Category: Magazine

The autumnal equinox gets short shrift across the board. It seems like a blind spot in the American imagination.

 

By Bart Everson

 

 

[editor’s note: Bart Everson lives in New Orleans but many years ago he lived in Bloomington and was co-host of the groundbreaking television series, “J&B on the Rox,” which aired on BCAT from 1992-1995. This essay is adapted from his new book, Spinning in Place: A Secular Humanist Embraces the Neo-Pagan Wheel of the Year, Frowning Cat Books]

 

There’s an old bridge over Bayou St. John in New Orleans, made from wooden planks supported by a steel frame and now used only for foot traffic. A Vodou ceremony is performed here on St. John’s Eve, just after the summer solstice, but recently I’ve come to associate the bridge with the autumnal equinox, because of a flower, of all things.

I first noticed them a few years ago, gorgeous crimson spidery blooms which seemed to have sprung out of nowhere in mid-September, in a little planter box at the end of the bridge. A friend’s grandmother calls them “naked ladies,” because they emerge tall and proud atop leafless stalks.

It wasn’t until several years later, as I was studying up on the equinoxes, that I realized these flowers are associated with the beginning of fall. They bloom around the time of the autumnal equinox. It’s a testimony to my own alienation from natural cycles that I noticed this not from direct observation or local lore but by reading about rituals of Japanese Buddhism on the internet.

The Higan Service has been observed at both equinoxes by Japanese Buddhists for over a thousand years. It’s traditionally a time to visit graveyards and honor ancestors. The naked ladies which I see in New Orleans are called higan-bana in Japan; they are often planted in graveyards and usually bloom around the time of the autumnal equinox.

Some say the flower has over 900 names in Japanese, including poisonous flower, fox flower, the flower of the dead, samadhi flower, abandoned child flower, and the flower that looks like a phantom. The Latin designation is Lycoris radiata, which I find almost as beautiful as the flowers themselves. In the American South they are also known by a variety of evocative epithets: red spider lilies, red magic lilies, surprise lilies, resurrection lilies. They have become for me one of the signal harbingers of autumn.

 

The boy who didn’t believe in autumn

The flower is also called the hurricane lily, which will need no explanation for those of us who live along the Gulf Coast. The peak of hurricane season comes on the tenth of September, statistically speaking, but the season officially runs until the first of November. Hurricane formation is driven by warm water in the mid-Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, which lingers on through the phenomenon of seasonal lag. It’s summer’s hangover.

Many locals take a dim view of September, the ostensible beginning of the fall season. September often seems like nothing more than an extension of the month before. August, Part II: The Revenge of the Humid. September is a sticky, sultry, summery month.

Here in the subtropics, spring may be ephemeral, but autumn can be downright elusive. Most of the trees in New Orleans stay green year-round, so we don’t see much fall foliage. The Saints may be playing football, kids may be back in school, and rumors of fall may filter down from the north, but when you’re mopping sweat off your brow it can be hard to believe autumn will ever come. The equinox can seem like a false premise. However, there is one undeniable reality that can’t be missed, even at our latitude.

I start to notice it at the very beginning of September. I rise at the same time, but each day it’s a little darker. Dawn slips forward through our morning routines. We are losing light. The days are getting shorter, as night encroaches upon day. Thus, even in the subtropics, we experience a sense of loss.

 

The other equinox

It seems to me that the autumnal equinox gets short shrift across the board. It’s my gut feeling that most Americans, if they are familiar with the concept of an equinox at all, think of the vernal equinox first. The vernal equinox is the subject of an enduring myth: that you can stand an egg on end on that one day and no other. For some reason, this story is told only about the vernal equinox. The poor old autumnal equinox gets virtually no traction in the American mind. I wonder why that is.

My suspicion is borne out by a moment with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which indicates that for 200 years the vernal equinox has been mentioned about twice as often as its autumnal counterpart.

The chart gets more cluttered if you throw the solstices into the mix, but it seems that the autumnal equinox has been the consistent underdog since the Civil War, at least.

I can’t help wondering if it’s a global phenomenon. One imagines that, for ancient people, the vernal equinox might have held greater importance in terms of the agricultural cycle. Knowing when to plant seeds is crucial information. By contrast, knowing when to harvest can be determined simply by observing the plants themselves.

I can’t help wondering what wisdom the autumnal equinox might have to offer us, in spite of (or perhaps even because of) its obscurity.

 

Abstract vs. embodied

Over the years I’ve amassed a collection of music related to equinoxes and solstices, and in so doing I’ve discovered a few things.

First of all, “Equinox” is a popular title. John Coltrane’s jazz standard is the most famous, but there are many others in genres ranging from death metal to ambient electronica.

Second, most equinoctial music is instrumental. Yes, there are some precious few songs about the equinox, but the overwhelming majority of tracks have no lyrics whatsoever.

Third, it’s often impossible to determine which equinox is being referenced. Some compositions seem to have a seasonal feel, either a bouncy vernal character or a more autumnal melancholy. Some titles make the matter explicit, such as “Vernal Equinox” by John Hassell or “Vernal Equinox” by Can (same title, but entirely different compositions). There are half as many titled with some variation of “Autumnal Equinox,” further evidence of the disparity noted above.

In some cases a seasonal association can be deduced from other clues. For example, John Coltrane was born one day before the autumnal equinox in 1926, so perhaps the title of his standard was chosen to invoke autumn. “Meet Me on the Equinox” by Death Cab for Cutie was released in early September 2014, just before the autumnal equinox, and the lyrical refrain of “everything ends” seems to fit with the fall season.
However, for most compositions, the reference is completely ambiguous, and this ambiguity intrigues me. Perhaps musicians are intending to reference both equinoxes at once, to reference the idea of the equinox in the abstract, rather than its embodiment at a specific time of year. Note that solstice compositions are almost never ambiguous; the reference to summer or winter is almost always quite clear. The solstices by their nature represent opposite extremes, whereas the equinoxes are identical, insofar as the celestial mechanics are concerned.

The autumnal equinox is a global moment which can be observed and celebrated by all, and it exists far beyond the scope of any government or institution.

It’s a precise moment that happens twice a year, when the equatorial plane of the earth intersects the center of the sun. For this moment only, the Earth’s axis will not be tilted one way or the other with regard to the sun. It’s easy to illustrate with a flashlight and any round object (a globe, an orange), and I’m happy to demonstrate to anyone who cares to pay attention. In fact I have demonstrated the concept on numerous occasions at a local elementary school.

Yet the thought of a non-tilted axis has probably not inspired many musical compositions. Rather, I suspect, it’s the idea of day and night in equal balance. There’s something mysterious, magical, even mystical, inherent in that notion. It’s obviously a natural phenomenon, and taking note and marking it seems deeply human as well. Furthermore, it’s a global moment, which can be observed and celebrated by all, and it exists far beyond the scope of any government or institution. And since this configuration of Earth and Sun happens twice a year, it lends itself toward abstraction.

 

A different kind of balance

The concept of balance, common to both equinoxes, is not static but flowing. We seek balance as the best footing for our actions. This flowing sense of balance is embedded in the seasonal continuum. In the spring, the equinox represents a transition from dark to light; in the autumn this valence is reversed. At the autumnal equinox we move from light to dark. Attendant metaphors ensue.

Perhaps that’s why this equinox seems like such a blind spot in the American imagination. Themes of loss and darkness don’t fit well with the national narrative.

Yet there is much to celebrate, if we aspire to a full and comprehensive vision of what it means to be human on this planet. The metaphors of the equinox can work for us, if are open to the possibility. These metaphors only gain power when embodied in their seasonal context.

As metaphors of new growth predominate at the vernal equinox, so harvest metaphors abound in autumn. This might be a time for drawing in, for gathering together. The equinox can be a time for reflection, for making changes and starting projects, for setting priorities and recognizing intentions. Glenys Livingstone writes of “stepping into the creative power of the abyss,”1 a wonderfully expressive and suitably mysterious phrase. Truly darkness and loss, though they present challenges, are not to be feared, if only we can gain adequate perspective.

Fear and denial are fundamental responses to loss and encroaching darkness. There’s no sense in pretending otherwise. However, there is another response which may seem surprising and counterintuitive, though just as fundamental, and that is gratitude — the reciprocal of the spirit of desire which we celebrated at springtime.

 

Methods of gratitude

In fact this cuts both ways. Reflecting on one’s mortality can enhance one’s sense of gratitude, and gratitude helps us cope with loss. There is now abundant evidence of the many benefits of gratitude in the emerging field of positive psychology sciences.

Most ancient wisdom traditions have also emphasized the importance of gratitude. Gratitude is like any other capacity we have: it grows when we exercise it regularly. So it’s good to be intentional about it, to set aside time for gratitude.

A fun way to do this with family and friends is to make a gratitude chain. Cut up some strips of colored paper, and on each strip write down things for which you are grateful. Join the strips together to make a chain. Add to it daily throughout the season and soon you will have visible evidence of just how much gratitude is flowing through your lives.

A craftier alternative, perhaps appropriate for a gathering, is to make a gratitude garland. Each person can bring a token to hang on the garland, representing a blessing which they wish to celebrate. As the garland is constructed, each person can share the story of their gratitude.

Another worthwhile exercise, suitable also for the solitary practitioner, is drafting a gratitude letter. This is simply a “thank you” letter to someone you’ve never adequately thanked. It’s surprisingly powerful. Try it some time.

There are other methods. Whatever you do, do something. A recent study by Robert A. Emmons and Anjali Mishra2 indicates that cultivating gratitude may help you manage stress, reduce toxic emotions and materialistic striving, improve self-esteem, enhance your ability to remember the good things in your life, build social resources, motivate moral behavior, make you more spiritual, help you reach your goals, and promote your physical health.

I heartily recommend it.

 

Objects of gratitude

I am riding my bike to my daughter’s school on a warm September afternoon. It’s sprinkling gently though the sun is shining. As I ride I puzzle over an issue related to this essay, a philosophical snag over which I’ve dithered for years.

We may feel immense gratitude for favors large and small done us by our fellow human beings, which is a truly wonderful thing in its own right, but what about that gratitude we feel for a beautiful day? For sunshine or rain? For the blooming of Lycoris radiata? What about the whole of existence?

Gratitude is usually constructed as having two objects. We feel grateful for something, and we also feel grateful to someone. Note that in the standard formulation, this second object is typically a person or agent of some sort. Does it have to be that way? Is it correct to speak of gratitude to impersonal forces, or is there some other word for that? Does gratitude require an object, or can it be sort of free-floating?

By the time I arrive at the school, the sprinkle has thickened into a more substantial rain. The September sun is still shining brightly, however. I’m supposed to take my daughter to aikido class. If we ride in the rain we’ll both get soaked. Fortunately a friend shows up. He’s taking his daughter to the dojo too, so he gives my daughter a ride.

I stand under the portico waiting for the weather to clear, appreciating the beauty of the raindrops sparkling in the sunshine. I wonder about the nature of this appreciation. It feels akin to gratitude, but for many years I scrupled to label it as such, because it wasn’t clear to me just who the object of this gratitude might be. I am grateful to Jameel for giving my daughter a ride. Am I grateful to the rain? To the sun? While the rest of the human race gets on with feeling grateful, some of us stop to wonder: To whom or to what am I feeling grateful? For years that question was my stopping point, my stumbling block.

Since my daughter was born, however, many things have changed. I started to experiment with some things, tentatively at first, but in time — slowly, cautiously — with greater enthusiasm. I thought to myself: Why not? Why not give it a try? Why not allow myself to feel gratitude to the rain, to the Sun, to the Earth, to the Universe? Was it possible to experience gratitude to everything for everything?

We began to say grace before dinner. “Thank you, Mother Earth, for the food that gives us life.” I started visiting a certain tree each morning for a brief meditative moment, and I found myself saying “thank you” to the tree. These practices felt good, but they had other consequences. The world around me began to seem more alive. An incipient animism was springing up in my breast. I noticed that many children seem to relate to the world this way. Was I that way once? I can’t remember.

When the rain abates, I get on my bike and head up Moss Street, along the edge of Bayou St. John. That’s when it hits me. One of the prime functions of mythical metaphors is that they allow and even encourage our expressions of cosmic gratitude. That’s kind of the whole point.
Gratitude surely is a social phenomenon which has evolved over millennia as part of humanity’s web of interdependence.3 Yet that web extends well beyond humanity without any clear limit. It’s only right and natural that we’d want to extend our social feelings to the natural world. This gives an emotional validity to the hard fact of our manifold interconnectedness and conveys many benefits besides. I suspect it’s “selected for,” as evolutionary biologists might say, but I’m speculating again.

This may be a minor revelation but it comes down on me with some force, just as I arrive at the footbridge where Lycoris radiata will soon be making its annual appearance, the very place where I started this overlong rumination on the autumnal equinox. It seems a fitting place to stop, and to express my gratitude to you, Reader, for coming with me so far.

 

 

 

 

Kevin Horan moved to Whidbey Island and found local farmers who allowed him to set up portrait studios in their barns.

by Michal Ann Carley

Yes, goats. Specifically, studio portraits of goats. These are the subjects of Kevin Horan’s suite of 16 photographs from his 2014 series Chattel that is on exhibit at Pictura Gallery through July 29^th. Formerly a photojournalist, Horan has published his work in The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, LIFE, U.S. News & World Report, National Geographic, and numerous other sites, but this series is decidedly not documentary. Nor, as one might anticipate when one has actual goats as subject matter, are the photographs coy or cute, stylized or commercial; rather, they are drop-dead deliciously beautiful portraits of subjects that strongly emote through their corporeal presence.

Kevin Horan moved to Whidbey Island in Washington state in 2006 where, after having been an editorial photographer for over 30 years, he began to explore local subjects of his own choosing. His neighbor’s sheep relentlessly serenaded him with a choir of unique voices as he passed by and, he imagined, told him their individual stories. But when he attempted to gather and corral that energy into individual photoshoots, he was met with skittish, squirrely subjects who tried to maneuver dangerously through his lighting setup.  Not defeated, Horan determined to find animals who were naturally calmer because they were accustomed to human interaction, such as herd dairy animals that were used to twice-daily milking: intelligent and somewhat docile sheep and endlessly entertaining and social goats.

Horan found local farmers who allowed him to set up quasi-formal portrait studios in their barns and who willingly assisted the artist with the handling of their flocks. A photo portrait studio is generally a careful configuration of specialized photofloods and diffusion umbrellas fixed onto tripods with booms and flash box controls tied into cameras, all of which engulf the subject who is positioned against a large neutral backdrop. Erecting this setup in an actual barn is no small task, but Horan found that working with the spirited animals was even more formidable. Unlike human subjects whose ego and vanity would be distinctly in play and would elicit active cooperation during a portrait photo session, the animals had no such pretentions; they were unruly and otherwise distracted, as curious goats are wont to be.

Many of the portraits were taken at the New Moon Farm Goat Rescue and Sanctuary also on the island. It is likely that viewers might project feelings of longing, want, and gratitude onto these goats as a natural response to having been provided haven; but, to this viewer, the unique personalities of the goats are not projections but are real and inescapable — we are  witness to their faces and eyes penetrating, seducing, and laughing.

The artist uses the conventions of traditional portraiture: isolating the head and shoulders in a neutral frame, orchestrating light and shadow-play over the figure while creating a focus on the most expressive features, and using a full range of tonality to create visual complexity and amplify volumes. Horan uses a Pentax medium-format digital camera to shoot the frames in black and white and then digitally superimposes subtle tones of sepia and umber to create richer, more naturalistic though staged images that reference formal portraiture of the 19^th century. “Chattel” means the possessions, or in this case, the livestock that one owns.  The British traditionally heralded the status of their prize animal specimens with a commissioned, oil painted portrait and with the advent of photography, a daguerreotype, a practice that carried over to the colonies. These portraits were intended to display the “beauty” of the animal through the documentation of its use value: its height, width, girth, weight, and the amount that it could pull or push. Horan’s title Chattel borrows from this notion of documentation and pride, but in his accounting, presents the subjects’ most salient characteristics as their facial features, physiognomic structure, and the texture and drape of their hair instead. These are cues to us, as viewers, to infer or sense the personality of each goat, recognizing it in the turn of their head, the lilt of their ears, or the gaze of their eyes.

The individual goats in Chattel are not identified by breed but rather by name, further indicating that they are not anonymous members of a herd, but are a part of a family, of sorts. Sherlock, whose head is shown in profile barely turns at the shoulders revealing a series of articulated creases in his back. His masses of cream-colored curls form an irregular contour that is in dramatic contrast to the deep black space that envelops him. This presentation is unlike those for pedigree shows, beauty pageants and the like. Instead, by virtue of his uncoifed and irrepressible waves of coiling hair in richly layered, umbered tonalities and as his curled horn that encircles the crown of his head and returns us to his attentive expression, he is uniquely aesthetically and psychologically compelling.

Ben stands intimately close. He is positioned frontally to compositionally isolate him in a sea of black, while his upturned chin and short horn imply a youthful innocence.  Together with his widely-set imploring eyes and flaxen colored fur, these features solicit an atavistic empathic response. If there is a patriarch to this menagerie, it is Jake. Presented as the largest photographic print (36 x 44”, edition of 3), Jake commands the pictorial space, filling it almost entirely with his emphatic girth, gnarly muzzle with a Mohawk ridge, heavily veined, silken ears that droop lower than his chin, and horns that spiral diagonally to almost the corners of the frame. His is midtoned overall with only slivers of deep shadows in the furrows of his wrinkled flesh and clearly inhabits the depth of field with its almost shared tonality. But it is his pronounced under bite turned upward as if in a grin and resonant eyes that emote a languid but playful dignity. We are captured in his gaze.

Ella formally is the most sophisticated composition and the subtlest evocation of the suite. Ella occupies the lower one and one-half quadrants of the lower right, but almost merges into it as her burnished black fur swallows the light and her soft eyes and nose, that barely stand proud, are coal black. One hesitant, shimmered reflection on the very edge of her long neck that reads as a barely perceivable line of light, demarcates her muscled body from the environment. Atop her head are a pair of ringed horns poised in arabesque flight that through the precise focus on their ridged growth patterns provides the only dimensional perspective of the piece. Horan’s withholding of chromatic and tonal contrasts makes viewers all the more active in their pursuit of telling information: her feathery eyelashes that obscure eye contact, the dirt on her muzzle that suggests active work or at least exuberant curiosity, the multi-hued layered rings that make up her horns and bespeak her age, and her sustained composer that appears at once distant and present with equanimity. We are her captive audience.

 

Kevin Horan has at his command all the tropes of photographic portraiture and exploits them to make lushly beautiful images of common animals we might well have overlooked. Chattel is a testament to not only his formal and technical prowess, but his patience and affinity to speak with and allow the animals to speak through him. He presents the ordinary and lets it tell its story quietly with no affectation beyond light and shadow and compositional arrangement.

 

 

Michal Ann Carley is an artist, free-lance curator, and teaches Arts Management classes in IU SPEA’s Arts Administration Program.

 

 

Pull

“These pictures insist upon an active engagement of our own feelings about the souls within other beings, human or otherwise, and how visible they are from out here. If we are paying attention to our own responses, we must grapple with the cause of our response.”

–Kevin Horan

Pull

Horan found local farmers who allowed him to set up quasi-formal portrait studios in their barns. But unlike a human subject whose ego and vanity would be distinctly in play and would elicit active cooperation during a portrait photo session, the animals had no such pretentions; they were unruly and otherwise distracted, as curious goats are wont to be.

 

Michal’s Note on images: The images are really important so I hope that the four Sherlock, Ben, Jake, and Ella can be run, in that order.

 

Each image can be captioned with the name of the goat in question

 

By John Linnemeier

When former Bloomington mayoral candidate and Ryder editor-at-large John Linnemeier and his wife Gail set sail aboard a cargo ship, they thought they were embarking on what would be a relaxing, uneventful sea cruise. Instead, the found themselves stranded, adrift and on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The article in the Wall Street Journal was good but these excerpts from John’s journal are even better. Happy sailing.

 

As I think back on it, everything was moving ahead so smoothly and with such a sense of efficient inevitability that I couldn’t have imagined anything disrupting it.   Who would have guessed that in two short weeks, the plight of our ship and all aboard her would land us on the front page of the Wall Street Journal….

 

From the bridge I could take it all in.  Out over the tops of thousands of containers stacked like Legos on the deck of our monstrous ship, stretched the sheltering sky with only a few puffy clouds on the horizon.  How many crab legs or door jams or dildos or dog toys could you fit into one forty-foot-long steel box, let alone five thousand nine hundred and seventy-two of them?  But in this almost forgotten space, the middle of the Pacific, halfway to Tokyo, our home, this mighty leviathan, is no more than a speck of pollen on the rippled skin of the largest ocean on Earth.

 

Out here for all intents and purposes we’re incommunicado.  That’s okay by me.  I’ve brought along about ten pounds of books to read and hope to do some writing as well.  We’re traveling in the owner’s cabin on deck F, a couple of floors beneath the bridge.  Tastefully carpeted and simply but elegantly furnished, the stateroom is battened down with heavy steel doors that close with authority and thick wooden cabinets that click tightly shut with strong little magnets.  Everything looks shipshape, spacious and far larger than a typical cabin on a cruise ship.  On the bookshelf, along with other reading material was a glossy in-house magazine with a story that might have alerted me to the possibility of what was to come.  The article mentioned “challenges” the company had been going through recently.  My only gripe at this point was that what looked like it was going to be an expansive view got blocked by a wall of containers stacked three feet directly in front of our portholes.

 

Booking passage on a freighter seems like a throwback to an earlier era.  I can scarcely believe it’s still allowed in a corporate world obsessed with liability.  I’m not sure what role we’re expected to play.  We can’t bring in much revenue.  Mere pocket lint in an operation this size.  Maybe we’re meant to be a break from the monotony of life at sea for the ship’s officers, or maybe it’s just a naval tradition and slow to change.  But for whatever reason, if you’re willing to sign the indemnity release form, buy the required insurance, and get inoculated for yellow fever, you can go almost anywhere on a working ship.  They rarely take on more than ten passengers, and often far fewer, since more than ten legally requires a doctor on board.  It’s considerably cheaper than traveling on a cruise ship, and your fellow travelers will likely be more interesting.

We joined our ship, the Hanjin Geneva, in Seattle.   Our taxi driver left us off just outside the gates of the terminal where we waited excitedly at security for the shuttle van.  After showing our passports, we donned hard hats and reflective vests.  Then after a brief wait, my wife, Gail, and I were driven out to our boat.  What a sight!  A hundred feet tall and over the length of three football fields.  A smiling young Filipino sailor quickly descended from the ship, grabbed our heavy bags and wrestled them up the gangway with me and Gail following close behind.

How peculiar it felt to find ourselves adrift halfway around the world while the suits in executive suites in Hamburg and Seoul decided our fate – along with the fate of mountains of frozen salmon, shoelaces and ping pong tables. 

Forty years ago I’d attempted to stow away on a luxurious Italian liner bound for Genoa.  I didn’t make it.  This time everything was legit, but my heart was still pounding with excitement from the thrill of coming aboard a great ship.

On the way up the elevator to our stateroom we bumped into a great friendly bear of a man, with rapidly moving, dark, keen, intelligent eyes, short inky black beard, and a head of hair like an uncontrolled squall…our captain, Robert Kuschmirz.  As we ascended, his massive girth seemed to occupy half the tiny elevator’s space.  He spoke quickly with a thick German accent that made it hard for me to understand him at first, though as the trip went on my ears gradually adjusted.  I never adjusted to his laugh though…the loudest I’ve ever heard.  We’d be eating in the officers’ mess and it would suddenly go off like a detonating hand grenade.  He was in a bustling hurry, but more than congenial.  I almost felt as if he might give us a hug.   He assured us we were welcome in the wheelhouse anytime cargo wasn’t being loaded or we were navigating in or out of port.

 

Food in the officers’ mess is solid German seaman’s chow…pot roast, bratwurst, sauerkraut, goulash, pork knuckle soup… If that’s too heavy, veggies are an option.  Our Filipino steward, James, is the smilingest, most obliging guy imaginable.  He serves all our meals and cleans the stateroom once a week.

 

The ship is manned by 22 souls…five European officers (four Germans and one Pole) and 18 crewmen (16 Filipino and two very popular Filipina).  Everybody speaks serviceable English, the lingua franca of cargo ships.

 

Many years ago in Goa I became friends with a group of retired sea captains…salty dogs with lots of stories.  One thing they all agreed on was that they’d lived in the golden age of seafaring.  Loading and unloading a ship today is so efficient that it scarcely leaves time for anyone to go ashore.  “Sailors these days are like prisoners,” said one.  That’s not to say that the men and women on our boat aren’t proud of their skill, but it can be a lonely life.

 

It’s fascinating to watch a container ship being loaded.  The monstrous, smoothly efficient machines look like kinetic sculpture, and the ballet of perfectly coordinated work has its own beauty.  You occasionally see people, but only occasionally, and when you do, they seem tiny and inconsequential.  Trains pull up to the dock where mobile cranes pick the individual containers up one by one and stack them in well-ordered piles along numbered lanes where a series of other gigantic insect-like mechanisms pick them up again and load them onto trucks that sequentially husband them through a labyrinth of colorful container stacks to a spot immediately beneath the mother of all overhead loading cranes, ten or fifteen stories tall.  The crane clasps each succeeding container, then effortlessly plucks it up, lifts it over the gunnels of the vessel and deposits it with a satisfying crunch into its designated slot.   Everything is dictated by dense, continuously evolving algorithms.  Every year more stuff gets moved around, and every year it requires fewer and fewer human beings to keep this relentless juggernaut of intentionality in motion.  In ports like Rotterdam, virtually all work is done by robots who don’t require healthcare and never ask for a raise.

Container ships have re-made our world.  Like the Internet they’ve leveled the playing field between nations and knit us into a global interdependent community with an economic stake in peaceful cooperation as well as a world where wealthy countries with well-paid workers have to compete with poorer countries over the production all things tradable.  Globalization has made a lot of manufactured goods incredibly cheap.  The fact that you can buy a watch that keeps near-perfect time at the Dollar Store continues to amaze me.  Naturally there have been negative effects as well, but my point is not to get into a discussion of the pros and cons of globalization, but rather to emphasize the fact that even though the uniform treatment of containerized goods that can be moved virtually anywhere on earth by ship, train or truck has revolutionized commerce, the process, especially the crucial sea link, takes place out of sight from most of us.

 

Initially Gail and I thought we’d be the only passengers, but in Vancouver we were joined by Rebecca, a six-foot-tall young woman from London, bursting with ruddy health and enthusiasm…an art student with long dark brown hair, lively, intelligent eyes that look you straight on, and what my untutored ear takes to be a faintly upper-class accent.  She has a bit of the manner of a giant puppy who’s always tripping over its feet.  She’s very dear.

Her job will be to shoot a video project about freighters.  It won’t be a run-of-the-mill documentary though, but rather something more creative that will be exhibited in an art museum in Vancouver along with the work of four other “emergent artists” traveling on similar container ships.  She has no clear idea what form her project might take, though she’s packed a few props and costumes.  She plans to shoot hours and hours of video, then try to make sense of it in the editing process.  I asked her about previous projects and she mentioned one in which she dressed up as a frog and hopped around on a pogo stick, periodically falling off, then climbing back on!

 

We awoke on our second day out to a gentle swaying motion.  Our cabin is located amid ship, which minimizes the roll.  On the outside stairs the sway was substantially more pronounced.  The stacked containers buttressed with a spider net of high-tension metal lashings creaked and groaned ominously as I made my way down to the main deck that encircles the ship.  When I reached the bottom of the staircase, things got wilder.  I found myself clumsily making my way along the slippery main deck, clutching onto the railing in a stiff wind as the bow of our ship splintered each succeeding twenty-foot swell with the crashing sound of WOW! WOW! WOW!  I’ve yet to acquire my sea legs.

 

The crew is fine, but all three of us passengers are feeling a bit queasy.  For me, what helps is climbing up to the bridge where I can see the horizon and have a sense of how the ship is attacking the waves.  Even several hours later back in our cabin I seem to carry with me a sense of being aboard a ship ponderously making its way through choppy seas rather than a person confined to a room that drunkenly, sickeningly lurches about in unexpected, seemingly random ways.  If things get worse, I have seasickness patches prescribed by my buddy, Rick Owens.

 

We’re well beyond the 200-mile limit so the ship is permitted to switch from relatively clean

burning diesel fuel with low sulfur content to less clean but cheaper bunker oil.  You’d only notice it if it was brought to your attention, but the exhaust coming from the stack is no longer transparent.  There’s some grayness to it, and you can see a bit more soot on the outside floors and railings.  Up on the bridge is a chart showing the year-by-year, progressively more restrictive environmental laws that ships must adhere to.  The days of lawlessness, when you could dump anything out on the open sea, are coming to an end.  Today only garbage can be thrown overboard, and then only beyond the twelve-mile limit.  At least on our boat, glass, plastic and metal are carefully segregated for disposal back ashore.  Theoretically that means no messages in bottles, though that is one rule I hope to break at least once.

 

Life aboard ship is by turns fascinating and monotonous.  Our next landfall after Vancouver is Tokyo, 4,200 nautical miles away.  We’ll cross eight time zones and lose a day when we pass over the international date line, a crooked imaginary ribbon that starts at the North Pole along the 180th parallel, zigs just west of the archipelago of the Aleutian Islands, then drops straight down into the South Pacific where it zags east between Fiji and Samoa, clears New Zealand, then zigs back to the 180th parallel on its way to a final rendezvous at the South Pole with all the other lines of longitude.

It always seems a little counterintuitive that a straight line drawn on a Mercator Projection is not the shortest distance between two points on a sphere.  Our voyage will take us on a great northern arc that breaches the Aleutians through Unimak Pass, briefly crossing into the Bering Sea before arching back south passing just east of the Attu Islands.  Then on to Japan.

 

One evening at dinner I mentioned to the captain that I’d heard that occasionally people have tried to make it to the US locked in a shipping container.  He said it would be plenty difficult while admitting that, other than knowing which containers require refrigeration (reefers) and which contain hazardous materials, no one aboard has any idea what the individual forty-foot boxes contain.  Only a small percentage of shipping containers are x-rayed, which frankly seems like a gaping hole in anti-terrorism security.

The conversation moved on to piracy…a very real problem in places like the Horn of Africa, the Straits of Malacca and the northern Indian Ocean.  He said he’d encountered pirates once several years back but was able to evade them simply by speeding up.  He reassured me that for our passage to China there was little to no danger of either pirates or icebergs.

 

For virtually the whole trip we’ll be operating on automatic pilot.  The captain resets our course and speed from time to time and the automatic pilot does the rest, continually altering our heading to compensate for wind and current.  There’s a “Deadman’s Button” that starts blinking every once in a while.  If whoever is on watch doesn’t quickly punch it back in response, an alarm goes off in the captain’s quarters and there’ll be hell to pay.

 

A lot of time on the bridge is spent filling out copious paperwork, and month after month of it can get tedious.  When I make my way up to the bridge, I’m always met with a smile.  It’s one of the many reasons I love traveling on a working ship.  There’s always something going on, and whoever is on watch seems happy to answer my incessant torrent of questions.

Typically, I take a look at the large chart on the table near the big window facing the stern to check our course and location, see if we’re around something cool like a buoy anchored out in the middle of nowhere for detecting tsunamis, or maybe crossing some great eight-mile-deep trench.  Another chart I like to examine is printed out daily and shows the direction and wind speed along our projected course with a series of tiny flag-shaped lines.  There’s an instrument that continually draws a line on a scrolling piece of paper indicating whether the barometric pressure is rising or falling.  Then there are electronic read-outs on the huge dashboard showing dozens of things like current speed and direction, distance from our last port, and what’s going on in the engine room.  One elaborate display shows all the ballast tanks, their locations, how much water each contains, and buttons that allow you to operate pumps that redistribute water between them to keep the ship stable.  A couple of dimly lit dials a full meter in diameter, set just beneath the great panoramic windows at the front of the wheelhouse, show weather and the location and identification of nearby ships.  There’s even a secret hidden button warning that pirates are aboard.  God, I love all that shit!

 

It’s the fourth day into the voyage and we’re entering Unimak Passage.  Rebecca, Gail and I were up on the bridge this afternoon with the third mate hoping to catch a glimpse of the islands we could see all around us on the radar screen.  This time of year up in the North Pacific clouds and fog predominate.  As we looked out into the enveloping whiteness there wasn’t a hinge between sea and sky.  Suddenly the fog lifted, and there directly across from us was a perfect conical volcano totally sheathed in snow, floating gracefully on a sea of clouds.  For the five minutes it lasted we whooped around the deck like idiots mugging and striking silly poses in the foreground of this magical apparition.

 

Much of the life aboard a container ship is repetitious to the point of tedium.  I can scarcely imagine what twenty years of nine-month contracts with virtually no time ashore must be like…long hours of uneventful labor, beneath the water line, amidst the continual roar of a monstrous engine with cylinders large enough for a man to crawl into.  That’s been the life of Gunnar, our chief engineer.  A sensitive man, he has a world-weary manner, tall and lanky with gentle blue eyes below bushy dark eyebrows, his disheveled gray hair tied back into a short ponytail.  If anything breaks down on the ship, it’s his job to fix it.  Up on the bridge the captain is the brain of our vessel, below decks the chief engineer is its heart.

Before we descend into the immense engine room, Gunnar explains succinctly that the engine is like a living organism and requires three things in order to operate efficiently…fuel, air, and water.  His job is to see that this monstrous creature and its many organs are healthy and properly fed.  After a short briefing, Rebecca and I (not Gail’s idea of a fun thing to do) put on headphones to protect our ears from the din and follow Gunnar through a heavy, tightly sealed door, down a set of steel steps and into the bowels of the vessel.

We emerge onto a platform overlooking the cavernous room that houses the great beating heart of our ship.  Below us is the immense ten-cylinder engine with a thick driveshaft emerging from its rear.  The burdensome shaft, roughly the girth of a telephone pole, and about forty meters long, spins at only about sixty rpm but with unimaginable power.  It connects to the propeller that ultimately drives us through the water.  I mouth the words, “How big?” and Gunnar shows 25 fingers, then points to his foot, at which point we all laugh.

There’s virtually nothing living, neither plant nor animal, aboard this vessel.  The flower arrangements in our cabin and the officers’ mess, where we take our meals based on a posted schedule, are all plastic.  A pair of small nondescript brown birds must have flown onto the ship in Vancouver.  We sometimes see them about the afterdeck.  They look forlorn but may survive till Tokyo by foraging a few chickpeas that have fallen onto the deck from some container.

 

One of the problems inherent in moving cargo from one place to another is the opportunity it affords for unwanted creatures to stow away on a ship.  Released into some new habitat where they have no natural predators they can wreak havoc on the local ecosystem.  In the early days of sailing, rats that escaped from sailing ships devastated the bird populations of small islands.  Small plants and animals can cause problems as well.  For that reason, ballast water picked up somewhere else, which might contain snails or clam spore or something equally problematic, is never discharged in port.

 

When we leave Korea a special crew of inspectors paid for by Hanjin will scour the boat searching for eggs or adults of the Asian Gypsy Moth.  When the ship reaches North America, authorities will fine Hanjin $1,000 for every egg cluster they find, even if it’s encapsulated in paint.

Speaking of painting, it’s a major and literally never-ending activity for the crew.  All day, every day, three or four sailors continuously scrape and paint the vessel with an epoxy paint that requires a noxious hardener to be mixed in each new batch.  Tough nasty work done by hardworking Filipinos.

The Filipinos onboard seem to prefer to hang out together.  Even Mark, the third mate and Alyssa, the adorable 22-year-old officer-in-training, who technically could eat with the ship’s officers, eat with the crew and hang out in the crews’ day room after hours.  The Filipinos on board are a jolly bunch for the most part and always glad to talk.  Everyone seems grateful to have a good-paying job, and they’re proud of what they do, but man do they miss being home with their families…and when it’s karaoke night, you’ll hear nothing but sappy, mournful love songs sung with real feeling.

 

Rebecca has been spending hours every day sitting on a small perch on the very tip of the bow, her favorite place on the ship.  A couple of days ago she spotted dolphins and three orcas, one of which crossed right in front of her.  Shortly afterward, the chief officer, Adam, reported seeing blood trailing in the water behind us, so perhaps the unfortunate creature ran afoul of our propeller.  A sad thought.

 

No hard liquor is allowed on board, but most of the crew enjoy having a beer or two when they get off work.  There’s not much going on out here, so any excuse for a party is welcome.  Last night was Alyssa’s birthday, and everyone was invited.  I’m not keen on karaoke, but in the spirit of the moment I thought I’d give Yellow Submarine a shot.  My initial verse was frankly embarrassing, but then came the refrain, “We all live in a yellow submarine,” … everyone joined in big time!  It was the hit of the evening.

 

We awoke this morning to shocking news.  Hanjin Shipping has gone bankrupt and cannot or will not pay for either the pilot’s fee to guide us into Tokyo harbor or the port fees that would allow us to dock. The scuttlebutt is that the captain’s orders are to anchor off the coast of Japan in international waters and await further orders.  We’re presently three days’ distance from Tokyo. We’ve been advised by the captain to conserve food and water. What a mess! We’ve got around a hundred million dollars’ worth of cargo aboard including a fair amount of perishables, so that ought to light a fire under people ashore. A message on the whiteboard outside the officers’ mess just announced a meeting for all crew members in the ship’s office at 9:00 tomorrow.

Next morning all available spaces in the tiny office were filled, but as we entered the room, two crew members jumped up and graciously offered their chairs.  There was electricity in the air.  Even though recent developments could mean that the captain and the entire crew would soon be out of a job, everyone seemed strangely and unreasonably larky, like it was a snow day.  The captain was excited to finally have a chance to do captain things like inventory our provisions and determine where we were going to drop anchor.  Everyone else seemed exhilarated just to have a break from the day to day monotony of life at sea.  And for three stranded passengers, how peculiar it felt to find ourselves adrift halfway around the world from home while the suits in executive suites in Hamburg and Seoul decided our fate – along with the fate of mountains of frozen salmon, shoelaces and ping pong tables.

 

Watched a glorious pink and golden sunset this evening. Tonight, we cross our eighth time zone since departing from Seattle. My body has been slow to make adjustments, but for a night owl like me that just means turning in early and waking around seven in the morning. No big deal. It’s been tougher on my early bird wife, who now rolls out of bed in the middle of the night. She also has had an irritation behind her right ear which has added to her discomfort. She’s had enough of freighter travel for the time being.

As I’d anticipated, the trip has been an excellent opportunity for reading.  I started off with Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind. Well written, with lots of thought-provoking ideas and quirky insights from an anthropological point of view. When Red is Black is a mystery story set in Shanghai in the 90’s.  A great read…very atmospheric.  Ready Player One, a sci-fi novel about a young man who immerses himself in a world of virtual reality to escape the dreary world of 2045 where earth has run through most of its fossil fuel…Barely able to finish it. Chasing Venus, the Race to Measure the Heavens.  In 1761 and again in 1769 the transit of Venus measured from many viewing positions around the world gave an international community of scientists the opportunity to calculate the earth’s distance from the sun.  The story of the brilliant, intrepid men who prevailed over wars and innumerable hardships to accomplish that goal is the subject of the book. Great stuff!

The captain cranked up the engines a little and we started to make 19 knots instead of our normal 14 Top speed is 27 knots. [editor’s note: a nautical mile is based on the circumference of the earth.  If you cut the earth in half at the equator, you could pick up one of the halves and look at the equator as a circle.  If you divided that circle into 360 degrees, then divided each of those degrees into 60 minutes that minute of arc on the earth is one nautical mile.  It’s about the same as 1.15 miles or 6076 feet. If you’re traveling at a speed of one nautical mile per hour you’re traveling at one knot. ] The captain is trying to get us just beyond the reach of the typhoon and into an area of calm seas and balmy weather. Yesterday Rebecca and I spent several hours dangling our legs off the front of the bow, chatting while spotting the occasional dolphin or shark who nimbly shot off, avoiding us as our boat quietly plied its way in a southwesterly direction towards the Japanese coast.

 

This bankruptcy is actually a pretty big deal, the largest ever in the shipping industry. We’re the third largest shipping company on earth by tonnage. That’s a hell of a lot of cargo. We’re (I’m beginning to feel like I’m part of the enterprise I guess) especially important between China/Korea and America and Canada’s west coast, and our collapse could conceivably affect America’s Christmas. The whole imbroglio has made me realize just how complicated the corporate structure of international trade is. Maris, the company who originally booked our trip, arranged it through NSB, a German company (which is reflagging to some other country with looser rules) who provide the crew for Hanjin Shipping, which falls under its parent, Hanjin Group, that in turn owns dozens of other entities like Korean Airlines.

The company makes its money from fees for container transport, and pays for things like canal passage and docking fees. Those fees have recently dropped from $2,000, to a scarcely believable $600 from Shanghai to Seattle.  To add another layer of complexity, Hanjin doesn’t even own the boats; they only lease them.  A German company named Conti contracted for construction of the ship from a Korean shipyard.  Not sure what relationship they have with the “owner.”  But at any rate, it’s this “owner,” whatever human or byzantine corporate entity that might be, who tells the captain what to do and when to do it.

 

The sea has turned from dark green and the sky from steel grey in the Bering Sea a few days ago to a deep lapis lazuli with towering white clouds today. The air has been made fresh, sweet and balmy by the greatest immensity of water on the face of the Earth. I was able to strip down to a T shirt as I sat on the front of the bow with Rebecca this afternoon. We talked about a million things and scanned the horizon for ships, perched comfortably ten meters above the soft sound of water slushing beneath our bare feet.

We’re within a day of Tokyo harbor and still awaiting guidance from the mysterious “owner.” We might anchor off the coast of Japan in international waters, or we might proceed around the southern tip of Honshu and on to Busan in Korea.  To complicate things, a typhoon is approaching from the south. We’ll skirt it but it will still mean heavy seas before long.

 

By the standards of freighter travel, yesterday was pretty exciting. About noon we got our first glimpse of the coast of Japan. Despite the captain’s request that we proceed directly to Korea to offload cargo and passengers, the “owner” instructed us to drop anchor 12 miles off the coast, near the entrance to Tokyo harbor.

After carefully looking through the charts the captain selected a spot far from wrecks, cables and pipelines with a depth of around fifty meters (our draft is 14). Up on the bridge, the fore and aft depth indicators suddenly became crucial, though I’m told that veteran seamen can sense ocean depth by the feel of a boat passing over a shallow spot.

The monstrous anchor, attached by a chain with individual links three feet long made of steel as thick as your thigh, was made ready. The engine was idled.  We slowly came to a stop and the word was given.  The bosun up near the bow, turned the wheel that released the chain and it began to fly out of the hold with a violence that rattled the whole ship.

 

This evening, for the first time since we left Vancouver there are ships around us everywhere.  All of a sudden the watch on my phone has adjusted to local time and we can see that our airbnb hosts in Shanghai have been desperately trying to get ahold of us by email. After two weeks of peaceful solitude we’re connected with the world again.

Gail’s ear is better and she’s feeling more cheerful today… a great relief.  In many ways the quiet routine with plenty of time for reading suits her, so I feel good about that. This morning I inadvertently violated ship etiquette by sitting at breakfast in the normal seat of Adam, the ship’s chief officer. It bothered him far more than I would have expected and afterwards I found myself searching all over the ship to apologize.  He graciously accepted, and thank goodness everything is patched up again.  I’m grateful that we have such amiable shipmates for this trip.  Any friction between us in such a confined situation would be hard on everybody.

Rebecca continues to work on her video project which will apparently be more slapstick than esthetic. She’s asked me not to give anything away till her art exhibit opens next October, so mums the word on her shenanigans until then.  It’s somehow comforting to know that the world provides food, clothing, shelter and maybe a lot more for someone whose job it is to live this life. The other day she was sitting outside on the bow chatting on the phone with her boyfriend back in London who was using the app Marine Traffic, when he said something about the two boats coming up behind her.  She turned around and there they were.  I’d used the same app to track the progress of our ship as it crossed back and forth across the Pacific when I was back in Indiana. For five dollars anyone can buy something that allows you to locate and track on your phone, any ship in the world 24/7.  Not surprisingly it’s SOP to turn the function off in areas infested with pirates.

Rebecca was just down in the ship’s office checking her Facebook account when a woman with four containers of frozen french fries on our boat noticed her posts and contacted her and inquired if Rebecca had any idea why we weren’t proceeding to Busan to offload our cargo. The woman, apparently a titan in the world of Asian french fries, says that Hanjin owns the dock so she doesn’t understand what gives.

Seas are choppy today with strong winds and scudding clouds overhead.  No real news.  Rebecca, with her keen social media skills, has lined up interviews with such notables as the BBC World Service, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and The Guardian.  Who would have guessed that out here in the middle of nowhere we’d be of interest to anyone, let alone such media heavyweights?

 

Gail’s ear is much the same. She’s feeling well enough to work out on the step machine down on C deck.  There’s a 15-foot by 15-foot swimming pool filled with sea water, and a sauna in the gym that I might get around to using one of these days.

 

Still no news from the big shots back on land who’ll eventually decide our fate.  This afternoon, up in the wheelhouse I watched a powerful storm front coming in, both on radar and out on the exposed wing of the bridge.  When it hit, it hit hard.  Raindrops began to sting my face.  The wind would have carried my hat off if I hadn’t quickly grabbed it.  Back inside, ensconced in the captain’s chair I watched the dial on the anemometer show the wind outside gusting up to 50 knots. Pretty cool!

By evening the weather had quieted down.  After dinner in the officer’s mess, Taras the second engineer, enthusiastically invited me to go fishing off the back of the boat and I accepted.  He quickly grabbed a fish back in the galley to cut up for bait.  Then we swiftly made our way down the elevator and out the door to A deck, and from there down some more stairs to the poop deck and a railing overlooking the sea five meters below us.  Somebody had already lowered a light a couple of meters above the water to attract the fish.  All we had to do was throw our lead-weighted lines over the side, feed out 20 meters of thick, 50-pound-test monofilament into the ocean, then slowly pull it in.

There was a knot in the line at around 10 meters where Taras estimated there might be a school of fish.  Sure enough, when my bait reached that level I felt a strong tug followed by the unmistakable feel of a fish on the line.  I hauled it up, and a minute later there was a 12-inch, half-pound mackerel flapping madly on the deck…eat’n size.  Over the next hour I hauled in a dozen near identical fish, and every time Taras would exclaim enthusiastically in a thick German accent, “Good one! Big one!”

Finished, How Not to be Wrong, The Power of Mathematical Thinking.  Clever, well written and convincing. I can see why it was on Bill Gates’s reading list.

This morning the captain briefed us on the situation. Hanjin ships are being offloaded in Busan, and we’re in the queue, though we don’t know how many ships there are or where we are in the queue.  We’ve got 28 days of provisions, so we’re in no immediate danger there, though our all-seeing captain has noticed my profligate use of Nutella and has put me on short rations of chocolate till we reach port.  It’s been my sole hardship on the voyage so far.

 

Gail’s condition is slightly improved, though the swollen protuberance behind her ear makes it stick out a bit, giving her face a slightly asymmetrical elfin look.  Skimmed through The Vital Question, Energy, Evolution and the Origin of Complex Life…Pretty tough sledding.  I’m now out of reading material.

A full-scale typhoon is heading straight for us and will arrive sometime around the 18th, nine days from now, but for today at least it was balmy out on the bow with very calm seas. The captain stripped off his shirt and joined me and Rebecca up there while Gail industriously walked around the forward deck increasing the step count on her phone for the day.  Sad to say the fuel band on my wrist which monitors my daily activity hasn’t shown me achieving my goal since we stepped on board.

Had the bright idea of borrowing DVDs from the crew’s day room.  There were literally hundreds of them, but practically all were either action or porn.  Finally came up with a Nicholas Cage flick called Two Minutes Ahead, which wasn’t too bad.  Unlikely as it might seem, the gunfight in the denouement was shot aboard a container ship!

 

Awoke to gloomy weather and bad news. Rebecca brought her camera over to our room to record our reactions for possible use in her film project.  Then she announced that the British Foreign Office has told her that if/when our ship finally reaches Busan the Korean government won’t let us disembark.  As an artist interested in the absurdities of modern life she seems to have hit the jackpot.

Forgot to mention that Kim Jong-un, the possibly insane leader of North Korea, has exploded a nuclear device with twice the strength of his previous weapons.  In Seoul, they could feel the tremor of the underground test that registered 4.5 on the Richter scale, the force of a small earthquake.

There’s a lottery going on down in the ship’s office predicting the date we lift anchor. The range goes from our optimistic chief officer’s one day to our pessimistic 2nd engineer’s bet on the end of the month.  I’m guessing four days.

Rebecca informs us that there’s now a movement on Twitter with the hash tag “Save Rebecca” dedicated to getting her off the ship.  She’s now receiving hundreds of tweets from people she’s never heard of.  I can’t help but think of a refugee camp in Kurdistan (one of hundreds in the Middle East) I visited last year where large families were living in tents smaller than our stateroom with slim hope of ever returning to their homeland.

As I was beavering along compiling this journal, I got an excited call from the captain up on the bridge.  He says that NSB had just notified him that sometime within the next few days he’ll be ordered to proceed to Tokyo to discharge all passengers, who will then be allowed to pass through Immigration unmolested.  Hot Shit!!  Not getting our hopes up too much, but get me on dry land with an entry stamp in my passport and I promise I’ll never complain about anything again, ever.

 

Spent a couple of hours this afternoon walking around the forecastle up by the bow, listening to my iPod and singing my heart out without fear of another soul hearing.  I was wailing on “Gentle on My Mind.” “It’s knowing that the world will not be cursed or forgiven when I walk along some railroad tracks and find, that you’re moving on the backroads by the rivers of my memory and for hours you’re just gentle on my mind,” and “Treetop Flyer,” “People been asking me where’d you learn to fly that way? Was over in Vietnam chasing NVA.  The government taught me, and they taught me right, stay down under the tree line, you might be alright. ..I’m a treetop flyer…Born survivor… Usually work alone.”

There’s talk on the Internet of crowdfunding a boat to come and “rescue” us.  Rebecca has been contacted by an attorney who suggests that she might want to sue someone.  Friggin’ Nuts!  I think we’re getting our 15 minutes of celebrity.

The captain just advised me that the word from NSB is that our ETA for Tokyo is the 17th at 19:00.  That’s just two days from now.  He says he’s 99% sure it’s happening.  Sounds great but it’s not over till it’s over.

They were running an anti-terrorist drill onboard today. It was not unlike an Easter egg hunt.  The captain hid a box labeled “bomb” somewhere on the boat and it was up to the crew to find, and properly dispose of it.

It’s 100% now! We just got confirmed hotel reservations in Tokyo for two nights and an e-ticket to Shanghai for Monday.  I can’t help but wonder if Rebecca’s social media blitz may have played some role in getting us off the ship earlier than expected. I think the powers that be will be glad to get her off the ship and out of their hair.

The big day finally arrived.  We hoisted anchor and steamed into Tokyo harbor.  The captain, who’s normal attire often verged on slovenly was all decked out in full regalia, replete with epaulets and starched shirt.  If the boat was going to be arrested (a curious term invariably used by the owner), he wanted to be looking good, I guess.  As the pilot boat came along side we had no idea what to expect, but for whatever reason everything proceeded normally.

An hour later he’d cautiously steered us alongside our designated slip.  Ropes, fore and aft were tossed onto the quay, then carefully slipped over the bollards and ever so slowly our monstrous ship winched itself into its birth, eerily illuminated by banks of high pressure sodium lights that turned night into orange-tinted day.

The order was given to disembark…We’d been packed for hours.  Several of our Filipino shipmate pals helped us make it down the gangway with all our stuff, I leaned down and kissed dry land, then we all mugged for everyone’s camera phone.

A polite middle-aged Japanese gentleman hired by NSB met us at the dock and shepherded the three of us to a nice new van and offered us bottles of lychee flavored water.  Somebody way up the bureaucratic ladder must have taken an interest in our case, since customs and immigration were kept open after hours especially for us.  We got the full VIP treatment.  A half hour taxi trip to a ritzy hotel out by the airport and it was over.

Would I take another freighter somewhere?  Heck yes, travel on a working ship beats airplanes any day, and our problems were a black swan event.

 

Epilogue

Sitting here at my computer on a perfect Fall afternoon looking out the window at my pond, I just checked on the whereabouts of our ship on the Marine Traffic app.  Our ship is 7952 nautical miles from my present position.  She left Busan Korea 30 Sept at 05:39 and is now at anchor in the Laccadive Sea off the coast of Sri Lanka. It’s evening.  The wind is 12 knots coming out of the WSW at 250 degrees and the temperature is 28 degrees centigrade.  She must be unloaded since she’s only got a 9-meter draught.  A mile off her starboard bow whoever’s up on the bridge should be able to make out the Santa Fiorenza steaming into harbor.  Back on the poop deck the crew are most likely yucking it up and dreaming of home.  I wish them all well and hope the fish are biting.

 

Postscript

A month after submitting this story to The Ryder, I checked on our ship again.  Ominously, this time it showed she was anchored just off the coast of Pakistan near Gadani, one of those post-apocalyptic looking cities where they dismember boats. When I checked again the following week, no trace of a ship named Hanjin Geneva could be found.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Joan Hawkins

There was something apocryphal about the death of Leonard Cohen.  He passed away on November 7, 2016.  But we didn’t actually get the news until November 10, two days after the election. He was 82.  He had been ill for some time.  Still, for fans still reeling from Donald Trump’s victory, the two events—the U.S Presidential election and the passing of one of the great poet-songwriters of the 20^th century– seemed inextricably linked. That week Saturday Night Live opened with Kate McKinnon, the SNL actress who had played Hillary Clinton throughout the campaign, singing a serious cover of Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”  The following night, John Oliver announced Cohen’s death after a lengthy discussion of what Trump’s presidency might mean. And writing for the Paris Review, Adam Shatz noted that he couldn’t help connecting Cohen’s death to the election.  “Was it a sign of some sort…Did Trump kill him?”  On Facebook, fans posted seemingly prophetic lines from Cohen’s songs: “I have seen the future, Brother.  It is murder.”  And the title of his recent album took on a certain grim irony, You Want it Darker.

 

Poet-Songwriter

 

Cohen was born in Montreal, on September 21, 1934, to a well-to-do Jewish family.  And like all Jews who grew up during World War II, his coming of age was marked and marred by the near genocide of his people.  We often think of him bursting on the scene with romantic songs like “Suzanne” and “So Long Marianne.”  But many of his earliest poems were very dark.  “My lady was found mutilated/ in a Mountain Street boarding house,” he wrote in his first book (“Ballad” Let us compare mythologies 1956). His third Book, Flowers for Hitler, (1964) made the source of some of his darkest obsessions very plain, with poems like “Goebbels Abandons His Novel and Joins the Party,” “Hitler the Brain Mole,” and my personal favorite, “All There is to Know about Adolph Eichmann,” Cohen’s riff on what Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil.

 

Cohen published four books of poetry and two novels, The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966), before starting to record music.  He has said that he started writing songs to make some money, since poetry, even award-winning poetry, doesn’t pay very well.  But he also regarded songwriting as a sort of logical next step. Many of his early poems have a song-like rhythm to them.  “Suzanne,” for example, was a published poem, “Suzanne Takes You Down” before it was a song.  And he once said that he always heard music when he wrote.  “All of my writing has guitars behind it, even the novels.”

The problem was, he didn’t think he could sing. There’s a line in a mid-career Cohen song “Tower of Song,” that always got an appreciative laugh in concerts, “I was born like this/ I had no choice/ I was born with the gift of a golden voice.” Cohen’s voice was more like Dylan’s than like the cantors he grew up with; not pretty, but a powerful delivery relay for the message.  Some people say it was Dylan who gave Cohen the courage to record. Others say it was listening to Nico night after night at the Dome on

New York City’s 8^th Street.  But it was John Hammond who got him into the studio.  And for those of us who heard those first two albums, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967) and Songs from a Room (1969) back in the day, the fact that Leonard Cohen didn’t sound like Paul McCartney was beside the point.  Or perhaps, it was the point.

Cohen is frequently compared to Dylan, but they mined different cultural seams.  If despite his wishes, Dylan became ‘the voice of a generation,’ Cohen was more like a secret handshake. Initially, he did not write explicitly political songs, except in the sense that he wrote brutally honest love songs.  And as sexual theory teaches us, every sexual encounter is political, every relationship a delicate negotiation of power.  “I believe that you heard your Master sing,” he wrote  in “The Master Song.”

 

Sex, death and despair

 

In 1967, nobody except Leonard Cohen and Frank Zappa (another “secret handshake” musician) was singing explicitly sexual lyrics, the kinds of songs AM radio wouldn’t play.  That was the year The Doors were banned from future appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, because Jim Morrison refused to change the lyrics of “Light my Fire.”  “Come on, Baby, light my fire,” was titillating, but nowhere near as explicit as Cohen’s “you kneel for him to come” (“Master Song”).  As his career went on, sex was a through line.  “I love to see you naked over there, especially from the back,” (“Take this Longing from My Tongue,” New Skin for an Old Ceremony 1974), “my mouth on the dew of your thighs,” (“Take this Waltz” I’m your man, 1988), and most explicitly, in a song about Janis Joplin, “giving me head on the unmade bed/ while limousines waited in the street” (Chelsea Hotel #2, New Skin for an Old Ceremony, 1974).

But he also continued to write in the troubadour tradition of unrequited love.  “Take this longing from my tongue,” he implores on the same album. And given all that has been written about him since he died, I am surprised that nobody has mentioned this.  Cohen was the last Western writer I know writing in the narrative voice of a modern-day knight petitioning a lady for her favor, and with him an entire rich Western poetic tradition of troubadour poetry also dies.

It’s perhaps not surprising that Cohen didn’t get much air time. As David Remnick noted in his wonderful recent New Yorker essay, Cohen’s songs have been “death-haunted…since his earliest verses.” Side One of Songs from a Room ends with “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy,” an explicit song about suicide. “Nancy was alone/A forty-five beside her head/An open telephone.”  The song was inspired, he said, by a woman he’d known in Montreal.   “I think that the world throws up certain kinds of figures. Sometime in abundance, sometimes very rarely, and that some of these figures act as archetypes or prototypes for another generation which will manifest these characteristics a lot more easily, maybe a lot more gracefully, but not a lot more heroically. Another twenty years later she would have been just like you know, the hippest girl on the block. But twenty years before she was – there was no reference to her, so in a certain way she was doomed.”

If the sex and death weren’t enough to keep him off the air, there was a dark despair that often showed up in his work. Throughout most of his life, he suffered from depression, a term he did not use lightly. “When I speak of depression,” he told a Guardian reporter in 2012, “I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.” Like many people who suffer from this illness, he saw the world perhaps too clearly.

 

Even after playing the 1970 Isle of Wight concert, in front of 600 thousand people, he was rarely heard on the radio—even FM.  In San Francisco, where I grew up, the only DJ who regularly played him was Dusty Street, the first and, for many years, only woman DJ on the West Coast.  And she mostly played him in an off-peak time slot.  6 a.m. on Saturday morning.   On a show unofficially designated as a woman’s show.  Here Cohen played off against Joni Mitchell, some Dylan, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959). It was an interesting mix, but only nursing moms, students pulling all-nighters, and people who had odd work schedules like mine ever heard it.  Most people were introduced to Cohen by friends.  If you wanted to hear his music, you pretty much had to buy his albums.  Or hang with people who did. Judy Collins recorded “Susanne” (In My Life, 1966), so at least one of his songs was well-known. But many people never heard Leonard Cohen’s voice until Robert Altman used Songs of Leonard Cohen as the soundtrack for his 1971 film, McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

 

The Music

 

As I said earlier, Cohen is often compared to Bob Dylan.  Both are Jewish and literary, both use Biblical imagery, and both write lyrics that demand your attention.  But both are also consummate musicians, and when Dylan talked to David Remnick recently about Cohen’s work, it felt like a breath of fresh air to me, as though someone were finally setting the record straight.  “When people talk about Leonard, they fail to mention his melodies, which to me, along with his lyrics, are his greatest genius,” Dylan said.  “Even the counterpoint lines—they give a celestial character and melodic lift to every one of his songs.  As far as I know, no one else comes close to this in modern music. “(New Yorker, October 17, 2016).

The “celestial character and melodic lift” that Dylan mentions here help explain why even the darkest Cohen songs don’t necessarily feel depressing, and why so many of the songs have a spiritual feel about them, even though the lyrics are resolutely secular. And the melody he highlights illustrates the musical complexity that was there from the earliest recordings.  Discussing “Sisters of Mercy” Dylan notes, “the verses are four elemental lines which change and move at predictable intervals, but the tune is anything but predictable…The first line begins in a minor key. The second line goes from minor to major and steps up, and changes melody and variation. The third line steps up even higher than that to a different degree and then the fourth line comes back to the beginning. This is a deceptively unusual musical theme, with or without lyrics.  But it’s so subtle a listener doesn’t realize he’s been taken on a journey and dropped off somewhere.”

Cohen’s music is so lovely in its own right that Daniel Felsenfeld took the melody of “Suzanne” and used it as the basis of The Cohen Variations, a piece for solo piano that left Cohen’s evocative poetry behind.  Recorded by classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein in 2012, the piece was broadcast and re-posted on the NPR site on November 11, 2016, one day after we heard that Cohen had died.  A powerful reminder that we had lost a poet and a musician.

Cohen’s own musical arrangements became more lush and complex with each successive album until his last. Like Dylan, he continued to re-arrange the old standards, in part because his voice changed so much with age, deepening to a resonant low growl.  The depth of the older Cohen’s voice, Remnick writes, “makes Tom Waits sound like Eddie Kendricks.” And it made it very difficult for him to sing the original arrangements. Cohen always loved women’s voices and used back-up singers and harmonies from his earliest albums.  But the older he got, the more he relied on women to carry those melodies that Dylan praised so highly. The cover art for Ten New Songs (2001) features photos of  both Cohen and his longtime backup singer, collaborator, songwriter and producer-friend Sharon Robinson, Cohen’s way of acknowledging his debt to the women who had his back.

Musically, too, the compositions expanded.  In 1988 with I’m Your Man—both the studio album and the tour—Cohen settled into a complex international mix, that became his characteristic pattern for the next 26 years.  In his book Leonard Cohen: A Remarkable Life, biographer Anthony Reynolds observes, “…in almost every respect I’m Your Man marked not so much a progression but an evolutionary leap forward…Cohen’s new musical canvas was rich and wide, with its bold and bald use of sequencers, drum machines, synclavier, and synths all mixed exotically with the lingering eastern European textures of the bouzouki, the oud and the heart rending (old Russian school) violin.”  At the same time, Cohen began collaborating with other musicians on old favorites.  “Who by fire,” Cohen’s riff on the Yom Kippur prayer, was first recorded for New Skin for an Old Ceremony. In 1989 he performed it live with jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins, letting Rollins do a full minute lead-in before he took the mic. In 2012 and 2013 he performed the same song with Flamenco guitarist Javier Mas, giving it a much different arrangement and, for those who know the history of Andalusia’s Jews, a much different feeling.  In Vienna (2013), Mas played 4 full minutes before Cohen began to sing.  And if Mas had not nodded to the poet multiple times, I wonder if Cohen would have sung at all.

 

Cohen the seeker

 

As mentioned earlier, Cohen was born into an observant Jewish family.  His grandfather was a Rabbi and he always maintained ties to the Jewish faith and traditions, often weaving Biblical references into his songs. His most recent album, You Want It Daker, was released in October, just weeks before his death. The title track lapses into Hebrew at exactly the moment that Cohen the narrator says he’s ready to die. “Hineni Hineni/ I’m ready my Lord.” As Remnick reports, “Cohen asked Gideon Zelermeyer, the cantor at Shaar Hashomayim, the synagogue of his youth in Montreal, to sing the backing vocals.”  So both musically and spiritually, the album seems to have brought Cohen full circle.

Throughout his life, Cohen was spiritually restless, studying the Kabbalah, the chief mystical text of Judaism, and the I Ching, candle magic, alchemy and Buddhism.   There is a story that he once looked at the candle arrangements in Edie Sedgewick’s rooms at the Chelsea Hotel and correctly predicted a fire.  Not because of the danger posed by the candles themselves but because their arrangement seemed to be casting a bad spell.  “She shouldn’t fool around with these things,” he reportedly told one of Edie’s friends, “because they are meaningful.  Her friends should tell her.”  He danced with the Hare Krishnas for awhile (“no robes”) and flirted with Scientology.

But his deepest commitment was to a Japanese Zen master named Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi. (“Roshi” is an honorific for a venerated teacher and Cohen always referred to him that way).  Until the early 90s, Cohen used to study with Roshi at the Zen Center on Mt. Baldy in the San Bernardino Mountains, usually for a few months at a time.  But after a tour that found him drinking too much (“I was drinking at least three bottles of Château Latour before performances,” he told David Remnick), Cohen moved to Mount Baldy for six years. He became a monk in 1996 and was dispirited to find that he still suffered profoundly from depression. He tried anti-depressants. He tried writing through the depression. Finally he went to Mumbai, in the hope that another teacher, this one following the path of Advaita Vedanta, a Hindu discipline, could help him.

 

Before he left on his spiritual quest, Cohen made the fatal mistake of ceding nearly absolute control of his financial affairs to Kelly Lynch.  Lynch had been his business manager for nearly 17 years, and, at one time, briefly his lover. Cohen trusted her completely. And she abused that trust.  In 2004, one of Lynch’s disgruntled former lovers walked into an L.A. antique shop owned by Lorca Cohen, Leonard Cohen’s daughter.  After looking around for awhile and poking things, he went to the counter and suggested, sotto voce, that Ms. Cohen look into her father’s finances.  She did and then contacted her father.  Lynch had embezzled millions of dollars from his accounts. Leonard fired her immediately and sued her (although there’s at least one story that Lorca had to persuade her father to take action; he was very reluctant to get involved with litigation).  The court ruled in Cohen’s favor, awarding him more than five million dollars.  But that was just the beginning.  Outraged that Cohen had sued her, Lynch began calling Cohen twenty times a day and sending intimidating e-mails, some directly threatening him.  He took out a restraining order, which she ignored.  “It makes me feel very conscious about my surroundings,” Cohen said at a subsequent trial. “Every time I see a car slow down, I get worried.” The next few years were just hell. Lynch took to cyberspace, posting on every message board she could find.  Some posts were conspiracy theory jeremiads about Phil Spector’s trial (Spector had produced Cohen’s 1977  album Death of a Ladies Man); some accused Cohen of tax fraud, plunging Cohen into yet another round of hearings.  Luckily his partner Anjani Thomas knew a good music industry lawyer, Robert Kory.  Kory already had more business than he could handle. “But when Leonard Cohen shows up at your office,” he said, “what are you going to do? Close the door?” Lynch was sentenced to eighteen months in prison and five years probation.

But even though Kory deferred his fees, Cohen was broke. He never managed to collect the damages the Court had awarded him.  And it was clear that he would need to return to the stage if he was going to have any money for his retirement or for his children. In 2005, the music community gathered to make the documentary Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (Lian Lunson, 2005), featuring interviews with Cohen in his L.A home and a motley crew of musicians covering Cohen’s songs. Rufus Wainwright was one of the organizers; performers include the McGarrigles, Nick Cave, Bono, The Edge, Perla Batalla, Julie Christensen and Cohen, himself, blowing them all out of the water, at the film’s end.

In 2007, he began conceiving his tour, with a full band: three backup singers, two guitarists, drummer, keyboard player, bassist, and saxophonist. He rehearsed the band for three months before going on a tour that lasted 5 years.  Night after night, Cohen took to the stage dressed in his suit and fedora.  And every night at least once, he would drop to his knees in front of the audience.  Every single review I read gave him kudos.  The tour, Sylvie Simmons writes, “not only restored Leonard’s lost funds, it improved on them considerably.” And it vindicated his status as an artist.  After Cohen died, a friend of mine who saw him during that tour wrote “We went to see him at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn. He was nearly 80, but performed for almost four hours straight. I thought he might live forever. And I wish he could have.”

 

I’m your man

 

A lot has already been written about Cohen’s reputation as a ladies’ man, his personal relationships with women and the strong role women fans have played in his success.  As a young man, he had what David Remnick called “a kind of Michael Corleone Before the Fall look, sloe-eyed, dark, a little hunched.” (New Yorker, October 17, 2016).  And his most well-known muse and lover, Marianne Ihlen said that when they lived together on the Greek Island of Hydra “all the girls were panting for him.”

 

Cohen was definitely a gentleman of the old school.  Meeting him for the first time, Sylvie Simmons wrote, “he is a courtly man, elegant, with old-world manners.  He bows when he meets you, stands when you leave, makes sure that you’re comfortable and makes no mention of the fact that he’s not…”  Like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, he believed that women were mysterious and magic.  And in many a song, the narrator speaks of being struck dumb by a woman’s beauty.

He loved women.  And he spent his long career writing about and to us. He had a long list of lovers and several serious long term relationships with women including Suzanne Verdal (“Suzanne”), Marianne Ihlen (“So Long, Marianne”), Suzanne Elrod (the mother of his children Adam and Lorca; ) Julie Christensen, Dominique Isserman Furey ( a French photographer), Rebecca De Mornay, and most recently, singer Anjani Thomas.

And women loved him back.  Iggy Pop tells a story about Leonard Cohen that goes something like this. Iggy was in L.A. recording an album.  One night Cohen called and invited him over.  Cohen said he had a personal ad from a girl “who says she wants a lover who will combine the raw energy of Iggy Pop with the elegant wit of Leonard Cohen.  I think we should reply to her as a team.”  Pop reminded Cohen that he was married and said something like “you’re going to have to do this on your own.”  And just this year, Lail Arad recorded “1934 (A Song for Leonard Cohen)” for his birthday.  “Yes, I would have been your lover,” she sings.  “No, I wouldn’t ask for more/ It’s just a shame that you were born/ in 1934.”

More importantly, women loved his work.  When I think of his appeal to women, I’m reminded of an old story about Frank Sinatra, another famous ladies’ man.  Someone supposedly asked Old Blue Eyes once to explain his popularity with women. “It’s easy,” Sinatra answered.  “All you have to do is listen.” Cohen listened.  And that fact was reflected back in his songs.

But, as he told Simmons, “Everything changes as you get older. I never met a woman until I was sixty-five.  Instead, I saw all kinds of miracles in front of me.”  In the past he said, he had always viewed women through his own “urgent needs and desires, what they could do for me.”  But in his mid-sixties—about the time he left the Monastery and his depression at long last began to lift—he “began to see the woman standing there.”

As I wrote above, Cohen’s earliest forays into political songwriting had to do with family politics and patriarchal structures. So it’s fitting, that at the end of his life he would spend so much time trying to educate people about his daughter’s family. In February 2011, Lorca Cohen gave birth to Viva Katherine Wainwright Cohen.  The baby’s father was Rufus Wainwright, an openly gay musician.  Wainwright had wanted to honor one of his mother’s last wishes, that he would have a child.  Lorca and Wainwright had always been close, and so—Viva.  When Wainwright’s fans referred to Lorca as a “surrogate mother” online, the whole family, including Leonard, stepped up to correct them. Lorca is Viva’s mother and will be raised by Lorca, Wainwright, and Wainwright’s husband Jörn Weisbrodt, Daddy #2, Leonard Cohen said. And yes, he was doting grandfather to all his grandchildren.

 

Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye

In 1988, I went to the Berkeley, California  I’m Your Man Tour concert. Like a lot of Cohen fans I was excited.  Cohen hadn’t had a strong album in years.  Songs of Love and Hate (1971) hit the U.S. charts at 145, and even hardcore fans like me didn’t find the record until it had been out for awhile. There hadn’t been any displays in Odyssey records. No reviews in the press I regularly read. So it was only thanks to a record store clerk who knew me, that I found the album at all. New Skin for an Old Ceremony (1974), which I loved, had sold well in Europe but had not placed in the U.S. charts. Death of a Ladies Man (1977), the record Cohen made with Phil Spector, had been a disaster.  I actually like the album, especially the song “Memories,” but there is little on it to appeal to fans dedicated to Cohen’s intimate and confessional style.  Recent Songs (1979) and Various Positions (1984) did not place in the U.S charts.  Cohen was still popular in Europe, but his North American career seemed to be on the skids.  He was seriously depressed and the fact that he got it together to record I’m Your Man (1988) speaks to his sheer force of will and his spiritual practice.

That album was an evolutionary leap.  Lush, evocative, speaking very much to the geopolitical moment.  The record had already gotten good reviews and some FM airtime.  At that time in my life, I was in graduate school and hung with a Downtown No-Wave crowd.  And I still remember the energy that swept through the auditorium, as Cohen started “First We Take Manhattan,” Manhattan having been the birthplace of the Downtown scene.

 

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom

For trying to change the system from within

I’m coming now, I’m coming to reward them

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

 

 

As he hit that last line, some men in the back of the auditorium unfurled an ACT UP banner, and the audience roar was deafening.

About halfway through the concert, the band left the stage. Only the backup singers stayed.  Cohen had an amplified acoustic guitar, and he strummed a few chords that we all recognized.  The opening of “The Partisan,” a World War II song.  A song of the French Resistance, that he had recorded for Songs from a Room.

 

The eighties had been a hard time.  A terrible recession, AIDS, the increase in homelessness, Iran Contragate, and the continuing worry about a possible U.S war in Central America. The U.S. role in El Salvador, in Nicaragua and in the atrocities being committed in Guatemala had horrified many of us, and in the East Bay (where Berkeley is located) a number of churches had established themselves as sanctuaries for Central American refugees. There had been violence on Berkeley campus, when the city police were called in to dismantle a cardboard shanty town that the Committee for Divestment from South Africa (still an Apartheid state) had erected in the middle of Sproul Plaza.  For the first time since 1969, police helicopters flew over the University of California, and AIs (TAs, as we called ourselves) met to discuss a classroom walkout in support of the students who had been arrested. And to develop a grading policy that would not punish people for activism.  In late April, I was barred from entering Dwinelle Hall, where the class I taught met.  And I remember yelling that I had been planning to teach Sylvia Plath, but any students who wanted to meet me at the Café Mediterraneum should come prepared to discuss political theory.

So that is what had been happening in Berkeley, just days prior to Leonard Cohen strumming the first chords of “The Partisan.” The auditorium was very quiet.  And then in that way he had of leaning into the microphone, he introduced the song.  “I still like to sing this song,” he said in that phenomenal, basso voice.  “Because I think there are still things worth resisting.”

 

Two days after we got the news that Cohen had died, a friend who was with me that 1988 night sent a YouTube link to the song.  Her message said simply, “I think there are still things worth resisting.”  In the wake of this election and the difficult times we’re facing, I believe that is what Leonard Cohen would still tell us.

 

The wind, the wind is blowing

Through the grave, the wind is blowing

Freedom soon will come.

We will rise from these shadows.

 

Author attribution

Joan Hawkins is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School at IU.  She has written extensively on horror and the avant-garde.  Her books are Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde, and Downtown Film and TV Culture 1975-2001. She is currently co-editing an anthology on William S. Burroughs.  She has been a fan of Leonard Cohen since she first heard his albums, at the age of 16.

 

By Joan Hawkins

 

In my field of Film Studies, Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915) is the quintessential bad object and perennial pedagogical headache. Based on a novel, The Clansmen: A Historical Romance (Thomas F. Dixon Jr, 1905), the film is explicitly racist. It lionizes the Ku Klux Klan and seemingly endorses, or possibly incites, violence against Black people, particularly Black men.  But it also represents an evolutionary leap forward in the history of cinema.  Not just a film where there are some interesting aesthetics, but a total game changer.

It was here that D. W. Griffith developed cross-cutting, developed and extended the use of the tracking shot, developed and extended the use of the close-up to heighten emotion and facilitate viewer identification with a character. While previous films like A Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter 1903) or Voyage to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902) had used action to create strong narrative lines, no previous film had attempted a complex, action-driven narrative on such an epic scale. Or had attempted such a sustained, emotionally-driven story.  Birth of a Nation juggles multiple plot strands over the course of almost three hours.  It crystallized the narrative and formal vocabulary that has dominated American cinema for the past 100 years. For film scholars, it is a film that remains impossible to teach and impossible not to. “The worst thing about Birth of a Nation,” the New Yorker wrote in 2013, “is how good it is.”

 

So why would a Black electronic and hip-hop musician like Paul Miller– aka DJ Spooky, aka That Subliminal Kid—make it a project to recut, remix, reimagine, and “scratch” the film? To  resurrect it yet again?  He’s always been interested in appropriation art, citing both Duchamps and Warhol as influences. And he started his career working in science fiction, a speculative genre that encourages social critique through the depiction of alternative worlds, alternative histories. So when Rebirth was commissioned in 2004, Spooky saw it as a way to tell the story of American racism from the subaltern’s perspective, and in so doing to literally force (through reorganization of the image) a different point of view. “Rebirth of a Nation is a mirror held up to society’s racial politics,” he said. “You see a lot of paradoxes.”

Why would a Black electronic and hip-hop musician recut, remix, reimagine and “scratch” D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation?     

Spooky’s commission came at a sensitive moment.  Following the 9/11 attacks, we were at war in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Islamophobia had become a thing, and what might be considered America’s primal racism—the net effect of a country founded on slavery and on the subjugation of indigenous peoples—seemed to be spreading outward in concentric circles. Writing about the Rebirth project in 2015, Spooky said: “In an era where NSA’S PRISM program and whistleblowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have shown us that perspective can truly alter global events, we need more than ever, to see the context that early cinema offers us from the viewpoint of showing us that, as my old friend Saul Williams liked to say: Another World Is Possible. A remix of a film as deeply important and problematic as The Birth of a Nation reminds us, in the era of Trayvon Martin and Ferguson, that many of these issues still linger with us at every level.”

 

American Story: Birth of a Nation

Birth of a Nation (1915) was released into a country that was racially complicated, to say the least.  Segregation was the law in the South and the practice in the North.  But the Northern migration had begun and in cities like Chicago, there was some opportunity for work and for home ownership.  Photos from the era show the emergence of a sophisticated, urbane Black professional middle class. A middle class that was increasingly impatient with the racist imagery prevalent in the white culture industry.  Starting around 1910, Chicago film companies like Lincoln Motion Picture Company and Ebony Pictures began producing race movies for an increasingly discriminating audience.  These were movies with all-Black casts and serious story lines, that were shown as “Midnight Rambles” (midnight until 2 a.m.) in segregated theaters. The films featured stories about Black professionals who were trying to get ahead.  Some were genre films like romances, comedies or cowboy movies. And to see these films outside their historic context, one would think all was right with the world.  But the films were aspirational. Outside the theaters and Black community organizations, it was dangerous to be African American.  Lynchings were common.  In 1900, 100 Black folk were lynched in the United States—and that only counts the number reported and chronicled. “Georgia trees bear a strange fruit,” Lady Day sang in 1939. But at the turn of the century, African Americans knew that Northern trees, too, had their own “blood on the leaves, blood at the root.”  And so when D. W. Griffith made an epic romance about the Klan in 1915, the Black community and their white friends were outraged.

“The response of the Black community to Birth of a Nation predates the film,” Toni Cade Bambara tells us.  “The work on which it had been based, Thomas Dixon’s The Clansmen, had first been a book, then it had been a play, then it had been a pageant.  And there had been a mobilization of Black clubswomen against Dixon and The Clansmen.”  And now, having fought against the book, the play, the pageant, these same women realized there was going to be a film. Not just any film, but one with 15 reels, 3 hours long, that had already been screened at the White House and declared a masterpiece by President Wilson.  It had a massive publicity campaign. “Within the neighborhoods,” Professor Bambara continues, “not only are we being bombarded with billboards and flyers with the usual inflammatory, humiliating images, but now we’re being barraged by this massive film.”

Across the country Black leaders and their white supporters organized, went to court and staged protests in an attempt to ban the movie.  The Boston Globe reported that Birth of a Nation caused “a near-riot” in Boston, as an alleged plot to destroy the film resulted in “wild scenes and 11 arrests.” As it turns out, the Black community had every reason to be alarmed.
The film’s release is credited as being one of the events that inspired the formation of the “second era” Ku Klux Klan at Stone Mountain, Georgia, in the same year.  And the Klan used the film as a recruiting tool.

The film follows two juxtaposed families: the Northern Stonemans and the Southern Camerons. There is something of a Romeo and Juliet motif as one of the Stoneman sons falls in love with Margaret Cameron, and the youngest Cameron son falls in love with Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish). And for awhile, it seems that the film will focus on whether lovers from opposing political sides can ever be together.

 

While that theme does remain a constant throughout the film, it is overshadowed by a postwar Reconstruction horror story.  After Abraham Lincoln is assassinated, Austin Stoneman and his fellow radical Republicans are determined to punish the South, employing harsh tactics that Griffith depicts as typical of the Reconstruction era.  It is in the Reconstruction half of the film that racist representations—present throughout the film– become positively dizzying. Stoneman has a psychopathic mulatto protégé, Silas Lynch.  When the two travel to South Carolina to observe Reconstruction in action, they see Black occupation soldiers parading in the streets and pushing white residents aside on the sidewalk.  During an election in which Lynch is elected lieutenant governor, whites are prevented from voting while Blacks are observed stuffing the ballot boxes.   Newly elected Black members of the South Carolina legislature take their shoes off in the House, put their feet up on the tables, drink hard liquor and feast on fried chicken during debates. The Legislature is shown passing laws requiring white civilians to salute Black soldiers and allowing mixed-race marriages.  When Flora Cameron goes off alone into the woods to fetch water, she is followed by Gus, a freedman.   He tells her he wants to marry her, and she is so frightened by his insistence that she jumps into a precipice and dies.  In the meantime the despicable Lynch has designs on Elsie Stoneman.  It is the Klan of course who ride to the rescue, saving Elsie, revenging Flora, and under the leadership of Ben Cameron, riding in a massive formation to liberate an entire town. The following Election Day, Blacks find mounted and armed Klansmen outside their homes and are intimidated into not voting. A move the film clearly endorses. Birth of a Nation concludes with white supremacy restored and with a double wedding as Margaret Cameron marries Phil Stoneman and Elsie Stoneman marries Ben Cameron, the leader of the Klan.

The film spawned the first sequel in film history, The Fall of a Nation (Thomas Dixon, 1916). Despite its success in the foreign market, that film was not successful among American audiences.  It is believed that it is now lost.

In 1918, John W. Noble, co-founder of Lincoln Motion Picture Company (one of the race movie companies mentioned earlier), attempted to challenge Griffith and Dixon by making the The Birth of a Race.  And in 1919, famed African-American director Oscar Micheaux released Within Our Gates, another powerful response from the African American community.  Most notably, he reversed a key scene of Griffith’s film by depicting a white man assaulting a Black woman.  And in 2004, DJ Spooky remixed the original film and reimagined it using the tools of electronic music and hip hop culture.

 

Another story: Détournement

Détournement (French for “turning away” or

“hijacking”) is the act of appropriating a cultural artifact (movie, ad, painting, poster, book) and changing it just enough so that the new meaning subverts its original intent.  First developed in the 1950s by the avant-garde Lettrist International, and later adapted by the Situationists, it is the basis for what we have come to call culture jamming.  But in its early phase, it was quite subtle.  So subtle that Guy Debord, the chief theorist of the French Situationists, wrote long essays describing exactly how to do it.  And in one of those essays, he outlined a possible détournement for Birth of a Nation (“Methods of Détournement,” Les  Lèvres Nues #8, 1956).

 

To cut through this absurd confusion of values, we can observe that

Birth of a Nation is one of the most important films in the history

of cinema because of its wealth of new contributions.  On the other

hand, it is a racist film and therefore absolutely does not merit being

shown in its present form.  But its total prohibition could be seen

as regrettable…It would be better to detourn it as a whole, without

necessarily even altering the montage, by adding a soundtrack…

 

This is more or less what DJ Spooky does in his Rebirth of a Nation.

Conceived as a reimagining of The Birth of a Nation, DJ Spooky’s Rebirth  is a controversial and culturally significant project that examines how “…exploitation and political corruption still haunt the world to this day, but in radically different forms.” Originally commissioned in 2004 by the Lincoln Center Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, Wiener Festwochen, and the Festival d’Automne à Paris, the project was Miller’s first large-scale multimedia performance piece, and has been performed around the world, from the Sydney Festival to the Herod Atticus Amphitheater, more than fifty times. The DVD version of Rebirth of a Nation was released by Anchor Bay Films/Starz Media in 2008. The project’s live musical score by DJ Spooky, originally recorded by Kronos Quartet, was made available for the first time on CD from Cantaloupe Records, in summer 2015.

For his remix, Spooky cut the film’s overall length by about half, to 100 minutes. Most of the cuts occur in The Civil War Section of the film, so that the Rebirth of a Nation edit spends nearly twice as much screen time on the Reconstruction (the second act of Griffith’s diptych) as it does on the Civil War.  This has the effect of stripping away much of the romance and the character development of Ben Cameron. What is left is the most offensive imagery and a Klan leader who has no sympathetic build-up.  What is left is what Spooky calls “the core myth from the binary opposition at the center of the human mind.”

Within that pared-down edit, Spooky does some very subtle montage, bringing Black characters who live in Griffith’s background to the foreground of the frame for example, and using a parallax shift, so that objects and people are viewed from a different direction than they were in Griffith’s original film.  This part of the edit is so subtle that viewers who have never seen the original, or who have not seen it for a long time, probably will not notice it at all.  More obvious, is the repetition of images, particularly the now-chilling image of Ben Carson in Klan regalia, seated on a rearing horse. Or the offensive images of Black people dancing and menacing white women. Like Les LeVeque, another found footage artist, Spooky uses reversal and mirroring within the frame, so that key characters are looking at reversed images of themselves, which is perhaps the most basic visual iteration for what racism is, projecting onto the Other some weirdly altered version of one’s own fear and obsessions. He also draws on the frame, sometimes using squiggles and doodles, sometimes strangely precise vector overlays. “The effect,” Eric Henderson notes in Slant, “is like drinking a can of orange juice concentrate gone sour. It’s so undiluted yet hews so close to the original template that one suspects it was created not as an addendum to the original film, but instead as a replacement.”

While Spooky plays with montage more than Guy Debord would have liked, he does reserve his main intervention—as Debord suggested—for the soundtrack.  Back in the day, silent film always had a musical accompaniment.  In large urban theaters, this could take the form of a lush orchestral score.  Certainly in places like Chicago or New York, one would imagine that a blockbuster like Birth of a Nation would have warranted the full orchestral treatment.  But even in small rural church halls or tent-screenings there would be something—an institutional piano, some dude with a saw—to help give the moving picture rhythm.  And in the cases of melodrama, music was used as an important emotional clue as well.  How do we know that freedman Gus’s marriage proposal is meant to be horrifying?  Well that off-key piano in the hall, with its Simon Legree over and undertones, tells us so.  Spooky’s score, “by contrast,” Margo Jefferson writes in the New York Times,   “deflects our responses, then alters them. A hip-hop drum beat pulses. (It sounds African and ur-ban American.) A wash of industrial sound is joined by bells and cymbals; a dissonant violin; blues fragments. These are the sounds of history and racial complexity that Griffith tried to suppress. ”

The 90 second introduction to the film score throws all the electronic music cards on the table, the mood futuristic yet ambiguous.  Less than a minute into the second track and you know this isn’t going to be a cheerful or particularly romantic work.  The nature of the music itself is evenly split between the string quartet and the laptop with the occasional harmonica marking a change in the wind.  Spooky wrote the music. The Kronos Quartet, a string group known for its forays into new music (Terry Riley, John Cage, Phillip Glass) and its diverse genres (Mexican folk, acid rock, movie scores) are the musicians here, and they are fully up to the task of working with and around the “deep sense of fragmentation” that Spooky says, “occurs in the mind of a DJ” who “crafts physical form around an idea.”

Spooky relies on the usual techniques of soundtrack work such as repetition and the revisitation of themes, but he doesn’t use them as crutches. The themes are sticky and haunting and the repetition amplifies the tension. “North Isn’t South” is a good case-in-point. While a synthesizer cycles through a minor key repetition of themes (an ostinato), in a variety of keys, the Kronos ensemble sustains their overhead notes indefinitely. With or without visuals, it’s a stunning piece of music.

Nailing the score to any particular genre is impossible.  Spooky is a sample-artist after all and here he samples everything. While “Gettysburg Requiem” borrows from modern classical, “The Most Dangerous Woman in America” sounds like it could be handed over to Massive Attack without anyone batting an eye. The strings and harmonica give off very faint signals of old-timey forms with enough production overcast to mask any recognizable origins. “Music is always a metaphor,” Spooky writes in Rhythm Science.  “It’s an open signifier, an invisible, utterly malleable material.  It’s not fixed…Rhythm science uses an endless recontextualizing as a core compositional strategy, and some of this generation’s most important artists continually remind us that there are innumerable ways to arrange the mix.”

Which sounds like musician-ese for what Hayden White has notoriously said about history, that there is no master narrative, no verifiable version of reality (Metahistory, 1973)  For White, history too is about the way you arrange the mix (your “facts” are my “rumors” so they don’t make it into my version of the story).  Like DJs, novelists and historians are, Spooky tells us, “griots, and whether their stories are conscious or unconscious, narratives are implicit in the sampling idea.  Every story leads to another story to another story to another story.”  And another story is precisely what Spooky tries to give us here.  When official history and artistic “masterworks” are contaminated with racist ideology, what you can do is cut-them-up, sample them, give them a different score. Remind us that history is just another form of storytelling, and if you want to know how inclusive it is, you need to look at who exactly is doing the mix.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John Linnemeier (left) and Darryl Neher (dreadlocks)

MY RUN FOR MAYOR OF BLOOMINGTON

By John Linnemeier

 

According to Howard Dean, to get a D in democracy, you have to vote.  That’s barely passing.  To get an A, you have to run for office.

 

Outside the American Legion hall, a couple of inches of two-day-old snow still lingered on the asphalt. Inside, the party faithful were polishing off the last of their desserts. Things were off to a great start!  I’d just delivered a ten-minute stem-winder to the monthly Democratic Party meeting and it had gone well. Initially glazed and polite, the eyes of listeners grew more attentive as I got into my rhythm.  I started to detect several heads in the audience nodding in agreement. After a nice round of applause I took my seat feeling pretty good.

I’ve just described my campaign’s high-water mark.

Shortly afterward they called me and several candidates for city commissioner up front to answer questions from the audience.  A sweet little old lady I’m very fond of asked me how I felt about all the new construction going on downtown.  I told her I thought it was a good thing. Students had to live somewhere and this got them out of the nabes where their houses looked unsightly and their monkeyshines irritated townies.  Besides, they were reviving our downtown, which, like most small Midwestern cities was in danger of becoming moribund. My only complaint was the ugliness of the architecture.  That pissed her off.

Someone wanted to know my thoughts concerning the hospital’s plan to move to the periphery of town.  I said I didn’t like it, but figured it was a done deal.  My glib candor wasn’t playing well.  The thought that maybe I didn’t have the makings of a politician flashed fleetingly across my neural synapses.

Much worse was coming.

I started to feel woozy but figured it wouldn’t look good if I asked for a chair… decided to suck it up.  I should mention here that I was born with the blood pressure of a reptile. I was once unfairly accused of not having a pulse. In some ways my torpid metabolism is a good thing (I’m less likely to die of a stroke or heart attack), but it also makes me vulnerable to occasional fainting spells.

I fell into the arms of Dave Rollo, the District 4 City Council Rep saving me from a full face plant and woke up flat on my back on a cold linoleum floor looking up into the faces of my concerned fellow Democrats.

Off to a poor start but not dead yet… I had a plan.

I’d entered the mayoral race more as a protest than as a serious candidate.  I didn’t think it should cost big bucks to run for local office and wanted to show that you could run a viable campaign on a shoestring.  What bothered me even more was that despite several incidents involving the theft of public funds no one was talking about corruption.

As I’d warmed to the challenge it gradually dawned on me that despite the fact that I was completely inexperienced, too old, totally unqualified and not sure that I wanted the job, I still had a shot.

I might have been the best mayor ever. Power naps and musician’s hours would be my M.O.

Bloomington is a small, mostly liberal city, demographically dominated by a large student population who rarely vote.  The only real contest is the primary.  Any Democrat who wins the primary is virtually assured of winning in the general election.  John Turnbull, the unopposed Republican candidate, though blessed with common sense and well-spoken in a folksy sort of way, never had a prayer of winning.

Both of my fellow Democratic primary candidates, John Hamilton and Darryl Neher were formidable opponents:

John was confidant, eloquent, well versed in the issues, and had a great head of hair…a Harvard grad and smart enough not to mention it.   He came with a terrific resume… a former top aide to Governor O’Bannon, he’d headed the Family and Social Services Administration and the Department of Environmental Management for the state. He’d founded a highly successful NGO.  There was lots of money behind him.  In my opinion, too much of it came from well-heeled pals back in DC.   One of his $1000 donors was a guy named Cantwell F. Muckenfuss III.  I couldn’t have made it up.

Darryl was quick witted and wizard smart too… a business professor beloved by his colleagues and a local TV celebrity.  With one of God’s greatest grins and what theater people refer to as “stage presence,” he could fill a room with good vibes just by walking in the door.  He’d done a solid job as a city councilman and been elected chairman by his fellow council members.  The sitting mayor, who had the strong support of our large, politically savvy LGBTQ community, had endorsed him.  Like Hamilton he’d heaped up a sizable war chest. The afternoon’s rental fee for the Buskirk-Chumley Theater where he announced his candidacy cost more than my entire campaign.

My only clear advantage was that I was undeniably better looking than either of my worthy opponents.  I figured that plus my superior strategy might just be enough to propel me into office.

Low voter turnout was crucial to the scheme.  Luckily it was an off-year election, which made a big turnout less likely.  The incumbent, Mark Kruzan, had chosen not to run for a third term.  That was good too.  But what really got my hopes up, was that my two fellow candidates seemed likely to split the “establishment” vote.  I could make a virtue of my meager funding by running on the slogan, “Powered by Volunteers Not Money.”  Then I planned to discharge my secret weapon…Marijuana Decriminalization!!!

I’d rally students and dissolute citizens to my cause. With the majority of the vote equally split between John and Darryl, I figured a few thousand votes would win it.  There had to be that many dopers in town.  Finally they’d have an issue important enough to wake up in time to cast their ballot before the polls closed.  As decent citizens looked on powerlessly, the votes of scofflaws would propel me into the corner office down at city hall.

Anyway, who knows, I might have been the best mayor ever.  I saw myself operating as a chairman of the board kind of administrator aloof from partisan bickering.  Power naps and musician’s hours would be my M.O.  Look at Ronald Reagan.  The guy couldn’t have made it as a clerk at 7-Eleven yet he steered the free world into a radically different channel. Unlike the Gipper though, instead of former lobbyists, right-wing hacks and yes men, I’d surround myself with capable energetic appointees… young people who shared my vision.  They’d be tactics, I’d be strategy.   Before work every morning I’d organize laughing yoga classes for anyone who wanted to participate.  We’d build on the city’s strengths, a hip, high-tech Eden of tolerance, art, and music.   We’d spay and neuter those pesky urban deer, convince the cops, firefighters, and EMTs to turn the sirens down a few notches, and set up tighter accounting procedures to eliminate fraud.

Ah, but it was not to be.

 

Editor’s note: this is the first in a three-part series. Next month:  Kissing Babies on the Campaign Trail