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Alexander Cockburn's India Journal: Travels with Sainath Fakers and fakirs of the Indian neoliberal disaster, from the Indian elites to Bill Gates to Bill Clinton to the New York Times; heroes and villains of the Indian press; 5,000 suicides in Andhra Pradesh and the rise and fall of Chandrababu Naidu, World Bank posterboy; what the British did to India, from Warren Hastings to the Falkland Road; what Indians did to architecture, from the Taj Mahal to the dawn of concrete; making weight in upland Kerala; why America needs south Indian cooking; homage to the great peasant rebellion of 1857; can India recover from "reform"? Get the answers you're looking for in the latest subscriber-only edition of CounterPunch... CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 |
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Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY  Today's Stories June 15, 2005 Daniel Wolff Tim Wise Ricardo Alarcón Norman Solomon Alexander Cockburn
/ Jeffrey St. Clair
June 14, 2005 Paul Craig
Roberts Forrest Hylton Richard Gott Fred Gardner Steve Breyman Dave Zirin Robert Kent Paul Craig
Roberts
June 13, 2005 Gary Leupp Dave Lindorff John Stauber Fred Gardner Evelyn J. Pringle Norman Solomon Winslow T.
Wheeler
June 10 / 12, 2005 Alexander
Cockburn Sharon
Smith Brian
Cloughley Chris
Kromm Heather
Gray Kevin
Zeese Mickey
Z. Gary
Leupp Eli
Stephens Nick
Dearden Oscar
Olivera Robert
Fisk Michael
Dickinson Poets'
Basement Website
of the Weekend
Len
Colodny Christopher
Brauchli Ron
Jacobs Dave
Lindorff Katrina
Yeaw / Alex Schmaus Alan
Farago Saul
Landau
June 8, 2005 Jim
Hougan Alan
Maass Jason
Leopold Niranjan
Ramakrishnan Dave
Zirin Derrick
O'Keefe Diana
Johnstone Website
of the Day
June 7, 2005 Forrest
Hylton Greg
Moses / Susan van Haitsma Lenni
Brenner Col.
Dan Smith Joshua
Frank Dave
Lindorff Margot
Veranes / Adrian Navarro Michael
Neumann
June 6, 2005 Stew
Albert Paul
Craig Roberts Nicole
Colson Ali
Khan Jason
Leopold Charles
Walker Poff Ramzy
Baroud Rep.
John Conyers Evelyn
Pringle Gary
Corseri Website
of the Day
June 4 / 5, 2005 Alexander
Cockburn James
Petras Robert
Fisk Patrick
Cockburn Rev.
William Alberts Saul
Landau Mario
Lamo Jimenez Dave
Lindorff Lance
Selfa Tom
Crumpacker Joshua
Frank Fred
Gardner Michael
Dickinson Roger
Martin Reza
Fiyouzat Ben
Tripp Graeme
Greenback Poets'
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June 3, 2005 Paul
Craig Roberts Joseph
Massad Jeff
Halper Tom
Barry Bruce
K. Gagnon Joshua
Frank Mickey
Z. Gary
Leupp Website
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Craig Roberts Forrest
Hylton Mike
Whitney Brian
Cloughley Mazin
Qumsiyeh Russell
D. Hoffman Norman
Madarasz Norman
Solomon David
Price Website
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Petras Justin
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Lindorff Kevin
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June 15, 2005 Springsteen's Devils & DustThe Palace at 4 A.M.By DANIEL WOLFF "I want to know if love is real." Bruce Springsteen shouted it on 1975's "Born to Run:" a declaration of his rock& roll quest. With each decade, this apparently simple question of faith and possibility has grown darker and more complex. By 1987's Tunnel of Love, Springsteen was talking about having to "live with what you can't rise above." And by 1995's The Ghost of Tom Joad, he was hinting that we need to believe because, "What are we without hope in our hearts?" Springsteen's latest, Devils & Dust, pushes the issue even harder. Playing nearly all the instruments, moaning and murmuring his way across the (mostly) quiet melodies, Springsteen has gathered a set of songs that circle a central and inescapable emptiness. What if love is real -- and, on some fundamental level, that doesn't change things? How do we go on? It's not a question that lends itself to shouting. The new CD is dark, dense, and, at its core, non-verbal. Listen to its muted vocals, its droning melodies, and the first impression is that Springsteen doesn't really want to sing these songs or ask these questions. It's the sound of a man at the edge of what he understands, who then decides to jump. In the journey (or free-fall) that follows, we seem to go places: from the battlefields of Iraq to the South Bronx to the Mexican border. But this isn't the highway full of broken heroes that Springsteen rode to fame on "Born to Run." And it isn't "Thunder Road," where with a little faith the two lanes could take us anywhere. No, what we're traveling here is what Springsteen calls "the skull highway." On the first cut, we're in a field of "blood and stone;" on the last, an earth "open to its bones." They are the same. We've gone nowhere. We've gone inside. The valley Springsteen enters on Devils & Dust, is a lonesome one, and he mostly walks it by himself. There's help from producer Brendan O'Brien's swirling string arrangements, Steve Jordan's rhythm tracks that give pulse to the melodies, and some backup singing. But matching sound to subject matter, the CD is full of empty space. The individuals here are dwarfed by a landscape of "endless nothing." They have the gaunt, isolated feel of the figures of the 20th century artist, Alberto Giacometti, and for similar reasons. "Wanting to create from memory what I had seen," Giacometti wrote, "to my terror, the sculptures became smaller and smaller often so small that with one touch of my knife they disappeared into dust." There's some of the same terror in these songs of Springsteen. In trying to get down to the bones of what's real, he's employed a kind of musical minimalism. No easy answers; no E Street Band; no rock&roll climax. If that makes the new CD sound
despairing, it isn't. There's an understated courage to most
of the material: living with sadness is part of the job description.
But it is murky. The issues Devils & Dust, raises
may be easier to get a handle on if you frame them in more traditional
terms, the way Bill Monroe and his brother Charlie did in 1936.
In a shape-note hymn played as country gospel, the Monroe Brothers
asked, "What Would You Give in Springsteen agrees -- at least about the decay part. The CD's most graphic description of this is set in a whore's hotel room in Reno. There, as a hooker goes down on her john, he remembers a time when love was real, when a woman's smile offered "all I'd ever need." A slide guitar needles at a bed of lush strings; a tambourine taps in the background. The sadness in the music isn't just because the hooker's pleasures will prove fleeting and meaningless, but because his past love did, too. "Somehow, all you ever need," Springsteen mutters, "is never really quite enough." He slurs the dark news as if he doesn't want to admit it out loud. But where the Monroe Brothers stood on the solid ground of their faith, Springsteen can't. The songs here are about devils and dust, "shadows and doubt." They don't move from temptation to salvation. In fact, their narratives are designed not to reach resolution. Yes, Springsteen sings "Matamoros Banks" from the perspective of an immigrant trying to swim across the Rio Grande to a better life. But as the song opens, he's already an eyeless corpse, drifting in the current. The dead man's story is over, and the beautiful, not quite resigned melody echoes that. There's no plot, no meeting across the river, only the faint remains of hope. The same is true of "Silver Palomino," where a child falls in love with a wild horse, but never gets to ride or even touch it. The most that happens is the child sees it, from a distance. Out of the guttural of Springsteen's vocal flashes the vision of the pale horse, her coat "frosted diamonds." If Springsteen's rock&roll is often cinematic, building to a climax, these songs are photographs, capturing a moment, a mood.. Songs, then, without traditional narratives. But if you listen to Devils & Dust as a collection of character studies, you'll be disappointed. It's true that Springsteen turns each song into a kind of portrait by delivering some of the most varied and extreme vocals of his career. He sings the compulsive "All I'm Thinkin' About" in a high falsetto like the bluesman Skip James. There are Southwestern accents, the title song is gravelly with fear, "Long Time Comin'" is delivered in a cowboy shout, and the inner-city kid on "Black Cowboys" speaks in an unaccented baritone. Yet, the end result is a CD which plays as a single, seamless meditation. That's because these characters are variations on a theme: lost souls connected by their search for -- as Springsteen puts it on "Leah" -- "the same proof." Like Giacometti's pencil-thin bronzes, or the floating body off Matamoras, they are the material that resists and reflects and dissolves into the darkness. And that darkness is Springsteen's real focus. Folks do connect on Devils & Dust, mostly on the up-tempo numbers. "Long Time Comin'" offers its narrator the chance to "bury [his] old soul," start a new family, and "not fuck it up this time." It's the exception that proves the rule: the CD's rock&roll song with a narrative and a real chance at earthly salvation. More often, the emphasis is on the fuck-ups. "All I'm Thinkin'" may be sung by a man who believes he's in love, but it rocks with the compulsive intensity of someone caught in a trap. On "All the Way Home," the guy delivers his come-on in the nasal voice of a loser, and the electronic beat pumps him full of false courage: a variation on Springsteen's earlier "Dancing in the Dark." Throughout Devils & Dust, finding another person is a possibility and a blessing, but it's no answer. Chanting, pulling up deep organ chords, Springsteen's traveler falls into the roses of "Maria's Bed" after forty days and nights in the wilderness. Love is real enough, but it's a temporary shelter, a resting place where the soul can gather strength before doing more time. Given that Devils &
Dust was released not long after the singer's endorsement
of John Kerry, it's tempting to hear the CD as a response to
that loss, or to the present political climate. But only a few
of these "new" songs are recent. Many, we're told,
date back a decade to when Springsteen was touring behind Joad.
Some are even older. Though they're appearing in 2005, they aren't
tied to a particular time or politics the way Born in the
USA grew out of the Reagan years, or Springsteen's last,
The Rising, responded to 9/11. Even on the title cut --
where a man with a gun waits in what might or might not be Iraq
-- Springsteen doesn't use the situation for political purposes
but to meditate on fear and what it does to our "God-filled
soul." On the Joad CD, the highway was "alive;"
when immigrants came across the Springsteen's music has always been fueled from a dark vein. Starting with his first and still most famous locale, Asbury Park, the singer established a vocabulary of ruined arcades and small town losers. Asbury was a death trap, the town he was born to run from, and rock&roll the way out. But even as he escaped, Springsteen saw how unlikely that was for others. Since at least Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), Springsteen has been going back for those left behind, scraping away at the romanticism of the American Dream. His audience has rallied around both the promise in his music and its stubborn refusal to accept half-truths. The dead-end return of Vietnam vets became the uniting anthem of "Born in the USA." He created an international hit out of an AIDS victim's lonely walk through "The Streets of Philadelphia." From the killers of Nebraska to the fire fighters of The Rising, Springsteen has repeatedly gone to where we hurt in order to get at what we have in common. Devils & Dust takes the same route, examining and rejecting the comfort of easy answers, but it refuses to transcend. When Springsteen retells the Christ story, he pares away the dogma, and what's left -- over a gentle, keyboard-driven, gospel riff is a country ballad about mother love. The question of resurrection is no more important to "Jesus Was an Only Son" than the biblical record that Christ had siblings. What Springsteen zeroes in on is the nearly inexpressible hurt of a mother losing her son: "a loss that can never be replaced." In the end, Jesus asks his mother to remember the soul of the universe, but he never suggests it's a forgiving soul or one without pain. To the contrary, the song's built both melodically and lyrically -- to get to the hurt and then hang there. Without narrative or character development, without the release of rock&roll or its humor, without the social relevance that supported The Rising, Springsteen has deliberately constructed Devils & Dust as a bare stage. Like the narrator of "The Hitter," he places himself outside a locked door, alone, trying to describe where his life has taken him. If he can only get it right make his voice as battered as the way he feels maybe the door will open, and he can rest a while. Structured like an old mountain ballad, "The Hitter" refuses to ornament or build, repeating, instead, like the string of bloody fights it describes. It doesn't end with the door opening but with the fighter circling yet another opponent. What he does to survive (like the gunner in the title track, like most of the people on the CD) may well kill the things he loves and his ability to love. But what he's gained in this exchange is a stark beauty. Finally, he's fighting to tell the truth. And the truth is, he can't. "It's impossible," as Giacometti once put it, "to paint a portrait." The artist's solution was to leave his work incomplete: faces emerging from half-erased lines, figures whittled to their essentials. That way, he hoped the struggle, at least, would show: fresh and unprettified. Springsteen leaves his vocals rough, his melodies unadorned, and his lyrics suggesting what can't be said. The result is a gorgeous, uncompromising CD. If its central mystery and hurt remain impregnable, the fierceness of Springsteen's pursuit grows more beautiful with every listen. In the end, that's what Devils & Dust testifies to: that pursuit. "The content of any work," critic John Berger wrote of Giacometti, "is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of his staring at it." Daniel Wolff is a poet and author of the excellent
biography of the great Sam Cooke, You
Send Me, as well as the recent collection of Ernest Withers'
photographs The
Memphis Blues Again. Wolff's Grammy-nominated essay on
Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers is one of the highlights of CounterPunch's
collection on art, music and sex: Serpents
in the Garden. Most recently, Wolff wrote the text for
the collection of Ernest Wither's photographs in Negro
League Baseball. His next book,
4th
of July/Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land (Bloomsbury
USA), will be coming out this summer. He can be reached at: ziwolff@optonline.net
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