Way back in the dark ages when I first began writing this blog, I called it an mp3 blog and featured some of my favorite music from around the world. Those posts and songs are still here, though they’ve been subsumed under thousands of posts about the daily horrors of the Israeli Occupation.
But in honor of the wonder, beauty and power of song, I’d like to take you back to those days of yesteryear and feature one of the most wonderful pieces of songwriting I’ve heard in years. I first heard this song a few weeks ago on my local roots radio station, KBCS. I knew it was Marianne Faithfull singing and I knew the lyrics were killer. But you know how it is: I was in the car, only heard a few snatches of lyrics, didn’t hear the song credits, meant to look it up in the program playlist. Never got around to it.
Tonight, for some reason I started looking for it. Couldn’t find anything digging through old program playlists. Then, thinking perhaps the DJ may’ve been playing something from Faithfull’s most recent album, I hit pay dirt. The song is That’s How Every Empire Falls. It was written by a hitherto unknown Knoxville singer-songwriter, R.B. Morris (website), and appears on his Spies, Lies and Burning Eyes. John Prine recorded a masterful, haunting (as only John can do) cover in 2008 on his Fair and Square EP.
Finally, Faithfull recorded her own cover of the song for her new album, Vagabond Ways.
The lyrics are a haunting allegory in which the frailties of the human heart are woven into the decline of an empire. It seems, at least for me, that the best songs are the ones that somehow connect the heart with the deeper truths of human society. First, listen to the song and as you hear the last words (lyrics here), read these words and think of the 9/11 attacks, all those miserable years under George Bush, and all the lost opportunities we’ve had as a great nation humbled by our own hubris:
A bitter wind blows through the country
A hard rain falls on the sea
If terror comes without a warning
There must be something we don’t see
What fire begets this fire?
Like torches thrown into the straw
If no one asks, then no one answers
That’s how every empire falls.
What is it about such a song that distills human experience in such a primal, powerful way? It’s something like the role prayer and religion served at one time (and still for some) in human society.
KATE AND ANNA McGARRIGLE
Vocal duo, songwriters, guitarists, pianists, accordionists, banjoists. Anna, born Montreal, Quebec, Canada, December 4, 1944. Kate, born Montreal, Quebec, Canada, February 6, 1946.
Kate and Anna McGarrigle have not achieved the level of popularity and record sales of contemporary performers such as Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, the Roches, Leonard Cohen, or Maria Muldaur, but they comprise one of the most musically and lyrically gifted sister folk duos originating in the early 1970s second- generation folk-pop movement. They went their own musical way, never slavishly imitating anyone for the sake of tagging onto a popular style. Because of their iconoclasm they are all the more adored by their devoted musical followers.
Kate and Anna were born in 1940s Montreal. An older sister, Jane, also sang professionally with them for a short period. They grew up in St. Saveur-des-Mont, in the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec, about forty-five miles north of Montreal. Their interest in music came from their father, Frank, and his side of the family. Frank’s father became the first movie theater exhibitor in New Brunswick around 1906, according to an article by Mike Regenstreif, Kate & Anna McGarrigle: On Their Own Terms (in the February-March 1997 issue of Sing Out!). Between screenings, the young Frank and his sister, Anna, would sing Stephen Foster tunes and turn-of-the-century parlor songs.
“Music was always there at home,” Kate told Regenstreif. “My father would sit at the piano at night and play those songs. At parties, somebody would get up and sing, and my father would accompany them and sing the harmony. There were lots of friends and uncles and each would get up and give their big song.”
Kate continued, in an interview with Richard Silverstein: “We were children of the middle class. My dad played funny ditties and drinking songs from the 1930s. We didn’t really have an Irish folk tradition even though we were half Irish. . .There was no Irish folk tradition because they were subsumed under the prevailing English Canadian culture. The French, on the other hand, were quite the opposite. As an oppressed people, it was quite important for them to remember their language, history, and music. No conqueror would take that away from them.”
The McGarrigle sisters’ mom, Gaby, was also musical. She once played violin in the Bell Telephone Orchestra. Gaby loved the old music hall songs that were popular in the era after she was born (1904). The daughters told Regenstreif the story of their mother accompanying her father to the burlesque shows at Montreal’s legendary Gayety Theatre during World War I: “Gaby’s dad was French Canadian and didn’t understand English that well and she used to go to translate for him. ” One morning during that period, she came to school quite late. “Gabrielle, why are you late?” demanded a nun. “I had to go to the Gayety with my father,” she replied, to the consternation of her classmates.
The young McGarrigle sisters took piano lessons from the nuns of St. Saveur. At the age of ten, Kate remembers her dad showing her guitar chords. There were also a ukulele, a banuke (a banjo with a ukulele neck), and a zither around the house. In the 1950s Kate and Anna listened to popular music of the era: Carl Perkins and the Everly Brothers. “Janie had gone away to boarding school in Ontario when she was fourteen, and she really got into country blues and folksongs as well as McGarrigle originals. music. She introduced us to a lot of songs that otherwise we might not have heard,” Anna told Regenstreit. On Saturday nights “on a good night, the clear signal [of WWVA] from Wheeling, West Virginia, crossed hundreds of miles and international borders” to be heard by two sisters hungry for this music from another world. In the 1960s the McGarrigles were Montreal high school students. They once sneaked out of the house to see a Pete Seeger concert with an older friend of whom their parents disapproved. They discovered folk music and from that moment Kate wanted her own banjo. Then they saw the Weavers and quickly formed a folk- singing trio with a high school friend. They sang songs like Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and appeared at the Finjan, an early-’60s Montreal coffeehouse owned by Simon Asch.
In 1962, they met Peter Weldon and Jack Nissenson, members of a Montreal traditional folk group called Pharisees. Weldon and Nissenson knew folk legends like EwanMacColl and Peggy Seeger. They even owned Montreal’s first Joseph Spence albums. The McGarrigles joined Nissenson and Weldon as the Mountain City Four. Kate told Silverstein: “We entered into the folk scene through the records of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. But when we met Nissenson and Weldon, they introduced us to music at the sources and said, Forget about Joan Baez! Go to the sources at all times. Don’t copy styles, just learn the original music.’ I think that’s why we have an original sound. We didn’t try to imitate anyone, with the possible exception of Dylan, who everyone tried to imitate at one time or another.” While performing with the Mountain City Four, Kate and Anna began singing traditional standards like Willie Moore; Carter Family songs like Lonesome Valley; French Canadian songs like V’La L’Bon Vent; contemporary folksongs like “Land of the Muskeg”; and Arthur Crudup’s Mean Old ‘Frisco” In the Montreal folk scene, the McGarrigles met Galt McDermott, who later composed the music for Hair; Broadway’s first rock musical. McDermott songs No Biscuit Blues and Cover Up My Head made it onto the McGarrigles’ second and third Warner Brothers albums, Dancer with Bruised Knees and Pronto Monto.
Eventually, Chaim Tannenbaum, Dane Lanken (who later married Anna), and others joined the Mountain City Four. Meanwhile, Kate studied engineering at McGill and Anna took painting courses at L’Ecole Beaux Arts. It was during this period they met the French lyricist Philippe Tatartcheff, who studied at McGill and eventually completed his Ph.D. at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Kate decided to pursue a musical career in New York after college. She and Roma Baran formed a duo with Kate on piano and Roma on guitar, performing old blues and folksongs as well as McGarrigle originals. They played the Gaslight and Gerde’s Folk City in New York. They received a record offer but turned it down. In this period, both Kate and Anna began to write their own songs. Anna’s first song was Heart Like a Wheel. Incredibly, (when one thinks of the song’s subsequent popularity after it was recorded by Linda Ronstadt), Anna had no performing ambitions. The way Anna tells it, her lack of interest in performing helped her hone her writing skills. Kate’s musical maturity came slower, until, inspired by the burgeoning folk songwriting scene, she wrote The Work Song and one of their most haunting ballads Talk to Me of Mendocino.
Kate and Roma’s musical breakthrough came at the 1970 Philadelphia Folk Festival, where their Saturday night performance drew a rave New York Times review. They opened for Jerry Jeff Walker at the Gaslight. When Jerry Jeff heard their closing tune, Heart Like a the Wheel, he asked for a demo tape to send to Linda Ronstadt, who was putting together songs for a solo album. In 1971, Roma and Kate split up. Roma returned to school and Kate married Loudon Wainwright III, who covered We’ve Come a Long Way. Maria Muldaur covered The Work Song. The group McKendree Spring recorded Heart Like a Wheel in 1972. Kate and Anna’s big break came in 1974, when Ronstadt put Heart Like a Wheel on her album by the same name. Maria Muldaur invited Kate to sing harmony on a gospel song for one of her records. Muldaur also chose to sing Anna’s Cool River, for which producer Joe Boyd asked Kate to play piano. As Regenstreif recounts, when Kate told him she didn’t know the piano track, he said, “What do you mean you don’t know it? You wrote it!” She explained that Anna, her sister, wrote the song. Soon Anna said good-bye to her coworkers in Montreal and boarded a plane to L.A. When they entered the studio to make a demo tape for Warner Brothers, they didn’t know each other’s tunes very well because they hadn’t performed together in years. “It was that afternoon [in 1974] that we became Kate and Anna McGarrigle,” Kate told Regenstreif.
In May 1974, Warners offered them their first record contract. During 1975, they recorded their first album; Kate and Anna McGarrigle. The McGarrigles and their two producers, Greg Prestopino and Joe Boyd, had conflicting musical visions during the recording process. “Warner, at first, thought we could become the next Laura Nyro,” Kate told Silverstein. “They saw us as soulful piano player chicks. When we first got into studio, there were fights between Greg, who wanted to have a pop sound with no folk instrumentation, [and] Joe (who claimed to have created the English folk-rock sound), who wanted an eclectic folk-pop sound. When they recorded Anna’s ‘Complainte Pour Ste. Catherine,’ for example, we heard it Cajun,” Kate recalls. “Greg heard it pop and Joe heard it reggae.”
Remarkably, they completed the album, which has gone down in history as a classic. It made an auspicious debut in February 1976. Stereo Review named it Record of the Year, and Melody Maker called it Top Rock Album.
The McGarrigles had a surprise in store for record executives who saw them as the “next Nyro.” It was their “quaint” idea to put childraising before their career. They never toured to support their first album- certain death for a new release-because Kate was pregnant with her second child when it came out. They went so far as to hire a band of studio musicians and book a series of dates at a Boston venue, but when they were dissatisfied with the band, they decided to bag the tour. Similarly, as they completed their second and third albums, Anna’s two pregnancies complicated plans for extensive touring-enough to drive record executives to an early grave.
The debut album contains the gorgeous Talk to Me of Mendocino, a description of a cross-country car trip in which the songwriter takes leave of the mountains of Quebec and other natural markers of her youth, only to come face-to-face with the majestic power of the Mendocino redwoods: Talk to me of Mendocino / Closing my eyes I hear the sea: / Must I wait? Must I follow? / Won’t you say: Come with me? Rarely have poetic image, natural sound, and musical setting wedded so touchingly.
In 1976, Kate’s marriage to Loudon Wainwright ill ended. Returning home to Montreal with her young children, Rufus (who now has a successful recording career) and Martha, she began to collaborate more closely with Anna. They made Dancer with Bruised Knees (1977), which contains the gothic, alternately charming and horrifying Perrine Etait Servante, in whose lyrics you have the diabolical charm of the McGarrigles’ star-crossed lovers mixed with the no- nonsense “make something funny and useful out of a hard life” attitude, which represents traditional French Canadian life.
Pronto Monto (1978) contained the wonderfully quirky NaCl, a song dedicated to the romantic possibilities inherent in physical chemistry: Just a little atom of chlorine, valence minus one / Swimming through the sea, digging the scene, just having fun . . .
They toured sporadically, joining Bonnie Raitt, playing New York’s Bottom Line, and doing foreign gigs in England and Holland. In 1980 they played Carnegie Hall and were featured in a National Film Board of Canada documentary.
Also in the 1980s, they released The French Record (1981) and Love Over and Over (1983) (re-released on CD in 1997 by Rykodisc). The former was originally commissioned at the height of the Québécois separatist movement. Says Kate: “There was a French-Canadian record company which wanted to extend a hand of friendship to us and asked us as English Canadians to produce a record for a French audience. It was a political gesture in a sense. The odd thing is that it never came out in France and we’ve never played in France and weve never played in France!”
When asked why, Kate suggests, “I think their music can be insular. Also, with few exceptions, music doesn’t play that large a role in French culture. You just don’t hear in French music the kind of cross-fertilization that you hear in American music, for example. If you listen to Chuck Berry, the influence of New Orleans blues is unmistakable.”
The French Record contains one of their finest efforts, a rocking Cajun rendition of Complainte pour Ste. Catherine, and their first collaboration with Philippe Tatartcheff.
Much of their recording during the 1980s came about through happenstance. The mid-1980s were a fallow time for the McGarrigles and their relationship with the industry. After a National Public Radio interview, a Private Music executive called and offered them a contract to make Heartbeats Accelerating, which came out in 1990. “Musically, Anna and I like all different styles of music. Heartbeats Accelerating was written completely on synthesizers. But the record company wanted more of a folk sound, so we toned it down for them.”
Kate bemoans the stresses and strains of a large touring band. “For a while that was fun,” she told Regenstreif. “But then it got to be less fun. We couldn’t say to so-and-so on the drums, ‘Why don’t you sit this one out.’”
The McGarrigles are sometimes compared to another folk-pop sister group, the Roches; in a strange coincidence, Loudon Wainwright later married Suzzy Roche. While the Roches are a trio of New Jersey native Irish-Americans whose first musical encouragement came from Paul Simon, the McGarrigles are usually a duo, except when sister Janie sings with them. The lyrics of both are lushly, even tragically, romantic. The Roches have slicker production values, and their sisterly harmonies are breathtakingly beautiful. Many listeners who enjoy the McGarrigles will also find themselves taking to the Roches.
Matapedia was the first new McGarrigle recording in six years. Bob Franke, the great songwriter, wrote an homage to the album: “Anna’s Goin’ Back to Harlan celebrates the role that traditional music took in the lives of those of us who first discovered it in the mid-1960s. The myths it offered were not the ones that our parents, damaged by the traumas of World War and Great Depression, sought to create. Ozzie and Harriet had little to offer us compared to the likes of Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender. The original singers of these songs had a different relationship to history and culture than our parents did.”
The McGarrigles’ songwriting is drenched in musical and lyrical references to traditional songs and heroes, from Shady Grove to Barbara Allen. “Anna and I make references in our own songs to traditional folk songs because these people lived lives of great drama,” Kate told Silverstein. “In modern life, you cannot find the same pure passion and romance. Yes, people love and die today, but where is the grand passion that unites the hearts of Barbara Allen and her lover?”
Kate’s brilliant Jacques et Gilles speaks to us in two ironic contexts. Again, to quote Franke: “She creates a myth-to a wonderful variation on the tune of the old nursery rhyme ‘Jack and Jill’-that turns a loving but not flattering eye on her mill worker forebears. In doing so she crosses a line, becoming a social historian, coming to terms with her history, [and becoming in turn] something of a tradition-bearer herself.”
Kate described how she came to be interested in the New England mill towns that she writes about in Jacques et Gilles: “I came to write it because of my interest in Jack Kerouac and On the Road. Ten years ago, I realized the similarities in Kerouac’s and my own backgrounds. Though he was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, his family came from the same Quebec region as mine. Like him, I learned French in school and spoke English at home. Both of our upbringings were terribly insular. Our contact with the outside world was minimal. Perhaps that’s why he wrote a book about traveling. But you’ll recall that all his traveling, searching for a better life, ended up back in his mother’s home, where he died a terrible death.
“I didn’t come to understand any of this until I took a trip to Lowell. I brought along a video camera and asked a local woman for permission to film the local cemetery, where Kerouac is buried, from her balcony. When we got to talking, I realized how similar her background was to Kerouac’s and my own. She was born in the States, yet she knew almost no English and spoke only French. I found it amazing that you could live in this country for so long, yet still be apart from it. This woman lives through French Canada. Those are the only photographs on her wall.
“It wasn’t until I began doing research on this subject that I discovered that fully half the population of French Canada left for the factory mills of New England! That’s an astounding fact, yet very few people are aware of it. Despite these huge numbers, French Canadians have had nowhere near the impact on the greater American culture that Italian, Irish, and Jewish Americans have. There are no traces of their cuisine, language, customs, etc. I think Kerouac responded to this insularity by writing On the Road. Yet his search for freedom and liberation ended with death.”
In the McGarrigles’ 1998 Rykodisc release, The McGarrigle Hour, they have created yet another under-stated musical masterpiece. They hit upon the brilliant idea of integrating all of the values in life that they hold dear, most notably family and music, in a single musical recording. As Jane McGarrigle states in her liner notes: The McGarrigle Hour reunited many of the same people who worked on the first Kate & Anna record in 1975.” It also brings together the sisters with their respective spouses, an ex-spouse (Loudon Wainwright III); their children, including Rufus and Martha Wainwright; several distinguished musical interpreters (Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris); and current and former musical collaborators (including Joe Boyd, producer of their first two recordings).
The song selection, too, epitomizes the celebrated McGarrigle eclecticism: new versions of previously recorded material (Talk to Me of Mendocino and NaCl), plus the old pop standards like Gentle Annie (Stephen Foster) and What’ll I Do (Irving Berlin). Unlike Matapedia, there is no newly written here; but neither is there anything stale or nostalgic about this record. It gives fresh new perspective on individuals we felt we knew all along.
In a professional music business increasingly dominated by a frenzy for the next sensation or smash hit, Rykodisc deserves enormous credit for its commitment to the McGarrigles’ musical canon.
In addition to releasing their previous Matapedia, it re-released on CD such long-out-of-print titles as Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Dancer with Bruised Knees, The French Record and Love Over and Over.
Tribute to Kate McGarrigle with Emmylou Harris and Kate's family (Richard Termine)
And now for something completely different. My I-P junkie friends ( I say that lovingly!) will hopefully bear with me as I delve into one of my passions, one which has been stilled over the past few years by all the murder and mayhem in the Middle East. I know friends and enemies sometimes remark on my intemperateness in the comment threads here. So I thought it might be the right time to divert from the usual political fare and delve into different territory, where edges aren’t as hard and there can be more grace.
From the time I was a teenager and my dad took me to see Pete Seeger perform in high school auditoriums throughout the Hudson River Valley, I’ve adored traditional music. Somewhere about the time I was in college I discovered the McGarrigle Sisters and I had the privilege of interviewing Kate for the article I wrote about them for the Encyclopedia of Blues and Folk some years ago.
With great sorrow, I learned that Kate had succumbed to her battle with cancer a year ago. A month ago, Emmylou Harris joined with the Kate’s sister, Anna and their children Rufus and Martha for an memorial tribute at Carnegie Hall. I don’t live in New York anymore and its only unique cultural milestones like this that make me regret that.
But here we have the next best thing. Emmylou penned a gorgeous tribute to Kate on her new album, Hard Bargain. The song is called Darlin’ Kate (hear it), and what can I say–it brought tears to my eyes, as perhaps it will bring tears to yours. Emmylou performed on the McGarrigles wonderful song, Goin’ Back to Harlan. And clearly, from the lyrics you can tell that Kate was the love of Emmylou’s life, or at least one of ‘em.
This song represents the greatness of the human spirit and the triumphal power of music to enter spiritual realms. The lyrics are so perfect, so pure that I offer them to you in full here:
So it’s finally come, you have left this world
But we’ll miss our Kate, our darling girl
We held your head, kissed your lovely brow
And bid farewell, you’re sailing now
Free from the pain, you lay that burden down
But you’re strong and giving heart
Would surely be your crown
As you slip the surly bonds of earth and sailed way
Perhaps we will meet again somehow, someday
Until then, there’s nothing we can do but wait
To see once more, our darling Kate
All those nights we sang, talked ’till the sun come up
You fed our souls, you filled our cup
With your perfect words and all that voice
We fell in love, we had no choice
And I can’t say for sure where you have gone
But in that place, I’m betting there’s a better song
We’ve all known down here, taste of joy and strife
You were the sweetest note in the chord of life
Now you slipped the surly bonds of earth and sailed way
Perhaps we will meet again somehow, someday
But if there was one name I could consecrate
It would be yours, it would be Kate
I read a wonderful review of a new album, Baghani, by the Palestinian performer Amal Murkus that made me want to go right out and buy it–or at least listen to it. Unfortunately, you can’t–at least not easily, since no Israeli record company is yet distributing it (it figures). One of my Facebook Friends pointed me to this amazing YouTube video of the song, Memories of a Palestinian Wound, which is a song Murkus is well known for singing.
But based on hearing her version of this song and how different it is stylistically, I’m guessing that a comment in the Youtube video thread that the singer is named Omaimi, may be correct. At any rate, this is a slashing, powerful version of the song. Not knowing Arabic, I don’t know the words, but the pictures tell the entire story and they’re masterfully counterposed with the music.
The arrangement sounds like a combination of traditional Arabic music with almost a rock overlay of jangling electric guitars. No, it’s not pop music in any western sense, but it conveys its anger in a way that is somehow western, very direct, very modern, while remaining true to an Arabic musical idiom. To my readers who know Arabic, please fill in what I’ve left out. And please, if anyone has any of the music from Baghani, let me know. I’d love to feature it here.
If this song is the same as the Mahmoud Darwish poem, Diary of a Palestinian Wound, then you’ll find the lyrics here.
Lately J Street has made a few lame political decisions, one of them being joining with Stand With Us and the ADL in denouncing the Berkeley student divestment initiative. I’ve also been annoyed to discover that J Street is promoting Noa’s national concert tour:
STG Presents NOA with special guest MIRA AWAD
The Moore Theatre, Thursday, April 29, 2010, 8:00pm
Please join xxxxx in supporting the work of J Street:
Welcome Israeli artist Noa (Achinoam Nini) and Palestinian artist Mira Awad to Seattle. Noa and Mira will speak about their music and why they support J Street. This is a great chance to meet two talented artists face-to-face, and learn more about the work of J Street , in a beautiful lakefront setting.
Achinoam Nini, also known by her professional name Noa, is Israel’s leading international concert and recording artist. Over the span of a 15 year career with Gil Dor they produced four successful Israeli albums and four international albums.
Mira Awad, a Palestinian actress, singer and songwriter living in Israel, collaborated with Noa (Achinoam Nini) in her album “Now”, Idan Raichel in his second album “Mema’amakim”, Greek singer George Dalaras, and with hip hop artist Guy Mar. Mira is an actress with the Tel-Aviv Cameri Theatre, and on the TV series “Arab Labour”. She is featured in the movie “The Bubble”, recorded the theme songs for the films “Forgiveness” and “Lemon Tree.” Her debut album “Bahlawan-Acrobat” was released in May 2009, and was musically produced by guitarist Amos Ever-Hadani.
They’re apparently unaware that Noa voiced strong support for Operation Cast Lead, claimed Gazans sought Hamas’ overthrow, and expressed a devout wish that Israel would accomplish the task for them. She also called Hamas “Nazi-like” and ” a cancer,” accusing it of acts of rape and other heinous crimes which were baseless accusations. Here’s a taste of her ranting in case Jeremy Ben Ami didn’t do his due diligence before endorsing this woman’s performances:
I see the ugly head of fanaticism, I see it large and horrid, I see its black eyes and spine-chilling smile, I see blood on its hands and I know one of its many names: Hamas.You know this too, my brothers. You know this ugly monster. You know it is raping your women and raping the minds of your children. You know it is educating to hatred and death. You know it is chauvinistic and violent, greedy and selfish, it feeds on your blood and screams out Allah’s name on vain, it hides like a thief, uses the innocent as human shields, uses your mosques as arsenals, lies and cheats, uses YOU, tortures you, holds you hostage!!
I know this is true my brothers!! I know YOU know the truth!! And I know you cannot say it for fear of life so I will say it for you!!
…I know that deep in your hearts YOU WISH for the demise of this beast called Hamas who has terrorized and murdered you, who has turned Gaza into a trash heap of poverty, disease and misery. Who in the name of “allah” has sacrificed you on the bloody alter of pride and greed.
…I can only wish for you that Israel will do the job we all know needs to be done, and finally RID YOU of this cancer, this virus, this monster called fanaticism, today, called Hamas. And that these killers will find what little compassion may still exist in their hearts and STOP using you and your children as human shields for their cowardice and crimes.
Here is how Noa attempted to justify Israel’s election of the rightist Netanyahu government. She explained that the result shouldn’t be surprising in light of:
…The INCREDIBLE propaganda spread around the world by the ENORMOUS amount of Anti-Semites and Jew- haters who are bent on destroying Israel. When the Israeli population sees the lies spread around, the hypocrisy of the world who sees Israel as the aggressor rather than a country acting in self defence, a world whose eyes are blind to the killing and the massacres by the MUSLIM fanatics of the Palestinian people, of Fatah, of women who dare to raise their head, of ANYONE who does not agree with them, when the Israeli people who number 7 million, 1.5 million of them Arabs, see around them 1.5 BILLION Arabs, with hardly ONE voice raised in peace, compared to the ENDLESS Israeli and Jewish voices raised in peace
I realize that Noa is a performer and not a political analyst. But if she wants to make public political statements she has a responsibility to speak the truth and use facts rather than lies and prejudice. The passages above reveal her to be woefully uninformed about issues on which she claims to have some expertise and certainly some passion. Given the venom in these statements, why would J Street want to support her?
J Street also doesn’t seem to realize that the Israeli government, through the Israel Broadcasting Authority, cooked up the idea of Noa and Israeli Palestinian performer Mira Awad entering the Eurovision song contest singing a banal There Must Be Another Way. They also sing a baleful version of the Lennon-McCarthy, We Can Work it Out, as if solving the Israel-Palestine conflict was as easy as repairing a lover’s quarrel. For this they were “rewarded” with 16th place in the competition–a lackluster showing helped by the fact that the audience clearly saw through the hasbara nature of the performance.
J Street appears to believe that Noa and Awad together represent the best of what Israel is capable. Under other circumstances I might agree. I quite like Noa’s music and I find Mira Awad a compelling performer and I’ve written this here before. But I do not see how an American Jewish peace group can lend support to this enterprise given Noa’s shameful behavior during the Gaza war and her co-optation by the government to do its bidding in the propaganda wars subsequently.
Udi Aloni wrote a powerful critique of Noa’s support for the Gaza war.
I want to make clear that when J Street stands up for the right thing, I’m there to support it and I have done so. But when it steps in dog-doo as it has here, it deserves criticism and will hear it from me.
NPR featured a music review of an inspiring piece of music, Luminosity, by James Whitbourn. One of the songs is A Prayer of Desmond Tutu, which is a meditation narrated by him along with a powerful set of choral voices affirming his message:
Goodness is stronger than evil
Love is stronger than hate
Light is stronger than darkness
Life is stronger than death
Victory is ours through Him who loves us.
Lately, this message beats much fainter in my breast given the evil we see every day in the Occupation. I wonder whether goodness is truly stronger than evil. On what basis do we say this? What evidence? When hate seems to reign triumphant how can we dare say that love is stronger? And with so much death, why do we believe life is stronger?
I open the question to you my readers. Tell me what you believe. If you have hope, I’d like to hear it (and why).
Young musician from West Eastern Diwan Orchestra rehearsing on Ramallah rooftop (New Statesman)
If there’s a lyric to accompany this post it would be Elvis Costello’s What’s So Funny About Peace Love and Understanding? Except we’d have to adapt it a bit to today’s news: “what’s so dangerous about a classical music concert in Gaza?” Famed conductor and co-founder of the East-Western Diwan Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim asked the Israeli government for permission to bring his young musicians to Gaza for a concert.
The answer: No. Not until Gilad Shalit is free. As if those Gazans who would enjoy this concert were personally responsible for capturing Shalit and holding him for three years. International law prohibits collective punishment and that’s what this is: blaming an entire population for the acts of individuals within it.
So in case you didn’t already know: the IDF already bans dangerous products like pasta and musical instruments from entering Gaza; to that now add classical music. And Daniel Barenboim is a dangerous man, the equivalent of 20 Qassam rocket launchers at least.
But let’s be clear. Barenboim was tacitly criticizing the Gaza siege and Israel knew this. It had to make a calculated determination whether it could risk international opprobrium in rejecting Barenboim’s request in order to uphold the impermeability of the siege. It favored the latter. Apparently, the Israeli world view is that Gazans can never suffer enough pain. And they wonder why those who captured Shalit did so in the first place.
I saw Crazy Heart recently and thought it was terrific. I haven’t seen every picture Jeff Bridges has done but I’ve seen a lot of them and he’s consistently tough, honest, yet vulnerable. Those are qualities you don’t find in many leading actors. In Crazy Heart, he played a washed-up country singer a la Townes Van Zandt, who finds one last shot at redemption in the form of a beautiful young woman played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. The character’s name, Bad Blake, is perfection itself.
Besides Bridges’ straight from the heart performance, the music played a major role. It was produced and the original material co-written by T-Bone Burnett, who also produced the music for O Brother, Where Art Thou? As I wrote above, I heard echoes musically and in the plot of the life of Townes Van Zandt in the film. One of his most wonderful songs, If I Needed You, is even included in the soundtrack. As I watched Bridges face and listened to his singing voice I also kept hearing Kris Kristofferson, who would’ve done great honor to the role as well.
The film’s website quotes one of the most famous aphorisms about country music: “It’s three chords and the truth.” That’s what is so powerful about virtually every song by Van Zandt. It’s what’s so riveting about Bridges’ performance as well. You’re not on the outside looking in at this man. You’re right there with him. Every song he sings isn’t an act, it’s the hard-won wisdom of a man down on his luck, but clawing his way back from the brink towards redemption.
I haven’t seen Ajami yet but look forward to doing so. It was the losing nominee from Israel for Best Foreign Film. This is the third year in a row that an Israeli film was nominated and failed to win. Previous nominees were Waltz With Bashir and Beaufort. I was conflicted about the prospects for these films which, in many ways represented conventional liberal Zionist narratives about the Israeli-Arab conflict. But Ajami is different. It was directed by Israeli Jewish and Palestinian co-directors. The actors were largely not professional. Instead they were local residents of the Israeli Palestinian neighborhood, Ajami. This was the hard-luck story of the Israel left behind by the high tech bubble and bronzed bodies of Tel Aviv’s beach culture.
In a true to life story that would’ve fit perfectly into the plot, the Israeli Palestinian director’s two brothers were arrested by Israeli police two weeks before Oscar night for defending local children they claim were burying a family pet, and who police claim were concealing drugs. This is the conflicting narrative that is current Israeli society. The elites see the down and out as the unwashed, the enemy. The underclass see the police and political class as corrupt arbitrary forces that mean them no good.
What concerned me leading up to Oscar night was the embrace that even the most pro-Israel Diaspora Jews and Israeli government were offering the film. I became especially concerned when I heard statements endorsing the film by the director of the Seattle Jewish Film Festival while at the same time she specifically rejected the new documentary about Rachel Corrie’s life as being too downbeat (“the very first scene displays her death!”). Does this woman have a clue what she’s talking about? Ajami isn’t downbeat? Does she know a thing about this real place and the ferocious obstacles its real inhabitants face in living in modern Israel?
The problem with Ajami is it became the nation’s hope even though it ill-fit such a nationalist packaging. Earlier today, the director acknowledged this by renouncing his patriotic duty to represent Israel in the Oscars:
“I am not Israel’s national team and do not represent her,” Copti reportedly said. “It is an extremely technical thing…it says ‘Israel’ because that’s where the money comes from. The film technically represents Israel, but I don’t represent Israel. I cannot represent a country that does not represent me,” he said, according to Army Radio.
In truth, I think that Israel damages its Oscar prospects by representing its nominees as so closely a product of a national film industry and effort. Oscar voters may not dislike Israel per se. But they know things are ugly over there and they’re not inclined to wade into an internethnic conflict to make a statement on behalf of an Israeli film, even one that tells it like it is like Ajami. In future, I’d suggest as Yossi Sarid does here, that the Israeli government let its nominees speak for themselves as films and not place them in the awkward straightjacket of national pride. Israeli triumphalism in film or politics is not a message that resonates with Oscar voters or virtually anyone outside Israel (except perhaps a few thousand hardline pro-Israel Jews).
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