Me and Steve

 This is me and one of my oldest friends, Steve (I'm on the left in the checked shirt).  I remember when I first saw him -- it was 55 years ago and it was on a basketball court.  I was a year ahead of Steve in high school.  We played football and basketball together.  Steve was the best, strongest, and fastest defensive lineman I ever saw.  I played behind him as a defensive back and doubled as the quarterback.  We had a good football team; were always considered one of the best teams in the state.  Once after a basketball game my sophomore year, I was at the concession stand trying to find something edible when Steve sauntered up and offered, "What's the matter, Lance -- nothing intrigues you?"  I just thought, "Damn, someone who knows the word 'intrigues' -- I'm gonna have to get to know this guy."  And I'm glad I did.

We hauled hay together, presumably fished together (I just sat with my legs over the side), drove too fast, drank cheap wine, stupidly smoked filtered cigars, and double-dated.  Steve stayed local and eventually farmed with his dad, taking over the operation.  Several times over the past 15 years I've taken a summer off from the school I work at and have driven truck for Steve during harvest -- primarily wheat.  Everything got bigger, though -- trucks, combines, acreage -- and I finally felt entirely out of my element.

Steve and his wife Ann (whom I've known for 47 years) flew down to Sacramento to buy a beautiful deep red convertible sports car.  They then drove over to San Leandro but first stopped in Walnut Creek for a visit.  We toured the school I work at then hit the Cheesecake Factory.  Lots of talk, lots of laughs, and -- lots of love.  

Steve's sister Christi, who was a year ahead of me in school, sent me this picture that Ann took last Wednesday.  It's a happy twist of fate for me that these two, Steve and Christi, are also two of the dearest, truest, and longest-lasting friends that I've been fortunate to have in life.  There is nothing better than a lifelong friendship. To know and love people who truly know you, love you, and stand by you, no matter what -- that's the real deal.

Roma

 Another song from the Barcelona Gipsy Balkan Orchestra.  Someone posted below the video the following text explaining the derivation of the music:

"About this extraordinary and wonderful song: the first part of the song (00:00 - 2:25) is by Saban Bajramovic, called 'Opa cupa' (only music; the text was afterwards written by Marija Kovacevic in the Serbian language). Šaban Bajramović was a Serbian-Romani musician known as the 'King of Roma Music.'

The second part (2:25 - 4:30) is the song ¡Ai Carmela! - one of the most famous songs of the Spanish Republican troops during the Spanish Civil War. This song refers to the Battle of Ebro (one of the most important rivers on the Iberian Peninsula). As the Danube is the most important river in Serbia (and Europe), BGKO has merged two distant countries, cultures and the whole of Europe with this song. That's why I am extremely grateful. Viva la musica! Greetings from Serbia!"

And so, the song itself, and the fulfillment of my promise to provide something a little more lively by this group of musicians, truer to their collective musical nature.

BGBO Reprise

 Something unusually quiet by the Barcelona Gypsy Balkan (formerly "Klezmer") Orchestra, one of my favorite bands.  For those of you with a little gypsy in your blood or your soul.  Next time I'll find something livelier, but I loved the setting of this piece.

Sonnet For The Palouse

A week or so ago when I was in Half Moon Bay, I bought a used copy of Bill Bryson's book on Shakespeare and read that while on vacation.   Historically speaking, London in the late 16th century was a volatile, fluid, albeit interesting place.  The state spying on its citizens, Protestant and Catholic enmity and political intrigue, and the thought police of church and state together.  Yet still people got up to all manner of unbeknighted enterprises.  Like staging plays.

Any discussion of Shakespeare necessarily touches upon his sonnets.  They were apparently published as a pirated edition some time well after he had written them.  In fact, Bryson said the form was already considered a bit passe' by the time Shakespeare's sonnets came out.  And I thought the form an Elizabethan stalwart.

When I graduated with a B.A. in English, the head of the department surveyed my transcript and said, "How did you ever manage to get through here without reading any English writer past Shakespeare?"  That wasn't entirely true; I took classes such as "Native American Creation Myths," and "19th Century  Feminist Literature."  I just didn't read any actual English or American poets, novelists, or essayists after Shakespeare.  Call me idiosyncratic.  No matter.  He approved me.

The sonnet as a living, vital poetic form died long ago.  RIP.  My fond hope is that the ghazal will make a successful transition into the English language, with all its rich possibilities, and replace the staid and outworn forms of verse trailing along behind the car like so many clattering cans after the wedding.

30 years ago, I was doing some writing.  I'd sent some poetry to a fellow teaching in the Graduate Program at the University of Washington and he invited me to an ongoing workshop.  It was a shark pool; very competitive.  But at one point, we all had the assignment to write a sonnet.  So I tried my hand at it.

Having partly grown up on a farm, I thought I'd write a paean to the land that shaped me in so many ways -- the Palouse, a geographic anomaly formed by Ice Age floods, ancient lava flows, and the subsequent centuries of wind and dust.  This is the poem that came out, entitled "Sonnet for the Palouse."

 I walked those hills for years and ate their dust;

listened to the earth turn, watched wheat grow

and served the sentence of my father's choice.

The silent sky just burned, intensely blue.

Restlessness defeated by expanse:

what was there to do, where to go?

Winter made a nondescript advance;

pastel shades of grey and quilted snow.

If I could rip the mask from off that place,

what sudden inner vista could I cull?

Would night reveal a warm effulgent face

or day undress in dark and light annul?

Though years ago I fled its vacancy,

this landscape circumscribes and mirrors me.

It sounds a little nihilistic to me now.  I no longer feel that way about that land; I would write an entirely different sonnet now.  But that's how I felt at the time -- I was still dealing with the shadows and ghosts of my childhood passage through that locale and it would be years before I was free, free to simply experience the energies of the land as they really are, to feel rejuvenated and uplifted by the land's intrinsic power.

I can see I'm going to have to attempt a new sonnet about the Palouse one of these days, if I can gird my loins and gather my wits.  Until then....

Hasta la Raiz

An interesting song, interesting video, and interesting vibe by Natalia Lafourcade.

 

A Tip of the Hat to Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac

 It's a day dedicated to thinking about the brief but vital friendship between Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder.  Through their meeting in the fall of 1955 to their residential camaraderie of spring, 1956, fertile seeds were sewn for the future of ideas in America.  The Sixties, and certainly hippies, would never have happened without the cross-fertilization of Beat poetics -- which really was just the triumvirate of NYC outcasts William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Kerouac -- and the early Buddhism of Snyder, Phillip Whalen and Jack Kerouac, chiefly Snyder and Kerouac.  Kerouac published a novel, "The Dharma Bums," in 1958 and Snyder's Cold Mountain poems appeared sometime thereafter.  Together, they launched thousands of spiritual quests, some sincere and some quixotic.

Here's a photo of Kerouac at Gary's going-away party in Marin in early May, 1956 (Gary was off to study Zen in Japan for several years).  It's my favorite photograph of Jack.  He'd been meditating for about two and a half years; his mind and spirit appear calm, collected, and relatively quiet.

Here's a picture of Gary from around the same time.  He seems an early archetypal hippie, certainly one of the originals.  In fact, Kerouac used Snyder as his heroic figure in "The Dharma Bums" and I'd argue it was Gary's individual ethos, as portrayed in that book, that helped shape much of the cultural ethic that  subsequently emerged in the Sixties.

And lastly, a rather risque photo of Gary enjoying a skinny-dipping session with his Japanese wife and their young son in the Sierras in July of 1969, where he built his own home and where he still lives to this day.  Gary and his first wife* Masa divorced.  He then married the writer Carol Koda, who has since passed on.  I just stumbled upon this photo online and figured what the hell, I may as well share it.

A man in his prime, enjoying the natural life in a natural setting.  And that was Snyder's greatness, really -- the ability to enjoy his life in a healthy, rather than destructive way, and to explore and integrate a philosophy that was both personal and larger-than-self; that served the health of all.

What these two guys stood for at that moment in time was authenticity.  Snyder was able to maintain and gradually expand upon his with further growth but Kerouac's authenticity was a casualty of his fame, or rather, literary notoriety, and the loss of his own internal compass.  It's a continual battle in life to hold true to what is best in oneself.  External forces, often in the shape of other people or external pressures and events, buffet us, wear us down, challenge us, and chip away at our sense of who we really are.  Tough to stay true to one's own star throughout a lifetime.

*  A footnote:  I forgot Gary Snyder's two earlier marriages: firstly to Alison Gass in 1950 and later to the poet Joann Kyger.  Kyger, Snyder, Allen Ginsberg and Ginsberg's partner Peter Orlovsky traveled for several months together in India in 1962, eventually meeting with the Dalai Lama.

Renbourne Redux

After my happily meaningless and mundane post of yesterday, I felt the music didn't match the post.  I was just blathering, really, about something that will mean nothing to anybody.  But still, the music video didn't fit.  I was trying to find something authentically Scottish, and although the piece was composed by Dougie Maclean, a Scot as said, the song was a tad bit too wistful, methought.

So today a song by the late Englishman, John Renbourne, called "The New Nothynge" (sic re the Elizabethan spelling) accompanied by a video of castle remnants from Wales and elsewhere in Britain.  The song always calls to mind a vision of a court jester playing a lute and dancing in tights or pantaloons before the court.  I can even see in my mind's eye exactly how I would stage the dance.  Ah, life.  Ah, music.  And a bygone era....

John Renbourne, then --