January 21, 2007 - January 27, 2007

Faulkner Nobel Speech

William Faulkner hated giving speeches. He once said, "I'm just a farmer who likes to tell stories." But on December 10, 1950, he went to Stockholm, Sweden to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This is his entire acceptance speech:

"I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work--a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.

"Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

"Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

Posted by Jim Walsh at January 26, 2007 2:56 PM | Comments (2)

Go, Litel Bok

Ladies and Gentlemen, members of the jury.

Those of my trade, we are like the badger or the mole.

We work alone in darkness, guided by tiny

candles which we do not share, sweating to give birth

to replacement planets where things happen which don't.

And sometimes the hard jigsaw becomes a picture

and not a car accident. More rarely we place

our fingers adroitly on the frets or keyboard

and multitudes plummet through the small white trapdoor

which bears our hieroglyphs. Then we are taken up

into the blaze and shout of the conurbations

to make words in the air and strike the strange pose

from the clothing catalogue. But sometimes we see

a swallow in wintertime. And the talking horse

and the sad girl and the village under the sea

descend like stars into a land of long evenings

and radically different vegetables

and a flex is run from our hearts into the hearts

of those who do not know the meanings of the words

cardigan and sleet. And there is no finer pudding.

Now I am like that cow in the nursery rhyme.

The fire I have felt beneath your shirts. This surprisingly large

slab of Perspex. Your hands are on me. But this man

is another man. The clock chimes, my pumpkin waits

and the frog drums his gloved fingers on the dashboard.

May the god whose thoughts are like a tent of white light

above the laundry and the pigeons of this town

walk always by your side. My burrow calls. Good night.

-Mark Haddon

Posted by Jim Walsh at January 25, 2007 9:42 PM | Comments (0)

Harriet

I am sitting on the carpeted floor of my family's new apartment in Palo Alto, California, drinking a lukewarm bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. It is Friday, Sept. 27th, 2002, my daughter's fourth birthday. She is bouncing around the room hopped-up on cake and ice cream and attention and is 90 minutes away from a full-blown melt-down. She is wearing the present my wife got her, a Dorothy costume from "The Wizard Of Oz," the new poster of which is tacked up on the wall, the new video of which is playing on the television.

Minnesota-born singer Judy Garland is looking more Technicolor radiant than ever this evening, singing as she so often has to so many dreamers her song about flying over the rainbow to a place that she's heard of once in a lullaby. In an hour or so, she will click her ruby red slippers--just like my daughter's, her third pair--and incant to the room that there's no place like home.

It is 9 p.m. I have just finished my first week of classes as a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, where I have been ruminating on the words of great scholars, authors, philosophers, scientists, sociologists, and journalists, and trying to figure out my own version of journalism's Five W's: Who I am and What I'm doing and Where I'm going and Why I'm here and When I might ever feel like writing about music again or, more precisely, if I will ever have anything interesting to say about music again. I am hanging with a dozen of my fellow students and new neighbors who have gathered in our apartment to celebrate the birthdays of Helen and our friend Huang Wen, a photojournalist from Beijing. I am wearing blue jeans, a Jayhawks T-shirt, and the bifocals I got this year.

I am a long way from home, but not as far away as Wen's new husband, Xiaoying, who speaks almost no English. He just got into Palo Alto from Beijing last night, and even though jet lag is starting to get the best of him, he looks game for a party, probably because Wen looks so giddy. He sits quietly on the carpet while Wen occasionally flits from his side to talk with the others. I get up and set my beer on a shelf next to a copy of Wen's harrowingly beautiful book "Target," which documents the war in Bosnia-Kosovo.

I tug on Xiaoying's shirt and lead him to my CD rack, motioning for him to pick out some music, but with little enthusiasm, because I've had the mute button on my "music is the universal language" and "music can change the world" rap for a while now: I have written so many variations on that theme and still the world remains unchanged and supremely fucked up and I am flat-out tired of self-parody and pep-talking.

My 250-strong CD rack selection is small compared to the one I left in my basement back home in Minneapolis, a fallow dust-gathering rock critic's graveyard. But there's enough jazz, rock, funk, folk, country, hip-hop, classical, blues, and world music here for anyone to find something familiar, something that speaks to them, something that reminds them of home. I hope that's the case for Xiaoying, anyway, a stranger in a very strange land, but he just looks confused.

After a minute or so, Wen comes over to assist and explain. She takes her husband's hand, squats down in front of the rack and fingers an aqua-colored jewel box. "This is the first one I see," she says; "Can we have this?" She hands it to me and flips over the disc I plucked from my basement a couple months ago, the disc I packed in a box and shoved into the U-Haul that my brothers and nephew and I drove through deserts and badlands and mountains from The Land of 10,000 Lakes to the Golden State.

Wen's request is for "Harriet," the 1994 self-release by Minnesota-born singer Terry Walsh and his band, 2 A.M. Wen asks if I'm related to the singer, and I tell her yes, that the singer is my brother, who at the moment is probably fast asleep in his home in East St. Paul with his wife Shannon and their one-year-old son, Ian.

"Your brudder?," says Wen.

"Yeah, my brother," I say. "Both my brothers have been in bands. Me, too. I was a singer in a band for a long time."

I am sitting in my office chair now, my out-of-tune-but-not-dead-yet guitar propped up in the corner over Wen's shoulder. An hour from now, it will be even more out of tune, thanks to windmills from my son Henry and his new buddy Kwan, the son of my new Korean friend Jong, but I don't mind. People are sort of drunk. Low-grade magic is happening.

"You did?," she says. The incredulous look on her face makes me want to tell her that I am still a singer, that once you're a singer you never stop singing; that 20 years ago I used to sing a song about my city, a fantastic place where singing in a band isn't so much an anomaly or a hobby as it is a rite of passion; a song about my local music scene that went, "Twenty years from now at kitchen tables we'll tell how our heydays have cracked and gone/They were the best of times, they were the worst of times/The age of wisdom and innocence/And everyone I knew was in a band."

I want to tell her and anyone else who will listen that that lyric still holds true today, and that I miss singing it, and that the other day I picked up the guitar and wrote a song, or more like a skeleton of a song, but whatever; it was the first one I've written in 15 years, and I want to tell her that it was directly inspired by the sound of Wen and the rest of our new friends from around the globe telling each other about their lives and what brought them to this place.

Instead of saying all that, though, I do what I usually do when words fail. I play music. "Harriet." The speakers are at eye level and people are talking, so I keep the volume low.

Marion and her mother, Theresa, whom some of us have taken to calling "Mother Theresa," talk about the rosary they brought Helen from their home in Bombay, India. Armando talks about his home, Paraguay, and my kids' birth country, Colombia. His teenage son Sebastian sits at his father's side looking bored but thoughtful. Armando's wife Maria Jose talks about her home, and plays with their baby, Candeleria. Hannah sits next to my wife and I, and talks softly about India, China, Pakistan, and the Afghan people she lived and worked with. Jong sits with Dong and their kids and tells the group the meaning of his name: "Top of the world." Nobody talks about the "weapons of mass destruction" and nuclear proliferation and pending war we've all been talking about every day since we arrived at Stanford.

Out of the speakers, my brother sings about life, death, cemeteries, spots on the map, and our old neighborhood in South Minneapolis. The one that drifts me off as always is "Harriet," his self-maxim to following your dreams and a tribute to Lake Harriet, the single most hypnotizing body of water I've ever stared into. Corny but true.

As the license plates boast, there are thousands of lakes in Minnesota, and the names are mythic (Spider, Cass, Bay, Detroit, Whitefish, Adeline, Big Wolf, Little Wolf, Moose, Kitchi, Leech) and interchangeable, for even if you've never been there, even if you've never heard of it, every Minnesotan--whatever that is--recognizes the lifelong lure of a dock or beach where they caught their first walleye, listened to the Twins on a fuzzy transistor, or saw the Northern Lights for the first time.

For city kids, the lakes are always beckoning; big puddles in the pavement that make urban living feel like a nature hike to be taken, or taken for granted. The city lakes go by names such as Nokomis, Como, Cedar, and Diamond, and I'm convinced their presence is what makes the place so special: There's something in the water, and about living so close to the water, and about gazing off into the water several times a week, that soothes and fires the soul.

Harriet is part of the lake Harriet-Calhoun-Isles sibling revelry of Minneapolis, and I love all three, but I'm partial to Harriet, the lake I grew up in and around, the lake that was and is just up the creek from my home, the lake my buddies and I would and sometimes still do drive around to talk about girls. The lake my mom and dad took us to many sandy summer nights, the lake I almost drowned in, the lake my wife and I walk around, the lake my kids swim in now.

Several generations of Minnesota boys and girls have necked and watched the moon rise and sun set there. Several others have skinny-dipped in it after bar closing time in the summer and skated on it before work in the winter. Still others have listened to their hearts and car radios and the sound of the crickets, which are louder than any other world-class cricket chorus you can put it up against, because Minnesota crickets and their frantic back legs realize that their time on earth is short.

So they do what all Minnesota creatures do in the summer: seize the night and serenade the stars as loudly as they can for as long as they can.

I am sitting on the carpeted floor of my family's new apartment in Palo Alto, California. Across the way, Judy Garland says to nobody but herself, "The next time I go looking for my heart's desire, I won't need to look any further than my own backyard." Over the murmuring voices of citizens from six continents, my brother sings to me, "Harriet, next time I look into your face, you'll be the same old place, but I'll be a different man."

Posted by Jim Walsh at January 24, 2007 12:16 AM | Comments (2)

Song du Jour: "Word Up"

Cameo, "Word Up." So my friend Meghan and I go to the still-fabulous-after-all-these-years Arnellia's for the late show Friday night by these '70s funk stalwarts, not really expecting much. We're feeling a little conspicuous, not for being one of four white people in the packed club, but for the fact that we are not dressed in our Sunday best and I forgot my derby.

We hang for a while up in front of the stage, then stand in back, digging on the Prince-centric opening band. Just before Cameo goes on, I have the Marvin Gaye (chicken wings, fish sticks, fries, all double-salted to heart-attack proportions-pleasure) and a Corona, and pretty much feel like I've got the world by the tail.

Then the funk starts flying. Synth and bass and all that yow. The dance floor fills. "Candy," "Skin I'm In," and, of course, the now-I-can-die-happy "Word Up." We shuffle-dance like the old-schoolers most all of us in the house are (all except for one child-woman who wore her jeans "like she'd been packed into them with an ice cream scoop," as Woody Allen once described Earl "The Pearl" Monroe's girlfriend) and I wake up the next day wondering Did I really dance to Cameo doing Word Up LIVE last night?

Seems I did, though the core of the group -- Tomi Jenkins, Nathan Leftenent, and Larry Blackmon -- came without Blackmon's signature red codpiece. Alas; here it is now, for all your crotch-gawking pleasure. Yow.

Posted by Jim Walsh at January 23, 2007 6:26 PM | Comments (0)

Song du Jour: "Let's Pretend We Never Have Met"

Molly Maher & Her Disbelievers, "Let's Pretend We Never Have Met" (from the forthcoming CD Balms of Gilead). All hail the new honky-tonk heroine of Minneapolis, who plays every Wednesday at Nye's, and whose band is as good a bunch of poker- and semi-twang-players as has ever graced the time-stopped stage of Lee's Liquour Lounge, which they ripped up Friday night opening for the revamped Jack Knife and the Sharps, still shit-kicking and seducing new generations of swing-dancers after all these years.

An East Side St. Paul girl who sounds as tough and sexy as that thumbnail suggests, Maher's got a lived-in voice (Balms opens, fittingly, with the lonesome-whistle sound of a departing train that seems to say, "Baby don't get too attached, I'm not long for you or this town") whose weariness is bouyed by a fierce underlying ambition and an obvious love of music and people.

All of which leads to all sorts of sticky situations in the world of bars and bards. This insta-evergreen -- every bit as memorable as its kissing kindred cousins "Strangers In The Night" or "The Night's Too Long" -- captures that moment when the whiskey and music coagulates into a full-on crush. In the end, though, the gnaw of possibility is soothed by our benevolent barmaid's suggestion, "You forget about me and darlin', I'll forget about you."

Luckily, she doesn't slam the door on her way out the bar. While playing a yearning slide guitar that sounds not unlike her permanently open heart, Maher explains herself, and sums up the bittersweet plight of anyone who has ever tried to balance the black magic of the neon night with the healing hush of the drabby day:

Yes I sound sweeter
When I've had a few
I get a little bit crabby
When it's comin' on new
It's not that I've lost
My taste for you
It's the light of day
That makes me blue

Posted by Jim Walsh at January 22, 2007 9:35 AM | Comments (5)

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