I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: HANNI EL KHATIB-“Save Me” (Field Recordings, August 7, 2013).

I love when Field Recordings like this one [Hanni El Khatib Gets Saved In The Desert] are filmed outside.  For this one Hanni El Khatib and his bandmates head to the Mojave Desert where it is getting cold pretty quickly.

I’ve never heard of Hanni before, and his music is generic enough that I don’t imagine I ever will.  The acoustic guitar plays a simple back and forth chord structure to the rhythm of hand jive.  Hanni plays a series of solos on the electric guitar in between simple verses (although the line about boys in the desert seems apt).

After a misfire with the maraca–it is so loud that Hanni can’t hear himself–the other guitarist suggests he should play it more nonchalantly–like business casual.

There’s nothing bad about the song, it’s just , well, bluesy garage rock, a fairly uninteresting style.  But the setting is sure pretty

The Los Angeles singer-songwriter, on a break from touring in support of his latest album In the Dirt, gamely stripped down his loud, bluesy garage-rock sound and let the stunning backdrop of Joshua Tree National Park provide the drama.

[READ: January 9, 2017] “The Gospel According to García”

This story was short and was packed full of so much.  Especially since Garcia wasn’t even present.

The story is told in second person past as a classroom full of kids watch a man come in.  There are 12 students on the verge of failing.  Seven are seniors.  The man seemed to falter a he walked into the room.

The kids knew this was his first mistake–allowing them to size him up.

He sat down where García used to sit, just like that, as if he had the right to do so.

He tried to get them to speak–maybe we should introduce ourselves–but they said nothing.  He tried to make a joke about breaking the ice, but no one responded.

García had told them the longer you keep a secret the deeper, the richer the secret grows.

They say that if he had studied with García, he’d know to seek the weakest link, the one who would crack under pressure.  But he doesn’t.

Instead he began with an apology.  No. 4 of García’s Golden Rules: never ever apologize if you haven’t done anything wrong.

This substitute was the only one who dared to take the job of replacing García after everyone else in the academy had refuses. He was an outsider.

García taught them valuable thing in his class-like the importance of silence (the scene where no one spoke for fifteen minutes sounds really intense).

The sub says he can’t help them if they don’t help him.  He says he has notes and a syllabus but he can’t find any grades.  García had asked them if they wanted grades.

The sub was actually daring to criticize Garcia for his disregard of guidelines. Garcia had asked them what kind of grades they wanted–arbitrary darts thrown at grades on wall or all for one and all for all.

The sub doesn’t even understand the essay question they were given: “Why is indifference worse than murder.”

The class knows that something has gone wrong for Garcia.   They suspected as much when the Headmaster told them that Garcia’s would not make it in due to circumstances that were best left unspoken.

I want to know so much more!