We Are Artists

I have just finished reading Sherman Alexie's book THE WORLD'S TOUGHEST INDIAN, and after I turned the last page I always have a small wave of sadness; for Alexie is habit forming. His stories and poetry and essays burst from their pages and pin my ears back, and make me smile and guffaw, and bring me to tears, make me clinch my fists, makes me stare at heaven and raise my hands in exasperation, and they make the old heart in my hairy chest swell to bursting with pride and shame and memory.

In 2003 he was interviewed about his then new book, TEN LITTLE INDIANS. I have just ordered my copy of this book and I am looking forward to reading those ten stories, looking for those parallel characters, plots, themes, and symbols that haunt all his work. Maybe I will find a character named Polatkin, or an old man whose last name is Falls Apart, which Alexie has named his corporation, his conglomerate.

In the following article, published on BOOK PAGE.COM in 2003, he made a statement that just hums and resonates with me, "It's our job. We're artists. We're supposed to be loud and poetic and crass and inappropriate." My God, sir, you have just conducted my anthem, written my Bio, smacked me right between the ears. I love it.

Crossing cultures

Sherman Alexie explores the sacred and the profane

INTERVIEW BY KATHERINE H. WYRICK

Sherman Alexie may be one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation. The author of such novels as Reservation Blues and Indian Killer is also a poet and a screenwriter (Smoke Signals, The Business of Fancydancing). Alexie is a literary force to be reckoned with, but he watches "American Idol" like the rest of us. Award-winning authors need downtime, too.

Even while channel-surfing on the couch, his young son beside him, Alexie is doing more than meets the eye. During an early-morning phone call to his home in Seattle, Alexie says, "We've lost old ceremonies and we're casting about looking for new ones. And we don't know yet if they're going to work or not."

Ceremonies like watching "American Idol"? Alexie, a fan of pop culture, says yes.
"There's a hell of a lot of people watching this with me right now, and I thought, well, that's a ceremony, and we can't diminish the importance of that. We still have all those ceremonies, that shared stuff, the rituals, it's just that we don't learn anything through [them], nobody learns anything by watching 'American Idol,' nobody is challenged. Our ceremonies now don't require us to be conscious. That's what they're supposed to do."

Making connections

Alexie's latest collection of short stories, Ten Little Indians, tells the stories of people in search of the rituals and ceremonies that lend life meaning. They are characters longing for authentic connections with others; they are everyday people, Native Americans, trying to navigate their way through the modern world. Ten Little Indians holds within its pages many journeys, at once ordinary and epic. As Alexie says of his characters, "Everybody's on a religious quest, everybody's a pilgrim."

There is Corliss in "The Search Engine," a student on the trail of an elusive poet, trying to discover her own identity. There is Jackson in "What You Pawn I Will Redeem," a homeless Indian who must raise $1,000 in 24 hours to buy back his grandmother's powwow regalia stolen years earlier. The image we are left with at the end of this story is so stirring and powerful it lingers like an aftershock.

In "What Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church?," the final story in the collection, a once well-known basketball player honors his father's death by obsessively throwing himself back into a sport he sacrificed long ago. Witnessing him work through his grief is, at times, a painful thing to see, but Alexie doesn't go in for tidy resolutions or anything that smacks of sentimentality. "I wanted all these stories to be love stories and not happy endings, sanitized love stories, but the real mess. . . . Love is shaky, and magical, and terrifying," says Alexie.

Though, at this early hour, Alexie is soft-spoken, his tone bears a trace of the raw, bold voice behind his writing. In what is sure to be one of the more controversial stories in the collection, "Can I Get a Witness?," an act of terrorism brings two strangers into an even stranger alliance. Here Alexie, an outspoken peace activist, demonstrates once again that he has the courage to speak his truth, to question long-held beliefs and the status quo. Of this he says, "It's our job. We're artists. We're supposed to be loud and poetic and crass and inappropriate."

Alexie's writing, though provocative, is also funny. "It's the way I look at the world, with humor, and it's not necessarily on purpose. My family is very funny, and in fact if you put my brothers and sisters and [me] together, you find I'm the least funny one," Alexie says. "It certainly is a family way of looking at the world, and my tribe in a sense too; there's a lot of humor. In the Northwest especially, the joke is that if you have a gathering of Native Americans from all over the country, you know where the Northwest Indians are because they're the loud laughing ones."

"I didn't know I was going to be a funny writer," Alexie says. "I just started writing and people laughed. And at first I was sort of offended. I expected, like many young people, that writing was supposed to be so serious—that if people were laughing it couldn't be serious. But I've learned that humor can be very serious. You know if you have people laughing, you can talk about very difficult subjects. I use it as an aesthetic—I suppose I should say anesthetic—and also to be profane and blasphemous. There's nothing I like more than laughing at other people's idea of the sacred."

Keeping the culture alive

In Ten Little Indians, as in his other works, Alexie also explores questions of identity, both personal and cultural. Corliss, a latent poet in "The Search Engine" says, "no matter what I write, a bunch of other Indians will hate it because it isn't Indian enough, and a bunch of white people will only like it because it's Indian." Asked if Alexie shares these sentiments, he says that at times he does feel "trapped by other people's ideas of who I am and who I'm supposed to be . . . there are so many ideas about Indians, none of which we created. It's a special situation being colonized people where the colonizers always get to define us—and that still happens."

Asked about Native American culture being relegated to museums, Alexie says, "I love museums, but for me the greatest part of all this is I'm a completely active member of the culture. Forgive the immodesty, but I think it's much more important for an Indian like me to be in The New Yorker magazine than it is for me or an Indian to be in a museum [so that] we join the culture rather than become a separate part of it. It's great to talk about traditions and to see them represented and to get a sense of history, but I think it's more important to change the possibilities of what an Indian is and can be right now.

"We're not separate, we're not removed, we're an integral and living part of the culture."

Sherman Alexie, master of many mediums and a gifted storyteller, is living proof of that fact.

Katherine H. Wyrick, a former editor of BookPage, lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Glenn Buttkus, co-host of this blog, special educator for the blind, ex-actor, poet, unpublished novelist, essayist, progressive, film reviewer, muckraker, malcontent, mental activist, husband, father, citizen, clutz, putz, and Indian wannabe, who is soon to be retired from the drudgery of the yoke, the white collar and the office--lives in Sumner, Washington, that Ozzie & Harriet town just east of Puyallup, nestled at the shoulders of the foothills of the Cascades, in the glidepath for the next mud slide coming off an erupting Mt. Rainier; and he cannot seem to read enough Sherman Alexie or Cormac McCarthy.

Shapiro's World: Welcome to It

I wondered how much of a Bio the Wikipedia encyclopedia had on friend Alex Shapiro, and actually it held a bunch of cool data. So for those of you who wonder about her, up there on San Juan Island, and have not yet gone to one of her web sites, my favorite being NOTES FROM THE KELP, to listen to some of her music, and enjoy both her photography and comments, then get off your cyber posteriors and check her out.

Alex Shapiro

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alex Shapiro (born January 11, 1962 in New York City) composes acoustic and electroacoustic chamber music favoring combinations of modal harmonies with chromatic ones, and often emphasizing strong pulse and rhythm.

Published by Activist Music, her works appear on artists’ CDs for the Cambria Master Recordings, Innova Recordings, Crystal Records, Centaur Records, DC Records, and Oehms Classics labels. Educated at The Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music as a student of Ursula Mamlok and John Corigliano, Ms. Shapiro has received honors and awards including those from The American Music Center, ASCAP, the American Composers Forum, Mu Phi Epsilon, the California Arts Council and the MacDowell Colony.

Performance highlights include Ms. Shapiro's Sonata for Piano at the Beijing Modern Music Festival in China, For My Father from her Piano Suite No. 1: The Resonance of Childhood on the MoMA of New York series The American Season in Berlin, Desert Tide premiered at the Stellenbosch New Music and Art Festival in South Africa, Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. and At the Abyss performed at Carnegie Hall in New York. Other notable works in her catalog include Deep, a work for contrabassoon and electronics; a flute quartet, Bioplasm; and a string quintet, Current Events.

Ms. Shapiro’s pieces have been the topic of two doctoral dissertations, and her life and music were the subject of the one-hour syndicated radio show, American MusicMakers, broadcast in February 2006 on public radio stations across the United States.

Ms. Shapiro has been an active participant in the Los Angeles art music community, as President of the Board of Directors of The American Composers Forum of Los Angeles and Moderator of ACF-LA’s Composers Salon series from 2000 through 2007, for which she has interviewed over 80 composers. She has served as an officer on the boards of national music organizations including NACUSA, The College Music Society, and The Society of Composers & Lyricists, and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Los Angeles City College music department and of the Alumni Council of Manhattan School of Music.

Ms. Shapiro's guest lectures at universities and conservatories place an equal emphasis on music composition and current publishing technologies and business skills for composers. She has been a featured speaker at music events including NARAS' Grammy® in the Schools, the International Alliance for Women in Music's International Congress of Women in Music, ASCAP's I Create Music Expo, Chamber Music America's National Conference and the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s First Nights series at Walt Disney Concert Hall, and was the Keynote speaker for the Society of Composers, Inc. 2006 National Student Conference.

A theme throughout Ms. Shapiro's career has been her involvement and volunteerism in issues related to music as well as those only obliquely so. She served on the Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California from 1990 to 1996, including a term as the 30,000-member affiliate's Vice President. In her capacity as the Chairperson of the ACLU/SC's State and National Legislative Action Committee, Ms. Shapiro produced three Conferences that brought State senators, Assembly members, clergy and community leaders together for day-long seminars to openly debate current issues, often related to the same free speech and First Amendment rights upon which artists rely.

Ms. Shapiro is the recipient of three awards from the ACLU honoring her activism, including being named the 1993 Chapter Activist of the Year.

Shapiro now resides in Washington state's San Juan Islands, and her website offers a comprehensive overview of her work.

Well, gosh, that is quite a list of accomplishments for a gorgeous gal who was born the year I graduated from high school, who then grew up in the mean streets of NYC. It amazes me that despite her impressive Bio and fabulous success with her music, she is gregarious, approachable, warm, intelligent, giving, and interested in all forms of artistic fellowship. And I was able to sense all these things about her just from listening to her music, and visiting with her on her blog. Imagine what it would be like to be in the same room with her?

Glenn Buttkus

Sherman's FLIGHT

For those of you who have actually not yet read FLIGHT by Sherman Alexie, do yourselves a favor and read it. It is laden with his imaginative and heartfelt storytelling that never misses to be both humane and dystopic, philosophical and poetic. Following is an interview done with Alexie by the Spokane INLANDER in April of 2007. When you read FLIGHT you will think about Kurt Vonnegut and other novelists, poets, and mystics that used time travel to make their various points.


A Wizard of Words

by KEVIN TAYLOR

Sherman Alexie, riveting poet, rollicking storyteller, is appearing in Spokane Sunday on tour to promote his first novel in 10 years, Flight.

There. That's the news of it. But you aren't reading this for the news of it.
Take a deep breath, then, because I'm not waiting for you:

Remember all that "for the want of a horseshoe nail" drumbeat of propaganda alleging that every single one of us — even you, the squirmy doofus who was sentenced to the sunspot magnifying glass horrors of the First Row because your parents found out you couldn't even see the blackboard much less anything written on it, and that's why you're a failure already (break your mother's heart) in the third grade — was an important cog in the mighty workings of the universe?

Well, by that logic, when you go to the Bing on Sunday afternoon, it's because dorky guys pretending to be wizards made Sherman Alexie the writer he is today.
I swear.

He'll even say so.

"Dorky guys pretending to be wizards made me the writer I am today," Sherman Alexie says.

I apologize; there is journalistic license of compression in the preceding sentence. The fullness of the way Alexie says it is more nuanced and funny and heartbreaking all at the same time — just like an Alexie story.

It starts, as many of his stories do, on a trip with his dad, who is dead now. Anybody who's read Alexie's poems knows about his dad, who lives on as the complicated genie of every dad who demands room in the story of any son, sometimes revealing too much and other times not nearly enough.

"When I was in grade school," Alexie begins, "there was a Spokesman story about this hobby shop that used to be right off the Maple Street Bridge, right near that graffiti bridge wall if that's still there."

The newspaper story was all about dorky guys hanging out at this shop playing war games. Somehow this was big for a Spokane Indian boy.

"So Dad took me to the store and I sat and watched. I was 7 or 8. Dad went someplace else, probably next door to the bar, and I sat and watched these guys I thought were the coolest dudes in the world. I'm sure they were dorky 22-year-olds, but I watched them have this war, this Lord of the Rings war, for hours."

It was mighty... and captivating and important enough that Alexie's dad purchased a Dungeons and Dragons game. Alexie remembers a white box with pieces that were tiny and the text thin.
He held that box in his small brown hands, expectant, all the way back to the HUD house on the Spokane Indian Reservation near Wellpinit. Or maybe the box was in a paper bag, crinkling around on the floor on the passenger side. Doesn't matter; once he got it home, the box held the portent to transform Alexie into the coolest of dudes.

He was already a kid singled out by well-meaning but oblivious teachers as someone who was smarter than you in a universe that stomped the crap out of teacher's pets — even unwilling ones.

"I was always dreaming if I could get a magical sword I could kill all the bullies on the rez," Alexie says.

The slender white box, it turns out, didn't give Alexie the powers he thought it would.

"I could never get anyone on the rez to play," he says. "So I sat in my basement and played hours and hours of masturbatory Dungeons and Dragons."

And here's why:
"It was the story-telling nature of it ... it was the heroics ... it was an escape from a shitty-ass world," he says.

In the classic way of fantasy quests, it was the thing unlooked for that lent the power Alexie still wields.

Dorky guys pretending to be wizards made him the writer he is today.

Oh, this is so Spokane. Free tickets – about 600 free tickets – to attend Alexie's Sunday afternoon reading at the Bing vanished into your sweaty, buffet-tong paws just days after they became available.

Oh, sure, he's big now. Back in the day, it seemed Alexie was reading at Auntie's every five minutes, sometimes the STA schedule, sometimes even opening for people you've never heard of. Like Janet Campbell Hale. (Be honest: Name three of her books.) Where were you then, Spokane?

Once Alex Kuo at WSU helped Alexie forge his voice, it has always had the power to astonish. And Alexie was quick to realize being a good storyteller was not the same as being a good reader and his appearances soon became SRO.

There was that first collection of poems, The Business of Fancy Dancing, that made you wonder how so much laughter, so many tears, such longing and goofiness could fit into such a skinny book.

Then came the short stories, the novels, Hollywood. And the well-documented spiral into "posses" and bling and the seamy underground world of poetry slams where the Mob dictates the winners. (What? Not the cap-M mob?) Never mind.

Sherman's a professor now. Yeah, dig this: at the UW. ("Here I am the Cougar alum teaching for the Huskies ... it's sort of like jury duty for me," he says). You know how white professors grow their hair long and pretend to be Indians or hippies? If Sherman's any example it seems Indian professors cut their hair short to appear to be bankers.

He's 40. He's got the short hair, now. And he's in Spokane as part of a book tour to promote his first novel in 10 years.

And you know he's not going to put on a pair of half-glasses and drone away, occasionally moistening his lips with a damp kerchief. There will be jokes, there will be riffs, improv. Tragedy and accusations. That's why we all went to Auntie's to snag the free tickets. He's a ride, not a reader.

It's cool with Alexie. He understands Spokane.

"When you think about my lifestyle, I am very much Spokane," says the father of two boys who play Dungeons and Dragons in the basement.

"And not the new Spokane," he hastens to add, "I am not the condos in the old Burlington Coat Factory Spokane. I am the P.M. Jacoy where you buy a Swisher Sweet and a pull-tab Spokane."

He was saddened last week at the death of Kurt Vonnegut. Alexie has spent weeks talking about Vonnegut because Flight, a story about the horrors and comedy of a 15-year-old half-Indian foster child who wants to wreak vengeance on the world, uses the same device Vonnegut did when relating the horrors and comedy of fire-bombing Dresden: time travel.

Because he's Sherman Alexie, a major literary figure and an Indian, Flight is getting some rave reviews.

Because he's Sherman Alexie, a major literary figure and an Indian, Flight is getting pummeled.

"This is the first time I've felt like a very large target," he says. And he's not surprised.

Some reviewers, hearing the news Alexie signed a contract to deliver some young adult novels, are treating Flight as one of them. And they're looking down their literary noses. Some are even — God save us — bashing the novel because of its page count (208). That's like pounding Rembrandt because he didn't do more sofa-sized pieces, the bastard.

Others, as they did with Vonnegut, don't know what to make of the sci-fi whiff of time travel.
In a universe that can often withhold such things, there is a nice bit of serendipity. Alexie's editor for Flight was Vonnegut's editor for Slaughterhouse-Five and sent Alexie a gift.

"He forwarded me the original New York Times review of Slaughterhouse-Five. It was absolutely condescending in the same way some reviews are of mine — and mine is no Slaughterhouse-Five, just a meager replica."

Which sets Alexie off on a riff.

"Native writers are so f---ing literary. We are all professors," he wails. "All these young writers coming up get into teaching. No one is even aspiring to be Stephen King.
"I went to Grindhouse the other night, and I thought, 'Why isn't any Indian trying to make movies like this?'" Alexie asks.

He wants redsploitation flicks and already has the poster — a muscled Indian glaring and glowering. His name is Johnny Fire, and the tagline is: "He's just pissed. ..."

Alexie gets animated: "I have the first scene. A model-gorgeous Indian woman in a flannel shirt with the cut-off sleeves is driving behind some tourists when they hit an elk. Kill the sucker. She jumps out of her truck with a big knife, freaks out the tourists. Runs to the elk, slices it open and looks at the tourists and says 'You got to get the pituitary gland out before it ruins the meat.'"
And of course that's not news to any of us here in Spokane. But it's why Spokane wants to see Sherman Alexie.

Spokane holds a place for Alexie, too.

"I'm just happy Dutch's Pawn Shop is there," he says. "One of the great memories of my life is going to Dutch's with my dad and buying comic books by the pound. Dutch's Pawn Shop is always showing up in my work."

It's weird, Alexie says, that Dutch's is on one side of Main Avenue in downtown Spokane and that Auntie's is right on the other side. In actual steps it's nothing, but the personal journey is another matter.

"That walk across the street from Dutch's to Auntie's is huge," he says.

Publication Date: 4/18/07

I borrowed this article right off Alexie's website, which is a real ride for any of us that enjoy, that live for the next poem, short story, or novel; or possibly film. Sherman Alexie, in his own way, has become a Titan, a literary behemoth, who hibernates within the catacombs of his office up there on Aurora in Seattle. He still has the power to dazzle us, to bring us to tears, to make us sad we are simply white, and not just a smidge Indian. Like Burt Reynolds, I was always told that my great great great grandmother on my mother's side was a Cherokee princess. Too bad she wasn't part of the Salmon Tribe, those infamous Spokanes.

Glenn Buttkus

Chakra Trek

This fine morning on Alex's blog we were treated to a photo taken from her ferry ride back to her island. She lamented the loss of her snow and mused a bit about transitions, states of transit, and chakras. Her musical selection today was ChakraSuite1 running 3:10 minutes. It transported me somewhere else, somewhere warm, a place of incense and beautiful women.

CHAKRA TREK

Sitar daydreams and
wet kisses
from Mother India,
bleached, blended, and blinded
white
for a tiny moment,
reflecting high
on the Taj facade,
becoming
Ganges wine;
muddied, bloodied, and littered
with fat yellow flower petals;
soon morphing
golden, yet still
trimmed pink to red
as you cajole us
to place them, it
between our lips,
sliding it, gulping
into our awaiting
mouths,
so that we can
get to know its
essence,
its vibrance,
its value;
bitter at first
on the very front
of our tongue,
but soon becoming
soft breath
and a gentle humming
and a tantalizing tinkle
as it drops
down our bare throat;
sweet at last,
devouring the last of the
notes
with our eager
swallow.

Glenn Buttkus 2008

And what follows is the Shapiro hidden poetry, always cleverly disguised as prose, but not from me, never from me.

Transit

My beloved snow
has melted.
White has been
replaced
by the vibrant green
it temporarily
shrouded;
very pretty,
and almost
warm.

Transferring
one's existence
to another:
moving boxes
morph
from tree
to container,
and travel from there
to here;
grapes morph
from fruit
to beverage,
and travel
from bottle
to belly.

Snow melts,
and I ferry
back and forth
at will.

Life
in all its forms
is a constant
transit.

Alex Shapiro 2008

Snow Girl of the San Juans.

Alex Shapiro is at it again on her terrific blog site, NOTES FROM THE KELP. She was returning to her beloved San Juan Island from Seattle yesterday, and the snows of kilimanjaro hit, leaving actual "snow" there on the island. She seems to enjoy the stuff. I am a native Northwesterner, used to hills and dales and valleys and forests, and every damned time the snow hits it rains on my parade. I love to look at it if I do not have to drive in it. Alex wrote on her blog:

It’s not uncommon for islanders to head south for the winter months and join the other snowbirds, even though the season here is very temperate. Most days are in the low to mid forties, dipping into the 30’s at night. There isn’t the bitter cold of the Minnesotan or New York winters that Charles and I grew up enduring. The air here is crisp and fresh and pure and invigorating, and tromping around outside to chop wood or spread birdseed is a joy. This dark-eyed junco is especially pleased that I feel this way. It rarely snows and when it does, the powdery fluff is gone within hours, melted into a memory.

But yesterday as I was headed home from Seattle, it did indeed snow on San Juan Island– and the snow stuck! A couple of very pretty inches that have turned everything in view into a work of art. I’m loving all phases of winter here and can’t imagine why others flee for Arizona, Florida, the Caribbean, Mexico, Hawaii and Central America. Ok, well, I can– but I’m so completely at home in this, that staying here seems like a vacation in and of itself. The weather here is so much better than where I grew up. Is there a word for feeling even more at home than where your original home was?

Then, in her way, she posted a wonderful picture of the bird in the fluff snow, and posted some of her music to illustrate the illustrate, or to illuminate it, or to underscore it. The piece was The White Horse. It was 45 seconds of bliss, part Celtic, part jazz, all Alex. I wrote a little piece of free verse as a response to her music.

SNOWS OF SAN JUAN

The white horse,
wearing
a white blaze,
not completely white,
but nearly,
stood,
on a white day moment,
in the snow,
fetlock deep
in the fluff,
white on white;
and its magnificent tail
swished like a
conductor's baton,
humming in the crisp air,
the equus concerto,
as her pink-blue eyes
saw me
there;

In my white snow suit,
behind my white and green scarf,
neath my silly white and red woolen hat,
with my slender white fingertips
clicking and clicking
the imaginary pic
that would cue
that wonderful trick
of finding
the music;
for it must be
done
to salve my imagination,
to soothe my emotions,
to calm
the euphoria deep
in my chest,
and to provide
the necessary sustenance
for my Muse,
who is always,
it seems
hungry.

Glenn Buttkus 2008

Then I thanked her for her epic poem that I clearly read in my mind as I read her prose. It went something like this:

TWEET TWEET

ONE

It's not uncommon
for islanders
to head south
for the winter months
and join the other
snowbirds;
even though
the season here
is very temperate.

Most days
are in the low
to mid-forties,
dipping
into the thirties
at night.

There isn't
the bitter cold
of the Minnesotan
or New York
winters
that Charles and I
grew up
enduring.

The air here
is crisp and fresh and pure
and invigorating,
and tromping around
outside
to chop wood
or spread birdseed
is a joy.

The dark-eyed Junco
is especially pleased
that I feel
this way.

It rarely snows,
and when it does,
the powdery fluff
is gone
within hours,
melted into a
memory.

TWO

But yesterday
as I was headed Home
from Seattle,
it did indeed
snow
on San Juan Island--
and the snow
stuck!
A couple of pretty inches
that have turned everything
in view,
into a work
of art.

I'm loving
all phases of
winter
here,
and can't imagine
why
others flee
for Arizona, Florida, the Caribbean,
Mexico, Hawaii, and Central Amerca.

Ok,
well,
I can--
but I'm so completely
at Home
in this,
that staying here
seems
like a vacation
in and of
itself.

The weather here
is so much
better
that where
I grew up.
Is there a word
for feeling
even more at Home
than where
your original home
was?

Alex Shapiro January 2008


There probably is such a word, dear lady, but it is spoken only by the wind in whispers, rattling your warm windows late at night, interupting your dreams, becoming your dreams, wrapping you like silk, sitting, lying quietly, watching you sleep, hoping you will wake soon and come out and play.

Glenn Buttkus

Far.Cry.Blue.

Doug Palmer had a few "words" to say as introduction to his incredible Violin Duet last Friday night in Seattle.

Far.Cry.Blue.

You can view
"American Music"
as Dvorak
copied out
by Nadia Boulanger students;
or you can say
it's Steven Foster
to slave chant
to blues
to jazz
to Rock.

The latter of which
actually makes
money,
(though not always
for the right people).

I believe
I have achieved
a synthesis
in this piece,
inasmuch
it is American
music,
and it is unlikely
to make
any money.

Doug Palmer January 25, 2008

Palmer Triumphs at Good Shepherd Center

Here is an interesting email exchange from Doug to me to Doug and back to me. It reveals some salient bits of humor and hubris, as well as insight of a sort. The performance went well and all's right in the universe on this day. Doug Palmer deserves recognition. Some of us, through our own devices, as slaves to our own ego, and falling in line with our Type A personalities have had our fair share of limelight, applause, accolades, awards, and atta boys. I think we ought to get ahold of the mayors of Renton and Seattle and declare a DOUG PALMER DAY each January 25th, just because, just for the hell of it. Three cheers, hurrah tripled, Dougie--and may many more triumphs follow on the hot heels of this one. Many thanks to Alex Shapiro for her kind and warm appearance and her support of fellow composers, music, the arts, and all like that.

Doug Palmer wrote:

Hi Glenn, My book group is reading "No Ordinary Time" about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during WWIIOne of the group has asked for movies about that time. Do you know of anyone who might be able to help her out?All I can think of is "Dumbo"Or maybe Belushi's "1941"See Ya later.......................................Dougie

Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 14:30:30 -0800From: gbuttkus@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: WWII Dramatic films
To: lanesavant@hotmail.com

Of course the number of films that have WWII as a background are too numerous to put on a single page; but most of them are classified as "war films", full of action, death, battles.Your request is a bit vague, but here goes.

If the folks want films about the Roosevelts, the mini-series ELEANOR AND FRANKLIN would be a good place to start. A half dozen actors have played FDR over the years. But if what you, or they, are seeking is an interesting "drama" that is not technically a war film, they might look up:
1. John Boorman's HOPE AND GLORY.
2. YANKS with Richard Gere.
3. THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES with Frederic March.
4. THE BRYLCREEM BOYS with Gabriel Byrne.
5. THE GATHERING STORM, both the Richard Burton version, and the superlative Albert Finney version, about Winston Churchill.
6. THE LAST DAYS, kind of grim about the Holocaust survivors.
7. THE WAR LOVER with Steve McQueen.
8. ATONEMENT in theaters presently.
9. HANOVER STREET with Harrison Ford.
10. WATERLOO BRIDGE, with Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh.

There are several more, but I would have to actually think about it. These are off the top of my kopf.
Glenn
p.s.: Hope the performance at Good Shepherd went well.

From Doug Palmer this morning:

Sorry you couldn't make it to the salon. The piece was a big hit. I'm walking on air.Alex is as nice as you would expect. David Mesler showed up. Janet and Mack too. I even got comments (and advice) about the piece last night at the opera from Keith Eisenbrey (a friend from the Seattle Composers Forum)Tom Baker has promised a recording, I'll post it asap.I think this list of films will be good. Kate Chatham referred herself as historically ignorant. It's up to us who know virtually everything about that period from Mein Kamfp to Nagasaki to enlighten the ignorant.Many thanks.

It does appear that sometimes the stars align and the universe smiles and "good things" happen to each of us. Doug Palmer is a hell of a composer, and maybe, just maybe, he will spend some time in the sun, and will receive so many pats on the back he will be lame for three days after.

Glenn