The Bushel Basket, Folk Music, and an October Evening

The other day I took some audio equipment to a repair shop run by a guy named Ted Syperek. Of all the people I know, excepting my Sister, he’s my longest acquaintance. I met him at the Bushel Basket Coffee House.

In 1965 some friends and I decided to have a coffee house in our church basement in Whitby, Ontario. We named it the Bushel Basket, I designed a logo, and we put out the word. We arranged tables, stuck candles in Brio bottles, and on the first night, John McKibban and I got up and sang a Beatles song to my three guitar chords. At this level how long this might have gone on before boredom would have ended it, is anyone’s guess.

But just a few weeks later the door opened and in walked about a dozen strangers from nearby Oshawa, friends from a folk spot called the Green Door. Mostly musicians, these people proceeded to entertain us with some amazingly good music, and become regular additions to the basement event.

I soon knew...
Dennis Delorme (aka Reverend Orval Rutabaga), a multi-instrumentalist who later became pedal steel guitar player for the award-winning country-rock band Prairie Oyster. Paul Grady wrote songs that were recorded by three national acts and had his own career. Macbeth Swackhammer, a man as eccentric and wonderful as his name, proved to be a consummate blues harmonica player. Chris Cuddy (aka Jeremy Dormouse) is still active in the music scene. T.R. Gleecoff became a local radio DJ. Of the three Shaw siblings, Karen became my first serious girlfriend. Then there were the Aiken brothers, John Gurney, Ellen Hunter, Penny Sidor, Kathy Reid, Rick Gullison, Zeke Mazurek (aka Fiddlin Zeke Zilch) and many more. And Ted Syperek.

This was the era of tremendous interest in folk music, both the traditional music reaching into the past of America and Britain, and new offerings with personal or protest themes from astounding songwriters. This was the era of Bob Dylan, Eric Anderson, Richie Havens, Phil Ochs, Donovan, Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Hamilton Camp, Dave Van Ronk, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Gordon Lightfoot, Tim Buckley, and a Canadian poet, Leonard Cohen, who much to our surprise came out with some music, singing his songs in a rough voice.

There are certain sweet qualities to folk music. When someone sings a personal song or a cover of something like Cohen's Suzanne, using an acoustic guitar played with a gentle finger-picking style, a pensive spell hangs in the air. On the other hand a number of people on stage with several guitars, a fiddle and mouth harp, performing some blues or jug band tune, creates awesome manic energy.

I was not the happiest teenager in those days, convinced that I was an academic, social and athletic failure at high school. The folk crowd was almost the only place outside of my family where I felt accepted and affirmed. This group helped fan the flames of my life-long love affair with music. And I'll never forget Dennis, who I idolized, surprising me one day by saying he thought I was cool.

In 2001 I got a call from Paul Grady, who wanted to do a Bushel Basket reunion. Using the new function of email, the two of us contacted almost all the people from thirty-five years before. The response showed me I was not the only one for whom the Bushel Basket had been important. 

The event took place in the original church basement on October 13th, with a crowd of original members, augmented with spouses and offspring. People flew in from the States and the West Coast. There was a meal, an impressive evening of performance, and great joy in reunion. It was a real pleasure to see my son playing guitar in an ensemble for one number. And Paul recorded the event on CD for us as “An October Evening”.

I am far from upset these days when an audio component needs attention; it’s an excuse to go and see Ted, another Bushel Basket alumnus. 

Chatwin

Now reading Bruce Chatwin’s first book, In Patagonia. 

Chatwin is great! He just had this talent for going to a place, and then really exploring it on all levels. 

The man noticed things. And he made the most of the things he noticed. Not that they were always the most significant details, or the truest ones (he had an imagination), or the most dramatic ones, but the sum total of all his observations amounted to the sort of fascinating story only he could tell.

He had great powers of observation, but also such a sense of history and art and architecture and culture and natural science that he always dug out the most fascinating angles on a locale. He had a nose for ferreting out the bizarre. He could connect everyday details in with history, personal anecdotes with literature, things happening on the street with items in the museums, the sacred with the profane. His stories are told simply, by means of perfectly chosen details.  A wonderful example of a man of culture, learning and adventure.

I've heard it said he was a very physically beautiful man, maybe one of several reasons he seems to have had no trouble making connections wherever he went in Europe, South America, Africa, Asia, Australia. 

And he was a maniac about hiking! Moving! A man intoxicated with places.

Like Hemingway, a writer he admired, Chatwin makes you want to leave it all behind and be somewhere new, with new landscapes, with new people, listening, watching, touching, smelling, feeling, and walking, walking, walking.

The Crossing, by Cormic McCarthy

Well I've read a great book, The Crossing, by Cormic McCarthy, and I got off lightly this time.

One dealing with McCarthy has to deal with the violence of his books. I am not proud of the fact that I managed to finish my first McCarthy book, Blood Meridian. It is an endless stream of violence and atrocity. Of course I understand that it is based on an actual band of degenerates, but historical reality  does not justify a book's focus. The current tagline for the upcoming film is "Every man has a scalp" - I will not be watching this movie. Three of his books have made it to the screen before, All the Pretty Horses, the Road and the Academy Award winning No Country for Old Men. The last two rated R for violence, the first, All the Pretty Horses, not without a moment of horror.

I was thus strongly conditioned on starting The Crossing and was ill at ease through all of the book, because I felt for young Billy, and feared the worst. But McCarthy shows us some mercy this time. Should it be a spoiler to know that the protagonist is still above ground at the end of a book? I'm sure I will relax more into the next reading, perhaps to the detriment of the experience.

Two American teenage brothers wander into northern Mexico on horseback. Nineteenth century America, as I first imagined? No, 1938, but that's not a modern date in the West. And to cross into Mexico is truly to cross into a former century.

The story starts with a strong plot line which ends abruptly and completely on page 127. But there are still 298 pages left! The rest of the book never achieves quite the focused drama of the beginning, but I guess someone's mostly aimless wandering doesn't support plot. Never mind, its the crossing that matters not the destination.

McCarthy uses words in variant forms I've never heard of. Odd turns of phrase. "The night sky lies so sprint (sic) with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are not less."

McCarthy's storytelling is curious also for what he does and doesn't include. A doctor deals with a gunshot wound, the procedure is described with all the detail and attention of a zen tea ceremony. Reading up on saddlery and tacking a horse would be useful in following McCarthy's constant technical references regarding the chief means of transportation. A knowledge of Spanish, or at least a Spanish to English dictionary, would be helpful in understanding most of the direct dialogue. Far be it for him, in the midst of endless descriptions of the fauna and topography of the state of Chihuahua, the weather, the flight of birds and the movement of the trees, to give us any direct cues as to what the main character, Billy Parham, or any other human for that matter, is feeling. I mean most of the conversations are in a foreign language! All characters seem wrapped in a stoicism complete, although any person encountered is game to launch into a long and unlikely and inconclusive monologue (seemingly important as its in English) about God's nature, predestination, freewill, sin, how we come to know the world, and other such philosophical topics, while eating their last stale tortilla. The one time McCarthy finally drops his guard and someone actually bursts into tears comes as an explosion, and almost serves as the climax.

In the midst are the poor of Mexico in their rags. The endless acts of kindness as those who have almost nothing share with those who have nothing. But then that's my conclusion, McCarthy seems to have no opinions to clutter up his creation, the reader has lots of space to fill in.

So why is it a great book? McCarthy is a great writer. Read just the first two pages.

I'd like to try Moby Dick now, as it seems McCarthy is often compared to Melville.

But dare I read more McCarthy?

Vivian Maier and Love

Vivian Maier was a career nanny in Chicago most of her life. In 2007, shortly before her death, someone stumbled across boxes of photographs she had taken. By the time her talent was identified she had died.

Although it appears she never received any encouragement or money for her photograph, she left behind over 100,000 images, some as undeveloped film and so never even seen by her. 

The words amateur, or hobbyist, could be applied to Vivian. She made no money with her camera, had no career path, was unknown. If she had talent, it was unrecognized during her life. On this basis we might not consider her a serious photographer.

An amateur (French amateur "lover of", from Old French and ultimately from Latin amatorem nom. amator, "lover") is defined as someone with a love of something.

This amateur photographer was the exact opposite of a hobbyist, was someone totally serious about her endeavour.

If I am an amateur, if I do something just for the love of it, should I not see that impulse from my heart as the most important activity I can have in my life?

Gravity

I really enjoyed Gravity. In some ways it's a standard Hollywood movie. Two big stars, a fast pace that keeps the characters rather dimensionless, and the usual cliched attempt at human interest.... something about having no will to survive because a young daughter died previously in a tragic accident.

All of this is secondary, because the movie makes us experience something for the first time, something we may have thought we knew. Other movies have shown humans orbiting in space. But Gravity presents space-walking with a reality and authenticity that sucks us right in. 

Many great movies have done this. Presented us with an experience of some reality that totally captures us. Das Boot was not the first movie about submarine warfare, but it was the first one that drew us in so powerfully because it conveyed  an authenticity that hit us in the gut. The chariot race in Ben Hur no doubt performed the same function. Platoon first showed some sense of the real Viet Nam war. The first horrific twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan, the Omaha Beach scene, is a masterpiece of film making, tacked on before just another Hollywood war movie.

This is the achievement of Gravity, we have a new experience because of the authenticity and reality the film makers have managed to convey. I mean Holy Shit !!

And in the last minute, gravity never felt so good!

Greetings From Tim Buckley

Between 1965 and 1972 there was an amazing transformation in popular music, brought about by the appearance in those seven years of some of the major musical talents of the twentieth century.

Bands like the Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Jefferson Airplane and Santana, to name just a few, came at us with a full body slam.

A number of performers presented us with a different music, rich in subtle emotion and poetic image. Of course we interpreted the wild imagery as psychedelic in origin, a disservice to their talents and proof of our naiveté, but hey, it was the Sixties.

Poetry was being smuggled into our consciousness through popular music.

Singers such as Tim Buckley, Phil Ochs, Judy Collins, Leonard Cohen, Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan all performed music with mystical lyrics and a sense of longing. Some of them, like Ochs, Collins and Dylan, came from a folk music, protest song background, but albums like Ochs's Pleasures of the Harbour, and Collins's Both Sides Now turned away from that towards a more experimental and esoteric meaning. Dylan gave one song, his hypnotic Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, a whole album side.

The standout for me is Tim Buckley. This man produced music that still thrills. In songs like Pleasant Street, Chase the Blues Away, Sweet Surrender, Song to the Siren, Phantasmagoria in Two, Carnival Song, No Man Can Find the War, Morning Glory, his voice has an impressive range from high falsetto to deep growl, his tone has a sweetness and purity, his emotion is often one of a deep yearning. Let me limit myself to saying, before I descend into shameless hyperbole, that his voice is magic. 

My poet friend Martin Singleton and I were lucky to see him at the Riverboat in Toronto in 1969, a show I had high hopes for, but for some reason didn't impress me that much. Buckley often threw his fans off with sudden changes in direction. I do remember how surprised I was that such a powerful voice came from a small man.

Tim made his first album at the age of nineteen, and made eight more before his death at twenty-eight of a heroin overdose. HIs son Jeff made one album before his death from accidental drowning at the age of thirty in 1997.

I recently saw a film called Greetings From Tim Buckley. The story jumps between two time periods, one in the late Sixties portrays Tim, the longer interval in the Nineties explores the life of his son Jeff Buckley, who saw almost nothing of his Father. The main focus is a Tim Buckley memorial concert in New York City (which actually occurred on April 26, 1991), in which Jeff reluctantly performs and which forces him to confront his feelings about his deceased father. An aspiring singer himself, one of my favourite scenes shows Jeff jamming with a guitarist who offers some new guitar licks he has been working on and Jeff begins to croon over top of them. The movie makers allow those of us familiar with Jeff's only album to realize for ourselves the song will later become the ecstatic Grace from his critically acclaimed album of the same name. A wonderful moment.

It's a good little film, although I grew somewhat tired of the actor playing Jeff doing "brooding and conflicted" while he showed off his handsome bone structure. A number of Tim's songs are on the soundtrack and their unexpected appearance each time gave me goosebumps.

A book called Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Tim and Jeff Buckley, is on my To Read list.

How Real is a Photograph ?

A photograph is not reality.....

Any photograph is a deviation from reality. We accept its flat, two dimensional nature, and that it has been selectively cropped; that you can't have a photo without this, or that we accept it, does not make it less of a distortion. Similarly we accept black and white photos as legit, even though taking all colour out of a scene is an extreme manipulation.

There is a story that a man once said to Picasso, "I'd like to show you my wife" and produced a snapshot of her, to which Piccaso responded, "She's very small, isn't she".

Things that are accepted imperfections of the optical side of photograph are also approved, such as lens flare, wide angle distortion of perspective, or the softness of the out-of-focus area of a scene (something present in our own vision, but usually avoided by our pinpoint attention and our brain). Some of these optical phenomena are actually used by some photographers for a purpose, as if, in our image saturated world, they have become phenomena in the natural world as well.

There are no rules here.

In a photo community I am part of, individuals sometimes describe a photo as "SOOC", which means Straight Out Of Camera, in other words, "this is one photo, believe it, I didn't mess with".

One of the key areas I like to adjust is the sky. I like to deepen the blue. I want the sky to somehow have a sense of mystery, to be somehow beyond the objects in the lower part of the picture. I love this dichotomy between the down-to-earth particular and the nameless unbound. This is what I feel when I look at a scene, that's the feeling I want in my photograph, and so I deepen the blue. If it's a black and white I can sometimes take it to something close to black along the top.

A photograph is reality......

And yet, even with all I've said, a photograph has power because we see it as a representation of the real. The sailor kissing the woman on VJ day in Times Square is an image with a significance no painting could have hoped to achieve, even considering that there is controversy about how spontaneous it was. It's as if we're looking back in time and experiencing that exact moment.

The photo collages of Jerry Uelsmann, combining straight images with solarized or negative images, have a fascination because they play with this real/unreal conflict.

I find myself creating two kinds of images. One is the obviously manipulated, such as the photo above. With the other kind of image I may take liberties with the appearance or content of the photo, but I am not happy if the photo does not look real, something anyone would feel they could see in their own world. 

As a photographer, I warn you that any of my photos that you view have without doubt been manipulated. How and to what extent is my concern. How real they are is something I'll let you worry about.