From Edmund Pettus to John Lewis Bridge Now!

I am not a fan of cancel culture. Hegel once said, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” He exaggerated, though it is true we don’t learn much. We need to look the ugliness of the past (and the present!) in the eye rather than sanitizing it or we won’t learn anything worth learning. More importantly, extremists caught up in antifa, BLM, and cancel culture moments are handing Trump a huge campaign issue. If Trump is reelected, not a damn thing extremists are doing will matter.

John Lewis in 1965

There are, however, times in which cancel culture is justified. The symbolism of a mule-drawn wagon bearing the body of Representative John Lewis across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, is profound. Lewis was a decent man, a champion of civil rights, and a victim of the brutal Bloody Sunday beatings of 1965, when he and 600 marchers tried to cross the Alabama River and into Selma.

Who was Edmund Winston Pettus? The short answer is that he was a racist. That doesn’t tell us much, nor does the first line you read in most online biographies: “a U.S. Senator from Alabama from 1897-1907.” It’s not pretty, but most white people were racist well into the 1960s and beyond; that’s why there was a civil rights movement and why John Lewis tried to cross the Pettus Bridge in 1965.

Edmund Pettis

As for Pettus (1821-1907) being a “U.S. Senator,” that’s almost a joke. Pettus grew up in Alabama, where his family owned slaves. Young Edmund was an ardent supporter of slavery. Pettus fought in the Mexican War (1846-48) and briefly moved to California–just in time to help exterminate most of the Yuki natives who had the audacity to leave their reservation. He wasn’t there for the infamous Mendocino War of 1859 in which troops finished the job, but he would have applauded it. (Today there are fewer than 250 full-blood Yukis left.) He moved back to Alabama in 1853 and beat the drums for secession, though ironically the region around Selma was mostly opposed to it. When the Civil War began, he gleefully joined the Confederate army.

Pettus was captured when Vicksburg fell, but the Union foolishly released him in a prisoner exchange. He was immediately promoted to brigadier general and sent to Tennessee. He also took part in unsuccessful attempts to repulse Sherman’s March to the Sea until he was put out of commission by a leg wound that some have claimed was self-inflicted. He was again jailed, but pardoned after the war.

Caroline Randall Williams, gt. gt. granddaughter of Pettus

Pettus falls into the category of unrepentant traitor. As an Alabama Democrat–back then, the Democrats were civil rights opponents–he supported the infamous Black Codes, the collective term given to scores of laws across the South immediately after the Civil war that sought to disenfranchise and deny civil liberties to ex-slaves. Pettus then became an outspoken opponent of Reconstruction. When it ended in 1877, he became the Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. Alabama had the dubious distinction of leading the nation in the lynching of African Americans. We have no evidence that Pettus actually took part in these, but as Grand Dragon it’s inconceivable he did not know about or sanction them. He remained a Klansman for the rest of his days. Like many white Southerners, his racism did not quell his lust for black women. He fathered a mixed-race child, probably via rape. (A black woman bringing charges against a white man under Alabama’s post-Reconstruction laws would have been unthinkable.)

Peach of a man, right? It didn’t prevent Pettus from becoming a U.S. Senator. Bad history articles will tell you that Pettus was “elected” to the U.S. Senate in 1897 by “defeating” James Pugh. Not quite. Pugh was no prince either, but Pugh "lost" his renomination to the U.S. Senate courtesy of party leaders. Until the 17^th Amendment was enacted in 1913, citizens did not choose U.S. Senators; they were appointed by individual state legislatures. That of Jim Crow Alabama placed Pettus in Pugh’s place.

Pettus served until his death in 1907. Try finding anything significant he did during his decade in the Senate. Nonetheless, in 1940 the state of Alabama slapped Pettus’ name on a bridge. I’d like Pettus to be remembered–as a traitor, war criminal, racist, and hypocrite. Put up a museum display for future generations to ponder in disgust. As for the bridge, there is but one sane thing to do. It is time for the John Lewis Bridge to span the telling of a far more heroic past.

Rob Weir   

I Give It to You A Middling Effort

I Give It to You (August 4, 2020)

By Valerie Martin

Penguin Random House, 304 pages.

★★★

Valerie Martin is among my favorite novelists, but I must give a mixed review to her upcoming I Give It to You. There is much to like about any novel set partly in Tuscany, and Martin has a gift for storytelling, though this time plot lines and plot holes too often overlap. Martin also leaves herself open to charges of class insensitivity.

The novel opens in 1983, when Jan Vidor, an English professor at a Pennsylvania college, books a vacation stay on the grounds of a Tuscan country house. Her plan is to work on a new novel, but that scheme veers in different directions when she arrives at Villa Chiara (“bright villa”). The grounds bespeak wealth, but of a faded variety that starkly contrast with Jan’s light and airy quarters in a converted out-building. Days pass before she meets her hostess, Beatrice Bartolo Doyle, whose family owns the villa. Beatrice (Bee-ah-traay-chee) is an Italian professor at a small college and lives part of the year in New York State, which she dislikes. (She doesn’t seem to like teaching much either.) Jan’s fascination for Tuscany dovetails with Beatrice’s devotion to her native soil and forms the basis for a long friendship.  

I Give It to You is a multi-generational chronicle of the slow decline of the aristocratic Salviati/Bartolo family. Jan infers that the Mussolini years (1922-45) somehow diminished family fortunes, but surviving family members are silent or vague about what happened, which side they were on, and why Beatrice’s gentle uncle Sandro was killed during the waning days of World War II. This is odd, as Beatrice shares intimate details of being a graduate student in Boston and of her brief marriage to an Irish American man whose surname she and her son bear. Emily Dickinson famously wrote, “Tell the truth but tell it slant.” Tell it slant around a writer and she will try to straighten it, even if it takes years. Martin asks us to consider a writer’s craft. Should stories and biographies–told and untold–be used as raw material for one’s own yarn?

Jan is the book’s narrator, though mostly a passive and non-judgmental one. It is unclear whether she is also an unreliable one. That’s fine, as a major strength of I Give It to You is the ambiguous questions it poses. When someone answers a novelist’s query with a family story and says, “I give it to you,” does she merely mean she is recounting a tale, or is she giving permission for the novelist to do with it as she wishes? Does the dialogue we read–the chapters skip between real time and the past–represent Beatrice’s actual words and stories, or are they sections of the book Jan ultimately writes?

In my estimation Martin misses the boat by making Jan an underdeveloped character. We know little of who she is other than a curious observer. How can she not be appalled by the aristocratic haughtiness of Beatrice and her cousin Luca? This is especially evident in their expectations that those living on the estate should be forever deferential, and their expressed outrage when commoners show distressing signs of raising their own status. Along similar lines, how can Jan not make more of the fact that David, Beatrice’s adult son, is a pompous ass who has inherited his mother’s sense of privilege? Readers are free to choose whether Jan is clueless, starstruck by nobility, living vicariously through Beatrice, or as heartless as her erstwhile friend.

Novelists, like poets, are often introverts but they tend to reflect upon the human condition. If Martin would have us see Jan as both inquisitive and a relentless researcher, how can she be so obtuse? There is a logical disconnect in the small questions Jan asks in the name of uncovering the past, whilst ignoring big (and obvious) ones about the present. How can social class never come up in discussion? How is it that Jan never considers whether her friendship with Beatrice is deeper than the bottom of a wine glass? She doesn’t, thus the novel’s final lines ring hollow and false.

I Give It to You has been billed as a novel about “writing, friendship, family and betrayal.” Be forewarned that “writing” is the only uncloaked part of this equation, and even it raises more questions than it answers. One senses that Martin has too many devices in the fire, not the least of which is that Americans in Tuscany have gotten generous workouts in literature­. Martin herself has previously trod upon Tuscan turf in Italian Fever (1999). Despite being a different kind of book, the latter also involves a villa with secrets, the intoxicating effects of Italy, and a buttoned-down American writer. There is also the matter of a trans-Atlantic novel–parts take place in Boston, Cape Cod, New York State, and Pennsylvania–that strain for vitality outside of Italy. Likewise, the relationship between Beatrice and Jan seems only to bloom under a Tuscan sun.

I Give It to You has fascinating diversions, especially for those lucky enough to have visited Tuscany. These are, however, exactly that: diversions. It’s not a bad novel–Martin is too talented to write rubbish–and it bears saying that it holds one’s attention. Nonetheless, I Give It to You is a case in which the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Rob Weir  

Weather: A Hazy Novel

Weather: A Novel (2020)

By Jenny Offill

Alfred A. Knopf, 205 pages.

★

Have you ever seen any of those Woody Allen films in which Manhattan pseudo-intellectuals prattle on with great conviction about things they grasp only tangentially? Transfer the Lower East Side of the 1980s to Brooklyn Heights in the 2000s and you have the idea of Jenny Offill’s Weather. It has been widely hailed, but it will certainly be on my list of the worst books of 2020.

Offill plays off of two meanings of weather: metaphorical atmospheric shifts in social paradigms and “weathering” trauma. Those who like the book see it as a tale of our times from 9/11 to Trump and COVID. Those of us who dislike it see it as an unfocused expression of existential angst concluded with deus ex machina hope. To be sure, we live in trying times, much of which makes an appearance in the book: assortative mating, culture clashes, climate change, drug addiction, racism, struggles in the gig economy, and, worst of all, fear that the Anthropocene age is coming to an end. If you believe the last of these to be true, do you bother to get your teeth cleaned?

A young woman named Lizzie is at the center of Offill’s novel. She washed out of graduate school, much to the chagrin of her mentor, Sylvia, who pulled strings to secure her a place as a university librarian. Sylvia is (apparently) a social psychology professor who also has a podcast so popular that she is on the lecture trail and would like Lizzie to help her answer her mail. Lizzie does so, though she has a lot of her plate already. Her mother is ill, she and her husband Ben have an active son, Eli, whose needs must be balanced, and Lizzie’s brother Henry—to whom she is creepily attached—is an addict constantly trying to get straight. (As if marriage and a child of his own are good ways to accomplish that!)

These are the bare bones of the novel. Don’t expect flesh to appear. The book is written in small paragraphs, each set off from each other, and frequently disconnected. They appear more as diary entries, or perhaps real-time thoughts jotted in a journal. Some are aphorisms—though Pudd’nhead Wilson this isn’t—and others are fears real or projected. Many are also doomsday and disaster scenarios. Quite a few passages are beautifully written, but two major issues emerge. First, I can relate to running mental doomsday scenarios. I do it myself, but I am aware that they are fundamentally stupid, because the future immediate and hereafter is unknowable. Second, Offill’s literary device is by nature dissociative.

We know early one that Lizzie is smart, but a neurotic mess. She goes to Margot for meditation classes, which serve to give her bigger questions rather than helping her achieve Zen. She uses a private ride service she can’t afford because she worries she might be the only client of “Mr. Jimmy,” frets over a “doomed adjunct” slowly going squirrely, and avoids people who might engage or enrage her. She is a recluse who lives in her head, yet she somehow summons the energy to make survivalist plans with her husband. Alas, that’s about all she ever does. So what are reading, Wom[a]n on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown? Nope.  

The book has been praised for its dark humor, but I found it just plain annoying even though the issues Lizzie considers are important ones. Distinctions made between what is impossible and “barely possible” or unbearable and “barely bearable” are insufficient for an ending that feels more like resignation than resolution, and more barely connected than really connected. Any allusion to hope is akin to an Amazon delivery person who sprints to your door, drops the package on the porch, and jogs away. Weather is well written, but to what purpose? Like many of the novel’s detractors, the best I can say is that it’s short.

Rob Weir  

Portrait of a Lady on Fire a Rare Treasure

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

Directed by Céline Sciamma

Pyramide Films, 122 minutes, R (nudity, abortion)

In French, Italian, and Latin with subtitles

★★★★★

Portrait of a Lady on Fire was a huge hit in LGBTQ film festivals for its frank and steamy take on the relationship between two women, a painter and her subject. Do not make the mistake of thinking of it as “just” a lesbian film. It is one of the best movies of the past two years, period. That’s why Céline Sciamma won a César award for both best director and best screenplay, why Claire Mathon won for best cinematography, and why the film carried off the Palme d’or Jury Prize. It’s also why it has won recognition from everyone from the Golden Globes to the National Board of Review. 

The film opens to a gowned art teacher, Marianne (Noémïe Merlant), posing for her students while offering instruction on how to observe. As the class draws to an end, a student asks her if a painting in the back of the room of a woman peering out across the ocean is one of hers. Marianne acknowledges that it is, and is titled Portrait de la jeune fille en feu. With this we flash back to 1770, when Marianne is in a small boat being rowed across sea swells to an island off the coast of Brittany. At one point she dives into the ocean to retrieve a large flat box filed with canvasses.

On land, the soggy Marianne hauls said box and other belongings up a steep cliff to a cheerless and spartan estate, where she meets the Countess (Valeria Golino). Marianne is tasked with painting a portrait of the Countess’ daughter Héloïse (Adèle Kaenel) that will be sent to a Milanese nobleman destined to be her future husband. (Think of how anyone in an impending arranged marriage would know what their betrothed looked like in the days before photography.) Marianne must pretend to be Héloïse’s companion and get close enough to memorize her features, as Héloïse disfigured the previous male painter’s effort.

Posing as a companion isn’t hard, but getting close is. We learn that Héloïse was called back to Brittany from a convent after her sister, the intended bride, threw herself off a cliff. The only other person in the house is a servant, Sophie (Luàna Bejrami) so there’s lots of room to roam, as the estate is far from the village. Marianne and Héloïse spend a lot of time walking along windy bluffs–almost wordlessly for a time, as Héloïse has no desire to be married and misses the music of the convent. She knows next to nothing about the world and is essentially out of her element. After endless hours traipsing moors, headlands, and beaches Marianne is exhausted and must force herself to paint. I imagine some of you are holding Gothic thoughts–battered old home, windswept cliffs, foul weather…. There are even spectral visions. Stop! This is not Jane Eyre Lite.

Marianne will soon become Héloïse’s conduit for learning about the world. As Héloïse’s exterior thaws, frisson sparks between them. Héloïse is especially intrigued to learn that Marianne has no desire to marry and plans to take over her father’s business when he passes. Soon the two and Sophie spend time talking, playing cards, and gadding about. Before you can say forbidden love, Marianne and Héloïse have shared a bed. When the Countess must leave for a week on the mainland, Héloïse’s emotional and physical love for Marianne deepens. An attempt to help Sophie leads Marianne and Héloïse into the company of village women. The film features a gorgeous sequence of women on the beach after sunset, singing around a bonfire. Their tune is wild and uninhibited, with keening evocative of Balkan music, though it’s actually a piece Sciamma wrote. The hand clapping and soaring voices evoke a witches’ coven, though it’s nothing of the sort. It is, however, one of two episodes that make sense of the film’s title.

To add still another layer of awakening, Marianne and Héloïse read to Sophie. The tale of Orpheus and Eurydice baffles her. Why, Sophie wonders, would Orpheus make his way to the Underworld to reclaim his love and then do the one thing he was told not to do: look behind him until he was outside of the abyss. Héloïse’s response startles Marianne and I will only say that it is a unique female perspective that she will later use in a painting.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a film about passion at a time in which independent-minded women had to be careful about many things. And sometimes they must simply yield to social expectations. Among the things the film does well is give us glimpses into how painters think and practice their craft, how the heart tricks the mind, and how planted seeds blossom later. The performances of Merlant and Haenel are marvels to behold, and one can only be astounded by Sciamma’s efforts. What more could she do after writing the script, some of the music, and directing? Well, she also hired a painter who reportedly spent 16 hours a day at her easel so that her work could mesh with the demands of the narrative in real time. Sciamma also uses the untamed coast of Brittany near Saint-Pierre-Quiberon as if it’s a major character. Sometimes its waters sparkle in turquois; at others it is white-capped fury evocative of inner turmoil.

Where does love go when it is sniped too early?  Page 28 gives a clue, Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” another, and painted canvasses still more. None of this will make sense unless you see the film. Call them three good reasons to do so, and there are many more. If I might, Portrait of a Lady On Fire is a painterly treasure.

Rob Weir

Small Towns: Sturbridge MA

Welcome to Sturbridge

 

{Note: Photos taken in the summer of 2019, which is why no one is masked. Clicking on images will reveal it in a LARGE size}

Welcome to the first version of a doable “Small Towns” feature since March. Current evidence suggests that masking, social distancing, and being outside is the safest formula other than barricading yourself in your home, so let’s visit a place that combines these features: Sturbridge, Massachusetts.

The Worcester County domicile of Sturbridge is indeed a small town–just 9,268 people–within spittin’ distance of Connecticut. It has a picturesque town green, several lakes for recreation, the Tantiusques nature reserve, and–in the section known as Fiskdale–the Blackington Building, an eye-catching red brick block built in what I call Gothic barn style. None of these things would tempt most folks to go there. Except for one thing, Sturbridge would be a sleepy town occasionally awakened by a busy traffic merge where the Mass Pike joins Interstate 84. That one thing is Old Sturbridge Village (OSV).

I can practically hear the eyerolls. If you grew up anywhere within 90 minutes of OSV, chances are good you were once dragged to OSV on a school field trip. I’ve heard many a New Englander say they would rather re-shingle the roof–even if it doesn’t need it–than go back to Old Sturbridge. OSV tends not to get a lot of love from locals, and I confess that I was one of them. Until last summer, I hadn’t visited since I was living in Vermont, and that was 35 years ago.

Allow me to offer the view that it’s usually a good idea to let go of youthful prejudices. If you need to get out of Dodge for a bit–and who doesn’t right now?–OSV will surprise you. If you have a family, there are 200 acres where the kiddos can roam and somehow, it’s not the same deal as when teachers are watching over them. I observed kids squealing with delight at all of the farm animals queuing for hayrides, munching on molasses cookies, and playing old-time games like hoop the hoop.

OSV is an outdoor museum that presents itself as a typical New England farm village between the years 1790-1830. It’s artifice, of course. There isn’t much left of the real Sturbridge and most of that lies in the town, some quarter of a mile away. OSV is an imagined village in which homes, churches, businesses, and structures were moved from elsewhere and rebuilt on the OSV site. Farms were laid out in places that were decidedly unlike 19^th century farms. For one thing, they are clean, lack sucking mud streets, and don’t reek of mold and manure. Nor are the farmers covered in excrement and followed by clouds of flies. (Believe me, few tourists would ever wish to visit an ‘authentic’ 19^th century farm!) 

Adults can, however, appreciate the art in the artifice and learn a few things. Many of the costumed guides try to stay in period character, and even those who don’t–such as some of the artisans–devote themselves to producing tinwork, leather goods, milled lumber, baked goods, woven textiles, and more in accordance with historically accurate methods and technology. So what if someone occasionally excuses himself to pull an iPhone from his breeches to answer a call? OSV is a treasure trove for antiquarians, but also for latter-day artisans and builders who enjoy comparing the old ways to the new. Plus, unless you’re lucky enough to employ a team of gardeners, you can get a botanical education by wandering though the herb garden. Both the pasture and river walks are bucolic, healthful, and restorative. Except for the trails, most things are wheelchair accessible.

In short, OSV is simply a nice way to while away a summer’s day. You might even wish to venture into the actual town. I won’t say it’s a gourmand’s delight–more of a pizza, fast food, and quick Chinese or Thai kind of place–but you can find spots to relax and refuel before driving home. Isn’t it time to exorcise those old fieldtrip demons?

Rob Weir

New Exhibits in Brattleboro That Make Us Think, Laugh, and Marvel

Alison Wright: Grit and Grace, Women at Work

Postcards to Brattleboro

Steven Kinder: 552,830; Coffee and Conversation

Wesley Fleming: Silvestri, Wild and Untamed

Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Brattleboro, VT

(Through October 12, 2020)

NOTE: Colors of images are inaccurate. Museum lights cause color shifts and light burns.

Things have eased a bit for art lovers in the Northeast. People from my part of Massachusetts are now allowed to visit Vermont, so I made the 40-mile trip from Northampton to Brattleboro, Vermont. It was the first time since March I’ve left the state, so it felt like a big deal. Plus, I got to visit Brattleboro’s Museum and Art Center (BMAC), a favorite small museum. Forget what you might read on old websites, the exhibits reviewed here are open through October 12–face masks on, of course.

Alison Wright is an award-winning photographer who lives in New York City–when she’s home, which isn’t often as she’s often on the road for National Geographic. Chances are excellent that you’ve gasped at some of her images while leafing through National Geographic. Wright doesn’t just document, she composes. The exhibit at the BMAC is devoted to women at work and it is indeed, as the exhibit title puts it, an effort of grit and grace. Lewis Hine once described himself as a reformer with a camera, a descriptor that fits Ms. Wright.

If I might be iconoclastic, I’d like to start with the last image in the exhibit, which is of a small girl from South Sudan with her back to the camera scribbling numbers on a battered slate. As Westerners wring their hands over the potential “hardships” of taking online classes in the fall, perspective demands we look at this image. South Sudan is the world’s third poorest nation, and this girl is “lucky” in that 7.5 million girls in sub-Saharan Africa never attend school. Look at the slate and then tell me those Chromebooks are a hardship.

Each of the 28 images in this exhibit has an amazing, sometimes heartbreaking, backstory. You will see Liberian shop vendors and chicken farmers, Nicaraguan trash-pickers, Tunisian and Bangladeshi garment workers, Indian brothel workers, Rwandan brickmakers, and more. All are women and, despite low wages and horrendous work conditions, a few manage to emerge triumphant. Here are a few to ponder because of their artistic merits.

Paruti, a mother of four, is from Bangladesh. She is a Hindu Dalit; that is, she’s an “untouchable” from the bottom of the caste system and earns just $25/month as a street sweeper. Notice how Wright uses vivid colors that illumine her subject. The use of posters reminds me of how photographers during the Great Depression posed their subjects in cabins decorated with newspaper ads–promises of prosperity a cruel irony. Wright makes a powerful point, the picture worth any words I could write. 

 
Wright’s images of Helena, a co-op framer in Tanzania, and Ishimalanga, a fisher in the Democratic Republic of Congo, are lessons in effective composition. Note how Helena’s hoe is held at an angle that draws our attention to the red shawl that contrasts with the green maize, and how it bisects both her body and the flatness of the field and sky. Ishimalanga’s net is being unfurled in ways that give a still picture the illusion of movement. It is also the most colorful part of the image.

The image of Kadatu, a fruit vendor in Sierra Leone, is simply wonderful. It is filled with color, texture, contrast, and sneaky compositional elements. Notice how the fruit tilts slightly to the right and echoes the slat in the wooden shutter. Note also how Kadatu is posed beside gathered stalks that mirror her erect posture, and how we “see” depth, thanks to the left edge of the building.

Postcards to Brattleboro highlights work created by and sent to Stuart Copans, known to envelope artists as “Shmuel” and is curated by another, Chuck Welch, who goes by the handle “Crackerjack Kid.” It is a whimsical delight of an exhibit that echoes one at Holyoke’s PULP GalleryI recently reviewed. It is amazing what creative people can do with a small space. Even more incredible is how they can incorporate shells, wood, bark, poetry, and messages of all sort onto such small “canvases.” Copans allegedly has a collection of over 25,000 objects. The exhibit feels like walking into a gallery from Zap Comix. You can ponder these wonders, or just wallow in amusement. I’d recommend dollops of each.

 

Can one overdo an important topic? Each night an estimated 552,830 Americans are homeless. This is both a national tragedy and a national travesty. Steven Kinder takes on homeless in Brattleboro, a vest pocket city of just over 12,000. Kinder shows us some of them, but presents them (in acrylic, pencil, and pastel) on large sheets of canvas that hang from the ceiling the way one might enter a sports hall of fame. These–mostly around 8-feet tall–make us look at the homeless as individuals. They posed themselves and most opted to forego surroundings suggestive of squalor. I liked this exhibit, but it’s cramped and some panels are hard to see. I also felt as if subjectivity got lost at times in the oversized panels. Liz LaVorgna also tells of the homeless, but her Coffee and Conversations features photographs and a video installation in which Brattleboro street people tell of how they cope with or have escaped their plight. Those stories are literally told over a cup of java. Maybe it’s just me, but the smaller scale moved me more deeply.

Call me a newbie when it comes to glass art. I confess that I generally glide by it on the way to other things when I’m in a museum. Wesley Fleming has a wall case of work at the BMAC that’s impressive. He has replicated columbine, jack in the pulpit, lady slippers, and other plants in colored glass. I’m coming around, but at present I’m more drawn to those working in non-representational glass. Fleming’s work is delicate and precise, but I’d still rather hold a real flower than one replicated in silica. But Fleming might make me reconsider.

Rob Weir   

Eliza Gilkyson and 2020: July 2020 Album of the Month

Eliza Gilkyson

2020

Red House Records

My worst-kept secret is that pretty songs open my tear ducts. (Where can a guy hide who needs a tissue every time he hears Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”) Eliza Gilkyson’s latest made me reach for a Kleenex a half dozen times.

It is titled 2020 and it’s what we all need to make it through our current travails. Gilkyson, who will be 70 next month, still sings like a chosen one. Maybe that’s because she sings from the heart. Her previous album, 2018’s Secularia, was filled with Gaia-based spiritual observations, and you’ll hear echoes of those sentiments on 2020. The new album opens with “Promises to Keep,” which unfolds to Bukka Allen’s rolling organ, then cuts to Eliza’s spare guitar. The melody and vocal are gorgeous, even though her wink and nod to Robert Frost segues to pointed observations that no one knows what it will come down to… we’re on fire. A few bars later, she captures quarantine anxieties with: I’ve been counting on the angel choir/to put some wings on my feet/…and get me out on the street. The song is a weepy, yet is filled with hope. Not much more to say except, damn, what a great song!

She could have quit there, but more wonders pour forth. “Peace in Our Hearts” has a folk blues vibe with the song’s title providing an all-join-in repeating line. Then comes “My Heart Aches,” and so will yours when you hear it. She chronicles the past 50 years and prevails upon hopeful past slogans—such as we shall overcome, give peace a chance, hammer out justice—to highlight things left undone. When she laments for the children of tomorrow and the world they have to fix… my heart aches, like Tom Dooley I wanted to hang down my head and cry. It is well and proper that later on, Gilkyson does a tender rendition of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” The album’s other cover is a rather ominous-sounding take of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” How sad that that song remains relevant.

Gilkyson’s overtly political original song is “Beach Haven,” which is based on a 1952 letter Woody Guthrie sent to his Brooklyn landlord decrying the racial barriers that kept black veterans from living in his apartment complex. That landlord was Fred Trump and some 20 years later his seed (or should I say seedy?) Donald was accused of redlining to keep his own projects lily white. Gilkyson, though, channels her anger into a call for coming together. After all, there’s just so much outrage one can ingest and remain human. Gilkyson’s fragile “One More Day” is a love letter to life, as is “Beautiful World of Mine,” which calls us to be stewards of nature. Warren Hood’s fiddle adds grace to the latter, which is basically a country two-step.

Though they are not paired on the album, I like to think of “Sooner or Later” and “We Are Not Alone” as companions. The first is a soulful, bluesy boot-in-the-butt warning to the powers that be: Sooner or later it’s a natural fact/Gonna rise up, gonna take it all back. Mike Hardwick cauterizes that defiance with searing electric guitar. Fittingly, Gilkyson leaves us with a call to action that’s almost a prayer. “We Are Not Alone” opens quietly and builds to a chorus enhanced by WEWIM—a group to encourage female singers that she cofounded—and together they take us out anthem-style by repeating the song title like a giant group hug.

I adored everything about this album, one of the very best from an artist I have admired for decades. There’s an expression from my Pennsylvania childhood that sums up Eliza Gilkyson; she’s “just good people.”

Rob Weir