I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: GORDI-“Can We Work It Out” (Night Owl, November 20, 2018).

I wanted to finish out November with one more live recording.  Turns out NPR was there to help out.  They have a new feature called Night Owl.

Every so often, late at night over the past couple years, a team of NPR Music video producers has been toting approximately 80 pounds of audio/video equipment and a statue of a golden owl to the far reaches of American cities. The owl is our Night Owl, and it’s the totem that has presided over nearly every episode of a show that goes by the same name. Night Owl is our chance to get out into the field, put some of our musicians somewhere unexpected and see what magic may arise.

They have released a bunch of these videos on YouTube.

I picked one from an artist I didn’t know yet, Gordi.

I’ve heard of her, of course, but I think this was my first exposure to her.  She has a lovely (slightly rough) voice as she sits at the piano singing this pretty, ache-filled song.

[READ: February 8, 2018] “Wars in Distant Lands”

This story was translated from the Arabic by Raymond Stock.

At first I really enjoyed this, it felt very contemporary and compelling.   And then it just got weird and war-based.

The narrator pulled Teresa’s postcard from the mailbox.  She was arriving on a train at 7PM on June 16.  The end said, this is being mailed from Havana and will probably arrive the same day as her, which it did.

He’d known Teresa for five years.  They’d loved and hated each other passionately, violently.  Then they broke up for real, not one of those “breakups that last a night or two…but the story of separations that last a long time.”

She left with a Cuban sailor.

He wasn’t angry or jealous, primarily because he was sympathetic to soldiers and sailors.  He feels it was his fault that they couldn’t settle down.  She offered to get him work, to settle down somewhere different but he could not leave the ruins of Basra. It the war that paralyzed him.  Which one, he wondered, the first the second or the third that might yet happen.

Then we see a lengthy description of him not giving up the trappings of the war (which inexplicably to me include Boney M and Tom Waits’ “Waltzing Matilda.”.  Even his friends would say that all he cares about is war.  Eventually Teresa bought him an outfit–white suit and Panama hat, to drag him out of the war–to get him over the curse.

After getting that postcard he decided to give up his old war habits. He threw away the tapes and put on that suit.

As he headed to the train station he ran into a man who called out “Campos!” The man was wearing a sailor’s uniform–the kind the narrator wore back in the Seventies.

He and the man looked a lot alike.  The man acted like he knew him, although he was clearly mistaken.  But since the narrator had time to kill, he sat with the man and told stories (which he explained to us he was making up).

They tell stories and reminiscence and they are so full of detail that narrator begins to feel he was there too.

Finally the narrator says that he and this man should switch clothes–allow Alejandro to get out of the military and allow the narrator to get back in. They looked enough alike that it shouldn’t be a problem.  When he looks at the clock it is almost 7.

Has he made a decision about his future?