I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: DEVONTÉ HYNES interviews PHILIP GLASS (Field Recordings, September 21, 2017).

This is the final video under the “Field Recordings” headline [‘When You Gonna Get A Real Job?’: Philip Glass And Devonté Hynes Compare Notes].  Unlike the other videos I have watched, this one is actually an interview, not a song.

I was unfamiliar with Devonté Hynes.  He is a 31-year-old British producer and songwriter who performs under the name Blood Orange,  He has made many hit records with the likes of Carly Rae Jepsen.  And Philip Glass was at the time of this interview, 80 years old (and calls the cast of Hamilton hipster, instead of hip-hop, but he did rave about the show (which Hynes was unable to get tickets to!).

Walk into Hynes’ third floor loft in New York’s Chinatown and you’ll find a photo of Glass on his piano. He discovered Glass’ music by chance as a London teenager, when he bought the 1982 album Glassworks on the strength of its crystalline cover image alone. What he heard after he brought it home transfixed him. Today, he says Glass’ influence “seeps” into his music.

This spring, Hynes invited Glass to his apartment where they sat at a piano, compared chords and traded stories. Ninety minutes later, their wide-ranging conversation had touched on the pulse of New York City, the pains of striking out on your own as a musician, what role the arts play in society today and Hamilton. Plus about a hundred other ideas.

This clip is only 6 minutes, and they don’t touch on all that much.  We learn that Glass grew up in Baltimore and worked in his father’s record store.  His father knew nothing about music but loved it and soon enough young Philip was the store’s record buyer.

Glass moved to New York in 1957.  His mother told him that being a musician would be a terrible life of travel and hotels.  And he thought that sounded wonderful.  He worked day jobs loading trucks and moving furniture–he never took a job he couldn’t get out off if he had the opportunity to play.

He says that Einstein on the Beach was a hit but he knew nothing about money and they actually lost money on the deal.

For his part, Devonté came from London to New York ten years ago.  he says you can hear Glass’ jobs in his music, like the sounds of the city as he drove his taxi around.

Glass concludes, “When bad things happen in the country the artists become the voice.  Without the arts our society would be a prison.”

[READ: January 17, 2018] “Sans Farine”

I really couldn’t believe how long this story felt.  Even with enjoying most of it, it seemed like it was 50 pages not 9.

The narrator, Charles Henri Sanson is an executioner in France around the time of the revolution.  He was a real person.  I didn’t know that while reading this but it doesn’t really impact my take on the story.

His father and his six brothers were also executioners.  There is quite a stigma to the job–most people are not allowed to even communicate with them, much less marry them.  And yet ask any soldier what his profession entails  He’ll answer that he kills men.  No one flees his company for that reason.

There’s a lot of detail about his life, both before and after the revolution,  He and his family have negotiated the revolution well and he still works,no killing the royals,

He talks about Joseph Guillotin reinventing the penal code–a less barbaric, swifter execution for all condemned.

As the revolution took hold, thee was no slowing down and he was executing 29, 30 people a day, a steady stream of people and blood.  At a recent execution their son was holding aloft the head when he slipped in the blood, fell and cracked his head open.

Ultimately, his wife insisted that he not participate the execution of the queen

He says the medical community was grappling with a problem–were heads staying conscious after beheading?  some were.

Eventually I was asked to assist a Dr. Seguret, professor of anatomy, who’d been commissioned to study the problem. He set up an atelier on the same square as the machine, and my assistants delivered to it a total of forty heads. We exposed two, a man’s and a woman’s, to the sun’s rays in his back courtyard. Their eyelids immediately closed of their own accord, in a way that was startling, and their faces convulsed in agony. One head’s tongue, pricked with a lancet, withdrew, the face contorting. Another’s eyes turned in the direction of our voices. One head, that of a juring priest named Gardien, dumped into the same sack with the head of one of his enemies, had bitten it with such ferocity that it took both of us to separate them.

Other faces were inert. Seguret pinched them on the cheeks, inserted brushes soaked in ammonia into their nostrils, and held lighted candles to their staring eyes without generating movement or contractions of any sort.

His report was suppressed, and he refused to have any more to do with such experiments, or with me.

In the final two sections he reads the note from his wife and grows meditative, it was a rather dull ending,