Odean
Pope has led me to Catalyst. This
is a seventies band in which the great Odean Pope played saxophone, flute
and oboe. Coming up in and around in Philadelphia they were never afforded the recognition that time has ultimately bestowed.
I’ve a tune on from what appears to be 1972 entitled “Little Miss Lady”
that is remarkably beautiful. The
comparisons to Weather Report or Return to Forever to me seem off as this feels
a whole lot more grounded in the jazz tradition, more approachably funky, less
concerned with angular flash.
Indeed, one of the albums collections is entitled “The Funkiest Band You
Never Heard Of,” which feels about right.
This song “The Demon Pt. 2” is real funky.
My daughters start their first day at a new school this
morning. We will head out
shortly. They are both,
understandably nervous. I’m trying
to remember what that was like. I
remember starting fifth grade in Pleasantville, New York in 1976 or so and I
can distinctly remember the principal had white shoes, which struck me, even
then, as foolish. Even a fifth
grader can pick up on it when someone is a schmuck
and when a welcome is harried and insincere. I settled into
class with Mr. Mondello and, as I recall, made it through OK. We didn’t have a “Hopes and Fears”
session as I am to have with my little one this morning.
Well, back now.
No white shoes to report. They were nervous, but brave. I was proud. We
were proud. This will be a very
different year, at least as I imagine it.
On my plane ride back here yesterday I finished up the first
of my Saramago novels. Jose de
Sousa Saramago is the Nobel Laureate who one the prize in literature in
1998. I got a book of his called “The
Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis” written in 1984, which I dutifully schlepped
all over Portugal only to begin in New York and promptly loose there. It is somewhere in my Dad’s house. I know it. So, I started one of the other books of his I had, provided
to me by my mom “Raised From the Ground,” first published in 1980. Tracing the family of the hapless Mau
Tempo family who were laborers in the not-so-long-ago feudal Alentejo section
of Portugal where Evora and Beja are located, one considers what a rough,
conservative place the country must have been, landless, 家贫如洗,[1] in Catholic Iberia.
One part socialist realism where in we are made to feel the
injustice of poverty, consider the simple bravery of resistance and the
grinding, extractive cruelty of capitalism, and a manner moral and
pedantic. But what makes the read
and this author more interesting is the way time conflates, events accrete to
form tension gradually, and spaces are left unexplained, so they beckon. And in this way we progress from the
last century to the fall of Salazar and wind up in contemporary Portugal with
and in every generation it seems the pale blue eyes first introduced to the
family by a rape at a well, seem to reappear, unluckily.
Today, as I was walked from class to class with my kids I
felt keenly aware that the book in my hand was “The Gospels According to Jesus
Christ.” Saramago was a socialist
and this book is apparently rather blasphemous. On account of it and the outrage that resulted he moved from
Portugal to Spain. The most recent
of the three it was written in 1991 which is hard but not impossible to imagine
being a time of such intolerance.
Though, unless you know who the author is the book, per the title, would
appear to be some kind of evangelical primer. I fancied the people next to me peering over and sizing me
up based upon a quick glance at the book jacket. Less
about Portugal and more about Palestine, it will be the last title I read about
the land I spent some time in this summer, for a while I suppose. That, unless my pop finds the one I
lost.
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