Music

Hello Again

/ howardshapiro / 4 Comments

We were in New York a few weeks ago.  Saw two shows and went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art squeezing into two exhibits: Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty and Van Gogh’s Cypresses. The exhibits and the shows were radically different: Parade – about the Leo Frank lynching somewhere outside of Atlanta in 1915 and A Beautiful Noise – the story and music of Neil Diamond from Sweet Caroline to Coming to America. We can talk about Parade in a different post.

Eileen and I were captured by A Beautiful Noise; loved the music; you could sing it; loved the glitter and the sequins; felt so good, so good, so good. Things I did not know: unlike many contemporary actors and performers, Neil Diamond never changed his name. He was born Neil Diamond and still is. He didn’t pick up the guitar till he was 16. Many of his songs are deeply personal mirroring different stages of his life. And so much of it is about acceptance and loneliness. I hear his music differently now: self-reflective and even soul searching. You got to get past the façade of bright lights and shiny costumes. Just like when you love someone you love not only their persona but also the person they are within, with all the beauty marks and all the flaws, with all the strengths and weaknesses. You see, I am not a music critic, and I am not a psychoanalyst. “I am I said, to no one there and no one heard at all, not even the chair…” We all want to be heard, noticed, felt that this one life we have is impactful.

Some of us sing; some of us tell stories; some of us write; some of us nurture; some of us teach; some of us provide; some of us heal; some of us listen, some of us create; some of us grow things; some of us paint. And some of us struggle and can’t find the road back. It might be ridiculous or ludicrous to pair the two but the Van Gogh exhibit at the Met wants “in” to these words. The image at the top of this is Van Gogh’s “Country Road in Provence by Night”. He was obsessed with these cypress trees. He calls them “flame like” and even writes, “no one has yet done them as I see them.” Maybe it’s the loneliness theme. I often wondered do you have to be lonely or besieged to be creative. Is suffering the secret ingredient in the paint on the palate?

The painting isn’t as famous or as intense as Starry Nights, but it speaks to me about the life we have been given and the road we all are invited to take – one that winds through and by the trees. There are probably many paths, and they change as we grow, age, mature, become. The challenge is to recognize it, stay on it, celebrate it, affirm it, walk it with as much joy as we can muster no matter what God/Life/Chance/Luck bring us. Van Gogh died of suicide. Neal Diamond has Parkinson’s. What do we really know?

Blue Grass

/ howardshapiro / 3 Comments

bluegrass

We were at a blue grass concert the other night in an outdoor venue. It was one of those Western North Carolina evenings with thunderstorms popping up and dissipating as the night air began to cool everything down. The Steep Canyon Rangers were playing with a full orchestra behind them, great evening, great music.

The fireflies were out, hovering two rows in front of me. I first thought it was a floater. (An age related change in your eyes that causes shadows that glide in front of your vision.) I only have one. (So far, my Ophthalmologists tells me.) At first I saw it maneuvering in and out of my vision constantly. But like almost everything, you get used to it. (Except of course now as I think and write about it.)

They flashed independent of the music. They created sparks of light, softly and chaotically announcing there was more there than there was there. It was the evening after the Supreme Court announced that the administration’s travel ban on Muslims was constitutional. The banjo is quarreling with the violin. Their dueling creates a vibrant sense of contentious harmony. It is wondrous; it is beautiful. More fireflies find their way into my field of vision. I feel they are speaking a truth to me about my country and its future and I am concerned.

It isn’t that I disagree with every policy. It is that I hate the triumphalism and the language and the promises that all of this is going to solve all our problems. Keep them out; Build a Wall; Ship them back immediately – no recourse to judges or courts. We don’t have enough judges anyway: Where will we get them, from the barbershops?

Which brings me back to harmony. The mandolin and the bass each sing their own variations of the melody. But there is one song; there is one vision; there is one united presentation. And the differences between them are celebratory. You can feel the strength that is building as they each tell their own story and interpret the anthem in their own unique way. I don’t get that with this government. I don’t sense that from the way our leaders situate their personal beliefs and/or their political positions. It is as if everyone is playing his or her own song and no one is looking out for the band.

The fireflies are still doing their thing. I’m a symbolic thinker. Are they going on or are they flickering off? And what about the lamp beside the golden door? Perilous times.

 

 

 

 

I Bought a Hat

/ howardshapiro / 3 Comments

IMG_5822We were in New York last week and got tickets for Dear Evan Hansen. We were there for the matinee performance the day they won the Tony for best musical. It was an incredible experience, touching, disturbing, funny, challenging, thoughtful, entertaining. The amount of talent on the stage was intimidating. Forget the voices and the staging how did they remember all those lyrics? I can barely remember the name of the person I just met.

I bought a hat. I’m a sucker like that. I usually do the t-shirt thing but I had left my favorite hat in Iceland a few days before and if you know the topography of my head, you know I need a hat in summer. I saw it during the intermission and buying the hat was part of my internal conversation during the second half of the show.

It’s about how a high school boy who can’t find his place and lives his life trapped inside unable to open a window to the world, singing: “I’m tap tap tap tapping on the glass …. Can anybody see … is anybody waving back at me?” It’s about suicide and how the death of a classmate weaves its way into Evan’s story and turns him into a social media sensation ultimately bringing redemption, flawed, problematic, disturbing but healing never the less. It’s about love, lies and life lived imperfectly.

The audience is young for Broadway. You can see and hear it in their laughter, tears and cheers. Did I say I loved it? Did I say the lying and the moral ambiguities of the plot nagged at me? Most of the New York critics fall in love with Evan. A few zero in on the darker side. One reviewer in Slate calls our hero: “A self-serving fabulist who exploits the suicide of a high-school classmate by peddling a fake connection to the dead boy. The con man revels in the resulting internet fame, which wins him popularity and even the sexual attention of the boy’s grieving sister. What a creep…”

But that’s no creep who wins my heart and wins the Tony. That’s you and me. Reb Nachman said: Falling down is the beginning of rising up. Ok so we don’t do it with as much talent; we don’t have some one to stage our entrances and exits or hauntingly raw music to accompany the lyrics we call conversation. Everyone I know (maybe my circle is too limited) falls and slips as they climb through the waking hours of each day. Our hero is flawed. Our hero lies. Our hero grasps for broken straws to pull himself out the hole he is living in. There is a piece of our hero in all of us.

So I bought the hat and even downloaded the music. Reb Nachman let me. Every ascent begins with a descent.

That’s How The Light Gets In

/ howardshapiro / 8 Comments

leonard-cohen

I am not a music critic; I am not a poet. I feel totally inadequate to the task but I also feel compelled, obligated. I owe it to Leonard Cohen. His music has touched me so deeply and so often. So this will be from the heart but if you want a really complete and savvy commentary on Leonard Cohen try the professionals at Rolling Stone or your favorite source.

His words and music found a way into a deep part of me, even when I didn’t understand all the lyrics. But I could feel the pain; I could touch the sadness even the occasional despair. Lots of people describe his music as dark; I won’t argue. But I find an honesty there that resonates with me. It is an honesty that speaks about the limits we all struggle with: time that is finite; joy that is always incomplete no matter how satisfying and filling; longing, yearning never fully realized.

And yet I believe he lived his life abundantly and copiously, never afraid to search for more, for spiritual truth, for the physicality of love in Chelsea hotels and famous blue raincoats. I envy the courage to walk, run, crawl, climb whatever path opens before you. Conventions be dammed. Expectations be trashed. Bring it on.

I love how he fused his Judaism with his world and his work. No pandering or pampering, you had to work to get it. So many of his songs a midrash on Biblical themes, heroes and villains. I think of him as a true “cohen” – a descendant of ancient priests, a grandson of Rabbis. He stands on the generations that went before him: outstretched hands, fingers formed in blessing, shrouded by a prayer shawl of Hallelujah choruses, too powerful to look at, too holy to touch. I think life was like that for him.

For one of my birthdays, Eileen took me to his concert in Vegas and arranged for him to send me an autographed copy of his newest collection of poetry, “Book of Longing”.   It gives you a good sense of who he was and is (for me). Try this on

“Anyone who says

I’m not a Jew

Is not a Jew

I’m very sorry

But this decision

Is final.”

So filled with contradictions, so flawed, so stretching for perfection, so inventing and reinventing himself, his art, his music, his words, he lived profusely. That brings comfort and allows me to image him now in the light, for in his words: Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.