lot of feel, and in rock this has meant that I’ve come to prefer a lot of less technically proficient players to technicians.  I’ll take Ringo and especially Charlie Watts over Neal Peart any day of the week.

What this has meant–and I blame no-one at all for it–is that I’m commercial poison as a drummer.  I know it, I’ve considered changing it, and I’ve decided to keep it.  I write this because in the past month for various reasons I’ve decided that my next project will have me drumming on it, and drumming in my usual way.

Claremont, CA – 06/11/10

By its Very Nature Fleeting

“By its Very Nature Fleeting,” from Begging Bowl (2007).

In a cold, concrete cave
In the mists of the city
In the skeletal form of a dorm room
Lit by shooting, blue electricity
There’s a sharp, tearing wail
Like a wounded ass braying
Hello Nancy!—she’s sweet, but she’s antsy
And this is what she’s saying:

“Gone, gone away.
I’m a wild wind retreating
And the blueness of the firmament
Is by its very nature fleeting.
When my mind will finally fade
There won’t be a pause for grieving
Because the whole damn planet
Is hurtling through infinity
Through this vacuous vicinity
Through a mind of raving lunacy.”

Now a bursting voice chimes.
It’s the young convert, Felix.
“There’s a place out in space where the towers climb
Like the spiraling double-helix.
In the wide, distant sky,
See the flaming sign shining.
Without it, our lives would be bestial,
Our words, a hollow whining.

Gone, gone away.
Your whole life is time retreating.
And there’s no-one beneath the terrestrial sun
Who’ll hear your heart stop beating.
When this mundane shell decays,
You better know what you’re believing
Because the whole damn planet
Is hurtling through infinity
On a crash-course with the trinity.
It’s en route to Judgement City.”

A new voice softly breathes.
It’s the usually silent Valerie
With her words wafting down from the top bunk
Like a sweet breeze from the peanut gallery.
“You can hear what I say.
You can just as well ignore me.
But the thoughts jetting out from your synapses
Are as real as your body before me.

Gone, gone away.
You see the shining sky retreating
While some unnamed, unknown part of the globe
Feels the burning dawn light heating.
Though your shifting form will fade,
It’s no real cause for grieving
Because the entire, spinning planet
Is hurtling through infinity
Through our molecular vicinity
Through the streets of New York City
Through a tiny probability
Through the grossly disfigured and the pretty
Through a mind of bright simplicity
Through a mind of shining simplicity

I’ve always had a soft spot for this tune, since I first wrote it in 1997, right before I began the stretch of tunes that would become The Duck Hunter.  I had been toying with the riff, in which I play a D minor chord in a D major tune for two or three years by the time I really sat down to write the thing, and I felt at the time that I was writing the poppiest thing I’d written in a while.  Certainly, it was the pop-rockiest thing I’d done since the Little Band.  I wrote it moderately quickly, but well, and it shows.  It feels fresh, even after all these years, and the words do not seem labored in the least.

I imagined, for some reason, a friend’s suite at Pitzer, in Mead Dorm, as the setting.  I can’t for the life of me remember the guy’s name now, though I imagine it will come back to me at some point.  I remember, distinctly, getting together and playing some tunes informally one evening, including Bob Dylan‘s “The Man in the Long Black Coat,” which was at the time brand new and certainly the best tune on Oh Mercy, correctly considered a return to form.  My friend wasn’t the best player in the world but he was great company.  For some reason, when imagining where this tune takes place, I see the same room, with, of course, different people in it.  I would add that nearly everything I’ve ever written takes place in a very specific place I’ve been, most often with no connection whatsoever with the subject matter of the tune.

I won’t spend too much time on the lyrics, because I’ve commented on them before, but I will note that the basic form, in three parts, is more or less my most common organizational scheme and certainly one of my most effective.  It is very easy to write a compelling lyric if one takes whatever one is imagining and views it from three perspectives.  You can’t go wrong.  In this case, it’s death, but it could be absolutely anything.

This tune popped into my mind as something to write about–getting to the recording of it–because I was driving last week and it came on my radio, with my iPod on shuffle.  I was immediately struck with how much I missed my Rhodes.  I got the thing for a birthday present, cheap, right after college in the Summer of 1991 and I sold it, cheap, in 2005 before leaving for Senegal.  There was no real way I could keep it, and we don’t have space in our current digs–pretty spacious for San Francisco, to be sure–for a Rhodes.  I got a lot of mileage out of it and while I’m not much of a pianist I can’t recall a recording on which I used it to better effect than this one.

I used a trick I’ve used a couple times, which only works as a trick when it’s not planned.  I cut two tracks for the solo sections, one with electric guitar and one with Rhodes.  I played both on both solo sections, and figured I’d keep the one and keep the other, in whichever order had the better solos.  On playback, I played both initially, and found that having both simultaneously was far and away more compelling than either one by itself.  I’m a very limited soloist, most of the time, but I can arrange things pretty well.  At least, I can spot a good arrangement when it lands in my lap.

Bira Almeida, Capoeira: a Brazilian Art Form

At the start of this school year I made a promise to myself that I wasn’t going to buy any more books.  Rather, I would use the library or would borrow books from other people.  I have in the past spent a fair amount of money on books, though never that much compared to what I have spent on restaurants.  It’s more a question of space to store books—we don’t have a ton of it—and the fact that I haven’t re-read a book in I don’t know how many years.  I get it in my head that I’m going to re-read The Master and Margarita one of these days, but then some new book I haven’t read before steps up and I read it instead.

I’ve read things, then, for which I would not have put down money but which I’ve appreciated.  In the case of Capoeira: a Brazilian Art Form, my path to it began with comic book I’ve been reading, Daytripper.  It’s top notch.  Not to give too much away, but the basic conceit of the series is that the main character dies at the end of every issue.  That is, the same person dies, over and over, in differing circumstances.  The writer and artist are Brazilian and the whole thing takes place in Brazil.  In one issue, the main character and a friend holiday in Bahia.  They meet a beautiful woman and the main character strikes up a flirting relationship with her, thinking he will get lucky.  Turns out that she is Yemanja, the orixa associated with the sea.  He follows her out into the ocean and drowns.

I don’t want to make anything seem more spiritual than it is, but the thought of Yemanja stuck with me, knowing nothing about her, or about candomble generally.  What I can say for certain is that I grew up going to the beach, and spent a lot of time in the ocean as a kid.  I miss it terribly on occasion, one of two things I ever get nostalgic about.  (The other are ice cream trucks.)  In any event, I popped on to Wikipedia one day and looked her up.  A novel was mentioned in the article: Sea of Death by Jorge Amado, which the article read dealt extensively with Yemanja.  I put a hold on the book at the library, and never got a response that it was on hold, despite the fact that the computer showed a copy on the shelf at the Mission branch of the SF Public Library.  Frustrated, I popped down to the Mission to get it off the shelf myself.

This is why actually going to the library beats ordering books either from an online retailer or even having holds put on things over the computer.  They had at the Mission branch a shelf entitled “Latino Interest” or something like it–a wall actually, quite extensive–and I couldn’t immediately figure out how it was organized.  There were clearly like books with like, so it was subdivided somehow, but I couldn’t figure out the logic, and it wasn’t clearly marked.  So I ended up going through each subsection and following the alphabet, looking for Sea of Death.  One stumbles across all kinds of great things one would never find if one approached things intentionally.

I chose the capoeira book rather than a number of other things partially because it was something I knew absolutely nothing about and partially because the book was relatively short and had pictures.  Also, I have as I indicated earlier been reading about the black diaspora for a while and capoeira is an essential part of that process.  The book absolutely did not disappoint.  One thing that was particularly nice was that it’s clear that Almeida is not a professional writer.  The writing was absolutely clear, but at the same time totally without literary conceit.  His intent was to put various ideas about capoeira on paper, not write something that made himself look artsy.  Each chapter tackles a different aspect of the art, from technique to history to the spiritual dimension of it.  Well worth the read.