Southern Bookman

Happy Thanksgiving

It's time to give thanks for our blessings.

This year has dealt me highs and lows. Here are a few snapshots from my 2019 album.

Eight days in the hospital. I'm thankful for the doctors and nurses who helped me feel better again.

A trip to New York City to see Jeff Daniels' masterful performance as Atticus Finch in Aaron Sorkin's theater adaptation of Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird."

The Miro show at the MOMA, before the museum closed to receive a new look. Miro's stance against Fascism in the 1930s gives us courage to resist Trump and the GOP's assaults on truth and human dignity. I was overwhelmed by Picasso's "Guernica" when I first visited MOMA nearly 50 years ago. I'm looking forward to visiting yet another new MOMA.

Trips to Portugal and Amelia Island, Fla., two places where rivers join the Atlantic Ocean. Both are threatened by rising sea levels and the crush of tourism. Like distant cousins, they are battling to preserve their proud cultures.

The Braves' rush to the pennant. Joe Burrow and the Tigers. Anne-Marie and I getting together with our children Sara, Luke and Ruthie in Nashville, Tenn. Learning to play Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" on the piano.

We'll soon turn the calendar to another year, which looms as one of history's crossroads. The personal decisions of millions will determine whether the nation follows the course of freedom or an American totalitarianism.

No matter what happens, truth and beauty eventually will prevail.

 

Memories of Lisboa and Porto

Young male clerk wearing John Lennon glasses
at Livaria Bertrand, world's oldest bookstore,
stamps my books: Virginie Despentes and Pessoa.

"How did you get here so fast," I ask him
when he's already at the door,
without glasses, as I leave.
"I'm like that," he answers,
his smile like the sun on the Tagus.

Guitarist and trumpet player on the sidewalk.
playing Amy Winehouse songs.
Joyful music by young men in suits;
an old schizo joins their dance.

Smiles of women with dark hair,
the embrace of the female doctor
in her lab coat,
who takes my pulse
and assures me
my heartbeat is OK.

Small children in their school uniforms
at Sanhora do Rosario.
Community center for kids who grow up
wild on Porto's streets.
The director with his stutter
speaks of holiday barbecues,
afternoons playing football
with the young men.

At the nursing home, an old woman
wails in the corner as the elderly priest
awakens in a dusty glow
floating through the windows.
Doors flung open reveal
Christ on his cross, his downcast eyes.

How beautiful their Portuguese voices
searching for English words.
The man with legs bent backwards
begging on the Avenida de Liberdade,
men selling chestnuts on the street,
smoke rising in the light
reflected from the slippery sidewalks
made of yellow tile.

The happiness of old and middle aged men
gathered for lunch, hugs and kisses
cheek to cheek. The rain, changing to sun,
changing to rain, changing to sun,
the rivers, rushing to the Atlantic.

The suave guide John,
handsome as a rock star,
leads us to the castle,
tells how Ulysses founded Lisboa,
Tall pine trees, shaped like arrows,
cork held between our fingers.

Stylish young woman
guides us through
the immigration center.
Solemn faces of refugees
as they wait
in the enormous room.

Walking in the darkness
from the hotel to the airport,
5 a.m. departure.
Old oak trees, broken sidewalk.

As we sit on the bus,
to take us to the plane,
a song fills the space:
"I see fire burning the trees."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Millennials' jibe "OK Boomer" shows nothing new under the sun

Bob Dylan told baby boomers not to trust anyone over 30.

Now, the millennials, who comprise several generations, snarl "OK, Boomer" to us aging postwar babies.

The generational putdown, an Internet sensation, has received rebuttals from New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page.

Generations X, Y and Z - what will new generations be called now that the letters have run out? - blame us boomers for climate change, declining economic prospects, Donald Trump and the Eagles. They probably think Dylan can't sing.

Dylan and other Baby Boom heroes were not even Baby Boomers. Dylan, born in 1941, and John Lennon, in 1940, were of the "Silent Generation," which came after the "Greatest Generation," and before the post-war baby explosion. With all of their music and social protest, those rockers weren't very silent.

Once we sang "The Times They Are a Changin'." Now, the younger generation wants us gone. As college football old-timer Lee Corso would say, "hey, not so fast."

In the pre-industrial age, people lived pretty much the same year after year. The generations' experience stayed the same, and people died young. Retroactively, historians branded ages like the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but Shakespeare, Michelangelo and Voltaire didn't think of themselves as members of defined generations.

Generational conflict goes back to ancient times. Ecclesiastes, in the passage from which Ernest Hemingway found the name for his novel "The Sun Also Rises," warned that "one generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever."

Britain in the 19th century began identifying historical periods with the reigns of monarchs: the Victorian Age, the Georgian Age. Literary critics retroactively called Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lord Byron and Charles Lamb the Romantics. Romanticism was also a European movement, including Beethoven and Goethe.

During the 20th century, enormous changes from decade to decade led to the rise of  distinct generations. Those of the Depression Era had different outlooks from those born in the 1950s. Music, fashion, art, culture, and social mores shifted.

The designation of generations emerged after World War I, when Gertrude Stein told Hemingway that he and  his contemporaries were members of a "Lost Generation." Then came the postwar flowering of writers like John Updike, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell and Gore Vidal. New waves of writers, musicians and film stars followed. From Chuck Berry to Katy Perry, the world kept turning.

The Baby Boomers reached a new level of self-consciousness, or bloated self-importance. Talking about my generation, we did bang the drum and blow the horn quite loudly.

Now, the millennials look at us as old duffers.

But remember, kids, a new crop of babies is being born, who will look at you as hopeless.

 

 

 

 

Emmylou Harris shares love, music with Atlanta fans

Emmylou Harris gave adoring fans a generous helping of beloved songs Sunday night in a performance at Atlanta's Symphony Hall.

Now white-haired like many of those in the audience, the 72-year-old Harris kept the love flowing. Her energy remains high, her voice glorious.

Harris upheld the protest-song tradition with a searing anthem about Emmitt Till's murder in Mississippi, and a number honoring a Nashville program that matches foster children with pet animals.

With her band tautly ranging from rockabilly to bluegrass to old-time mountain laments, Harris thrilled the crowd with favorites like "Together Again," "Green Pastures" and "Pancho and Lefty."

She honored her early muse and partner Gram Parsons with "Las Vegas" and "Wheels," leaving Parsons fans longing for a few more songs from "Grevious Angel," "GP" or "The Gilded Palace of Sin."

Along with a heart-tugging encore of her own "Boulder to Birmingham," Harris presented an anthology of American songwriters, from James Taylor to Don Williams. Her signature performance of Billy Joe Shaver's "Old Five and Dimers" mirrored the life experience of the many aging hipsters present.

She closed the show with a rousing cover of Neil Young's "Long May You Run," raising our hopes of carrying on.

Farewell, Nick Tosches

Nick Tosches' death brought memories of rock criticism's golden age.

Tosches, who died Sunday in his beloved New York City at the too young age of 69, brought a pugnacious, free-floating spirit to music writing along with his "noise boys" compatriots Richard Meltzer and Lester Bangs. Like Bangs and Meltzer, Tosches reached dazzling heights, but also crashed spectacularly.

At first writing for gritty small publications, Tosches moved on to music bibles Creem and Rolling Stone. His reputation suffered from reports that he sometimes wrote a review without removing the record from its plastic covering. He was notorious for a Rolling Stone review of Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" in which he didn't consider the album's music and confused the band with another group, Black Widow.

Tosches showed impressive research and writing ability with a pioneering book on country's contributions to rock. His"Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story," is considered one of the best music biographies. He gained mainstream success with biographies of subjects ranging from Dean Martin to Sonny Liston and built a career as a major magazine writer, contributing to Vanity Fair and other publications.

Going against that popular success, Tosches returned to his experimental roots with novels blasted by critics for their outrageous plots and pretentious writing, according to his New York Times obituary. That path from acclaim to critical disfavor is common is American literature.

Tosches made his reputation at a time when new forms of writing thrilled readers. A new Rolling Stone or Esquire was a major cultural event. Tosches was among those who created a new literature, now long in the past.

 

Farewell, Ginger Baker

The rock supergroup Cream's universal popularity is unimaginable today.

Ginger Baker, the group's pyrotechnic drummer, died Sunday at age 80 in London. Baker, bassist Jack Bruce and guitarist Eric Clapton reached a new level of rock success with Cream, drawing huge crowds with their turbocharged music and selling millions of records. Their once innovative power rock today seems as old-fashioned as the big band era did in the 1960s. Fractured audiences and collapsing album sales now thwart widespread appeal.

Baker, who saw himself as a jazz drummer, hated Cream's ear-breaking sound as Clapton and Bruce accumulated more and more amps for stadium performances. While Baker looked down at rock music, he was acclaimed as one of rock's greatest drummers, fusing jazz and blues rhythms.

Cream's luminous career ended quickly, wrecked by animosity between Bruce, who died in 2014, and Baker, as his New York Times obituary recounted. Baker and Clapton joined Steve Winwood to form Blind Faith, which also flashed briefly.

Known for his unpleasant personality, Baker played with several more bands over the years, and reunited with Bruce and Clapton in 2003.

Several rock stars died early. Baker, who battled heroin addiction, survived the rock era's excesses. Two other aging rockers, Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney hailed Baker as a consummate musician. Clapton continues to perform.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Richard Russo's "Chances Are" finds redemption for Vietnam War generation

Richard Russo's "Chances Are" is a valedictory for old men who came of age during the Vietnam War.

Now in their mid-60s, three friends from college gather at Martha's Vineyard to examine their pasts.

Lincoln, a successful real estate developer in Arizona, owns the ocean home in Chilmark, Mass., where they seek to re-create a similar get-together decades earlier, after their graduation from the prestigious private school where they met.

Mickey, a lifelong rock musician who never found stardom, and Teddy, a mystical book editor, are the other members of the trio who adopted the Three Musketeers' "All for one, one for all" motto.

Each of them is haunted by the memory of a young woman who disappeared after joining them on their first visit to the island. Meeting her in college, they all were in love with Jacy, their muse, confidant, temptress and moral center. Their efforts to find out what happened to Jacy make for a mystery that runs parallel to their ruminations, which dominate the novel.

Although the characters represent different traits of the 1960s male personality, they are fully developed individuals rather than symbolic abstractions.

Russo at 70 displays a master's craftsmanship. Each well-made sentence seems essential to the narrative. The book is like a well-constructed house with no board or nail out of place. The plot's different elements come together like a symphony.

After a slow beginning, the book gains momentum. Expertly using a third-person omniscient narrator, Russo alternates among each character's point of view.  The interior passages drift toward the solipsistic, but mostly remain on track. He succeeds in giving each character a distinct personality. The characters' viewpoints outweigh the detective story's suspense, making the book more literary fiction than thriller.

Showing the Victorian scope of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, the book also recalls Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" and Francois Truffaut's film "Jules et Jim." The book gives a fresh take on mythical and classical themes.

Millennials will see "Chances Are" as another monument to baby-boomer narcissism, a portrait of aging men still obsessed by Vietnam choices.

Prone to outbursts of violence and holding on to the '60s drugs, sex and rock-and-roll ethos, Mickey is the least appealing character. His impulsive behavior undermines Russo's painting him as heroic at the book's climax.

Lincoln, battered by the 2008 recession, is the most well-adjusted to the business world, and has a strong marriage and family. He launches an investigation into Jacy's disappearance that leads to a few contrived, unconvincing plot twists.

The cerebral Teddy, emotionally paralyzed by introspection and what used to be called nervous breakdowns, is the most sympathetic character, in the end rising from his self-absorption into a new course of action.

An engrossing closing revelation about Jacy allows the trio to make peace with their pasts. With elegiac tones, the book finishes with hope for renewal. Lincoln, Mickey and Teddy find new reserves of love, forgiveness and purpose.

"Chances Are" continues Russo's late career flowering. Along with Richard Ford, he has assumed the mantle of distinguished older male novelist from Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow.

 

Farewell, Leigh Harris, "Li'l Queenie"

Tipitina's opened just before I left Louisiana as a young man.

I saw Gatemouth Brown, Professor Longhair and Asleep at the Wheel at the club at the corner of Napoleon Avenue and Tchoupitoulas Street in New Orleans' warehouse district. No act matched the excitement of Lil' Queenie and the Pecolators.

Leigh Harris, the diminutive woman with a big, raucous, New Orleans voice, died Saturday at age 65 from breast cancer. Performing as Li'l Queenie with her high-octane band, she blasted out soul, funk, rhythm and blues, and jazz, the city's musical gumbo. Dying her hair orange and pink, she created a stage persona as New Orleans-marinated as Dr. John's.

Leaving New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Harris found a serene life in rural North Carolina with her husband, musician Rick Ledbetter. She kept making music, recently releasing the album "Purple Heart." In February, she was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.

Her New Orleans anthem, "My Darling New Orleans," was one of the songs featured on the soundtrack of "Treme," David Simon's HBO show about the corruption and resilience that surrounded the city's recovery from Katrina's devastating flooding.

That recognition was welcome; Li'l Queenie and the Percolators' sound was too New Orleans-flavored to gain widespread national success.

She was magical in her hometown, commanding the stage's light, true New Orleans royalty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

September arrives, but summer remains

In years past, we would have enjoyed a touch of autumn by now.

September no longer marks the end of summer. Temperatures remain in the mid-90s. The continuing heat affects wildlife. Yesterday, I chased off a crazed squirrel that had run up our glass-paneled back door.

I still look forward to the season changing, the arrival of fall, the promise of new beginnings. As is my custom, I played "Try to Remember" on the piano. I'll play the wistful song from "The Fantasticks" all month, meditating upon the passage of youth and time's quickening pace. I'll also seek to learn "September Song" at last.

As climate change progresses, I wonder if future generations will enjoy the coming of autumn, cooler days, the eruption of color.

 

Ken Burns tunes up for country music

I was dismayed to hear that Ken Burns had turned his guns on country music.

Like many others, I was transfixed by Burns' Civil War series. Along with many Southern boys of my generation, I prided myself on detailed knowledge of famous battles and personalities.

But Burns put the war in a broader context, uncovering new information and giving fresh perspectives on characters like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, U.S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman.

But I grew disenchanted by Burns' series on baseball and jazz. He embalmed both American institutions beneath a barrage of cliches, overblown pronouncements, commentary from talking heads, and archival material. His earnest, overly reverent approach fell short of expressing the simple beauty of baseball and jazz.

Nor did I care for Burns' look at the Vietnam War. His attempt at balance in discussing American war motives was misguided. In truth, Burns' treatment wasn't the reason I quit watching the show. Reliving the era was just too painful.

After seeing a couple of previews, including a concert at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, I'm hopeful about Burns' country music series.

While countless books have been written on the Civil War and baseball, country music has received less scholarly attention, although it has generated a substantial literature. That gives Burns a less trammeled perspective from which to view country music.

Country music is loved by a broader audience than jazz, touching upon more aspects of American culture. Jazz's appeal narrowed with the rise of bebop and abstract music, while country's has widened. Country encompasses a broader variety of musical genres, including jazz.

Country has not been burdened by the semi-mystical panegyrics that have weighed down baseball with cliches and overwrought nostalgia. Burns' baseball series was plagued by seeking to match those pastoral views of the game.

Once known as the national pastime, baseball is more and more a regional sport as its appeal declines to younger generations. The genre once derided as "hillbilly music" has increased its popularity, with a range of innovative artists and musical styles.

Like the Civil War, country gives Burns a broader framework for examining different parts of American society. While known as Southern white people's music, country was influenced by black artists and has grown to include Cajun music, Western swing, rockabilly and urban pop. Country music like the Civil War gives Burns a broad palette.

Plus, I love Dolly, Loretta, Jimmie, Ernest, Bob, Hank, Sara, Mama Maybelle and many others. I hope Burns plays a lot of country songs and cuts down on the talking heads.