Posted on: January 12, 2009
P. J. Harvey. Photo by David Mitchell
If you’re a great artist, you’re going to be misunderstood. That’s all but guaranteed. Much depends, though, on the degree of your own complicity, your own attempts to evolve, wear masks, repudiate old passions and personnas. Much depends upon how often you “put on” others and then take those put-ons back.
Few musicians have undergone as many incarnations, in so short a time span, as Polly Jean Harvey, better know as PJ. She’s been a vamp, a tramp, a chanteuse, a rocker, a folky, a poet, a punk and a tease. Always with an edge, overt or covert, PJ Harvey won’t stand still and she won’t give in to the pressures that face all successful commercial musicians.
Born (1969) in Dorset, England, Polly Jean was raised on a sheep farm, which is probably a bit unusual for a future Punk Noir goddess of the deep.…
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Posted on: January 8, 2009
Horacio Castellanos Moya
I wrote briefly yesterday about Horacio Castellanos Moya’s novel, Senselessness. It’s difficult to describe, because so much of it is below the surface, though it still hits you in the mouth. The bulk of this very short novel is the narrator’s struggle with his ego, with the things that bother him, with his mounting anxieties, like the smelly feet of a beautiful lover, or the likelihood that her boyfriend will beat the hell out of him, or that a sinister general might do something far worse.
He finds poetry in the words of the K’iche’ Indians (among other Mayan tribes), who have suffered through near genocide and are caught between opposing armies. He relates their horrors almost in a matter of fact way, unable to directly tie what they went through to the overall injustice and the political situation in Guatemala at the time.…
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Posted on: January 7, 2009
Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya. Translated by Katherine Silver
Guatemala, exile, El Salvador, Indigenistas, slaughter, remembrance, witness, suffering beyond words, words for suffering, escape from the words, deeds, torture, complicity. Paranoia with grounds.
Horacio Castellanos Moya has written a powerful and important novel, extremely compressed, about a real situation too horrific to be true. But it happened. The slaughter of Indigenous populations in various countries located in the Americas. Past, present, and likely enough, the future. Castellanos Moya has his fictional narrator immersed in the recent past (the book was written in 2004), the death squads, the machetes, and the few survivors who witnessed the atrocities. Their words of remembrance and disbelief. The narrator is chosen to edit an eleven-hundred page recite of the survivors, and their sentences haunt him. Haunt him so much he continuously repeats these phrases, seemingly without tracing them back to the people who suffered excruciating tragedies.…
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Posted on: January 5, 2009
The Stone Breakers, by Gustave Courbet. 1849
One of my favorite painters is Gustave Courbet. And not just for his art. His bold, courageous personality, his refusal to accept the status quo, his ability to sometimes lead his fellow artists into greater versions of themselves, make this man from Ornans important beyond his work. He was, in some ways, an existentialist before the word was in use, and that clicks for me. That sings my own song.
“I am fifty years old and I have always lived in freedom; let me end my life free; when I am dead let this be said of me: ‘He belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to any régime except the régime of liberty.”
The work above (The Stone Breakers) depicts something that all too many critics thought (at the time) was beneath the artist, literally and metaphorically.…
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