On an uncanny Godfather

 

For most contemporary readers, the Grimm brothers’ tale, “The Godfather” will seem like one of the strangest stories ever published.  But, in the prolific world of folk tales, where oddity is ubiquitous, “The Godfather” (Grimm #42) represents an entire genre of similar stories.  In the sea of story-telling, “The Godfather” isn’t unique; rather it represents a genus so populous as to require its own Aarne - Thompson - Uther index number – the story defines motif ATU 332 (or KHM 44) and, in fact, the Grimm iteration of the story is the type for this category: ATU 332 characterizes “Godfather” tales.  (The ATU index of folk tale motifs is the invention of a Finnish folklorist Annti Aarne; Aarne studied northern European Kinder und Hausmaerchen and classified the stories according to their predominant motifs.  Most stories, as it happens, contain several indexed narrative types.  Aarne’s work was published in 1910 in German and was refined by the American folklore scholar Stith Thompson about two decades later; the index was, further, refined by the German Hans-Joerg Uther in 2004.  In one of Borges’ sketches, a colossal map is created that correlates to the terrain on a one-to-one basis – no one knows how to use a map that is as big as the territory that it depicts and, so, Borges tells us that the map falls into disrepair, decays, and that, in remote parts of the kingdom, great fragments of the map can be seen half-drowned in lakes or wrapped around forests.  The ATU index is somewhat similar: it’s a map that is about the size of the territory that it represents and I’ve never been clear as to this mighty piece of folklore cartography is supposed to be used.)

A paraphrase of “The Godfather” is superfluous, although I will provide one.  Grimm’s fairy tales, at least, in their earliest editions are so laconic that they read as if already paraphrased.  And, in fact, I think their terse and skeletal form is significant – in many cases, the tales read like outlines upon a story-teller might improvise variations and details according to the circumstances of the telling.  It’s my sense that many of these stories are telescopic – that is, the tale can be expanded or compressed in the telling so as to fit the time allotted for the performance.  (Similarly, I think details in the story can be added or omitted according to the teller’s understanding of the audience and its expectations.)  It’s a bit hard to summarize something that already seems to be a summary.  Nonetheless, here is the story:

A poor man has innumerable children.  The man has run out of candidates to serve as godfather for his most recent child.  He has already enlisted “everyone in the world” as godfathers for his other children.  Distressed, the man lies down and falls asleep.  He dreams that he should go outside of the city gate and appoint the first person that he meets to be his child’s godfather.  And, so, this is what he does.

A man standing outside the city gate agrees to be child’s godfather.  The stranger, as he is called, gives the father a little bottle of water.  The stranger says that, with this water, the father can cure anyone of anything – but there is a condition: the water allows the man to see where Death is standing at the sick person’s bed.  If Death stands at the head of the bed, the person will survive and be healed.  If Death stands at the foot of the bed, the patient must die.  

The King’s son is sick.  The father attends to the ailing child.  Death is standing at the boy’s head and so the child is healed.  A second son becomes ill.  Again, Death stands near the boy’s head and so the father heals this child as well.  A third child, then, sickens.  Death stands at the boy’s feet and, so, he dies.

The father goes to the stranger’s house to tell him about what has happened.  On the first level of the house, a broom and a shovel are bickering.  The man asks them where the godfather lives.  They tell him: “One flight higher.”

The man goes up the stairs and finds “a bunch of dead fingers lying there.”  The man asks the fingers where the godfather lives and they say: “One flight higher.”

The man climbs the stairs to the third level in the house.  He encounters a pile of skulls who speak: “One flight higher.”

The man goes up to the fourth floor of the house.  There, fish are frying themselves in a pan.  The fish tell the man that the godfather lives “One flight higher.”

The man reachs the fifth floor of the house.  There is a door with a keyhole.  Peeping through the keyhole, the man sees the godfather.  On his head, there are “long, long horns.”  The godfather gets into bed and covers himself.  

The man says to the godfather that on the first floor of the house, he saw a shovel and broom quarreling.  “How can you be so simple-minded,” the godfather says, “that was just my man-servant and maid.”

The man tells the godfather that on the second floor, he saw dead fingers.  The godfather reproaches him for stupidity and says: “That was just salsify roots.”

The man tells the godfather that on the third floor, he saw skulls.  “Those were just heads of cabbage,” the godfather replies.

“I saw fish frying themselves on the fourth floor,” the man says. At that moment, the fish enter the room and serve themselves on a platter.     

The man says: “When I came to the fifth landing, I looked through the keyhole and saw that you had long, long horns.”

The godfather replies: “Now that’s just not true.”  (In German: “Ei, das ist nicht wahr.”)

It’s tempting to interpret this tale symbolically – in other words, to ascribe meanings to the weird imagery.  To some extent, I fall prey to this temptation in my remarks below.  But, we should start by accepting the story on its own terms.  As a performance told in real time, a person hearing the story wouldn’t have the leisure to define the incidents in the tale as allegorical or symbolic.  For instance, the “fish frying themselves” doesn’t necessarily have a meaning beyond what is tersely represented in the story – the uncanny occurrence doesn’t stand for anything.  In Maerchen, amazing events are like rocks and stones and trees – they have a sort of brute quiddity (“whatness”): that is, they just are.

In 1942, Martin Heidegger taught a seminar focusing on his idiosyncratic interpretation of Friedrich Hoelderlin’s ode, “The Ister.”  (These lectures, conducted in Freiburg at the height of World War Two, are infamous on political grounds.  But those contentious issues don’t concern us here.)  Heidegger begins his account of the ode by arguing that readers should not interpret the poem symbolically or as an allegory – interpretations of this kind distract our attention from the verse by making it “metaphysical.”  To Heidegger, great poetry is not metaphysical – that is, it can’t correlated to “spirit” or some suprasensuous or otherworldly realm.  The poem exists for itself and is not a signifier of some higher realm.  In other words, poems don’t “mean” in terms exterior to themselves.  The error underlying Western metaphysics, which Heidegger rejects, is identifying the suprasensuous, that is, “spirit” with what is superior and true.  Heidegger’s view is that poetry isn’t transcendent but immanent – it doesn’t look beyond itself to the “spiritual” and “symbolic” but, rather, is rooted in the earth, the sky and the way that human beings dwell on the earth and under the sky.  Heidegger says that the Ister (or Danube – “Ister” is an archaic geographic term for the Donau or Danube River) doesn’t represent anything and shouldn’t be construed allegorically or as something exterior to its identity as a river.  For this proposition, Heidegger cites the final lines in Hoelderlin’s ode: “Yet what that one does, the river / no one knows” (Was aber jener tuet, der Strom / weisst Niemand.)

Heidegger’s argument is that construing poetry in terms of symbolic meaning is an attempt to avoid the necessarily enigmatic character of the art – it makes what is concrete, if problematic, into “metaphysics.”  The reader of poetry must respect the “enigma” or to use the German word, the “Raetsel” embodied in the text.  Raetsel, meaning “enigma”, is rooted in the verb raten – that is, to counsel.  The enigma, accordingly, contains counsel or advice.  In the introduction to the 1812 edition of their Kinder und Hausmaerchen, the Grimm brothers identified the folk tales that they had collected with Poesie, that is, the “poetic imagination”.  In fact, they also counsel against making the tales into something that they are not.  And, so, I think it’s reasonable to bear this advice in mind when approaching “The Godfather” – at first, we have to accept the peculiar tale on the enigmatic terms that it presents to us.

Two-fold:

First, I think, we should notice that the story consists of two parts.  The first involves the father’s quest for a guardian for his child and the healing water.  It’s characteristic of Grimm’s stories that they are constructed from independent parts often only tenuously sutured together.  Narratives are built from discontinuous blocks of material – this arises from the fact that stories are not independent or complete in themselves but are amplified or made more meaningful by adjacent tales.

In this case, the opening of “The Godfather” is related to another story “Godfather Death” (Grimm 44).  “Godfather Death” is a very beautiful tale, much more “artistic” than “The Godfather” – that is, it is more symbolic and meaningful than “The Godfather” and, therefore, seems a more refined and esthetically pleasing story.  (But, of course, this is to interpret Grimm’s stories according to esthetic canons not really applicable to them – meaning and esthetic qualities are “secreted” as it were unintentionally and involuntarily by these tales.)  In “Godfather Death,” the father is given the choice of appointing either God or Death to be his child’s godfather.  In a startling and blasphemous decision, the poor man nominates Death as his child’s godfather – God is unfair, elevating the wealthy and afflicting the poor; but Death comes for all human beings regardless of their rank or worldly goods.  Death gives the child a gift, a healing salve but warns the his godson that there are limits to the potion’s power.  If Death stands at the head of a bed, the sufferer will be healed.  If Death stands at the foot of the bed, the sick person will die.  The remainder of the story concerns the godson’s efforts to thwart Death’s decrees.  Naively, the godson, who has become a famous doctor, decides that he can cheat death by rotating the bed in which the sick person is reclining.  He gets away with this stunt twice.  But Death is enraged, guides the famous doctor into a cave, and shows him an infinity of candles flickering in the darkness.  When a candle is snuffed-out, the life represented by that flame comes to an end.  Death ominously tells his godson that a candle that is “only burning a little is your life.  Watch out!”  (The scene in the cave is magnificently shown in Roberto Gavaldon’s Mexican film, Macario, produced in 1960).

“Godfather Death” differs from “The Godfather” in many respects.  We are apt to view the differences so as to regard “Godfather Death” as a better, more artistically successful story than “The Godfather.”  In “The Godfather”, the storyteller never mentions the godchild.  It’s as if the speaker has forgotten the premise of the tale.  “Godfather Death” makes the godchild, the protagonist of the story and logically develops the theme of the gift of healing powers.  In “The Godfather”, the protagonist is the father and the gift intended for the stranger’s godson remains in the father’s hands.  Whereas “Godfather Death” is about the arbitrary nature of life and death, “The Godfather” turns away from that theme toward the macabre comedy in the Stranger’s house, a grotesquerie that defines the uncanny nature of the godfather.  As is characteristic of fairy tales, both narratives are rooted in a single premise, but the stories, then, radically diverge.  The foundation is the same but the next “block” in the narrative creates a completely different structure.  

Adam:

The man in “The Godfather” is exemplary, a representation of all humanity.  He has so many children that he has “already asked everyone in the world to be godfather.”  This is not merely a humorous exaggeration.  The man is Adam, the father of all men and women.  In Adam’s fall, death comes into the world.  The first figure that Adam meets after his dream counsels him to “go outside the town gate” is the devil.  The devil stands in a particular relationship to death.  Either he is also death or death’s brother.  

The devil:

We are conditioned by John Milton and theology to regard the devil as an awesome, even darkly majestic, spirit.  But the devil that appears in Grimm’s fairy tales isn’t Milton’s Satan.  He’s a buffoon, a shady con-man.  In some stories, the devil has a wife who hen-pecks him.  He has whiskers that intrepid heroes pluck from his beard.  The devil in these tales isn’t God’s adversary – he doesn’t even believe in God.  But this unimpressive barnyard figure is all the more dangerous precisely because he is so unprepossessing.  It’s easy to beware of a satanic presence cloaked in brimstone and fire; the devil as clown and charlatan is much more deadly and insinuating. 

The Woods: 

In Grimm’s tales, the protagonist almost always ventures away from hostile circumstances entering the great woods.  As Jack Zipes writes: “The woods is the mother of all things”, the “perilous realm” (to quote J.R.R. Tolkien) – the woods are lawless and, in them, anything is possible.  In “The Godfather”, the woods don’t appear.  Here the topography is even more abstract and stark: there is the enclosure of the city, apparently established by a wall, and there is the dangerous realm beyond the town-gate.  City and the chaos owned by Death are separated by the porous membrane of a wall and gate.  Traditionally, graveyards are outside the boundaries of the enclosed city.  The devil wanders ravening among the sepulchers.

The Doctor

It’s no coincidence that the devil appears as a quack doctor, peddling a useless remedy against death.  Death like the devil is our great adversary, but, also, our comrade, our bed-mate, as close to us as the pulsing of our carotid artery.  The little bottle of healing water has no power.  Death isn’t about to cede he authority to some country bumpkin.  Rather, it is death’s posture with respect to the ailing person (either at the head or the feet) that controls whether the patient will survive.  The “healing water” is just a prop to make the doctor look as if he has affected the outcome – the “little bottle” gives the doctor the appearance of authority, but it is really Death that is acting.  If Death stands at the patient’s head, the sick man or woman or child has already been healed; the water doesn’t do anything.  Humans fear death and will make a deal with the Devil to escape mortality.  Notice, how the storyteller has already forgotten about the premise of the tale – the search for a fitting Godfather for the child of Adam.  The child never appears in the story that now takes a turn away from the fraudulent remedy against death.

The turning

Three of the king’s sons fall ill.  King here means the sovereign of the enclosed city, that is, the power of law and reason.  Death stands at the head of two of the children and, so, they can’t die.  Death stands at the foot of the third son.  Therefore, he must die. The man realizes that he has been duped.  The water doesn’t have any efficacy, although, of course, he can use it fraudulently to pretend that he is a great doctor.  This is apparently unsatisfactory to the man.  He desires to have the power over life and death and not merely the simulacrum of such power.  So the man goes to remonstrate with Death or the Devil (since the two forces are aligned).  The Maerchen says that the man wants to “narrate” (erzaehlen) what has happened to the Godfather.  In effect, the man is a storyteller like the person imagined to narrate the tale to Grimm’s readers.  To tell the story is to critique a situation and explain it’s significance.

The house 

The Godfather’s house has five stories.  Of course, the house is infinitely lofty.  It has a story or level for everything in the world (cabbages, brooms and shovels) and everything that is not in the world (fish frying themselves and talking “dead fingers”).  The man might be forced to climb forever, passing through interminable levels, before meeting the godfather.  (This is how Kafka would imagine the ascent.)  The storyteller is more merciful and shows us only five levels in the godfather’s infinite domain.  Each level is linked by a verbal refrain: eine Treppe hoeher (“One flight higher”).   Grimm’s Maerchen often have little rhymes, nonsense refrains, or other archaic-sounding verbal formulae embedded in them: consider, for instance, the chant that causes Rapunzel to let down her hair or Rumpelstiltskin’s little song accompanying the childish game that he performs, hopping around his cottage.  “One flight higher” has the same function in “The Godfather”  – it’s like the ghastly refrain “there’s room for one more” in a myriad of ghost stories involving deadly elevators or planes about to fall out of the sky.  Eine Treppe hoeher, a gorgeous and sinister combination of long and short vowels, provides the storyteller with an opportunity to entertain his or her audience with a mini-aria, an occasion for the speaker to use a distorted voice or to improvise in basso profundo or falsetto tones.  

Is the Devil’s palace inside the city or outside of the gate in its walls?  I will leave that to you to work out.

The Broom and the Shovel

A broom and shovel are quarreling because they aren’t mere tools but actually a man and woman enchanted by the godfather.  Death or the Devil (the godfather) makes slaves of human beings.  The broom (a woman) and the shovel (a man) are, like all of us, instruments in the hands the godfather.

The Dead fingers

On the second level of Death’s mansion, dead fingers somehow speak.  The godfather later claims that the dead fingers are Skorzenerwurzel, that is, salsify root.  Salsify root is an edible vegetable sheathed in a mummy-brown peel or skin.  In European folk-medicine, salsify root was thought to have healing properties – it’s akin to the water that the godfather gives to the man to heal his patients.  Salsify heals snake-bite and is a remedy for heart problems.  Salsify is rooted in the earth – the idea of being “rooted” is intrinsic to the German world: Skorzenerwurzel or Skorzen-root.  Roots have magical characteristics because they spring from the dark loam of the earth.  The salsify root shows us that the godfather controls healing magic, but, also, eats the dead – the roots are thought to be “dead fingers” by the man.  Nonsense, the godfather says, this is just something that I eat.  Death eats people.  

The cabbage

On the third level of Death’s palace, the man encounters skulls that also tell him to seek the godfather “one flight higher”.  Later, the godfather explains that the skulls were really just heads of cabbage.  The palace, like Bluebeard’s castle, is full of corpses, dead and dismembered.  These corpses are the godfather’s fodder.  The godfather eats the dead, but, also, apparently can resurrect them, at least, to the extent that they are able to speak.  Cabbages grow on the surface of the earth – they are mundane, commonplace.  The Devil, as the father of lies, speaks to persuade the man that fragments of dismembered corpses revelatory of his true nature are really just the most humble and ubiquitous of vegetables, a fixture of every German root cellar and pantry.  Cabbages remind us that vegetation grows and, then, dies in a seasonal cycle.  As with the resurrected fingers (that are simultaneously roots), the godfather both kills, devours, and brings back to life.

The fish

On the fourth level of the godfather’s mansion, some fish are frying themselves.  This image invokes a whole spectrum of Maerchen wish-fulfilment motifs: Tisch-deck-dich (“Table set yourself”) is table that magically produces delicious food; in some tales, purses replenish their contents and, therefore, are always full of gold coins; a pot of porridge overflows and threatens to engulf the world with sweet mush; roast fowl offer themselves to be eaten; sausages dance merrily before they are devoured.  The godfather’s world involves eating and being eaten.  Fish come from depths.  They are pulled out of the dark, cold water.  What lurks in the depths is the ancient dream of the Land of Cockaigne, the Big Rock Candy Mountains, a place where the curse of Adam that man must work to earn his food no longer applies.  This is an ancient dream and one that is insidious.  Notice that the godfather refutes the man’s perceptions of the broom and shovel, the dead fingers, and the skulls.  But there is no refutation of the fish frying themselves, that is, the oldest and most pernicious of all wishes.  At the climax of the story, the fish appear in the godfather’s chambers on the fifth and highest level of the mansion, presenting themselves to be eaten.

The horns

When the man peeps into the forbidden room – he looks through a keyhole – he sees that the godfather has lange, lange Hoerner (long, long horns).  This is the final revelation in the Tower of Death, that is, that the godfather is the devil.  As it is often said, the devil’s best tool for enthralling men and women is to persuade us that he doesn’t exist.  In the tale, the devil modestly conceals his horns.  He climbs into bed, maybe to hide his hooves and scaley skin and forked tail.  Presumably, he wears a nightcap to conceal his horns.  The devil tells the man that his perceptions are all wrong.  Who are you gonna believe?  Me or your lying eyes.  Maybe, the man hallucinated the squabbling broom and shovel, the dead fingers, and the skulls.  But the fish are indisputably in the room, servants of the godfather, and offering themselves for his delectation.  The devil denies the existence of his horns, but we know that the horns are really there – just as the fish are present and ready to be eaten.  

The godfather’s furnishings

The five stories at the godfather’s house encompass everything in the world.  (Just as the man has asked everyone in the world to stand as his children’s godfathers).  All tools, as well as men and women who use those tools, are the property of the godfather who is death and the devil.  The sick, the ailing, those in need of healing by salsify root, the dead themselves are owned by the godfather.  The vegetables on the surface of the earth that are the staples of life are the godfather’s property as is the cycle of dying and reviving vegetation.  The abyss is the godfather’s and its depths and the denizens of those depths (dreams, fish, and the unconscious) are also his property.     

The source

“The Godfather” was published in 1812.  We know the story was collected from Amalie Hassenpflug the daughter of Huguenot emigrants to Hanau, Germany.  (Her father was a bureaucrat, a government official.)  Amalie was born in 1800 and so the Grimm brothers heard this profound and complex tale from a little girl.  How did she know the story? Presumably, the Devil told it to her.

The Third Edition

The Grimm brothers liked this story enough to reprint it in all of the editions of the Kinder- und Hausmaerchen that they published.  In their third edition, they made two minor amendments to the tale.  The formula describing the devil’s lange, lange Hoerner becomes a “pair of horns” or, simply, horns.  This isn’t an improvement.  The repetition of the word lange (itself a word that sounds like what it means) provide each horn with its own adjective: there are two uses of lange because the devil has two horns.  The other revision to the story also doesn’t improve it.  Wilhelm Grimm (the author of most of the changes to the book) tells us that the man lauft aus – that is, ran away at the end of the story.  Apparently, this is to allay the reader’s fears that the man has become another of the devil’s servants and, perhaps, even been eaten. I think its preferable for the reader (or listener) to be left pondering the fate of the man.  What happens to those who come face-to-face with the devil?

Outside the city gate

Why doesn’t the man notice the godfather’s long horns when he encounters him outside the city gates?  Of course, the devil goes in disguise so that we won’t recognize him.  But how did he accomplish this particular sleight-of-hand – that is, hiding his horns?  One of the best illustrators of the Grimm Maerchen was Otto Ubbelohde.  This German artist illustrated the definitive version of the tales, published in three volumes by the Turm Verlag in 1906.  Ubbelohde proves a simple and elegant solution to the problem of the godfather’s horns.  He depicts the man meeting the godfather outside the city gates.  The godfather is wearing a black, peaked sorcerer’s hat, presumably to conceal his horns.  

On Elvis Presley's Heart

 

It was curious.  When music signaled the end of Helmut Kaeutner’s Port of Freedom, it seemed to me that I had known the tune all my life.  Yet, I had never seen the 1944 German film before watching it on DVD a month ago.  

In the movie, a handsome sailor, who has loitered too long in Hamburg’s waterfront brothels, resolves that he will return to the sea.  After a night of drinking, the sailor and two buddies stagger out onto the infamous Reeperbahn in the city’s red light district.  The hero played by German matinee idol, Hans Albers, has an accordion strapped across his chest.  The scene is suffused in the warm, amber tones of Hitlerzeit Agfacolor, the German equivalent to Hollywood’s technicolor in film’s like Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz.  In the buttery light of the whorehouse lamplight, the men move slowly at first, a bit hesitantly, but, then, the hero lifts the sagging squeeze-box in his arms and begins to play a jaunty melody.  The song inspires the protagonist’s comrades and they lift their chins and square their shoulders and, as the melody continues, they march toward the ship waiting for them in the harbor.  The tune has inspired them, given them fresh courage, and, in the movie’s last shot, we see the hero, ennobled on a towering sailing ship.  He is piloting the vessel and a great wheel, as large as the wheels on a hay wain or covered wagon, is pressed against his breast as he steers the ship.  

Critics say that Kaeutner’s Port of Freedom, known in Germany as Die Grosse Freiheit # 7 (“Great Freedom #7" – it’s a street address), is a movie uncontaminated by the political poison of the Nazi era.  The film is an accomplished melodrama about a sailor becalmed in Hamburg’s brothels.  The sailor, Hannes Kroeger (Hans Albers) is entrusted with the guardianship of a beautiful young woman seduced and, then, abandoned by his dying reprobate brother.  Kroeger brings the girl, shunned by the villagers in the small hamlet where she lives, to Hamburg, paying for her room in a boarding house in St. Pauli, near the brothel district where the hero performs nightly as a “singing sailor” in cabaret.  Kroeger has a frowsy, middle-aged whore for his girlfriend.  He’s middle-aged as well, probably in his mid-forties.  Of course, Kroeger falls in love with the girl, misunderstands some remarks that she has made, and, enthusiastically, plans a life together with her.  But, in fact, the girl loves another and, at the end of the movie, she rejects Kroeger’s proposal, sending him into an enraged drinking binge.  The scene involving the memorable melody occurs in the penultimate shot of the film as Kroeger returns to his true calling as a seaman.  

Port of Freedom is a brilliantly written and very precisely made film.  It’s a bit like a German version of Casablanca without the spies, but ending, like the American picture, with an affirmation of male friendship in the face of romantic tribulation.  Like Casablanca, Kaeutner’s film involves some famous musical numbers, particularly an indelible version of “La Paloma” sung by Albers.  Port of Freedom is decidedly adult with frank dialogue and several risque sequences – German pictures of that era were considerably more candid than their American counterparts since  Nazi cinema was not afflicted by the Hays Code.  Indeed, in some respects, the brothel and cabaret sequences have a decadent Weimar era flavor and parts of the movie seem to anticipate similar pictures that Rainer Werner Fassbinder would direct thirty years later.  Although the movie was made under difficult circumstances, there’s little trace of the chaos of bombings and mass murder engulfing Germany at the time of the film’s production.  (Location shooting in Hamburg became impossible when the city was fire-bombed resulting in about 35,000 casualties due to the air raids in the summer of 1943.  Production was transferred to Berlin but halted there as well due to aerial attacks.  The movie was finally completed at the Barradanov Studios in Prague – it wasn’t shown in Germany during the war because of censor’s concerns about its brothel milieu and because there were ultimately no movie theaters in which to project the film.)  Some film historians remark that Port of Freedom is apolitical, imagining Hamburg as exempt from the ferocity of the war raging in Europe.  As we shall see, this is untrue.

The accordion melody at the end of the movie triggered an Ohrwurm in my imagination.  I recalled the song from an American version, but couldn’t put words or an artist to it.  Nonetheless, I seemed to hear in my mind’s ear lyrics about having a broken heart, indeed, something to the effect of an admonition by the singer “not to break my heart.”  But words that I summoned to mind didn’t exactly fit the cadences of the melody and I was puzzled by the fact that I knew the music, but couldn’t recall where or when I had heard it.

In 1960 or 1961, my family moved from New Jersey to Minnesota.  We lived in New Brighton, a suburb to St. Paul and my father worked as an Operations Analyst for a defense contractor, Honeywell.  My father was close to his eldest sister, Rosemary, an English teacher in St. Peter about 80 miles to the southwest of Minneapolis.  (When an unexpected pregnancy forced the marriage of my parents, high school sweethearts from a tiny town in central Nebraska, Rosemary and her husband helped the newly weds, found my father summer work at a State Park in the panhandle of that state, and, generally, acted as benefactors to the couple.)  Every other weekend, my parents drove down to St. Peter where we visited Aunt Rose in her apartment on the ground floor of a dormitory at Gustavus Adolphus College. Rose’s husband, Howard Mickelson was the Dean of Men on campus; my grandmother, Helen Beckmann lived with my Aunt and was also employed by the college, a prestigious and expensive Lutheran school – she worked as a House Mother in one of the dormitories for women on campus.  I don’t know exactly what my parents did during these visits.  I recall that we usually arrived in time for Sunday dinner, the big meal served at noon after Church, and, usually involving mashed potatoes with gravy, pot roast, and jello.  In the afternoon, I think my father watched football games or baseball depending upon the season with “Mick” Mickelson.  The kids were set free to walk down the big hill from the college perched overlooking the river valley to St. Peter’s Main Street.  There was a movie theater that showed matinees in the early afternoon and we often went to the show.  

The theater was jammed with kids and so loud that it was hard to hear the dialogue on-screen.  Grade-school children ran back and forth in the theater and teased one another and I don’t recall any adults supervising the chaos.  Ordinarily, the show began with a cartoon and, then, a serial.  The serials were either set in the West or outer space.  In the outer space serials, people wore ridiculous costumes with turtle-neck collars and marched around to theremin music on cardboard sets; sometimes, flying discs wobbling on wires that were supposed to be invisible moved across painted backdrops of stars and spiral galaxies.  The serials were old and badly frayed and, sometimes, the pictures were scuffed to the point of being almost invisible.  The Westerns showed men in ten-gallon hats menacing one another on stages that were supposed to represent saloons or pioneer cabins.  In between confrontations, stock footage of posses racing across the plains were intercut into the action.  The overwhelming impression created by these serial films was one of decay; even, today I recall these films as being so dusty that the images were filling up, it seemed, with fine grit and silt and were abrasive to the eye.  

The main feature was usually an Elvis Presley movie.  These pictures produced in me an aversion to Elvis Presley that lasted until I was about forty years old.  In Presley’s movies of this era, the singer plays a hillbilly with courtly southern manners who is always getting into fist fights. He woos an ingenue, usually a would-be sex symbol (I think Ann-Margaret is featured in one of his movies), and there is generally a burly rival for the girl’s affection.  Predictably, Presley ends up with the girl by the end of the movie.  Along the way, there are usually half-dozen songs performed by the singer.  The songs are like the fist fights or rodeo scenes or race car sequences: they are interpolated into the romance plot as digressions.  As a little kid, I thought these movies were detestable – I’m not sure as to reason for my animus; my father was a Dixieland jazz fan and disapproved of Elvis Presley although he was, more or less, a contemporary with the singer, and I think some element of father’s distaste colored my attitude toward these movies.  But, objectively, the pictures are, indeed, pretty bad.

After the movie, we would walk back up the hill to the apartment in the dorm.  Sometimes, local kids would harass us and, on a couple of occasions, I recall that we got beat up.  The terrace in front of the dormitory was also perilous.  Sometimes, the college kids drunk in their dorm rooms would pitch beer bottles at us, dropping them down from their high-rise rooms.  It was all pretty scary and, I think, the contrast between Elvis’ heroic fisticuffs and our cowardly escapes from the local bullies also affected my experience of the afternoon matinees in St. Peter.  

In those days, first-run movies reached St. Peter about a year after they had been released in New York or Hollywood.  Elvis Presley’s G. I Blues was shot in April 1960 and released in November of that year.  The film probably played in St. Peter in the Fall of 1961 or, even, later – perhaps the Summer of ‘62.   I suspect that I saw the movie in a rambunctious mob of children and teenagers at the theater on Main Street.  I don’t specifically remember the movie.  All of the pictures starring Elvis in those days were, more or less, interchangeable.  I have seen parts of G.I. Blues in the last decade, at the time that my daughter was briefly obsessed with Elvis and so collected all of his movies.  G. I. Blues is weirdly meta-textual.  A handsome soldier, Tulsa, is stationed at an American military base near Frankfurt.  Tulsa (Presley) has heard a song on the radio called “Blue Suede Shoes” performed by an artist named “Elvis Presley”.  Inspired by the music, and Presley’s success, Tulsa schemes to raise money to open a night-club, a business plan he hopes to implement after his discharge from the military.  At the time the movie was made, Elvis Presley was, indeed, enlisted in the army and had been stationed in Germany.  (He was nearing the end of his two-year stint when the Department of Defense cooperated in the film’s production – the movie was deemed good for recruitment.)  In the picture, Tulsa is competing with a buddy, betting that he can seduce the icy virgin, Lily (Juliette Prowse) before his comrade.  Of course, Tulsa falls in love with Lily and a romance ensues.  Vintage advertising for the film proclaims that it features “ten new songs” performed by its star.  One of those songs is a jaunty tune called “Wooden Heart”.

In the picture, Tulsa and Lily embark on a river cruise identified as the Duesseldorf - Cologne line.  The movie is shot in technicolor and simulates Germany with extensive, and unconvincing, rear-projection – high bluffs with ruined castles, barges plying the mighty Rhine.  On the river-cruiser, Lily points out grafitti carved into a wooden table, a heart enclosing the words “Fritz liebt Ema”.  Lily and Tulsa discuss the meaning of the word “lieben” and the G.I. says that “it’s first word GIs learn here – “ich liebe Sauerkraut.”  Lily says that she’s not “sauerkraut.”  Tulsa tells her that she has many nicknames, including “cold potato” and “the original fish eye.”  Lily says that she’ll have to accept those epithets as compliments.  

Juliet Prowse who plays Lily was primarily famous for her gams – “the best legs since Betty Grable.”  She’s a bit homely in the film, apple-cheeked with squinty eyes and a perpetually forced smile, speaking with a fake German accent.  (In fact, she was a Brit, born in Bombay and raised in South Africa.)  In G.I Blues, her appeal is hampered by the role – she’s forced to play the wholesome girl next door.  In fact, she was sexually provocative in other parts: in Can-Can, featuring her famous legs, she offended Nikita Krushchev when he visited the set by performing a suggestive dance for the Soviet premiere.  At that time, she was having an affair with Frank Sinatra.  She was sleeping with Elvis during the production of G.I. Blues but the affair was concealed – already Presley was a victim of his fame and unable to leave his hotel room without being swarmed by fans; the starlet was insulted that they had to hide in his suite.  (Prowse was later a fixture on TV; she was badly mauled twice by a leopard and her ear had to be reattached by plastic surgeons – the gig with the cat was some kind of publicity stunt that went badly awry.  She died at 59 of pancreatic cancer.)

After disembarking from the river cruise, Tulsa and Lily attend a puppet show.  Again the “meta” self-reflexive aspects of the script are on display: the puppets are an American G.I. courting a German Maedchen.  When the puppet master tries to play a record on a phonograph, the device fails – it’s “kaputt” as the old man tells Tulsa.  The hero has heard enough of the song before the phonograph’s failure to be able to improvise lyrics on the tune.  Tulsa enters the puppet theater and performs “Wooden Heart” serenading the marionette of the German Jungfer.  The words to the refrain always end with “ ‘Cause I don’t have a wooden heart...,” that is, “If you say goodbye / Maybe I would cry / ‘Cause I don’t have a wooden heart.”  After singing a couple stanzas to the puppet in English, Tulsa, then, sings in German, repeating the words “Muss i denn, muss i denn” with other lyrics as the children in audience sing along. The girl’s puppet-father appears at the end of the song and bops Tulsa on the head with a toy cane.  The spectacle of Elvis Presley singing a love song to a dirndl-clad puppet (the doll has twin pony-tails like “Wendy”, the inspiration for the burger franchise) is dispiriting.   Elvis is pretty as a picture with unbelievable smooth and white skin (he has a better and softer complexion than Juliet Prowse), but the situation is humiliating for the King of Rock and Roll.  Nonetheless, G.I. Blues was successful at the box-office – the 14th highest grossing picture in the year of its release – the song “Wooden Heart” was released as both a single and on the LP featuring music from the movie.  On the single and LP, the song is credited to a number of writers and said to be arranged by Bert Kaempfert, a prominent German pop composer and bandleader in the late fifties and early sixties.  

Of course, “Wooden Heart” is the tune that bored its way into my ear after I heard the melody in Port of Freedom.  The song is called Muss i denn in Swabian German, although it has a more descriptive formal name: Abscheid, that is, “Departure.”  In its present form, the melody was first published in 1827 in an arrangement by Friedrich Silcher.  In the sheet music, the song is set for four male voices with piano accompaniment.  Silcher said that the tune originated in Wurttemburg and was very old.  (Silcher was prominent collector of German folk songs and arranged many of them – he is most famous for his setting of Heinrich Heine’s ballad “Die Lorelei”, and, also, well-known for the plaintive war song “Ich hatte ein’ Kameraden” – “I had a comrade” or “The Good Comrade,” a military lament for a fallen soldier frequently played at German armed services funerals.)  The lyrics of Muss i denn involve an apprentice leaving his sweetheart for his mandatory Wanderjahr – that is, the apprentice setting out to practice his trade for other masters in other parts of the country so as to demonstrate his proficiency as an artisan.  The Wanderjahr was an important aspect of German vocational training in the medieval and early modern eras and the song represents an apprentice bidding farewell to his girlfriend.  The apprentice promises to return and marry his sweetheart; he tells her that he will resist the temptations of other women and that she should wait for him to return when “the grapes are ripe for cutting:” Muss i denn, muss i denn / Zum Staedele heraus, zum Staedele heraus/ Und du, mein Schatz, bleib hier (Must I now, must I now/ To the village then, to the village, then / And you, my dear, stay here...” – some translations are more prosaic and vernacular: Muss i denn becomes “Gotta go.’)

Helmut Kaeutner’s Port of Freedom is said to be uncontaminated with militarism.  This is almost true.  But, in context, the folk song Muss i denn would have carried some martial implications.  The song was well-known as a capstan-shanty, that is, a work song frequently heard in the German merchant marine.  The idea of the apprentice setting out on his year-long sabbatical Wanderjahre is cognate with the notion of a sailor leaving his girlfriend to return to the sea – the context in Port of Freedom.  The song was also played as a quick-step march in the Imperial German navy.  As the sailors in Port of Freedom take heart at the thought of returning to the sea, they increase their pace and, in fact, end up marching toward their ship.  Furthermore, there are obvious parallels with military service in general.  The notion of duty is encoded in the song in the repeated words Muss i denn – that is “I must now” depart for war. 

The military significance of the tune is confirmed by Marlene Dietrich’s version of Muss i denn appearing as a B-side on the singer’s recording of “Lili Marlene”. “Lili Marlene” is another departure or “Abscheid” song, much more famous than Muss i denn.  The song, based on a poem by Hans Leip (set by Norbert Schultze), portrays a young soldier, conscripted into the army, bidding farewell to his sweetheart, probably a prostitute, who is waiting for him under a street lamp near the barracks.  The song was extremely popular with both German and Allied soldiers and, often, performed by Dietrich during her USO tours during the Second World War.  Both “Lili Marlene” and Muss i denn represent men renouncing (or, at least, deferring) love in favor of service.  Elvis is in uniform in G. I Blues when he sings “Wooden Heart”.  In context, a German audience in 1944 would have interpreted the song Muss i denn as a summons to return to the Front.  Love is all well and good in peace-time, but during war, we must be made of sterner stuff.  The history of humanity would be different if young men renounced war to pursue sex.  But, for some inexplicable reason, duty is accorded more value than love.  And, so, it has always been. 

The Munsters

 Rob Zombie's Netflix-produced The Munsters is either a daring and subversive experimental film or one of the worst movies ever made.  It's not beyond the possibility that the film is both.

A few days ago, I saw Criss Cross with Burt Lancaster and Yvonne de Carlo.  At the end of the film, the villain fires several bullets into Lancaster and his moll, Annie, played by Yvonne de Carlo.  An inserted shot shows the dead actress sprawled across Lancaster's lap, a Baroque posture that recalls images of the Pieta, albeit with the gender reversed.  Sixteen years later, the actress, now a bit matronly, played Lily Munster on TV, costumed in middle-European garments, skin whiter than white, vampire white with long black hair, featuring a Susan Sontag-like streak of silver above her exotically made-up eyes.  The Munsters,, also featuring Al Lewis as the macabre "Grandpa"(with his dragster "Dragula") and Fred Gwynne as the grotesque pater-familias Herman Munster, was probably a pretty bad show, but I recall it with warmth -- the program lasted only two seasons (wiped out by being broadcast opposite Batman during its second series) but Tv casts and crews were hardworking in those days:  seventy shows were produced over the two-year run and ,in 1966, a movie called Munster Go Home was released to little acclaim.  Fred Gwynne wore four-inch asphalt-spreader shoes and had his face painted bright violet so that it would register as a ghastly tint, possibly green, on the black-and-white TV screen.  The series' theme song was excellent, someone noted later that it sounded like Bernard Herrmann channeled through Duane Eddy -- it's a prototype for Danny Elfman's compositions in the eighties, sounding a bit like the theme to The Simpsons.  The tune is so good that it effectively serves as the climax for the re-boot by Rob Zombie.  

Zombie's movie is a prequel to the 1964-1965 TV show.  The plot involves the courtship between Lily, the Grandpa-vampire's daughter, and Herman Munster.  Munster has been built from pieces of cadavers assembled by Count Orlock -- as the name implies, this figure is a rat-like vampire with pointed ears, fangs, and red eyes modeled on the monster in Nosferatu.  Igor, Orlock's assistant, is told to steal the brain of a nuclear physicist, recently deceased and resting in a local morgue.  Instead, he takes the cerebellum of the scientist's twin brother, who happened to die on the same day and ended-up in the same morgue.  The twin brother was a sort of Borscht-belt comedian, specializing in awful puns.  It's his brain that occupies Herman Munster's flat-topped skull and, of course, the mix-up results in the monster spouting terrible jokes and, then, braying loudly at his own jests.  As on the TV show, Herman Munster, who is hideous, believes himself to be movie-star handsome and is an endearing, goofy naif.  Munster woos Lily notwithstanding Grandpa's virulent objections.  (One of the film's better jokes is a sixties-style musical number in which Herman and Lily massacre Sonny and Cher's "You got me, Babe.")  The couple get married and honeymoon in Paris, a place that is shown as voluptuously beautiful and that the honeymooners disdain.  (A running gag in the movie, as in the TV show, is the Munster's complete inversion of aesthetic values  -- they regard the ugly as beautiful and the beautiful as disturbingly hideous.)  Herman gets schnookered by Lily's shady brother-in-law who is a werewolf in debt to a sinister gypsy named Zoya.  Herman signs over the family's vast and oppressive castle to Zoya as part of a business deal with the werewolf.  Evicted from their home in Transylvania, the family has to decamp to Mockingbird Heights (near Hollywood), where they buy a decaying Victorian mansion at 1313 Mockingbird Street, the address where the monsters lived in the TV series.  The Munsters move into their home on Halloween and are duly impressed by their neighbors who seem to all be horrible-looking ghouls and zombies.  In the morning, they find that their neighborhood is full of yuppies, all of them blonde and wholesome, with their perfect little families.  The Munsters are horrified but, in the spirit of the Civil Rights movement, decide that what matters about people is not how they look, but the quality of their characters -- and, so, they persevere, avowing that they will try to become good members of the community.  Herman gets a job man-handling corpses at the local mortuary and the film ends with a pastiche of the opening theme song and sequence from the TV show, complete with Herman busting clumsily through the front door with Lily and Grandpa following.  (In this show, there's no trace of the vampire child, Eddie Munster, nor do we see Marilyn Munster, the family's "normal-looking", indeed, glamorous daughter, who is, however, the subject of her parents sympathy, because she is so ugly.)  The movie is a bit like several of the TV shows patched together -- it's episodic with sequences that don't really connect with the main plot:  for instance, in Paris, Herman and Lily go into the sewers to capture a labrador-sized monster that has been terrorizing people.  The sewers are a great set and the monster is effectively designed, but this part of the movie is a complete dead-end.  I don't think these sorts of effects are accidental; Rob Zombie seems to be interested in duplicating the stuttering stop-and-start rhythm of sixties sit-coms.

Zombie's film is shot in color on completely stylized and artificial sets -- it looks like a garish technicolor version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  Everything is expressionistic and lit with bizarre flares of orange and violet light until the family reaches Mockingbird Lane -- there the exteriors are shot in natural light, but the colors remain heightened and lurid.  The dialogue is consistently completely idiotic and revolves around terrible puns.  There's a lot of clumsy slapstick.  Curiously, except for a minute or so of off-color (and homophobic) jesting, the film is completely chaste and conforms to the limitations of sit-com TV in the 1960's.  The viewer experiences the curious feeling of continuously disappointed expectations endemic to watching sit-coms in the era and, even, through the mid-eighties -- scenes are set up for something terrible or disturbingly violent or erotic to occur, but TV standards and practices always thwart the viewers' prurient desires.  Nothing really violent or sexual can be shown and, so, these shows operate on the basis of audience desires that are endlessly deferred.  Zombie's ambition is to replicate the sensibility that animated the Munsters and other shows of its kind (Batman and The Addams Family as well as Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie) and he mostly succeeds.  But whether this is an objective worthy of being achieved is unclear to me -- why exactly would you want to precisely imitate dreck that was wholly disposable when it was made more than fifty years ago?  In this regard, the movie has a distinctly avant-garde flavor -- it's single-mindedly pursues objectives that are pointless although dauntingly difficult to achieve.  After all, there's been a lot of "water over the dam" since 1965. 

The picture is spectacular.  The colors are bright to the point of producing head-aches.  Many of the film's big productions sequences are startlingly well-staged.  For example, when Herman marries Lily, she is brought to the chapel -- in a graveyard -- of course, in a spectacular white hearse with roaring gilded lions on its side.  She emerges from her cream-colored casket in diaphanous white mermaid robes and her bridal veil is decorously lifted by big, mouse-faced bats.  The vows are pronounced by a cartoon-style robot, apparently made of square pieces of cardboard, and Butch Patrick, who played Eddie in 1965, provides the voice-over.  When the robot has completed the vows, he bursts into flames and Lily says "Better call 911" -- Herman mutters "Car 54 where are you?" referencing an earlier TV series in which Fred Gwynne and Al Lewis performed together as feckless New York cops.  The dialogue is ridiculous and the show has nothing even approaching acting -- the characters just ham it up for the camera.  However, the images are so bizarre and beautiful that, perhaps, the movie could be watched with some pleasure with sound simply turned off.  The movie begins with a rather scary scene in which a monstrous undead composer stalks around -- I don't have any idea what this opening sequence is supposed to mean and it's not convincingly linked to the rest of the movie.  On the evidence of the credits, the film was entirely shot in Hungary, apparently on large sound-stages there and, perhaps, this accounts for some of the movie's rococo aspects.   

  

On a performance at the Austin VFW

On Saturday afternoon, Rayce Hardy sent me an email telling me that J Keyser was playing that evening at the VFW Club.  You may remember that Sena lived with Rayce for a few years.  He’s still teaching economics at the Community College and I encounter him from time to time.  Rayce said that Keyser, whom I haven’t seen since a funeral last Autumn, about a year ago, was going to play with some local musicians and was scheduled to start at about 9:00 pm.  I left the house about 8:10 and walked downtown.  The streets were strangely silent – no cars and no one outside, except one lady walking a little white dog in the gloom.  I cut across some parking lots and, then, followed Main Street down to the SPAM museum where I walked past the bronze statue of the farmer with the two fat pigs and, then, crossed the vacant lot next to the new Courthouse and Law Enforcement Center.  A man and woman were standing in the vacant lot, in the middle of grassy lawn – for what purpose, I didn’t know.  On the windowless west wall of the VFW, there was a big banner that said WELCOME PACELLI CLASS OF 1970.  There were a couple of tables near the front door where people were sitting.  I found Keyser at a fold-up picnic table near a second bar (the place is set up to serve from two locations) facing the stage.  The VFW is a big single room about 30 foot by 80 with a stage pushed up against the corner farthest away from the entry.  The toilets occupy a kind of wooden shed or lean-to up against one of the inside walls.  Next to the humble bandstand, there are plaques with pictures showing past commanders of the VFW dating back to the thirties.  Several flags are stashed along the wall and there’s a big wooden cabinet lit from within that displays about eight carbine rifles  – these are the guns that are used to fire salutes at military funerals in town.  There’s usually a white drift of pull-tabs under the stools around the horseshoe-shaped bar, but they had been cleaned up for the Pacelli Class Reunion.  It was about 8:30 and I didn’t see any signs of the Pacelli reunion.  Steve, J’s son, told me that the Pacelli folks has vamoosed when the house band began to play – that is, around 8 pm.  The place was fairly busy, about half-full and the hard-core music fans were seated at some more white picnic tables across the dance-floor from where the band was playing.  

Keyser knew the musicians from way back.  The leader of the house-band is Mark Conway, a guitarist that used to play with Keyser many, many years ago, when I followed the Austin music scene.  In those days, around 1982, Keyser fronted the town’s dominant band called “Shapes”, I think, and they played just about every weekend in one of the seven taverns downtown that featured live music.  Mark Conway and his wife Paulette were also in “Shapes” as was Randy Broughton who later became the steel guitar player for the Gear Daddies.  In those days, the Gear Daddies were learning their trade in the Austin bars; Brad Zellar traded off his with his brother, Marty, singing lead vocals at the old Leisure Bar.  (They still sometimes perform in this way – Marty and Brad both appeared at the Women’s Club of Minneapolis, a dignified auditorium just off Loring Park downtown, last Tuesday and Wednesday.)  Conway is a good guitar player and the house band featured Matt Gosha as drummer. (Matt Gosha was Sena’s drummer when she performed with her father in Plan B.)  The house band has a superb steel guitar player, a rough-looking dude with a boozy red face, a mouth full of broken and rotting teeth, and greasy hair.  I didn’t know this guy although I talked to him later after Keyser’s gig.

Keyser was wearing his trademark black John B. Stetson hat.  He looked pretty good.  Of course, he has huge watery lemur eyes.  About twelve years ago, he was diagnosed with hyper-sensitivity to chemicals and had to quit his day-job which was providing tech support at a parochial school in Richfield.  Keyser told me that he had to to go outside to get some fresh-air.  By this, he meant that someone’s perfume nearby was bothering him and so we went outdoors to sit at a table in parking lot.  Some old Austin musicians talked to Keyser in the parking lot where they were smoking.  One of them had a little case full of “harps”, that is, harmonicas, but he said they were all broken.  Keyser’s car isn’t working and so, Steven, his son, had to drive him to the gig from St. Paul where he lives.  Keyser has had some health problems – he had COVID and was very sick (he’s an anti-vaxxer and so wasn’t boosted); then, he fell out of his bed and broke some ribs.  It was sort of cold in the parking lot, maybe about 45 degrees, and, after awhile, we went back inside. Keyser wanted to talk to me about de Tocqueville, an obsessive passion with him, and he delayed going on-stage so he could tell me about his most recent discoveries reading this writer.  About six months earlier, I had participated in a ZOOM conference with Keyser in which we discussed de Tocqueville’s book about France before the revolution – the book is called The Ancien Regime.  (J Keyser is important to me for several reasons, but, perhaps, most importantly because he taught me how to read Plato.)  People were summoning Keyser to the stage and, so, he reluctantly went up on the bandstand with Conway and the others.  J is fussy about sound and he spent five or six minutes adjusting microphones and doing checks on the amplification.  Then, he began to play.  

Julie bought me a purse for my birthday and, so, I was carrying it across my hip.  I’m no longer allowed to keep my wallet, moleskin, and phone in my pockets.  Instead, I have to carry them in my man-purse.  This makes me uncomfortable, but what can a girl do?  I was a little uncomfortable but no one seemed to notice the purse, even when I dug around in it to find money for the beer that I had ordered.  A woman named Kelsey R– (I once represented her on personal injuries from a car crash) was seated at our table along with the Superintendent of Schools.  The Supe has a villain moustache in a style circa 1895 with villainously curling tips.  Somehow, he knew Kelsey and was chatting with her.  Kelsey seemed to be on a date with Manicoochi, a well-known drag-queen here in Austin.  Manicoochi (whose cis-name is Dylan) had a big blonde bee-hive hairdo, was heavily made-up with garish lipstick and eye-shadow, and was wearing a sensible-looking pants-suit, the sort of thing that Mrs. Clinton might favor.  I guess my man-purse was not too noticeable next to the flamboyant Manicoochi.

Keyser played a couple of songs including one of my favorites “The True Story of Billy the Kid”, a tune with an elaborate, brooding flamenco-style introduction.  But he wasn’t satisfied with the sound and kept demanding that Rayce Hardy turn him up.  He did another sound-check before performing his signature song “I Believe”.  Rayce told me that J kept turning up his volume in response to Mark Conway who was also matching, and, even, exceeding his amplification.  So the music kept getting louder and louder, an irritant to some in the bar because the VFW is a convivial place where old alcoholics gather to discuss the events of the day and sociable conversations of that kind are not possible when musicians are dueling to increase their amplification.  Rayce said: “Mark turns up and, then, Keyser turns up and so it goes.”  I replied to Rayce: “Well, they’ve been doing this for fifty years.”  And, to my amazement, that statement wasn’t even an exaggeration.  For fifty years, on and off, Mark Conway and J Keyser have been playing together and they aren’t really friends, more rivals, and, as a result, they have spent a half-century of gigs trying to out-amp one another.  

Keyser sounded rusty although he remains a phenomenal guitar player.  He did a great version of “Tom Thumb Blues” – a song that first appeared, I think, on Highway 61 Revisited.  “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez / And its Easter time too ... Don’t put on any airs when you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue / They’ve got some hungry women there and they’ll make a mess out of you...”  Keyser used to play this song with some searing guitar solos at the old Loading Dock in Austin, at the Colonial, and Smith’s Royal Bar aka The Shady Lady, on the stage in the loft above Marvin’s Gardens that he shared, sometimes, with strippers and, needless, to say the music brought back a lot of memories, not all of them happy or unalloyed with grief.  Although he can still play with weirdly effective reverb and distortion, Keyser messed up on several of the cues, botched the bridge on the tune, and forgot some lyrics.  It didn’t matter.  The song is great even in ruins and I was glad to hear it played.  The VFW is a haunt for old alkies and the place empties out pretty quickly after about 10:30 and, so, when Keyser was done playing at 11:15 pm, most of the audience had gone.  The drag queen left at 10:30 with Kelsey and the educators all went home to bed at 11:00 and, pretty soon, it was just me and a half-dozen giddy and drunk girls who had wandered in from some tavern on Main Street, a couple of Mexican dudes with big ten-gallon hats who were buying drinks for the steel guitar player, Rayce Hardy and three or four old men who seemed to have no place to go.  Mark Conway took the stage again and began another set, playing to an empty room – without having to compete with J, he sounded more alert, louder, and more clear and the steel guitar cut through like a knife.  

J was chatting up some woman, maybe, an old flame from forty-five years ago.  She was wearing dark glasses even though it was now pretty gloomy in the bar.  The staff had shut off most of the lights except on the stage and, in that corner of the tavern, the only illumination came from the funeral-rifles lit as if by candles in their wooden gun cabinet.  I said goodbye and walked out the front door, crossing the empty lot next to the cop-shop on the diagonal.  It was about 11:30 and I was glad to see that downtown was alive.  Hispanic guys in pick-ups were cruising Main Street and there was a roar of amplified Mariachi music coming out of Mexican cantina squeezed in between the financial planner’s offices and the accounting firm.  There were people wandering around and cops were on patrol and the whole place had a vaguely festive aspect, a bit like a working class neighborhood in Mexico City.  (When I was with Gabriel in Mexico City, actually Coyoacan, we ate at blue-collar joint with big black and white pictures of movie stars from the golden age of Azteca and Churrubusca Studios, people like Cantinflas and Ranchero stars whose names I didn’t know, strong cowboy-types, and, of course Dolores del Rio and Katy Jurado.  The place had concrete floors and looked like it had once been a car body repair shop and the waitresses had sinister tattoos, but it was lively and something about the scene on Main Street in Austin at 11:30 pm reminded me of the place.)  

A few blocks away from Main Street, among the churches, it was quiet again.  A cat crossed my path.  I remembered all the nights I had spent listening to J Keyser and Mark Conway and their band, now forty years ago, the icy cold nights when the sidewalks were slick and the hot nights, particularly in some of the old bars that didn’t have functioning air conditioning, the people fighting in parking lots, the alleyways between the taverns – you could go out one joint’s backdoor and cross a narrow alley under a yellow light bulb, a place like someone’s basement with wet walls and garbage stacked-up next to the bricks, and enter the next bar only twenty feet away and, in all those bars, there were young people, just kids, with live music playing, the rooms all dense with blue, smoky air.  My whole life was ahead of me then.  Nothing was known for sure; everything was just a possibility, just something latent concealed in between the lyrics of the songs and the guitar licks.  It seemed that life would go on forever and that the future was endless.

On the sidewalk, a lamp casts a shadow through a fragile, freshly planted sapling.  The pattern of shadow-leaves and shadow-branches is very neat and precise.  On my block, it’s still.  In the house, my old dog is too stiff to greet me.  She just looks up from the couch where she is sleeping.  The rooms are empty and cluttered.  Julie is asleep upstairs.  I’m too excited to go right to bed and, so, I watch the ending of an old film noir, Criss Cross (1949) with Burt Lancaster and Yvonne de Carlo.  The lovers are cornered in an shadowy cottage, backed up against the glittering expanse of the Pacific shot day-for-night in velvety black-and-white.  The bad guy barges into the cottage and guns down the lovers. Then, we hear sirens and flashing lights register on the screen and the title The End appears.  

In another context, T.S. Eliot said “Life is very long” – he’s actually citing Joseph Conrad's Captain Lingard from The Outcast of the Islands.  My dear readers, however old you might be, remember that you have your whole life ahead of you and that you can make a difference in things.  “Life is very long” until it’s not.  But you have so much possibility ahead of you so don’t despair.