Common Ground: Reviews

May 2008 | Art & Soul

Reviews

MUSIC

Rupa & The April Fishes
eXtraOrdinary rendition
(Cumbancha)

You would miss the meaning of Rupa Marya’s impressive debut if you tried to break it down into its constituent parts. The true worth is in its whole, which could be described this way: one person with a musical idea and a lot of influences meets five equally adventurous people and records an album. Their style spans the jazz/cabaret scene, with dabs of French, Latin, Indian and Gypsy folk woven together. Marya is a cross-disciplinarian, a San Francisco-based doctor who flaunts sonic dexterity in dark and dancing clubs — only these days those clubs are getting bigger by the minute, beyond the Bay area.

She deserves her immediate accolades; this is a damn fun recording — un-self-conscious and daring. The chanson elements are especially inviting and point to her partial childhood in France, her native India and America. Indeed, a quirky Serge Gainsbourg subtlety appears. Her music is equally haunting; the quiet landscape of “Mal de mar,” with its creeping cello, hypnotizing trumpet and sinister bandoneon are a perfect match for Marya’s soothing and seductive vocals.
— Derek Beres

Jef Stott
Saracen
(Six Degrees)

Although this is his debut full-length album, Jef Stott has been an important insider for some time. Cutting his teeth by co-founding female vocal-led ensembles Stellamara and Lumin, he eventually founded Embarka Records, producing and releasing the likes of Algerian rai-hip-hopper MC Rai. Most impressive from this multi-virtuosic producer is the compelling instrumentation on Saracen.

Trained in oud, saz, santur and various Arabic percussion, the album is a playroom for Stott’s imagination to create freely. (Credit equally co-producer extraordinaire Yossi Fine.) Like label-mate Cheb I Sabbah, Stott is reorienting the psychology and sociology of two traditions: classically oriented Arabia with refined electronica. He never demands that an oud take on a four-four template or relies on drum and bass for odd time signatures of dumbek. Instead, he meets both worlds head on and shows how they get along without strain or tear. The heavy beat of “Faqir” is akin to Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” on steroids; the perfect complement for an emerging field of global electronica steadily gaining widespread critical recognition.
— D.B.

BOOKS

Red Bird
by Mary Oliver
(Beacon Press)

Mary Oliver has long been my — and many others’ — go-to poet. She’s the one whose words I have reached for and recited when the knot where my inner-life joins the natural world becomes slack and is in need of tightening. When every other voice seems to be hastening the bitter end of something — the species, culture, this planet — Oliver has consistently admonished me to open my eyes, look more closely, and be astonished by what is there. Hers is a voice of unconditional hope — an endangered species, indeed; and necessary.

Oliver’s last book of poems, Thirst, threw me, though. The poems were dense with imagery, as always, but somehow less accessible than her others. They were more heady, less certain of themselves. Learning Oliver wrote the book while mourning the death of Molly Malone Cook, her partner of forty years, I let her off the hook. Still, I was uneasy about cracking open Red Bird, her latest collection, for fear the simple wisdom she’s always imparted would not be there.

I needn’t have worried. From the first stanza of the first poem — “Red bird came all winter/firing up the landscape/as nothing else could”— Oliver as we’ve known her is back — captivated, utterly astounded, by the natural world and dutifully translating it into words that make transcendence seem easy.

And yet, with these poems, Oliver is not just some blind optimist, chirping birdsong while the world flounders around her. She writes of “this broken world;” of beautiful birds, extinct, found only in a museum drawer; of a “body I saw/crumpled/and complete without a name,” in Iraq; of “the President who loves blood” and “the governmental agencies that love money;” of “a culture that feared death/and adored power.” She frequently intones death — something, which, at 71 years, seems to be on her mind — as well as grief and uncertainty and the fading past. But always, she returns to gratitude and, more simply, to love.

As long as Oliver is around and writing poems like these, I will return to her for that hit of hope. And even when she is gone, I will remember this book, within a poem called “Sometimes,” contains the explicit instructions by which she has lived and written, and by which we too might live: “Pay attention/Be astonished/Tell about it.”

Community: The Structure of Belonging
by Peter Block
(Berrett-Kohler Publishers)

You’ve heard the sob stories about community: Our social fabric is ripped nearly beyond repair. Our sense of isolation from one another and with the outside world is increasing. Our civic participation in democracy is in sharp decline. As a result, crime is up, poverty is rampant, environmental degradation is widespread. All in all, the situation looks bleak.

Peter Block, a San Francisco-based author and trainer hopes his new book, Community: The Structure of Belonging, becomes the first to a happier turn in the tale. Instead of a lengthy academic analyses of causes and effects of community decline, or descriptions of what the world will be like if we don’t get our act together, Mr. Block’s book showcases on-the-ground, go-do-it-today solutions.

Block says our individual efforts to transform our personal lives are taking away precious time from gathering together in community. Community transformation, he believes, can happen only when neighbors come together. When you gather, Block writes, your purpose — no matter what kind of group you are in — is singular: Have conversations that build relatedness. Block warns of the impulse to just check items off a to-do list or to problem solve, tactics which do not focus on possibilities, or the inherent gifts in the community members.

The way to build relatedness, says Block, is to ask questions that are ambiguous, personal and stressful. If you already know the answer, if the question doesn’t make you squirm, find another one to ask that does. All of Block’s ideas are fleshed out in bite-sized chapters, crafted in clear prose and loaded with examples of his ideas in action. The overall effect is inspiring and makes it seem entirely possible that if you went and knocked on your neighbor’s door tonight, you just might change the world.
— Eric Larson

Farwell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living
by Doug Fine
(Villard Books)

After graduating from college, Doug Fine did what a great many of us probably only dreamed of during those fifteen-minute coffee breaks at post-college dead end jobs. He fished his backpack out of the closet, and, quite literally, went global: He ticked off five continents and dozens of countries — including Burma, Rwanda, Laos and Tajikistan — and then wrote about it.

In his new book, Farewell My Suburu, Fine scales things down to the local level and writes about his year-long adventure in living off the grid on a remote New Mexico ranch called Funky Butte. What makes the book especially interesting, and fun, is that Fine is all but inept at farming, auto-mechanics, electricity, irrigation systems — precisely the skills he’ll need to survive the year long experiment in “simple” living.

Fine’s experiences include interesting — and conveniently highlighted — tidbits and statistics about locally grown food, climate change and alternative energy. Plenty of them you’ve probably heard, like what will happen if Greenland’s ice sheets melt (bye-bye NYC and London), but a few you probably haven’t, like the fact that it takes three to four years of powering your home to offset the energy used to make solar panels.

Although books about living deliberately are nothing new (see Thoreau, H.D.; Jacobs, A.J.; Kingsolver, B.; et. al), Farewell My Suburu is distinctive for its slightly irreverent tone and its serious aim toward educating the reader on the ups and downs of committing to full-scale green living.
— E.L.

DVD

Unsettled
80 minutes
Directed by Adam Hootnick
Resonance Films
unsettledmovie.com

The Israeli Defense Force spent the summer of 2005 being trained to evict 8500 Jewish settlers from their homes in the Gaza Strip. Tensions on both “sides” ran high. Not only did the soldiers face potential backlash from the settlers themselves — some of whom had called Gaza home since just after the Six Days War of 1967 — but also from the nearly 4,000 protesters who showed up in support of the settlers.

Unsettled, an impressive first film by Harvard Law graduate and former MTV producer Adam Hootnick, focuses only indirectly on the political and historical implications of the withdrawal from Gaza. The real focus is on the profound impact the lead up to this historic event had on the everyday lives of six twenty-somethings — two soldiers and four settlers, three who support the Jewish settlers, three who oppose them.

By choosing to focus on young, pretty, passionate people, and utilizing the quick-cut editing style he no doubt picked up at his former gig, Hootnick makes the film palatable, understandable and interesting to a generation that might otherwise dismiss the immeasurably complicated conflict as a vestige of the past.

If not for the touching scene of one settler family salvaging the shingles from their home (all settlements were to be destroyed after the settlers were forced out), if not for the shots of pro-settlement Israelis arguing in the streets with anti-settlement Israelis, or settlers screaming for soldiers to have a heart as they march in to do their duty, then see the film for it’s final scene:

Soldiers enter the home of one character’s family. They are invited to sit around the table. The family engages the soldiers in a sophisticated conversation about the evictions. They disagree. Many tears are shed, but no voices are raised. The law is the law. They share a drink, a blessing, and the soldiers quietly escort the family from their home.
— E.L.

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