Nowadays in the wealthy west consumers spend more time surveying the shelves of the shop for the five brands of the same food item that they don't know what to buy.
They spend more time in supermarket than ever they would spend in church where there one God, and one brand, telling or asking him, why is he so wonderful. It can't be the effective marketing......
I was thinking about God the other day whilst browsing my local supermarket looking for some modesty but beyond that not knowing what it was that I wanted.
I saw the hand height row of buttons near the exit, where after they have paid for their shopping they can press the button that best expresses their mood, wide smile, smirk, frown, or grimace.
They can silently comment, and say what their shopping experience was that day.
I don't know who collects and collates all the responses, but I do know that often finding kind and personal words when I leave church can be more than difficult, some parishioners are allergic to wet fish handshakes.
Perhaps in the interests of a measurable efficiency, the church can take a discreet leaf from the world, and at adult hand height in the foyer they should have the four buttons to press instead. They might get more responses....
It is more than likely that, like dissidents down the ages, government agent provocateurs made sure that Guy Fawkes, Thomas Wintour, and Robert Catesby took the only logical course of action that seemed right for the cause. And the government agents knew they could stop what the three started, and would enjoy seeing them arrested for something they had goaded the three to do.
This story needs to be updated for the age of conspiracies consider it done.
Longevity in creativity is a relatively modern phenomenon, the further back into history we might go, the more limited the means for creativity were, and the older a writer or composer got, the more uncertain their life chances became whilst their energy for life and creativity slowly, then more overtly, drained away.
Enter the world of amplified music, often played on guitar, where the player's ability to stand, concentrate, and sing the lyrics they had written are less demanding in themselves, though touring the music town to town, city to city, will tire a musician eventually.
Enter one musician who died recently. Bass player Phil Lesh of The Grateful Dead, who in their time set the standard for touring, playing live, taping gigs, and making the road a creative place to be, where with their music they formed a deep bond with their audience that was as unique as it was immersive and enduring.
That bond may be somewhere between myth and memory now, due to the 1995 departure of Jerry Garcia, where after his death no number of digitally buffed up live CD's of when that band bond was at work can replace the feeling of being in their presence, as the band played.
But from the accounts of their past, future generations can know that deep and loyal bonds between musicians and their audience may still be created in future -when the musicians get tight with each other and put the work in, finding who to play for, and most of all play for much more than money.
When I saw that this was on at my local art house cinema I needed no persuasion to book to see it. The sound system in cinemas makes them the ideal way to appreciate a music documentary. Paul Simon has been a performer for longer than I had been alive. He started with Art Garfunkel as a duo called Tom and Jerry in 1957, and they remained connected with each other even when Paul Simon performed solo as he had done, periodically, from 1965 onward.
When I sat down to watch this three hour forty minute documentary I realised how little I knew very little about the career of Simon and Garfunkel and that I knew even less about Paul Simon. The most I could say about him was that he rarely did television interviews, did few print based interviews in music magazines, and in the years that he chose to be a celebrity he was uncomfortable with it. As the documentary showed, his marriage to Carrie Fisher at the height of her fame for her being in the Star Wars films was a short lived and quite intense disaster, one of a series of projects that Paul Simon undertook that misfired with the public.
But to begin nearer the beginning, the people the public know as Simon and Garfunkel have been friends since about the year 1950. The names Simon and Garfunkel are anglicisation, well maybe Americanisation, of the names of two young Jewish men with a vocal talent that rivalled The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson. Along with, in the person of Paul Simon, a skill with writing tunes that maybe bests, Brian Wilson. But where Brian was a great tunesmith who had access to vocal harmonies that were miraculous, who Capital called a genius which in inflated his ego and fame to infinity only for it to crash after, Paul Simon only set out on Simon and Garfunkel properly after he had studied law including music business law, and allowed Art Garfunkel to arrange the songs Paul Simon wrote after Simon presented them to Garfunkel, and Garfunkel got no fee and had no legal hold on the work he arranged. In private Paul Simon was, ahem, more controlling of his material than was apparent in the incurious interviews with the two of them together in the 1960's.
'The Graduate' was the film that cohered Simon and Garfunkel as an act. Their soundtrack to that immensely popular film made sure that they would never be anonymous or poor again. It would also give them a live audience to tour and play to that would eventually create the pressure that split them up. From The Sound of Silence (1966) to Bridge Over Troubled Water' the trajectory and pressure was upwards, upwards and further into the fame trap in such a way that they could not see the exit. In popular music today journalists wearily talk about 'the album/tour/rest/album/tour/rest cycle. It was seen as 'rest' for Art Garfunkel when he was offered acting roles in the films 'Catch 22' and 'Carnal Knowledge', he did not need to be with Paul Simon when Paul wrote the songs. But for the sake of balancing the duo and of creative input Art Garfunkel had to be with Paul when the songs were written to create the vocal harmonies that kept the duo together. So when Art Garfunkel could not leave the film set of Catch 22 because the film was taking longer to make than was originally stated it would Art arrived in the studio with Roy Halle to find that his parts had been arranged but something that was core to duo's unity had cracked, broken. They toured 'Bridge Over Troubled Water', rested but when Art wanted to be the first to hear the songs for the next album he was told 'No, you went away and did not come back to do the vocal arrangements for the last album.'. There proved to be other complications for the duo too, that made splitting inevitable, not the least of which was that there were no lyrics for Art Garfunkel to create vocal harmony arrangements for, for them both to sing. End of part one of the documentary. The footage of Simon and Garfunkel is wonderful, visually it was a reminder of a lost innocence, and all immaculately edited too. See the documentary for the first half alone, if you want to.
The second half of the film heavily features Paul Simon in his Texas home studio and a local church making 'Seven Psalms', his latest album made as a sprightly eighty something year old, whilst surveying his solo career from the first record 'Paul Simon' recorded from 1970 onward, and released in 1972 through to the 1990 album 'The Rhythm Of The Saints'. I really enjoyed the studio footage of Simon grooving with Toots and the Maytals for the song 'Mother and Child Reunion'. Likewise the footage of the creation and touring of the 1986 album 'Graceland' showed a normally reserved white man seeking to reach new horizons and find space for his lyrics in the joyous rhythms he least expected to be including as part of his music. There were other career troughs and peaks to explore, including what led to the 1981 Simon and Garfunkel reunion concert in Central Park, New York, and the subsequent tour. All of this became interspersed between footage of Paul Simon in his Texas studio working through Covid and the sudden onset of deafness in his left ear first, but alternating between both ears later. Again I thought of Brian Wilson who has had hearing in only one ear since 1964. The footage of Paul Simon struggling against the aural equivalent of tunnel vision was almost existential.
But I felt that having made that point in the film, the director could have shaved ten minutes off the end of the film. That or the time could have been used to mention the musical he wrote 'Capeman', or the five studio albums he has released between 'The Rhythm of The Saints' (1990) and 'Seven Psalms' (2023), none of which got a word said about them. But maybe they deserved a ninety minute long documentary of their own.
Lastly, in the past my view of American music was often informed by the wonky live harmonies of The Grateful Dead, where as Jerry, Bob, and Brent reached for a particular harmony part in a song the listener was taken aback at how close they got to the harmony they were aiming for, and yet how far from the harmony the end result remained. The perfectionism in Paul Simon remains an acquired taste for me, but the more he adopted world music the more interesting his music became.
When the rivers in the land of plenty run red with death, and the language that describes them has been poisoned, made unfit for human use, then generosity has turned for the worse, it has been inverted. It is irredeemable, unfit even for slightest recycling.
Who then will choose the only roles left -the wounded who can't help themselves as they live out their woundedness? Or their false accusers and comforters who wound others, and defend their actions with bland rhetorical reassurances?
Who then will resist being the victim, persecutor, and rescuer where to resist we have to escape the circular arguments in the new, Olympic level, blame games?
I don't know why William Burroughs is smiling here. Maybe it is because before he was photographed close after when he'd had his latest shot of methadone, a drug that by omission he denied he was dependent on for 38 years, where interviewers colluded with him by them never asking him about it. By his evasions he earned his place as the master of the uncanny phrase, and as an unsettling dark humourist who set standards of dark humour that were impossible to follow.
Please enjoy the interval music, a piece that has only gained in stature in the century or more since it was written, by Eric Satie. He was a man with a sense of humour who saw the future more than he realised when he wrote variations for piano like this.... ...who knows? Perhaps would also have appreciated the youtube adverts that occasionally interrupt the flow of the music.
