A review of SLUMBERLAND by Aileen Reyes

by Paul Beatty, Bloomsbury Press 2008

I like it. There’s no plot, but Beatty’s bombardment of language, fearless articulation of informed thoughts on race and music, and an eloquent non-pretentious use of English, made this a tedious yet enjoyable read.

This is not one definable story. It’s a segment of the main characters life, revealed in an almost collage like form. These “thought chunks”, leave no room for sappy sentiments, clichés or happy endings.

The vessel for this literary cyclone is the mind and life of DJ Darky. This black LA disc jockey, who, after scoring a series of porno films, leaves for Berlin, to take a job at the Slumber-Land bar, as a Jukebox Sommelier, 2 in order to find a virtuoso saxophonist, named Charles Stone, known in DJ Darky’s musical world as The Schwa. The Schwa is discovered playing “the chicken-fucking song” 3 , on the soundtrack of a porn video, sent to anonymously to DJ Darky .4

DJ Darky is quite the character, with a phono-graphic memory 5 and intriguing love for the invention of new words. His romanticized yet realistic homesickness becomes a great device in drawing the non-writing audience into Beatty’s world. In fact, nearly anyone can relate to missing even the ugliest things about the place you once called home.

As far as the mystical character known as The Schwa’, Beatty’s description makes him a elusive musical oddity, perhaps a blend of Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus and the lower eastside literary legend Orion. 6

Beatty’s invention of disposable characters, DJ So-So deaf, who is actually deaf, the female rapper, Bitch Please as well as other minor players, come and go with great timing If left to linger, they, become caricature.7

The “time frame” of the story is the tumbling of the Berlin wall, the perfect place for “black poetic literary license.” Riffs on race thrive in this revolutionary European setting. Instead what we have is a playground for racial realities and language to play freely. As a result this book reads like free jazz, from beginning to end. You might get lost if you don’t listen close, or it could get too “noisy” or cluttered with invention for the typical reader.8

There are points where Mr. Beatty, finds a great use for footnotes (which I’ve only seen in nonfiction books), as a way to elaborate on thoughts that will steer the book into countless tangents, if included as part of the text. The footnotes then become the literary equivalent to the news strip on the bottom of a T.V. screen, which on the T.V. can be annoying but in this book becomes an excellent place for humorous back-story. At times, I wasn’t sure if it was the author or the character talking to the reader.

The Female characters, mostly respectable real women with minds, mostly the love interests, but not mis-used as an excuse for a sexual interlude. The most interesting female in the book I believe is not heard from enough, her name is Fatima, she is the sister of Klaudia von Robinson, Darky’s black Berlin girlfriend.

Dj Darky on Fatima “What had been a healthy fear of white people shared by most of the country’s colored inhabitants ’had recently morphed ipnto full- blown leukophobia, fear of all things whit .It was debilitating at first . She stopped answering any mail that arrived in white envelopes. Refused to drink milk or eat mashed potatoes. Polar bears, snowstorms and Danes had to be avoided at all costs, because they were bad omens. And in blessed irony, toilet paper scared her shitless.”

The actual book, is very elegant, a simply designed jacket, that makes it impossible to judge it by its cover, making it even more intriguing ,because the title, catches your eye immediately and if you recognize the authors name ( which more people ought to do) then you know that it ain’t no half asssed attempt at a book.

It’s lazy to place Paul Beatty in a box and compare him to other writers, so I won’t , seeing as how people do that more when speaking of artists or athletes of color. Though there is no doubt of his many influences, even hints of black comedian Paul Mooney9, what we have in Mr. Beatty is a fresh, brave voice, saying things that most people may ponder but would never mention in public.10

This novel is centered on black music, Jazz, in a fresh modern voice, without beating you over the head with it, though it is clearly a black man speaking, he has created a­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ forum to share his thoughts in a non threatening manner. Though I’m not sure Wynton Marsalis would agree.10 ½

Don’t sleep.

____________________________________________________________

1..Bottom of page 114

2 .Fun word , not sure if this occupation exists or if it is another one of Beatty’s brilliant inventions

3. a play on DJ Spooky perhaps?

4.please note I did not say the fucking chicken song ,but the chicken-fucking song

5 remembering every sound ever heard

6. Orion, (A.K.A. cyanide) transient middle-aged poet who in the 1990’s frequented place like the Nuyorican Poets Café, abc no rio, and other places of words, reciting his genius sometimes undecipherable ,heavy accented use of language, this often included an assessment of his surroundings, fellow “poets”.

A speaking Rubiks Cube , sometimes the 3 minute limit that was imposed when poets became too lazy too edit never stopped him, as he often grabbed a piece of paper, and in black ,magic marker (always) scribbled the rest of his thoughts and posted them in the neighborhood, Example, one of my favorites, from, my own archives left on the lamp-post outside the Nuyorican,

“To Bassi , the crutch on your nose doesn’t give a fuck about you but since you won’t let it off the hook it makes you possessive- cyanide.” He often used that nose crutch term, I thought it was a reference to Salvador Dali’s paintings, or cocaine or a nose job though it didn’t look like she ever had one.

7. Like Tasty Taste in the 90’s hip hop spoof “Fear of a Black Hat”

8. Luckily it’s balanced with references to real world, places like Trader Joe’s, that make it accessible without cheapening the rest of the book

9. In a reference to a beer, named NEGER on the bottom of page 68 “I’ll have the gin and tonic, and the lady will have a large nigger”

10. I kept waiting for my favorite ponderance (yeah, my word) to pop

Up, “Do white people really sing “for he’s a jolly good fellow” or it it just something they do in film for a festive effect? …and if so what do they say if it happens to be a woman?

10 ½. see pages 52-53 and 96-97, that’s all I got to say.

Inopportune: Stage I

Inopportune: Stage II

Visionary, rabble-rouser, contemporary artist, Cai Guo-Qiang is the first Chinese artist to have a major retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. In his artist’s toolbox are explosives, gunpowder, yak skin, live snakes, wooden arrows, real cars, life-like replicas of tigers and wolfs, and trenched up sunken ships. Witness the spectacle created by this modern day alchemist. Born in 1957 in Quanzhou, Fujian province during Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and trained in stage design in Shanghai. Cai moved to Japan in the late 80’s where he was a part of that country’s Avant Garde period, and then eventually settled in New York City in 1995. Cai lists among his influences, Taoism, Buddhism, 9/11, mythology, Feng Shui, utopian idealism, Maoism and military history. He is currently in Beijing serving as Director of Visual and Special Effects for the 2008 Olympics and was thus not available to be interviewed. Instead, I caught up with Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator of Asian Art, and head curator of “I Want to Believe” Cai Guo-Qiang’s Mid-Career Retrospective.

Project to Extend The Great Wall of China by 10,000 meters

Borrowing your enemy’s Arrows

I asked Ms Munroe to describe Cai, the man and his art, and tell us what it was like to work with him.

AM

Cai is a very innovative and ambitious artist and it has been quite extraordinary to work with him. I have learned a lot about his working methodology, for which I have great respect. Everything in Cai’s world is process. He is an artist who is dedicated to change, for whom nothing is ever static, but rather in a constant state of motion and evolution. I also learned a lot from his approach to exhibition making. He ensures that every aspect of the show, its planning, its catalogue and its public program is a manifestation of the project, interconnected, and related back to the core ideas of the show. It was a privilege to work to with him.
“I Want to Believe” is indeed an appropriate title for this large-scale exhibition, which fills all levels of the Guggenheim’s impressive Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda. When viewers enter the museum, they are instantly griped by Inopportune: Stage 1. Nine cars spiral upwards, from floor to ceiling. The white cars with colorful lights spraying out of them represent a car bomb, yet they are almost cartoonesque and reminiscent of Pop art. They appear more attractive than frightening. Although a clear reference to 9/11, this work according to the artist also alludes to the glamour of Hollywood’s car obsession and should invoke a dreamlike beauty.¹ This is the essence of ‘wanting to believe,’ approaching horror with hope, matching destruction with rebirth, curiosity, and a persistent spirit. It also alludes perhaps, to wanting to believe in the promise of Western democracy, although faced with its many corruptions.
Cai frequently represents this opposing duality in his art, “Often people will ask what ties my works together, because sometimes they seem so different from each other. Among other things, conflicts and contradictions embodied in the work is one tie. The very fact that I make little attempt to offer solutions is characteristic of my work. Some artists try to offer resolutions, but I only point to the argument.” He elaborates, “If you don’t attempt to resolve everything then it is possible to talk about contradictions, difficulties, and obstacles. You can bring these up and address them, but you don’t always need to have an answer.”²
Americans have been saturated with images of real destruction through the news media and depictions of faux-catastrophe in film. Cai’s re-interpretation of these images allow us to look again, without being bombarded with one scene’s definitive meaning. Instead of: photo of an accused terrorist = evil, clip of the US president = Good, we can refreshingly remember to think for ourselves and to view the inherent contradictions in an image’s meaning, holistically.
Jonathan Shaugnessy elucidates this concept concerning Inopportune Stage I and II. Stage II depicts nine tigers, who appear to have just a moment ago been impaled by a barrage of arrows. He explains that,

” By playing with the contemporary viewer’s reactions-is this bravery or cruelty, beauty or ugliness?-the work attempts to restore a sense of primal balance between the forces of revulsion and seduction in regard to violence, forces that are often repressed as a matter of social order and conformity.”³
Cai also applies this concept to his gunpowder drawings and explosion projects. He first experimented with gunpowder in the mid-80s, wanting to use unpredictable materials. He has said that his favorite moment in the work with explosives is the time after the fuse has been ignited but just before the explosion. Cai explains, “There is a brief moment where energy is moving together before it finally goes in all different directions.”⁴ One of his larger scale explosion events was Project to Extend The Great Wall of China, in which he laid 10,000 meters of fuse in the Gobi desert, beginning at the edge of The Wall. 100,000 people came out to see the explosion and momentary extension, by smoke cloud of this artifact of ancient Chinese Civilization. I asked Alexandra Munroe to elaborate on the significance of Cai’s experimentations with gunpowder.
Robyn

In Cai’s work employing gunpowder and explosions as mediums and in Inopportune: Stage One, by simulating a car bomb, he melds destruction, beauty, fear and release. I would like to hear your perspective on these unorthodox approaches. Is there a reference being made to Hegel’s theories, and Maoist ideology? What does his approach achieve?

AM

I don’t think Hegel; I don’t think that he is so aware of Hegel. Cai is not an intellectual. He is not a scholar or a philosopher in that sense of having read modern philosophy. He is definitely not. But Maoist ideology yes, because he lived through it, intuited something from it, and is replaying that through his art. The core idea there is no destruction, no construction. You have to destroy in order to create. In Cai’s world, the actual methodology of his art making is destroying in order to create work. It is also, on a much bigger scale taking Mao’s idea to destroy an existing order of cultural practice in order to reformat a new one. Cai, again doesn’t take anything for granted, he is not literally destroying modern and contemporary art lineage, but he’s ignoring it, which is almost as bad as destroying it. he ignores its inevitability. Instead of assuming its inevitable, he picks and chooses freely from the lineage of modern and contemporary art and intersperses through it a new lineage with factors from ancient and modernist china, popular science and anything that strikes his fancy. In that regard, my interpretation of his work is that it is deeply embedded in Maoism.

I also asked her to elaborate on my favorite piece in the exhibition, Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows. A large wooden boat is floating just below the ceiling. It has been excavated from off the shore of Quan Zhou, pierced with 3,000 arrows, and adorned with a Chinese flag. The title refers to the story of a Chinese general aware that he is about to be attacked by a superiorly armed neighboring enemy. Rather than accept defeat the general loads his boat full of decoy soldiers made of straw and under cover of night sails to the enemy camp. At dawn, the opposing army just glimpsing the boat, attacks it with their great store of arrows. The general is then able to return home, with a stock of the enemy’s arrows, which he will use to defeat them in the next battle.
AM

This is a very important early work of Cai’s that dates to 1998. It was shown in an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art that was presented in New York, at an Asia Society/Ps1 exhibition called Inside Out: Contemporary Art from China. This work like so much of Cai’s is based on an ancient Chinese tale. Cai conjures that tale and presents it to the west, as if the west could be threatened by China’s overcoming the west, because of garnering Western know how. Just as the Chinese general overcame his enemy by using the enemy’s own ammunition to overtake the enemy. So, in a typical and witty way this work is provocative and challenging of the core assumptions of Euro-American supremacy. It is a very typical Cai gesture, that is, highly post- modern, representing a global- era perspective and an agitation against the status quo and presumptions that the West has had about its own position in contemporary affairs.

Another highly interesting installation in the Guggenheim retrospective is the piece New York’s Rent Collection courtyard. This is a collection of sculptures that was first presented by Cai at the 1999 Venice Biennial, but that is an appropriation and reinterpretation of a piece called Rent Collection Courtyard. The original was made as a public art work in 1965 by a team of students at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. The original sculptures and the newer versions both depict peasants being forced to work inhuman amounts under the pressure of oppressive pre-Revolutionary Chinese landlords. One of the students who worked on the original, Long Xu Li also worked to recreate the pieces in both Venice and New York. In discussion with Cai and Thomas Krens, Director of The Guggenheim Foundation, Ms Monroe spoke about the meaning of the work, interpreting it as a questioning of the qualitative value that is put on certain styles of art. I asked her to elaborate on this concept.
R

I liked the way you spoke about the question of whose art is counted. I think that connects to what you were saying earlier in our conversation about the assumed supremacy of western art.

AM

You have it, What you have said is perfect. To relate it back to what I said a moment ago, it operates on many levels. It is a profoundly conceptual piece, which really has multiple meanings. One meaning, by presenting this work in a contemporary museum setting in 1998 in Venice and in 2008 in New York at the Guggenheim, is to challenge the west and again our assumptions. During the 1960s, certain styles of contemporary art were dominant, conceptual art, minimalism and pop art for example. Our art world was entirely geared around those three movements critically, in terms of what we were exhibiting and in how are tastes were formed. Cai is saying that during that same period half the world was deeply moved and 100 percent engaged with this propaganda form of art based on Soviet Socialist-Realist styles. They were deeply moved by this particular work that was reproduced in hundreds of cities throughout China. It was consumed at a level that Andy Warhol could never even conceive of in terms of his ideas about appropriation in pop art. In that sense, it is a very characteristic Cai work. He is constantly reminding us of other alternative systems of thought that operate in the world. He does not want to replace our systems with those systems but he is constantly reminding us of the multiplicity of perspectives and the multiplicities of histories.
R

You have mentioned that process is very important to Cai as an artist; I think that there is real relevance to that approach. His work is provoking thought. It is affecting people on many different levels, which brings me to the next question. I thought it was mischievously appropriate that the yak-skin boat and the river were built at the Guggenheim. When I visited the exhibition, it was amazing to see little children and men in Business suits competing for a chance to ride on the boat
AM

That’s great.
R

It was very peaceful, a break that one could have from the city, just by being on this little river. I wanted to ask you on a more personal level, did you ride in the yak-skin boat? How would you please describe your experience?
AM

Yes, I did and it was a very beautiful experience. It is a beautiful work. I love that work. It is completely an unusual way to operate in the museum system, so the shock of that is incredibly wonderful. It is an experience that no one has ever had before, riding a boat in a museum! Just contemplating water and movement as aesthetic elements, process is again referenced. I think it is all very beautiful and a very powerful artistic experience. It was a very popular piece.
The last work I want to consider is Reflection-A Gift from Iwaki. This piece consists of a boat that was excavated from the bottom of the sea in Iwaki, Japan by Cai and a team of locally based artisans. It has been filled, and is overflowing with broken ceramic sculptures of a Buddhist Goddess, which were rejected from their intended role as prayer idol, because of their slight imperfections. It confronts the intersection between religion and culture and was made as a collaborative project, again reinforcing Cai’s commitment to an interactive art making system.

R

In an interview with Jonathan Shaughnessy, Cai responds to a question regarding Reflection: A Gift from Iwaki as follows:

Shaughnessy: “Reflection and the focus on Iwaki in the Exhibition certainly reveal your collaborative and holistic approach to art making that encompasses the local and specific-by engaging directly with a certain community- in projects aimed at fostering relationships that go beyond geographic and cultural lines.”

Cai: “You have to be very careful though, there is a fine line. You want to avoid doing a cultural exchange or some kind of Environmental activism or whatever it is that concerns you in the work that it references. After all, you are an artist, and in reality art does very little to change the world. If you understand that and proceed with caution, then you don’t fall into the pitfall of all of a suddenly trying to fulfill a function that art does not have.”⁵

In conversation with yourself and Thomas Krens, also about the Iwaki work, Cai comments that he, “Likes people who don’t understand contemporary art.”⁶ Part of the appeal of Cai’s work is that it does reach those uninitiated into the world of art and art historians alike. What do you make of the aforementioned quotes? Can art change the world?

AM

(she laughs)That’s another big question. Yeah, I think art can change the world. Art changes the world by changing the way people think about the world and progress is made in part by intellectual advancements and by expanding people’s minds to comprehend perspectives that they hadn’t even known existed before. In that way Cai is presenting us with perspectives, ideas, that I think do reflect a contemporary, geopolitical, psychic and cultural reality that is new to both the Chinese and Westerners. I think that elements of that vision do reflect specific shifts in the world today. Understanding those shifts through art makes as more interesting people. If you are a more interesting person, you can change the world. You think differently, more scopically, and with bigger dimensions. I think art can change the way people perceive and that, in turn can change the world. I don’t think it’s the purpose of art to do that, but I think art has the capacity to reflect. In that capacity, in that process, things happen.

Cai Guo-Qiang has challenged the perception of both Chinese and Western contemporary art and uplifted our senses, challenging us to experience viscerally the contradictions embedded in the process and product of expression. In his own words:
“For me the central thing about my work is having the freedom in which to make art. That’s what I discovered early on when I first saw the vitality of Western contemporary art, and that remains the most important point for me- to maintain that freedom from the East, and from the West. For me, above all, no law is law, no method is the method. This is my guiding principle.”⁷

New York’s Rent Collection Courtyard

An Arbitrary History: River

Patricia Spears Jones’ second collection Femme du Monde is a passport into the soul of a sophisticated lady, a rich and engaging interior voice that explains her journey inward, outward.

We embark on Patricia Spears Jones’s journey at a place physically and metaphorically called “Hope,” Arkansas. The young college student with her mates on their way to a wedding, stopped at a place of seeming normalcy, a “golden arches”. The young Jones pioneers here have maternal instincts, protective of the young white girl in the car next to them:

“But who is this man to this child? Father, lover, dirty old uncle.”

Later,

“ We want to rescue this child.

But where would we take her?

And what would happen to all that money?”

Straight away, the poet makes it clear she is not a passive traveler; we find a woman always paying attention, curious, question, and full of wonder.

So many of the poems in Femme du Monde focus on self exploration as in “Days of Awe”

“I feel as if my life were held together by wishful thinking

And Krazy Glue. Somehow it works.”

Several lines down

“…God gives

and God thinks things over. And while the pondering abides,

Each of us has the time to act one way or the other.

Give, get. Build, destroy”

The poet is not just a mind in motion; being and God are equally in motion. Nothing is finite in this larger process. It is not necessarily in synch, also moving, a constant state of giving and getting, building and destroying. Process, is the nature of things, and she so eloquently and vividly ends this poem:

“As trees old and young

starve their leaves into gold, flame, rust.”

Yet, another metaphorical journey that appears in Ms Jones poems is the social and political one. In “Saltimbanque” we find tribute for those who struggle and an outstanding homage to Martin Luther King. Ms Jones chronicles the student riots, the Paris riots. And, all the progressive movements she captures, they are met with a violent response, but the people stick together:

“people make a song, new song, riot song”

Her beautiful end to the poem, the homage to Martin Luther King, I mentioned, shows again the transcendental nature of those who sacrifice for all of us. These are people who are larger than the movement they embody.

7. “Martin Luther sat bleeding in a Birmingham jail. He worked

his mind along the sacred stations of the cross and found,

if not solace, then the tattered cloth called dignity,

as he prayed for the souls of his jailers.

Tracing Alabama dust, his cross just heavy enough to bear,

Word could have been miracle, joy, power.

It was likely to have been song, people, or alone.

He made, in private, a face mimicking the fat, snuff-dipping guards.

Clown face turned towards the jail-floor dust.

His tears roll away holy laughter. Saltimbanque

In a moment of amazing tenderness and pure rage.

Under the paving stones, the beach.”

This book continues to take us all over the globe, bringing us inside the over- priced lingerie shop in SoHo, NY; the Paris underground, and wherever we go, there is music. This is a lyric collection that is engaging, honest, and with sprinkles of delightful humor.

Richard Prince one man show at Guggenheim is a massive affair. The show consists of different cycles of artists work, his famous cowboys, biker chicks, car hoods sculptures, nurse paintings,DeKooning paintings, check paintings, black and white; color paintings, celebrity publicity assemblages etc…. Walking up the spiral of Guggeneheim in a chronological order you immerse yourself into his world, which supposed to be a pure concentration of American pop culture.

From the huge amount of amassed work, the thing that mostly jumps out is the Cowboy series. This is Princes most successful and justifiable his most known work. The whole show has a very 80’s feel to it and this most powerful work , the Cowboys, are from that decade ( he produced more of them through the years). That was the time of Roland Reagan and his god morning America commercials. This was the beginning of America long slide to the hard political right. The symbology is obvious, Prince consciously wants his work to be obvious ,as a continuation of the Andy Warhol Pop ethos. Reagan a perfect cowboy ,directly from the Hollywood casting, riding to save America and the free world. This is the Marlborough man before the cancer. The intent was a creation of a pure piece of Pop art, interest he shared with his contemporary traveler Jeff Koons, who did the same with his Michael Jackson. This two man were chasing pop ideal ,with Jeff Koons being more successful at it.Warhols most simple one liners and appropriations standing next to this Cowboys are like Hamlet in his deepest angst. Road started with Braque’s and Piccassos’s cubist collages, Schwitzer’s train tickets, Duchamp’s urinal context shifting, Richard Hamilton’s arrested Mick Jagger and Warhol’s Marilyn nicely resolved themselves in this cropped Cowboys. The appropriation of these perfect manly man on horses from commercial photographs from glossy magazines are looking great. In full gallop with wast American western sky and landscape or in a contemplation with a horse, like characters in John Ford films, work well as the ultimate embodiment of American art. As it was the obviousness of its meaning when it was created , today meaning is as clear as the bell, with this current president, that is pointless to write about it and just that is were he is so successful and seductive. It is no wonder that this work is a main staple in NYC auction houses, catching for a photograph in edition way over a million, because in its pure formal and visual perfection and in it’s emptiness was able to transcend some commercial aspects of Warhol’s work.

Another interesting element of this work is the appropriation as a central practice in art making in contemporary art and the issue of copyright, as is being applied today to every single thing. From Dada or Surrealists collages on, artist were using visual material from their soraunding ominous as a source material for their work, commenting on the society. Today, especially with the advent of digital technology and the web, the source material is like a constant mental flow, our media immersed life make the need for the artist to reach and grab from this stream of data and images a necessity. The fact that every single thing today is copyrighted and owed, mostly by large corporations, that you must clear and pay for it to get a permission for the use in art making, cuts into the heart of art production by paralyzing it. Apart of making art creation costly , it is being used to censure and to force artists to self-censure , because you’ll never know when you’ll lend in-front of a judge (Jeff Koons is a god example of this, there were more ominous than this one). This Marlborough man bring as back in time, that appropriating an image from your surrounding for your art, to be illegal would sound crazy.

As are this Cowboys sharp and great work, unfortunately the rest of the show dasn’t hold to Princes own standard set in them. There are still his well known ”Americana art” ( it definitely influenced many artists of younger generation) “Girlfriends” series of Biker chicks that still hold their ground, but everything after that, especially paintings are less interesting. References and style of the work, it’s like taking a walk in mid eighties trough Leo Castelli gallery, from 80’s Jasper John’s and Warhol’s work all the way to Donald Judd’s. You can see what was in the mix at that time, including text based works of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer. The tone of the language in its exclamation of truths is similar, except the politics of the text. While Barba Kruger and Jenny Holzer are dealing with politics of gender, race and class his text is opposite in it’s machismo and a bit of misogyny, I guess wanting to be a bad boy.

If the Guggenheim would dedicated only one room to his Cowboys and few other pieces, it could be a great show.

BOOK REVIEW (Portuguese)

Ponciá Vicêncio

Evaristo, Conceição

Publicado em 2003, 132p.

Por: Thatiana Santos

O romance afro-brasileiro relata a história da infância e vida adulta de Ponciá Vicêncio, menina pobre que nasceu e cresceu em uma pequena cidade chamada Vicêncio (nome do antigo dono de terra) com seus pais e o irmão Luandi Vicêncio.

Descendente de escravos africanos, a história de Ponciá Vicêncio é um panorama entre as lembranças de sua infância (trabalho nas terras dos donos de engenho; o canto como expressão de manifesto durante as horas de trabalho; o trabalho com artesanato que realizava junto com sua mãe Maria Vicêncio; a personalidade e a presença forte do espírito do avô paternal Vicêncio que a acompanhou até a fase adulta), um presente estagnado e uma falta de perspectiva em relação ao futuro.

O relato de uma infância sofrida é um paralelo - real e imaginário - entre as experiências de vida vividas pela protagonista e a autora Conceição Evaristo. As buscas pela identidade negra e autenticidade como mulher, a luta por uma vida melhor. Evaristo, após trabalhar muitos anos como doméstica na cidade onde nasceu, Belo Horizonte, conseguiu terminar seus estudos e mudou-se para o Rio de Janeiro, onde se formou em magistério e começou a lecionar. A personagem Ponciá, após a morte do pai, deixou a pequena vila de Vicêncio e partiu para cidade em busca de trabalho para poder ajudar a mãe e o irmão, tomada pela esperança de um “mundo” melhor, já que sabia ler e escrever.

O tempo presente da vida de Ponciá é baseado nas conseqüências do passado, o qual a protagonista recorda cada detalhe com bastante intensidade como, por exemplo, a memória da fase final de vida do avô, que tentou suicídio em virtude da opressão, dos maus tratos e da humilhação sofridas pelos escravos. A estreita relação entre Ponciá e o avô, através até mesmo de gestuais semelhantes, leva o leitor a ver a personagem como reencarnação do espírito de seu antepassado.

Filha de Oxumaré (religião afro-brasileira: candomblé), orixá que representa o arco-íris e que também simboliza o transporte de água entre o céu e a terra, Ponciá Vicêncio vive a angústia de uma vida difícil, cercada pela pobreza, pela dolorosa recordação de sete abortos naturais e por um casamento infeliz, cercado de falta de compatibilidade e de violência doméstica.

Devido a todos os seus problemas, Ponciá começou a viver em um mundo imaginário onde o presente já não tinha mais significado. O marido passou a ser apenas uma figura sem importância a quem, ela como mulher, cozinhava, servia, cuidava, mas não tinha nenhum desejo sexual e muito menos amor. A busca por respostas infinitas, de uma forma poética, parece ser constante na mente da personagem. Por que os negros tinham que passar por tanta humilhação? A desigualdade social, racial e econômica seriam permanentes? Haverá esperança de mudança? Vale a pena viver para ver?

Ponciá Vicêncio é a triste história de uma mulher negra que foi além, em busca da própria identidade e da tentativa de descobrir se pertencia ou não àquele mundo onde a desigualdade e o preconceito foram, são e serão fatores que nunca desaparecerão. Dentro desse mundo interno angustiante e de um mundo social opressor, Ponciá ainda descobre que a terra, o rio e a história de vida de seus ancestrais são a base de toda sua vida.

“Um dia o coronelzinho, que já sabia ler, ficou curioso para ver se o negro aprendia os

sinais, as letras de branco e começou a ensinar o pai de Ponciá. O menino respondeu logo ao ensinamento do distraído mestre. Em pouco tempo, reconhecia todas as letras. Quando o sinhô-moço se certificou que o negro aprendia, parou com a brincadeira. Negro aprendia sim! Mas o que o negro ia fazer com o saber do branco? O pai de Ponciá Vicêncio, em material de livros e letras, nunca foi além daquele saber.”

Evaristo, Conceição, Ponciá Vicêncio

About The Omnipresent Phillip Glass

Glass: A Portrait in Twelve Parts, a film produced and directed by Scott Hicks
By Tom Savage

This excellent documentary/interview film with and about Phillip Glass starts with him going down the Astroland roller coaster in Coney Island with a smile on his face. All those years of involvement with Buddhism and other spiritual traditions would seem to have paid off. But why subject one’s life to danger gratuitously? The question is neither asked nor answered. Glass claims not to be a Buddhist. Nevertheless he has a Buddhist teacher named Gelek Rinpoche and is on the boards of numerous Buddhist organizations including Tibet House and a magazine I get four times per year about Buddhist topics called Tricycle. The film features Chuck Close, the famous artist who paints portraits mostly in black dots that look like blown up photographs. Close has known Glass for many years, since they were young and unknown, and has painted many portraits of him. The gallery at the Metropolitan Opera was given over this spring to these portraits. I don’t remember how many there were but they filled the small gallery. In the film, Joanne Akalaitis, the director, is interviewed. She was once married to Phillip Glass. Glass is quoted as saying “a new language requires a new technique.” When he was young, Glass made his living as a cabdriver. He talks about his early concerts in lofts. It so happens I went to one of those over thirty years ago. His music at first seemed loud, repetitive, and boring. I didn’t get the point then, as many people still don’t now. It so happens I love Glass’s many operas, a good number of which I have seen over the years, but find his Symphonies boring. Close and Glass say they like negative reviews. They must be kidding. Still, I suppose the early non-comprehenders contributed to their fame. Asked about fame through “vilification”, Glass says “it helped.”

This is a good film but has some drawbacks as a movie. A lot of talking heads. I couldn’t help wondering if this film will be shown eventually on the public television series American Masters? It looks and sounds very much like one of those programs which is okay, I suppose, but this is supposed to be a movie I’m seeing in a movie theater. Glass inherited money, after which he bought a home in the country, in Nova Scotia. He hasn’t driven a taxi in a long, long time.

What is music “about” anyway? Glass is shown working with the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, a champion of many new music composers, on a piece called “Waiting For The Barbarians”, a piece not based on the great Cavafy poem of that name. Glass cites Ginsberg as an influence and a friend. Allen never wrote a poem of that name.

Glass’s father knew and liked classical music. Glass was the youngest student at the Peabody Conservatory and then moved to Juilliard. A dead wife is mentioned briefly named “Candy.” His current wife is interviewed at length. Glass claims to be open to suggestions from his co-workers and collaborators, also filmmakers. Glass has scored many films in recent years including at least one by Woody Allen. Glass calls himself an “impersonator” and an “impostor” then laughs. Erroll Morris and Godfrey Reggio, filmmakers are interviewed. Also Martin Scorsese who made Kundun, about the Dalai Lama. Although influenced a great deal by Ravi Shankar’s music, Glass also studied with Nadia Boulanger, the great French teacher who taught most of the important American and French composers who have emerged since the 1930’s. Glass says he was afraid of her although she, somehow, gave him self-confidence. But to him Shankar is as important a teacher as was Boulanger. Although to many of us the music of Ravi Shankar seems like a dated fad now, if one listens to it again, one can see that there is a relationship possible between it an Glass’ music. Some of this film, however, is about Glass as a person. He does the Chinese meditative exercise practice chi gong every morning. This Taoist practice brings us to Glass’s other spiritual interests, including a Mexican Toltec shaman.

Also, it turns out that Waiting For The Barbarians is a novel by the well-known South African novelist J.M. Coetze. Finally, Glass comes off as a truly unpretentious and even humble man. He still seems surprised by the good luck that brought him fame after his opera Einstein on the Beach was produced and directed by Robert Wilson years ago. Although he is certainly now the best-known American composer of his generation, it is not one hundred percent certain that his music, outside his operas, will last. It’s initial hypnotic effect has given way to official acceptance, in that his twenty year old opera Satyagraha about Gandhi was done this year by the Metropolitan Opera company itself, which had never produced one of his opera before. Although done at the building which houses the Metropolitan Opera during a period when the company was not in residence, Einstein on the Beach was actually produced independently.

Although the film was informative, it added little to my understanding of Glass, as I’ve been listening to his music with pleasure for nearly thirty years.

Do Tell Hotel
Review by Kevin Riordan

The Hotel of Irrevocable Acts
by Carl Watson

Autonomedia, Unbearable Books, 2008, $14.95

To read Carl Watson’s novel is to put on a pair of X-Ray glasses that do not stop at the skin, but go on to eviscerate instead of titillate, the literary equivalent of the Swedish film Travis Bickle takes his date to. From the first line, I thought I had a handle to grasp this book first published in French a decade ago: a new Jim Thompson, whose first person anti-confessionals were cherished in France and nearly neglected here, like so many other tough paperback original authors, like David Goodis, Chester Himes, or Charles Williams. This contrarian thwarted and eluded that grasp in no time. The book is as free of cliché as it is of guideposts, as he resolutely qualifies every line that might put things in the light, until, like diamonds in a seam of coal, he plants a gem of faceted brilliance.

After a succinct rant at our penchant for blaming everything on everybody, we find “Turn on the TV any day of the week and you get to see your DNA at work.” His juicy language is pungent and poetic but far from flowery. It’s of a kind that can’t be brought home to mother, or taught in college, and to even put its like in an assignment today would get you profiled and detained.

I could speculate that while in utero, the author’s mother was traumatized by either a big fish or a double feature of Roger Corman’s artist/killer/beatsploitation gem Bucket of Blood and Touch of Evil, wherein Orson Welles portrays an exemplar of depravity while maintaining total control of the direction. If you’re looking for graphic gestational metaphors, you’ll find a whole chapter of them, serving, like Esther’s Nose Job, to eliminate the casual reader.

Once we have established the rough setting of protagonist Jack’s young life, and his conversational tone has tempted you to forget he has (purportedly) killed someone, the subject is nothing less than the eternal wrestling match between thought and reality, a hot potato in Jack’s hands. Of course, there is a ripping, sometimes tense story, and it involves vivid characters engaged in irrevocable and misbegotten acts; but I came to see the whole book, even when the subject was two broken-bottle wielding drunks rolling in the gutter, as a straightforward description of storytelling itself. “Here the left side of the brain creates stories in response to the attempts of the right side to discern narrative sense from raw data.”

At about halfway through, we leave off grappling with reality long enough to dissect a specimen of it, a portrait of Uptown Chicago in the 70’s so vivid you will smell it. “All the windows in the building seemed like tombs, etched with epithets of human behavior.” This ambience is also conveyed eerily by Kit Boyce’s cover painting. Except for a few chapters like this, the world of the novel is so internal that someone just walking down the street seems like a squadron taking off in formation.

When the voice, person or narration changes, the pitch is invariably heightened, the disappointment with the failure of reality more keen, but the casual wisdom of those sudden lines is still there. “The present is as absent as the past.”

If you’ll bear with me for one more allusion (now), the compelling conclusion brought to mind Sontag’s Death Kit, whose narrator may be lying, delusion, homicidal or all three, but we go along willingly as wholly believable death comes to life on the page.

Kevin Riordan is an artist and working slob who lives in Chicago.
www.kevinriordan.com

Yoko Ono’s “Touch Me” at Galerie LeLong, April 1 to May 24, 2008

On first entering the Yoko Ono show, “Touch Me,” at the Galerie LeLong, one is immediately struck by the presence of a young gentleman sitting on a chair at the edge of an enclosed small room. In that room is a small objet d’art, a high-heeled shoe, with bleedings of bubbly red paint on its edge and interior. It is Ono’s “Family Album Exhibit M, High Heeled Shoe.”
It’s worth thousands of dollars and, you would think, should be enclosed in a thick, bulletproof glass case. But it isn’t. Instead, a young man is paid to sit there, bored out of his mind, and stare at the objet in case anyone might try to handle or, perhaps, steal the shoe.
So, the first question to ask about the show - one which cuts to the heart of what Ono’s art is about - is why does the gallery prefer to use a low-paid drudge rather than a lockbox to guard her art?
A superficial examination might conclude this is done merely for cost effectiveness. The super-exploited gallery employees obviously earn little money and saves the cost of fitting an expensive box. Still, I think the choice is more ideological. By leaving the shoe outside the box, as it were, the arrangement creates an atmosphere of casualness, informality and freedom, which, as long as one studiously ignores the context, gives the work an aura of being unfettered.
Let’s go further and note that this attempt to establish such a gallery tone falls in with the (sad) attempt to recreate the feelings Ono’s work evoked in her youth when she was a vital member of the Fluxus Group.
This re-creation is done most diligently by playing contrasting videotapes of her Cut Piece, a performance in which she allows random audience members come forward and clip off pieces of her dress. It was done as part of a Fluxus event in 1965 at Carnegie Recital Hall. Then, it was redone as a nostalgic tribute in 2003. The two performances are as different as night and day or, more appropriately, life and death.
Note these distinctive attributes of the Fluxus version.

1. It involves a small group of participants doing the shearing, as evidenced by the fact that the same people come on stage repeatedly, in other words, it is a community.

2. The participants are dressed in shabby elegance, wearing cast-off, shiny suits or out-of-fashion dresses, suggesting they are down-at-heels bohemians.

3. Each cut is done as a premeditated artistic act, some being more expressive or inventive than others, as evidenced by how a well-placed snip is applauded by the audience.

4. The camera woman or man is given unrestricted freedom, so that at times that person is training the lens on the back of Ono’s head, at others, zooming in on a near-invisible audience.

All in all, one gathers that the interaction combines solemnity and a sense of shared adventure.
The re-created 2003 version lacks all this and is, indeed, the diametrical and perverse opposite:

1. There is no sense of community among the cutters, who are all different.

2. They are all dressed well, though some casually, indicating they are socialites or well-off functionaries.

3. There is no finesse in the cutting, which seems almost perfunctory, the performance of a ritual that no longer has any meaning. (We’ll come back to this.) No audience response is heard.

4. The camera work is rigidly conventional, that of a hired hand, not a fellow participant.

In sum, as the participants move through the sequence like automatons, there is no applause, no spontaneity, no real life.
In fact, it is as if the participants were as dispirited and uninterested in what they are doing as the young man guarding the high heels.
And this, I think, is what Ono is saying by presenting these two tapes. For both the 2003 re-creation tape and the pervasive unhappiness that pervades the gallery (perhaps a read-off of the sensibility of the exploited workers employed in them) are clear presentations to show that the New York City art world in our neoliberal, neoconservative era - whatever the skill or even genius of the artists that show in it - is largely inhabited by tragic zombies who fastidiously re-create works of a more lively era, only acting in this way so they can be dead a little longer.

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’s recently released book, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30) is an in-depth and entertaining study of 20th century classical music.  It describes the lives and work of composers from Mahler and Strauss all the way to contemporaries such as Kaija Saariaho, Tan Dun, and Sophia Gubadulina, with an incredible depth and breadth of knowledge not only about music, but also about history more generally.  It as been well reviewed (and rightly so) with names of famous readers expounding its greatness on the back cover: if it is promoted by as varied stars as Björk, Osvaldo Golijov, Emanuel Ax, and Richard Taruskin, it must be good.  But with all these reviewers, and the scope of the work, it is hard to figure out who this book is for, why he wrote it, or whether there is anything particularly significant to be found in it.
Part of the answer to this question can be seen by the sorts of details Ross centers on.  He makes a great effort to pick out notable pieces of music and tries to describe them with an analyst’s attention to detail, translating complex musical ideas into a generally readable instruction.  Overall, these analyses are very astute, approachable discussions of the inner workings of certain compositions, though at times they fall into overly stylized language and the problematic talk of metaphors and evocations without which, admittedly, non-technical music analysis would come to no conclusions.  In this way The Rest is Noise reads like the program notes to the biggest pieces of the century.  But program notes are things to read when the concert itself gets boring.  Is this all Ross is trying to accomplish?  When the music ceases to be clear in its meaning, as is the case with most of the music Ross discusses, the critic must step in and connect it with real people and events, to give it a meaning in the face of its seeming incomprehensibility.  Accompanied by his blog (of the same title as his book) the reader has access to a large discography for his or her “to listen to” lists, and mentions composers along with their most significant pieces, pieces with which to get a proper taste of each composer.  Oriented toward the unspecialized but educated concertgoer, it is written primarily for the same people who read the New Yorker.  In fact, its Manhattan-centric view of the world (though not unfairly; that is where all the interesting stuff happens) only emphasizes the connoisseur-oriented eclecticism which hovers slightly beneath the prose of the book.
Central to the story line are the lives and personalities of the 20th century composers, the men (and a few women) of flesh and blood, as Unamuno would say.  Full of History Channel style trivia, the relationships among the composers - who knew who, who listened to who, who taught who, who lived down the road from who - makes an interesting read and also more soberly documents the connections through which the development of the music proceeded.  Usually these peripheral details seem to be meant as tidbits for popular consumption, interesting facts to quote at cocktail parties.  However, the extreme lack of such details in other discussions of music history are equally problematic and so the biographical, day to day anecdotes and connections serve to entertain the reader as well as to ground the ideas and ideologies at work in the practices of the various composers in a more understandable manner.
For this reason, The Rest is Noise is also a valuable book for those with more specialization in music.  Musicians and Musical scholars who have been brought up in another musical historical context entirely, in the ‘music appreciation’ class or an introduction to music history, which has its own modus operandi and own narratives, will benefit from the critically examining the lives and thoughts of various composers.  Rather that going through the same interpretations and same material, Ross takes a fresh look at many historical stories, with plenty of primary sources (and for that reason a great bibliographic section) while avoiding some of the more worn anecdotes.  It is notable that, while discussing Strauss, we do not read once about his depicting silverware in music, perhaps the first discussion of Strauss in fifty years not to do so.  The ideas about music also come under Ross’s discussion, from the alleged historical inevitability of Schoenberg’s music to the political content of music in Nazi Germany, the USSR, and the ‘40s and ‘50s US, or even the sacred nature of music in Messiaen, some ideas are tacitly denied, and some are interestingly sustained.
Ross escapes a big issue in his title “Listening to the Twentieth Century” since it avoids naming what sort of music constitutes his topic.  Now, if you walked into Barnes and Noble, most of the music which Ross discusses could be found in the “classical” music section, though there is nothing classical about most of it.  And while Ross discusses the Beatles, the Velvet Underground and a variety of other ‘popular’ musical artists, this book reinforces that specific realm of music, nowadays abiding mostly in the academy, of historically conscious, self-involved specialty of writing music to be listened to, thought about, and appreciated.  Even this definition seems lacking; still, it is not all music in the twentieth century to be sure, and this limitation is significant.  Jazz is discussed at times, as well as Rock, but the central focus is this music sometimes called “high,” “legitimate,” or “classical”.  It might be described in the broader sense of music lacking self-evidence.
But if there are biases in Ross’s work, they are not those biases found in the Twentieth Century itself - which are precisely those biases which the Academic study of music inevitably fall into.  This book is an example of popular research which in many ways surpasses scholarly research through its grounded analysis avoiding impassioned commitment to one tradition or one sound.  But the book does this by forsaking the reason why the academics have such a different method: the investments towards certain traditions it seeks to uphold.  Atonality and the Schoenberg tradition is, for most official music history, the continuation of the modernist classicalism of European ‘classical music.’  Ross speaks of it from a distance, and thereby escapes the predominant understanding of20th century “high” music.  On one hand we have the bitter passion of the academy trying to keep alive the dying tradition out of which it arises, and on the other hand, Ross, his level prose situating this rhetoric along with its music and its time.  Hence the analysis in The Rest is Noise presents a high quality study in which nothing is at stake, unbiased and uncommitted.
Yet it is clear that Ross is invested in the music he describes, but not because he says as much or commits to a rhetoric of value.  The investment is at once absent from the text and immanent to the whole work.  The project of the book is no less than to establish the canon of 20th century music, to place in encyclopedic detail those composers significant enough to be known by an educated audience.  While this was tentatively accomplished already for the first half of the 20th century, one strength of this book is Ross’s astute awareness of the composers of the last 50 years.  Until now, history had been reserving judgment on these new developments, especially since they are so unpopular.  As Adorno, whom Ross has clearly struggled with, says about modern art, “What has terminated tradition can hardly count on one in which it would be given a place.”  Still, Ross gives them a place, perhaps not one which they would have liked, but still better than they could have been given by the largely unappreciative and correlatively unwanted audiences.
Music criticism has a tradition of producing excessively scathing, bombastic rhetorical tirades about composers and pieces. With both the music, and the ideas about music, Ross maintains a dispassionate- perhaps we could say Kantian-disinterestedness, which is refreshing after two hundred years of grandiloquence about the horrors and triumphs of certain composers. At the same time, these composers, historical events, and pieces of music are still under debate.  The dust has not settled on the Twentieth century, and in contrast to these debates Ross’s tone sounds as close to authoritative as one can get these days. Still, Ross really has only nice things to say about the music - he might even convince some people to actually listen to some of it, which would be good - and his authoritative tone is inclusionary and intended for the betterment of people’s general musical reception.  For both those who don’t know what to think about 20th century music, as well as for those who already have dealt with some of it, The Rest is Noise provides an entertaining read and a nice resource for approaching the difficult music of the twentieth century.

There is a general sense that, even after a hundred years of jazz, no one really has completely figured it out. We could hide behind the esoteric “if you don’t know by now, you won’t ever know” mentality, but only thereby avoiding the challenge which comes with every calling of something significant. The will to jazz lives equally in performances, recordings and, I would argue, in the attempt at interpretation. Even the Dao de Jing, beginning with saying that the Dao which can be put into words is not the real Dao, continues for a time with some manner of instruction. Some music is more open to explanation than others, and some, needless to say, is really hard to get into. It is jazz at its most difficult, that of the last 50 years, for which we have an almost traumatic relation with, a phenomenon we want at once to come out into the open and want to keep hidden, like some subconscious force which we suppress and yet which defines our socio-musical egos.
Perhaps we desire no artist to be kept hidden behind a mystical veil more than John Coltrane. His music is for the initiated, for those first, second, third generation acolytes who have transcribed and learned his solos, who hear in his music spirituality and transcendence which are transmitted unspoken from teacher to pupil. He is also reserved for literal worshippers, those who take to heart so many words to that affect: that music has always in its potential a relation to the divine, and the prophet, the seer, is placed on a special pedestal. We hear in Coltrane’s music and his suggestive statements a pursuance, a forward searching for something else, desire for a state of knowing and being not yet fulfilled for himself by any other structure, musical or religious, extant in the world. In this way he becomes the musical, or perhaps literal, oracle who has some methexis in the absolute.
Naturally, the sober minded ‘rest of the world’ who still would otherwise like to appreciate Coltrane’s music, must focus on the theoretical, technical, and biographical details which are accessible and reasonable pieces of knowledge for everyone. Even in this context, though, an artist like Coltrane is taken up into larger stories of modernism, Marxism, or civil rights, and interpreted as a character in something ‘more’ meaningful. That he comes ‘after’ Charlie Parker and before the current scene takes on various levels of meaning, but his music is always prescient enough to help define some context, some paradigm or historical theme. Without any mysticism whatsoever, Coltrane’s music requires some interpreting, if only to wallow out of the murk of the thousand stories which pre-package him for each generation.
The historian critic and the jazz theologian would equally like to work through all of this in a rigorous manner. And in more of the former spirit, New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff has written the recently released Coltrane: the Story of a Sound (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24). Choosing to focus on issues of style more than biographical or strictly theoretical discussions of Coltrane’s music, Ratliff weaves in and out of quotes, anecdotes, analyses of recordings, and glosses of guiding concepts to attempt to come to a better understanding of the sound of Coltrane.
‘Sound’ –what does this mean? You know, a player’s sound. His tone color? More than that. His harmonic vocabulary, his participation with rhythm sections? Sort of, but… – then what? You know man, his sound. Right, I do know; I got Giant Steps when I was 14, studied music alongside Coltrane addicts, and have discussed jazz with enough self-defined hep-cat-in-touch musicians to know what people mean by ‘sound’. And I can sum up for you where Coltrane’s

came from somewhat quickly: Coltrane practiced non-stop, studied harmony extensively, listened to a wide variety of other music, and played with great musicians. That’s where it came from, and to know what it is, you just listen to Coltrane. If this book is merely a story, a story with no moral or thesis, then it accomplishes this, but little else. The mystery remains untouched.
Ratliff, I would have to guess, suspected that the central issue he wished to discuss was not exactly the details surrounding the sound itself, since this is a vague and limiting category sort of encompassing a diverse set of musical elements. And, he knew he didn’t want to cover the well-studied biographical and analytical elements of Coltrane. But the central issue which he wanted to broach continually escapes the book: each detail, each discussion of the next solo or album, the next opinion from the next critic or fellow musician moves along the periphery of a realm of truly difficult questioning into the significance of Coltrane’s music, in itself as the work of this human being and for us as students of the history of jazz these decades later. He suspected this because he felt the need to write a book about Coltrane’s music: The department of Coltrane Studies has not published its definitive statement. No unified field theory of Coltrane, or jazz itself is even on the horizon.
Ratliff’s book does help to focus the details of Coltrane’s life and work to better understand the dynamics of its development, giving, as it promises, a story of the development of the music. He does not really commit himself to the investigation of Coltrane’s sound per se, since this really is not a productive name for any part of the music. It is not always safe to play the naïve nominalist, but here it seems that nothing more central lies between the technical facts of the music and the spiritual content. A seer does not search for a tone of voice, a seer looks to articulate something through the voice. But Ratliff quickly discovers this. The book is full of discussions on the harmony, the tone color, the personnel, and the more discreet elements which make up the musical work (not artwork, but work accomplished, force over time) in which Coltrane labored. What would be necessary is not the investigation of a central focal point like sound, but a larger investigation which attempted to unify the extremes of technique and content. Ratliff works towards this, but stays a safe distance from a synthesis of any larger interpretation. But even the down to earth discussions of musical elements skirt around even local issues of significance. This seems to arise from the book’s commitment to non-technical analysis, the inevitably loquacious reconstitutions of musical meaning for those who would not be able to follow anything with more detail. But here, this commitment to the non-specialist reader drowns any true unity between the discreet technical elements and the themes of sound, whether they be historical, religious, Marxist, or what have you.
For example, when, in the end of the book, Ratliff discusses the ‘sound’ passing from Coltrane himself to the next generation of great saxophone players, this transmission is emphasized with a number of quotes, stories, and interviews which tell of the particular captivation of the many musicians who were influenced by him. In many ways, this lineage had a connection which was unique in comparison to other jazz greats and their followers. It was not merely about the transmission of technical skills (although every jazz player from now to eternity will study Giant Steps changes) nor simply about the possibilities of the small jazz ensemble, or any other number of musical legacies. The transmission was much more emotional, having to do with what personal motivations are for making music.
There is a telos which accompanies searching: a direction, a goal. And if one buys into the search at all, if one even speaks of it as searching, then one commits, if not to saying what Coltrane was searching for, at least saying what he was not. Ratliff does not commit. Chalking up all the mysticism to the ‘50s and ‘60s era hippie mentality, and chalking up all the modernism to the newly academic study of jazz and Coltrane’s role therein, discussion of Coltrane’s music returns to a safe level of historical contextualizing which fits nicely into the music connoisseur paradigm of appreciation: that Mr. Coltrane’s music is so interesting!
Still, no matter how sober a historian Ratliff or his reader may be, it is difficult to escape the fact that the figure and the music of Coltrane consummates so many Romantic notions of expressivity, subjectivity, artistic genius, modernism, and religiosity, that to not interpret him in some of these ways, at least to an extent, is to miss out on some provocative ideas concerning the possible meaning and significance of his music, or music in general. Ratliff, or anyone who wants to take up the noble pursuit of discussing Coltrane’s music, must commit not only to the details of the music, but to interpreting the music with a respect for its possible significance. This might require taking some sides, might require some different textuality, and it might require, (perhaps inevitably today) more of an academic context, or at least one willing to move beyond the market for easy-to-read, relatively brief, quick moving and elementary analyses. Unfortunately, the Story of a Sound rarely escapes this level.

Even an especially accommodating definition of what jazz is will not place its beginnings much before the first few years of the 20th century, and so this world of music, this hallowed tradition which constitutes an entire paradigm of musical practice, is barely one hundred years old.  Among many implications of this, one is that a single artist could participate in most of the history of jazz.  Many did; and those who were canonized as jazz greats did not merely influence the development of the art form with a notable recording or famous concert, but continued, on many occasions, to shape and refine the possibilities which jazz – and all music – could reach.  Born in 1917, 90 years ago this October, Thelonious Monk lived such a life within, parallel to, and constitutive of jazz as we know it today.
As an inversion of the history of European classical music, entire historical eras of jazz history make up mere periods of an artist’s style.  Because of this, a number of individuals like Monk held the power of changing the course of jazz history.  In some ways, it is remarkable that we have such a clear canon of great jazz artists, musicians who added such a distinctly creative element to jazz that everyone ‘afterwards’ understood jazz a little differen