Interview by Myriam Bardino

Black Ox Orkestar is a Montreal based quartet formed in 1999.They
released their record Ver Tanzt at the end of April through Constellation. 
The band features: Thierry Amar (contrabass – also Silver Mount Zion/Godspeed
You! Black Emperor/Molasses) – Jessica Moss (Violin, bass clarinet – Silver
Mount Zion/Frankie Sparo) Gabe Levine (clarinet, guitar- Sackville), Scott
Levine Gilmore (vocals, mandolin, cymbalon, drums, etc.)  Word asked
Scott Levine Gilmore some questions about their style of music and the
ideas they wish to express through this release.

WORD: Why did you choose klezmer music as a means of expression?
How do you relate your specific work with that of other klezmer artists
like: Oi Va Voi, John Zorn’s Masada, Elliot Sharp, The Klezmatics?

SCOTT – We chose to play klezmer because of our personal experiences
with Jewish music. Thanks to the revival of klezmer and Jewish folk music
that began in the 1970’s, the traditional music of European Jews (Ashkenazic
and Sephardic) has become an important means for Jews to connect with
their identity outside of the normative approaches of religious orthodoxy
and identification with Israel.
Music has been a central aspect to secular and religious Jewish culture
in the Diaspora. I wouldn’t say that our goal was specifically to reconnect
with Jewishness or anything like that. It’s more that, having been exposed
to this musical culture, we recognised the beauty in it and its potential
for exploration. Much of Jewish music bridges the divide between folk
song and art song.
There is a complexity to the music that demands an initiation into
its modes of interpretation and improvisation. It is this complexity
that allows you to play these old songs without sounding quaint, to breath
fresh ideas into it. We certainly aren’t the only band to recognise this.
The Klezmatics have been modernising klezmer and Yiddish song for years.
While they tend to draw more on theatrical music and rock elements than
we do, their innovation definitely opened the doors for younger musicians. 
John Zorn has made a great contribution to contemporary Jewish music. His
work with Masada and the Tzadik label have in many ways established the
field of alternative Jewish music.
I would say that we desire to break out of the Tsaddik mould a little.
I don’t mean to knock what the New York scene has been doing for the
past decade, but there does seem to be a certain sound that you find
across the Tsaddik roster. I would hate to see that sound define the new
boundaries of contemporary Jewish music.
In Black Ox Orkestar, we have tried to interweave new and old elements
without falling victim to eclecticism and fusion. If we can remain true
to the intensity of the old music, to its hypnotic weirdness, and use
its musical elements as a vocabulary than I think it is possible to create
seamless new sounds with it.

WORD: You are a Montreal based band with strong links to other Constellation
artists: Silver Mount Zion, Frankie Sparo, Sackville, Godspeed You! Black
Emperor. Do you feel particularly loyal to this label because of its
underpinning values?

SCOTT – Absolutely. I think Constellation is a great example of how
far you can get by really sticking to your principles. Not only are they
consistent in their aesthetic standards, but they hold true to their ideals
in their business practice as a socially conscious record label. In a time
where many independent record labels seem to be just talent-farms for the
majors, they have stubbornly insisted on remaining truly independent. I
think that their interest in putting our record out is partly an effort to
show that indie economics needn’t apply only to ‘rock’ music. It might be
a bit of a gamble on all our parts, but since the outset, we as a band have
always wanted to be making independent Jewish music. It’s just being honest
to our values and the values we see in the music. Klezmer has already been
co-opted in a mainstream, corporate manner. It makes sense that radical Jewish
music should make its way out into the world through radical means.

WORD: Gabe and you performed in “Le Petit Theatre de l’Absolu” a
political theatre and puppet show that performed across Europe. Do you
think that this work is complementary to your music and in what way?

SCOTT – Forgive me for waxing theoretical here, but I should confess
that both of these projects have been pretty intellectualised. Gabe and
I have  certainly seen elements of our band and our theatre influence
each other. In terms of performance, we have always sought means to break
down or play  with the boundaries of performer and audience. Puppetry
is a form of stage  magic that allows the performer to create a world
for the audience and invite  them inside to laugh at it, poke at it,
walk away from it, or critique it.  We always refer back to Bertholt
Brecht’s concept of alienation, whereby the  audience sees both the
character on stage and the mechanisms of performance.  It creates the
illusion and reveals its artifice at the same time. If you do  it
right, it allows you to be really thought-provoking without being too didactic.
You disarm the audience with your cute little puppets, and then let the
puppets speak the uneasy truth about power and history.
People always seem much more willing to listen to a puppet make
bold political statements than some earnest, breathless activist. In a
way, we try to do the same with our music. Jewish music has its campy,
irreverent elements. To a lot of people it sounds like circus music.
Like the clowns, we can speak the sad truth through silliness. So, the
bounce and energy of klezmer can be very disarming. And then there is the
matter of singing in Yiddish, a language that is practically dead. I feel
like I am doing a masked performance sometimes when I sing in Yiddish.
There is a certain ambiguity to it; people must ask themselves, “Who is
this person, this young punk, singing like an 80 year-old ghost from Poland?”.
It all leads back to Brecht’s idea of alienation. People can see the multiple
layers of identity that go into the performance, and somehow that critical
position opens up a place for thoughtfulness. That’s really what I want
for people to get out of our music; I want them to feel charmed by it, but
also to ask, “what’s this all about anyway?”. Yep, charmed & puzzled.

WORD: Is it important for you to sing in Yiddish? What is your position
with regards to multicularism and anti-globalisation movement?

SCOTT – It’s very important for me to sing in Yiddish for two reasons.
Firstly, Yiddish is the language in which this great, beautiful body
of folk music was sung. If we want that music to survive its history of
genocide and disappearance, somebody’s gotta sing it. Secondly, I think
Yiddish is amazing because it’s such a mishmash of different languages.
It’s an embodiment of cross-borders culture of diaspora Jewry. Although
I love Hebrew, the prospect of it (or English) becoming the mono-language
of Jewish culture strikes me as being unfaithful to the far-flung, polyglot
nature of Jewish history. As far as multiculturalism goes, I think it is
already an undeniable feature of the 21st century. There’s no fighting it.
Nationalists can tighten their borders and try to homogenise their education
systems till the cows come home, but the circulation of populations has
been a growing feature of global capitalism since the 19th century. There’s
no turning back, so we should celebrate it and figure out what kind of interesting
stuff it opens up to us.
Regarding anti-globalisation, I would make of Yiddish a humble but
sturdy cudgel with which to strike fear into the hearts of plundering
multinational corporations and their well-catered forums.

WORD: You sing, in ” Ver Tanst “A young soldier. He dances a hora
on Arab bones. He sings over Arab graves. There’s no peace, no truth. All
oaths are broken. Do the oppressed mirror the oppressor?” Members of the
Black Ox Orkestar are also involved in a local Arab-Jewish group that promotes
the end of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. What
do you think of Sharon’s latest policies and what do you believe ought
to be done for a resolution of this conflict?

SCOTT – Sharon’s latest policies are atrocities, just like his old
policies. This man seems to be incapable of seeing the light. I don’t
think any positive change can occur until the Israelis get him out of
office and break the stranglehold of the religious right-wing. The recent
IDF campaign in the Rafah refugee camp seems to be a bloody and crude attempt
to win back the support of the settlers and zealots after Sharon’s referendum
on a Gaza pullout blew up in his face. I would say that many, if not most,
Israelis realise that they are spinning out of control. But no one really
has any idea what to do or what can be done. The uncertainty and panic in
Israel is fertile soil for strong-arm solutions. There are many shameful
precedents of the right-wing wresting control in times of crisis through
the unequivocal language of violence: Fascist Spain, Nixon-era America, &
hell, post-9/11 America. There is an internal struggle in Israeli civil society
and I believe that this struggle has to be played out. My earnest hope is
that this can happen peacefully. I certainly don’t have any brilliant proposals
to bring peace to the middle east. Clearly, I believe that occupation in
the name of ethnic nationalism must end. And of course, the bombings have
to stop. The brutal antagonism that has led to generations of Palestinian
terrorism and Israeli militarism must be somehow pacified and reconciled.
If I knew just how, I’d be devoting the rest of my life to carrying it out.

WORD: The lyrics in “Toyte Goyes in Shineln”, the 8th track in your
album, are from the poet Itzik Feffer a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee (JAC) murdered by Stalin’s decree in 1952. Why did you choose
this piece and how do you relate to it?

SCOTT – I chose to write music for this poem for a reason that few
will be able to appreciate. I encountered Feffer’s poem in a university
course on Soviet-Yiddish literature and I was immediately drawn to it. 
The quality of his Yiddish is amazing. The poem is perfectly minimalist.
Its verses are tightly coiled in repetition and rearrangement. It describes
the sight of women frozen to death in Russian train stations during the
civil war and famine of the 1920’s. The writer merely observes a horror that
defies meaning. He doesn’t try to eulogise. In this poem, I always found
something that lays out the future for Yiddish poetry. It’s modernism is
a glimmer of future developments that weren’t fated to come. There’s a line
in the poem, “they waited for trains that didn’t come”. Well, the train for
Yiddish never came.

WORD: There are quite a few representations of ancient cabalistic
icons in your artwork: front cover, inner sleeve, and other 2 in the booklets.
What do they represent? Scott has drawn in the back cover an image of a
helicopter flying over of what looks like the skies of Babylon, is this
a representation of a kabala too?

SCOTT – There are a number of Kabbalistic images in the album cover.
It’s not that we are Jewish mystics or anything. There are aspects of
Kabbalah that I find interesting and parts that strike me as beautiful.
A sense of exile and alienation run through Kabbalistc mysticism. The image
on the front of our record is a representation of the ten layers of separation
between the divine and the profane world. I find this image of a labyrinth
as a sort of representation of isolation and loneliness that we have to
struggle to find our way out of. The drawing on the back cover is a bit
of an esoteric collage. The building is the alt-neu shul in Prague which,
according to legend, was where the body of the Golem was put to rest. The
Golem is like a Jewish Frankenstein, created by a Rabbi from clay to defend
the ghetto from persecution. Without a soul and without the ability to discern
right from wrong, the violence he is charged with overpowers him and he
becomes a threat to all around. This has always struck me as being somewhat
analogous to the creation of the state of Israel. And so, the helicopter
in the drawing is an Israeli chopper. I guess I wanted to suggest the Golem
idea and just put in contrast the realities of old-world and contemporary
Jewish life.

WORD: You wrote in your bio: “Ver Tanzt is not a record for dancing..but
as we play this old and new music, blending archival material with our
own experimentation, some ancient ghosts are certainly dancing around
our heads.” Did you particularly refer to any historical or political
characters?

SCOTT – I don’t think we had any particular characters in mind, though
I think we’ve been possessed at times by the spirits of Emma Goldman,
Karl & Groucho Marx, Moyshe Oysher, Meyer Lansky, & some Ziegfried
Follies girls. I had a dream once that I was taken over by the dybbuk of
Sigmund Freud, but it was probably just my own guilty conscience.

WORD: Have you got any plans for a next release or an european tour?

SCOTT – We have begun writing and researching new material for a
follow-up album. We will be recording in August. We don’t have any plans
for a European tour, but it is definitely a possibility for spring 2005.

<<Ver Tanzt>> was released on Constellation on 29th April
2004

Pete Hamill, author of 16 books, saw his first baseball game in 1947
at Ebbets Field

Johnny Marr

Will Hodgkinson
Friday June 4, 2004
The
Guardian

The most innovative guitarist of his generation is going back to
his roots. “I seem to be in transition a lot of the time, but the one
constant that has stayed through my life has been the notion of saying
what you need to say with an acoustic guitar,” states Johnny Marr. “There
are things that can be done with an acoustic guitar and a voice that I find
more interesting and more expressive than standing on stage with four geezers
in leather jackets. There is nobility in it.”

If ever there were someone whose first language is articulated through
his instrument, it is Marr. As a child he would spend Saturdays staring
at the guitars and amplifiers in Manchester’s department stores while
his mother did her weekly shopping, and any guitarist on television, from
a member of Cilla Black’s studio band to Marc Bolan, was an object of fascination.

By the time he came into prominence with the Smiths he had developed
a style that was richly lyrical and intricate without ever being bombastic.
“When I first discovered pop music, listening to it was an experience
that bordered on the mystical,” says Marr, who is quietly spoken and hesitant,
but endlessly enthusiastic about what he does.

“There’s a sad song by Del Shannon called The Answer to Everything
that my parents used to play, and it struck a chord in me because it sounded
so familiar. That song was the inspiration for [the Smiths’] Please, Please,
Please Let Me Get What I Want. I tried to capture the essence of that tune;
its spookiness and sense of yearning.”

Over an afternoon of coffee-drinking at his Manchester home, Marr
goes some way to explaining what it is that drives him. The legacy of the
Smiths is growing as the years pass – last year NME recently voted them
the most influential band of all time, and Morrissey has returned after
years in the wilderness of the Los Angeles sunshine – but Marr looks unlikely
to revisit his old band, or the orchestral, multi-layered music he created
with them.”I’ve had enough of smoke and mirrors, both literally and figuratively.
So I’ve been listening to Melanie, Donovan, Davy Graham, Joni Mitchell’s
first album… I don’t want to hear music that uses a large vocabulary to
say nothing. My attitude now is: why use a lot of words when fuck off will
do?”

of the British folk-rock group Pentangle. Marr was first aware of Jansch,
who has since become a friend, after seeing Pentangle play a concert
that was broadcast on television when he was 14.

plimsolls and odd socks, looking like the performance was interrupting
a drinking session that started two days earlier and was only just gathering
momentum. This was the era of Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin, and I got the
impression that Pentangle regarded those bands as utter lightweights musically,
physically, philosophically and lyrically.”

has been listening to recently – Sunburnt Hand of Man and the Six Organs
of Admittance are two of the more colourful names that come to mind –
while applauding two folk legends that are a million miles away from the
urbane sophistication of the Smiths.

String Band who went on to make solo records that sound like they are
best listened to with a bout of the plague. Incredibly, he left the Incredible
String Band because he felt they were getting too commercial. John Martyn
is the troublesome, troubled, alcoholic singer-songwriter of intensity
and depth. “Clive Palmer is so purist that he makes regular folk singers
sound like Will Young,” says Marr. “John Martyn made an album called Stormbringer
that is intense, heavy, beautiful, relevant – and that’s all from one
guy with six strings.”

Folk music is often accused of being gauche, or fey. Can such terms
be applied to the music of John Martyn? “Stormbringer is heavier – genuinely
heavier – than all the heavy rock bands. There’s a certain posturing
in rock music that has become outdated, and there’s only so much testosterone
I can take in one lifetime. It’s been done to death and there’s not much
strength in it any more.”

Two of Marr’s heroes, however, were chiefly responsible for creating
that pose in the first place. The first is Andrew Loog Oldham, the teenage
svengali and recent subject of Home Entertainment who managed the Rolling
Stones and fashioned their image; and the second is Keith Richards, whose
louche, ragged style has become the template for generations of rock guitarists.

“Andrew Oldham inspired me because he wore hyperactivity like a badge
of honour, and because he considers it impolite to be boring. I like Keith
Richards more for his ethic than his playing. He’s the captain of the
ship when it comes to being in a rock’n’roll band; he’ll steer the band
through anything, and go down with them if he has to. And he always looked
good.”

Whatever makes Marr such a soulful guitarist is an elusive thing.
From the Smiths to stints in the Pet Shop Boys and Electronic through to
his current band the Healers, he has intermittently rejected any guitar
style he has pioneered to make way for a new one, and he claims that he never
plays a known song on the guitar, least of all one he has written.

“When you play music you
catch whatever is in the air, and every now and then you catch something
that gives you a sense of ecstasy and transcendence,” he says. “My first
lightning bolt came from Marc Bolan. I bought Jeepster by T-Rex purely
because it was in the bargain singles box and it had a picture of Marc
and Mickey Finn on the label, so I figured I was getting more for my 25p.
When I played that record I heard magic. That magic is what I’m endlessly
trying for. That’s what keeps me breathing.”

27 June 2004
The
Independent

Glastonbury Festival was awash with rain yesterday, turning fields
to mush and drenching the masses. But spirits remained high, and it wasn’t
just the power of the music played by Paul McCartney and Oasis.

Festivalgoers, as well as thousands of other people around Britain,
have turned on and tuned in to the all-natural hallucinogenic kick of “psilocybe”.
The magic mushroom is back.

Last week, NME, the music bible, pronounced that 2004 is “the third
summer of love” thanks to the resurgence of the “‘shroom”, previously out
of favour for decades. Fans of the magic mushroom praise them as a natural
alternative to ecstasy, which is declining in popularity. Yesterday an
overdose of ecstasy was blamed for the death of a 24-year-old man at Glastonbury.

A curious loophole means fresh magic mushrooms are legal, whereas
the sale or possession of dried or cooked mushrooms are prohibited. This
weekend there were several stalls around Glastonbury as well as wandering
vendors selling numerous varieties – Mexican, Colombian and Hawaiian. Small-time
dealers made hundreds of pounds within hours of the festival kicking off
on Friday.

Dreadlocked Mary “the Mushroom Seller” took £600 from the sale
of Yorkshire-grown liberty cap mushrooms and others on the first morning
alone. “It’s a good living for the weekend,” said Mary, who tours the
summer festivals selling her wares. The use of mushrooms is extending
beyond the 900-acre site to towns and cities around the UK.

LSD fuelled the first summer of love in 1967; ecstasy and LSD the
second in 1988. NME has hailed the rise of the mushroom as the spark for
the third summer of love.

This week it published a “top tips for top trips” guide to magic
mushrooms in its Glastonbury edition, although it did add the rider that
they are best consumed in a familiar environment.

Concern has been raised about the use of mushrooms because of their
unpredictable effects. Professor John Henry, a drugs expert at St Mary’s
Hospital in London, warned that vomiting, an increased heart rate and flashbacks
could result.

“You can’t predict what is going to happen,” he said. “You may have
a nice trip where all the lamp-posts are wailing at you or a horrible one
where the lamp-posts are threatening you. People respond in different ways
and the same person may respond differently depend-ing on their mood – scared
out of their wits or running over a cliff. You can also have terrible flashbacks
weeks later.”

A spokesman for Avon and Somerset police said: “The advice we always
give is that for your own benefit don’t try anything new here. If you’re
in an area you don’t know, with people you don’t know, be very careful.
“

The NME’s editor, Conor McNicholas, defended the paper’s mushroom
guide: “A minority of young people will at some stage of their lives experiment
with drugs. You have to talk in a way that young people will relate to
– you don’t want someone coming on like your mum or dad and being told not
to do things.”

Certainly, ‘shroom fans were much in evidence at Glastonbury. Chris
Coul, an electrician from Slough, said: “They’re a nice natural buzz. There
is no aftermath which you get from chemicals. Pills are a cheap, quick,
synthetic buzz. For the same price, mushrooms give you a mind-altering high.”

Lucy Scones, 23, had stocked up with 80g of Hawaiian mushrooms from
London’s Camden Market before heading to the festival to beat the price
mark-up. “They’re perfect for the festival; with a good crowd and your ego
hit by the mushrooms, the magic can happen.”

The trade in fresh magic mushrooms is thought to be a multi-million-pound
business and growing rapidly. Chris Territt, business manager of supplier
Psyche Deli, said his staff has doubled in the past few months to cope.
Online orders had doubled as a direct result of people stocking up for
Glastonbury.

His company checked with the Home Office last year to establish the
legal position and was told fresh mushrooms and growing kits were acceptable.

Mushrooms were also easily available in London last week. At one
café in east London they were dispensed from a fridge in tin trays.
A 20g bag of Mexicans costing £10 was said to be enough for two potent
trips. The stronger Colombian strain cost £15.

A Home Office spokesman confirmed the mushrooms were not illegal:
“If they’re fresh it’s not a problem.”

Additional reporting Louise Jury, Genevieve Roberts and Sophie Goodchild

THE FACTS

The potent mind-altering effects of magic mushrooms have been known
for about 7,000 years. Rock paintings found in Algeria from that time show
the harvest, use and adoration of the fungus, which was later called the
“flesh of the gods” by the Aztecs.

Although the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act bans psilocin and psilocybin
– the two main active ingredients found in the mushrooms that result
in a trip for their user- the gathering and possession of fresh mushrooms
is not a crime in the UK.

However, deliberately drying, altering or freezing them would lead
to them being treated as class-A drugs. Both substances disrupt the balance
of brain chemicals, which regulate sensory perception.

Eating the mushrooms in their raw form slowly and on an empty stomach
leads to a more intense trip but, the taste of the raw fungus is not that
appealing. Some people put them on pizzas, French bread, or omelettes to
better handle the flavour. One danger in using or picking magic mushrooms
is that if you cannot identify them accurately you may eat a poisonous
species. Since the plant is considered hallucinogenic, side-effects could
include severe anxiety, paranoia, loss of reality or mental health problems.
They can also lead to stomach pains, sickness and diarrhoea.

There are four basic types of magic mushrooms for sale legally in
the UK. They are usually sold in 10-gram bags and range from £10
to £15 in price.

Zachary Mesenbourg

America, a History in Verse: Volume 3: 1962-1970
Edward Sanders
David R. Godine
388 pp., $19.95 paper

Reviewed by Lewis MacAdams
Poet Lewis MacAdams is the author of “Birth of the Cool: Beat, Be-Bop, and the American Avant-Garde.” He is at work on a biography of Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone.

University student named Edward Sanders and seven of his fellow pacifists
slid away from a dock in New London, Conn., and proceeded across the harbor
toward Groton. The flotilla’s destination was General Dynamics’ Electric
Boat shipyard, where the Ethan Allen, a nuclear submarine equipped with 16
atomic missiles targeted to eliminate 30 million people in the Soviet Union,
was being commissioned. Sanders and his cohorts were determined to board
the ship and get arrested, and the recently deputized shipyard workers who
jumped from a tugboat to intercept them were only too happy to oblige.

Convicted of a breach of the peace and resisting arrest, Sanders
and the others refused to pay their $150 fines and were sentenced to
77 days in jail. Over the next few weeks, writing on toilet paper rolls
and cigarette wrappers, Sanders produced his first major piece of writing,
“Poem From Jail,” which was published in 1963 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s
City Lights Books. With its classical references and hipster inventions,
its invocation of Egyptian gods, its echoes of Ezra Pound’s “Cantos” and
Charles Olson’s “Maximus” poems and Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish,” its slanguage
(“Goof City / the city of the / trembling flank”), its ecstatic diction
(“& I breathe / the god breath / & dance / in the rays / of Nonviolence”)
and its cracker-barrel charm (“and the salt-domes / rumble / as the arse
/ of a politician”), “Poem From Jail” announced the appearance of a poet-scholar-activist
whose work remains news to this day.

After graduating from NYU in 1964 with a bachelor’s degree in Greek,
Sanders opened the Peace Eye Bookstore on the Lower East Side. Over the
next six years, the Peace Eye functioned as an incubator for the alternative
culture, hatching, among other institutions, the pioneer underground newspaper
EVO, short for the East Village Other, and the Fugs, a hairy, total-assault-on-the-culture
folk-rock ensemble that performed songs like “Kill For Peace,” “Slum
Goddess” and “I Saw the Best Minds of My Generation Rock.”

Sanders took an active role in the 1967 attempt to exorcise the Pentagon,
when thousands of marchers at the end of a massive anti-Vietnam War demonstration
in Washington surrounded the building and chanted, “Out, demons, out!”
With Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and others, he instigated the Yippie-sponsored
protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. In the early 1970s,
he settled in Woodstock, N.Y.

Since that time, Sanders has remained a paragon of muscular literary
effort, publishing 15 books of poetry, including verse biographies of
Anton Chekhov and Allen Ginsberg; writing and producing musical dramas
(“The Municipal Power Cantata,” “The Karen Silkwood Cantata”); and releasing
close to a dozen Fugs albums and a CD of ancient Greek poems set to his
own music, which he plays on instruments he invented, such as the talking
tie and the singing quilting frame. In 1988, his “Thirsting for Peace in
a Raging Century: Selected Poems 1961-1985″ won the American Book Award.
His collection of 58 interlocking short stories, “Tales of Beatnik Glory,”
is about to be reissued. For 8 1/2 years, he and his wife, writer Miriam
Sanders, published and edited the biweekly Woodstock Journal. All the while,
he has pursued a relentless schedule of readings, teaching and lectures.

In 1970 and 1971, Sanders covered the murder trial of Charles Manson
and his followers for the L.A. Free Press, and his 30 or so articles
became the basis of the best-selling and much-translated “The Family,”
still the most important book on that dark phenomenon. During the several
years he devoted to the project — a “saturation job” he calls it — Sanders
began to think about the idea of a poetry that would marry his lust for
information (he boasts nearly 100 filing boxes and drawers crammed with
active files), finely tuned paranoia and poet’s unquenchable desire to
sing. In a 1976 manifesto titled “Investigative Poetry,” he called on his
fellow poets to “begin a voyage into the description of historical reality.”
“Move over Herodotus,” the screed begins: “move over Thuc’ / move over Arthur
Schlesinger / move over logographers and chroniclers / and compulsive investigators
/ for the poets are / marching again / upon the hills / of history.” He
then began writing what he called historical poems. One investigated the
premature death of Herman Melville’s father, possibly from mercury poisoning.
Another celebrated the “Yiddish Speaking Socialists of the Lower East Side.”

After warming up with a verse history of the year 1968, Sanders embarked
in 1999 on his most ambitious project to date, a nine-volume history
of America in verse. The first five volumes, he announced, would cover
the 20th century, after which he would work his way back to the 15th, one
century at a time. Volume 1 (1900-1939) of “America, a History in Verse”
dealt with the labor movement and international politics, Volume 2 (1940-1961)
with World War II and the Eisenhower era. He has just released Volume 3,
which covers the years 1962-70.

As Sanders writes in the poem’s introduction, those years were:

… the time of my

youthful rebellion

… when we searched for meaning

in the sawdust floors of the rebel cafes

or the stardust soars of psychedelic haze

or mind-stretching hours in front of

4- and 8-track tape recorders

getting our brains onto friendly oxide

while we outlined our livers

like a Dan Flavin sculpture …

Sanders is a character in his poem — co-founding the Committee to
Legalize Marijuana with Ginsberg, forming the Fugs with poet Tuli Kupferberg
— but his is only one skein in a complex weave rich with heroes and villains.
The heroes are not so much thinkers as people who take brave and principled
action. (“Nothing is possible,” as Sanders’ teacher, the great poet-scholar
Charles Olson, wrote, “without doing it.”) Rachel Carson writes “Silent
Spring” while battling cancer. The members of the Catonsville Nine are
sentenced to two to 3 1/2 years in federal prison for grabbing 400 draft
files from the local draft board and burning them. A soldier named Ron
Ridenhour breaks the story of the My Lai massacre. President Lyndon Johnson
signs the 1964 Civil Rights Act on TV even as he tells aide Bill Moyers
that the law “delivered the South to the / Republican Party / during your
life and mine.” At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, track stars Tommie Smith
and John Carlos bow their heads and raise black-gloved fists in Black Power
salutes on the victors’ platform as “The Star-Spangled Banner” is played.

The poem’s villains are, in Sanders’ eyes, liars and hypocrites,
including the “creepy smut-addict named J. Edgar Hoover” (Sanders catalogs
the FBI director’s obsession with Martin Luther King Jr.’s sex life),
the “secrecy-batty would-be Metternich” Henry Kissinger and Richard “Lazy
Shave” Nixon (Sanders returns again and again to their “secret bombing”
of Cambodia) and the “military-industrial-surrealists” whom Sanders accuses
of warping reality to sate their hunger for “domination, empire, space
warfare, carpet bombing, napalming, and nuking.” Yet he is not afraid to
examine his own errors. In an entry on the 1967 Summer of Love and the counterculture
he helped spawn, he writes:

It made great copy for mass culture sources such as

The 6 o’clock news or Life magazine

but nothing is easy

& the long-time all-level fierceness

required to forge such social change

was not quite there in the Zone of Fun.

Sanders records hundreds of people and movements and events, from
the night Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points against the Knicks to the
resignation of LBJ’s Supreme Court appointee Abe Fortas, which, in Sanders’
estimation, “began the Court’s lurchy trek to the right.” The poem celebrates
the legislation authorizing Medicare; the three days of riots after the
June 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, signaling
the emergence of gay and lesbian political consciousness; the first Earth
Day, April 22,1970, which occurred less than two weeks before four student
antiwar protesters were killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State.

The lives and loves and violent deaths of John and Robert Kennedy
and King resonate throughout “America, a History in Verse: Volume 3.” Sanders
tells these stories with a sense of the ineluctability of fate, though
he looks at Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray as patsies,
as victimized as the men they ostensibly gunned down on their own — a
larger, far more sinister tale. John Lennon and the Beatles are a recurring
presence. Sanders writes of Feb. 1, 1964, as the day “The Beatles’ ‘I Want
to Hold Your Hand’ became #1 / in a nation so eager for innocence / after
the shudder of November / & the dogs of Birmingham.”

Underscoring everything is the ominous drum roll of the Vietnam War,
growing louder and closer. Of the April 15, 1962, arrival in Vietnam
of a helicopter unit of 400 men, one of the earliest official combat
units to be deployed, Sanders writes:

If Euripides were writing it as a play

he would have had a chorus of the snipping Fates

swoon forth with a keening ee ee ee ee

like the eery ee-ing in Trojan Women …

To succeed in this audacious enterprise, Sanders invoked a trio of
New Muses connected to contemporary technologies: Retentia, the Muse
of the Retained Image; Sequentia, the Muse of Sequencing and the Poetic
Data Cluster; and Condensare, the Muse of Distillation. In a search for
what he calls “the Distilled Essence, the graceful illumination, the thrilling
or engrossing moment,” Sanders discovered his method in his own research.
“I had noticed when I was writing ‘The Family’ that many of my hand-written
pages tended to be broken into verse-like line breaks,” he recently remarked.
“I found when I made notes while interviewing people, the lines tended
to break into verse-like clusters.” Charles Olson was also an abiding influence,
especially his 1950 manifesto “Projective Verse,” which insists that “the
poem must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points,
an energy-discharge.” Equally crucial, Sanders says, is “the sequencing
of the poetic data-clusters.” The January 1966 “Trips Festival” in San
Francisco marking the advent of the LSD culture, for instance, is sandwiched
between the slaughter of “100,000 ‘communists’ ” in Indonesia and the
resumption of bombing in Vietnam after a peace pause of 37 days. Otherwise,
this poem might as well be schoolwork — gargantuan lists without resonance
or evolutionary import.

The most radical aspect of Sanders’ poem is the occasional use of
what he calls glyphs — that is, faces and images to represent people and
events. The enemies of peace and goodwill are characterized as “grrr-heads”
or “nope heads” or “national security grouches,” with cartoon lightning
bolts shooting out of furrowed brows. Any victory for democratic socialism
inspires cartoon capitalist eyeballs (“cap-eyes”) to roll. A recurrent image
throughout the poem is of the entrance to the J. Edgar Hoover FBI building
in Washington, with Hoover’s name crossed out.

The soul of Sanders’ epic is a patriotic attempt to apply Maat, the
Egyptian feather of justice, to his native land (an illustration in the
poem depicts the feather imposed on a map of the USA). “Between my country
right or wrong / & my country sometimes right sometimes wrong / or
my country terribly wrong / lies the / Feather of Justice.” A passionate
optimist, Sanders roots for the good America and celebrates it every time
it emerges. Neil Armstrong’s first moon-step “was a moment for America.”
The arrival of folk singer and environmental activist Pete Seeger’s sloop
Clearwater in the mouth of the Hudson, auguring the river’s clean-up, was
another such moment, as was Justice William O. Douglas’ successful effort
to stop a right-wing cadre led by then-Rep. Gerald Ford from impeaching him.
All are elements of Sanders’ “rhapsody of a great nation”:

… where so many sing without cease

work without halt

shoulder without shudder

to bring the Feather of Justice to every

belltower, biome & blade of grass

in Graceful America …

Our poets seem to have lived too long in solipsism. There are 348
creative-writing programs in this country, according to the Assn. of Writers
and Writing Programs at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and I venture
to say that almost none of them teach politics or history or economics or
ecology or statecraft. I would even argue that such a huge number of writing
schools exist precisely because external reality is not challenged by their
teachings or writings. Since the fading of the Beat Generation, the poetry
that is taught or anthologized or rewarded in this country is primarily
inward-looking and partial to the so-called personal poem.

There is nothing inherently wrong, of course, with gazing inward
on what Sanders calls the “swirlyswirly.” All poetry is personal, in the
sense that it is apprehended by an individual poet, but the subject matter
doesn’t have to be so limited. There’s also what Charles Olson called “the
figure of outward” — and the worlds of the material, which also require
our attention. When Olson used the term, he was referring to the great
American poet Robert Creeley. But time has bestowed that fine cognomen
on Ed Sanders as well. In his life and his work, in “America, a History
in Verse,” Sanders is showing us the way. *

Published: March 21, 2004 New York Times

James Turrell is known for making art out of light and thin air, challenging our notion of how we see. The artist says that his work is ”like trying to make the emperor’s clothes visible.” Turrell calls his
latest work — a 350-square-foot concrete ”skyspace” — a garden folly. It hangs 200 feet above Benedict Canyon in Los Angeles, cost more than a million dollars and took 13 years to complete because of its precarious site. It even outlived the renowned modernist architect John Lautner, whose
office got the commission, and was completed by Lautner’s project architect, Duncan Nicholson.

realize that we perceive the outside reality incompletely. We think we areseeing the whole, but in fact we are only seeing part. We think we exist
independently of nature, but we are very interrelated. We even influence
the colors that we see.”

So does Turrell. Like the Wizard of Oz, he pulls the strings to
transform what we see. More than 5,000 computer-programmed L.E.D. and
incandescent lights, concealed beneath the floor, wash the walls with
a symphony of colors — which in turn transform the sky outside from blue
to red to molasses black. At times it feels as if the whole room is pulsating
with energy. ”The colors work on the senses like abstract music,”
Turrell said. ”It is profoundly emotional work.”

Often the reaction it elicits is awe. ”Everyone’s mouth falls open
when they see it,” said James Goldstein, an entrepreneur, who commissioned
the skyspace. Twice a day he navigates the 230 or so steps down a near-vertical
hillside from his house to visit his folly, which is equipped with a wet
bar and a sound system — two distinctly un-Turrellian additions. The
artist would prefer that his patron listen to the sounds of the planets,
but he doesn’t dictate how the space is to be used. Turrell’s own dream
(apart from completing the Roden Crater, the celestial observatory that he
has been building in a sleeping Arizona volcano for the last 30-plus years)
is to build a sky-viewing house where he can live, eat, bathe and sleep
year-round. ”Light is strangely fragile,” he said. ”It needs to have
a home where it is cared for.”