Interviews: Pull of the Bush

Before I reformed my wicked ways, I plied the dark alleys of the fourth estate. Touring through my back pages, I intend to report here on some of the bits and pieces that I--and hopefully you--find interesting.

                                                          Kate Bush

I fell in love with Kate Bush when I heard her scream. Eccentric, English, as beautifully comforting as a cup of tea and milk on a rainy day in a cottage in the Cotswalds, as much performance artist as pop star, a pagan ambassador from the Wiccan Hyperborean, a familiar of wood nymphs and Gaelic satyrs, a vertiginous voice that could scrape Aeolian cleft heights as well as plod through swampy bass bottoms, and with a Poe-ish sense of the macabre, how could anyone not love her? Which is why, as editor of the humble magazine RockBill, I decided to put her on the cover instead of—what was her name, oh yeah, Madonna (no offence to Madge). But it was that scream that startled my neurologic circuits and microwaved my heart. It came hurtling out of the mist in the chorus of the flagship song, “Pull Out The Pin” on her masterpiece album, The Dreaming. The story—for with Kate there is always a story—concerns the life or death decision of a Viet Cong farmer/freedom fighter, grenade in hand, confronting his surprised, “pink-faced” Tunnel Rat American counterpart in a godawful patch of jungle “with my silver Buddha and my silver bullet.” But the scream, “I love life,” coming as the two mortal enemies, both as ignorant of each other as they are willing to kill each other, stand off in a Vietnamese showdown. Who exactly is screaming “I love life?” Both of them, certainly, but aren’t we also joining in the chorus? If you had to boil down all the philosophies of all the religions of all the cultures of this world, wouldn’t the essence at the bottom of the pot be that desperate, pleading scream, “I love life?” When I did interview Kate, I professionally wrapped my palpitating heart in layers of gauze and asked her the questions I thought I had to—the career, the songs, influences, the political paradoxes of indigenous peoples, blah blah blah—not realizing that a more true, deeper, and soul-enrapturing intimacy had already taken place. She cradled my head and whispered into my ear, and—to paraphrase from “Houdini,” another song on the album, she gave away the secret to all great escapes, including the greatest escapes from the illusions we lock ourselves into—with a kiss she passed the key: “I love life.” Kate and I would meet again. There would be more talking. There would be wine and roses. But her tongue had already done its damage. “There’s just one thing in it, me or him. And I love life, so I pull out the pin.”

The Spanish Requisition

Reflections on history while writing my novel, American Hero.

Spain gets a bad rap—mostly from Anglophone writers—about the cruelty of the Conquistadors. Certainly, the Spanish in the New World were brutal, but the 16^th century had their version of a Keith Olbermann—only this one people listened to.

            Let’s back up before we get to the triumph and tragedy of Bartolomeo de Las Casas. In my book, American Hero, one thing is very clear; nothing is very clear.

            We all know the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, sponsored Columbus’s long-cherished voyage to the West ostensibly to find a short cut to the spices, gold, and “unwashed” Asiatic souls in the East. In fact, Ferdinand had thrown the newly re-conquered Spain (from seven centuries of Muslim rule) into such a massive debt that he would envy Obama’s problems. His bribe to the Sultan of Granada to get him to abandon his beautiful city was staggering. The wail of the Sultan’s mother—“my son cries like a girl because he cannot fight like a man”—was a subterfuge to disguise her son’s greed with his cowardice. It was De Medici money from Florence that launched Columbus’s small fleet. As to why the De Medici invested in this venture, you’ll have to read my book to discover.

            What motivated the Spanish had as much to do with God as with gold. True, Indians died in one of the worst massacres in history, though mostly due to the inadvertent spread of small pox. But here’s where one man gets to redirect fate. A humble friar during the First Contact, Bartolomeo de Las Casas, soon took up the Indian cause. He claimed that if you rubbed off the beads and feathers, the natives shared the same values as Christians; family, faith, good works. Las Casas convinced the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope that Indians were innocent souls hungry for Communion wafers.

            Incredibly, the Spanish put down their whips and started treating Indians like human beings. Or, at least as badly as they treated themselves (another story). They baptized them. They married them. They had children together. The current mixed-ethnic population of Latin America is a testament to Spanish liberalism.

            For a contrast, observe the way the British treated the natives. Indians were reviled, sequestered, betrayed, massacred, and systematically removed from the mainstream culture. Even today, Indians in the United States have lived for generations with cruel apartheid.

            Las Casas should have been dancing in the streets celebrating this influential victory of human rights. Except, he wasn’t.

            If the Europeans weren’t going to enslave Indians, they, being Europeans, had to enslave somebody. Guess who?

Though old and sick, Las Casas spent the rest of his life fighting the now burgeoning African slave trade, claiming that Africans were humans, too.

There’s plenty of bad rap to go around, but let’s not forget that one of the world’s first and most influential human rights activists was the Spanish monk, Bartolomeo de Las Casas.

             

Interviews: Yesed to Death

Before I reformed my wicked ways, I plied the dark alleys of the fourth estate. Touring through my back pages, I intend to report here on some of the bits and pieces that I--and hopefully you--find interesting.

Jon Anderson

“I don’t think you can be too cosmic in life.” This was not all that surprising coming from Jon Anderson, the lead singer and lyricist of the ’70s psychedelic rock supergroup, Yes. I had seen the band in concert and enjoyed their spacey-symphonic adagios, though for the ’80s new wave magazine I edited, for the punk audience we coveted, they would fall into the dinosaur category of pop music. I didn’t image Syd Vicious or Joe Strummer giving much spin time to Tales From Topographic Oceans. Still, I liked Jon instantly. For one, he thought I was African. I have a darkish complexion, but the closest I come to Africa is Sicily (not counting that it’s the original locus of all humanity). Mostly, though, I admired Jon’s staunch defense of his phantasmogorphic worldview. “Reality can be such a drag,” he said, his gossamer voice fluttering out of his lithe body as if he was auditioning to play Legolas, the Mirkwood elf in Lord of the Rings. “Here we are in this physical world and we’re the soft machine. We can dream. We can say that’s a UFO or that’s the moon or that’s a goblin.” As he stepped out of the Narnian wardrobe, checking for wraiths behind his shoulder, his eyes blinked to adjust to the harsh light of reality in a midtown Manhattan hotel room. “What’s the alternative? All these shit wars and fucked up corporate governments? Fuck them.” Whoa, Frodo. What happened to the singing dolphins and “I’ve seen all good people turn their heads each day so satisfied I’m on my way?” But Jon had jumped off the Middle Earth Roundabout and locked his icy pale eyes into my pseudo-African face. “I’ve got a way of getting rid of all the bombs, all the nuclear shit. See, I don’t want some bloke saying they got rid of the fucking things. I want to see the damn things blow up.” He was scaring me, scaring me in a way that Johnny Rotten’s safety pins or Siouxie Banshee’s mascara never did. Maybe it was because, despite the intensity of his eyes, that alto soprano voice remained as whimsical as a 13 year-old girl’s sharing a secret with her best friends. The giggling secret, though, was an apocalyptic light show. “One beautiful evening, we stay up all bloody night, drinks loads of black coffee, eat sandwiches, and watch the explosions in the sky. ‘Hey, that could have been Chicago. That could have been New Orleans.’ I mean, we paid for the fucking things. Let’s see where the money’s gone. Let’s see them set the sky on fire.” Right. Thanks, Jon, I’m as cosmic as the next guy, but I prefer to keep the big bang at a little more of a distance.

American Hero: Italian Style

In my historical novel, American Hero, I have tried to tell the truth through fiction. The never named main character is kidnapped and brought to a mysterious organization in Florence sponsored by the De Medici family and called The Academy. From there, he is sent on a secret mission with Columbus to Spain.

Actually, it was no secret. For years, Lorenzo De Medici had been dreaming of creating a democratic republic that would emphasize every individual’s right to pursue happiness. Though they based their plans on Plato’s Republic, being Italian they couldn’t help but go beyond Plato and include a primary place for music and art in their ideal society. Unfortunately, the Inquisition burned their dreams away and the tyranny of the Church and Court one-percenters ruled. Any parallels to today’s American political climate are purely inevitable.

The De Medici Academy, whose members included Leonardo Da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli, Amerigo Vespucci, and Cristoforo Colombo, contracted with Spain to finance a voyage going west to get to Asia. This was mostly a cover. Spain, flushed with its final victory in their seven hundred year war with the Moslems and anxious to take on their rivals, The Portuguese, was ripe for De Medici manipulation.  The Academy really wanted to reach a rumored island—perhaps Atlantis itself—where their dreams of a true republic might be realized.

This has lot to do with the true origin of the unprecedented value on individual potential hard-wired into the political system of the United States. You can read more about it in American Hero.

"Let everyone open his ears well:
Let no one feed on tomorrow;
Today, young and old, let's be
Happy, everybody, women and men:
May every sad thought fall away;
Let's be celebrating always.
Let him be happy who wants to be:
There's no certainty of tomorrow."

Lorenzo De Medici

Interviews: Squeezed

Before I reformed my wicked ways and became a respectable teacher, I plied the dark alleys of the fourth estate. Touring through my back pages, I intend to report here on some of the bits and pieces that I--and hopefully you--find interesting.

Chris Difford and Glen Tillbrook

My first interview for RockBill, a magazine that mysteriously hired me as its editor-in-chief at the ripe age of 23, was with the British pub pop band, Squeeze. The two mainstays, Glen Tillbrook and Chris Difford, had written several bobbity semi-hits such as “Tempted,” “Cool For Cats,” “Goodbye Girl,” and, my favorite, “Black Coffee In Bed.” I met the blokes in a motel in Albany, New York. Their shared room was strewn with Guinness bottles, a just-bought Ella Fitzgerald record (yes, a long playing vinyl album), and a well-worn biography of Winston Churchill, along with the debris of clothes, personal grooming products, and greasy fast food paper bags. Posh. We talked a lot about the Beatles, an obvious influence, the unfettered joy of live gigs, and the endless struggle to resist becoming a “product” of the musical-industrial complex. The boys, though exhausted from life on the road—they had a gig to get to 500 miles away within 24 hours—livened up when talking about their experience with American bigness. “In Britain,” said Chris, “everyone cringes about, but you’ve got more room to breathe here, don’t you? Riding on the tour bus, passing all these farms, wheatfields, silos, highways—our driver playing ‘Home On The Range’ on his harmonica—I was about in tears watching this big country rolling by.” On the other hand, Glen pointed out, “America is so big that it makes it easy not to meet people. You have to drive to get anywhere and aren’t likely to meet chaps you know on the street. It’s easy to be anonymous in America.” A few stouts later, when the talk inevitably came to nuclear apocalypse, as it always does, there was some joking about making the Top Ten as the world ended. Better never than late, one of us said as I stumbled away, my rock and roll cherry popped.

American Hero: The Tide Is High

Unofficial Prologue

I'm still catching up with New Year's Resolutions made ten years ago. If time isn't illusionary, it should be. 


My goal is to get my new historical novel, AMERICAN HERO, out into the world. It is fiction--there's an exciting adventure story about an immortal teenager--and it's factual; the people and incidents encountered are all real. The major figures speak mostly in their own words. The book works wonderfully well as a supplement to an American history middle or high school class, as well as on its own. I've been using it in my own class for a couple of years much to the satisfaction of discerning teenagers.

AMERICAN HERO developed because there are more things in American history than are dreamed of in most middle school textbooks. I want to help people see the truth through the lens of fiction.