A little pre-election scatter to help the obsessed

Suddenly, the great David Clark Five song came to mind, which must mean I’m in pieces, bits and pieces. And indeed I am.

Our friends at Culture Shock, specifically MightyToyCannon, have been assembling a growing soundtrack of songs to get us through the election. As of this morning the clips numbered 17, and the last one was Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime. We feel some degree of participation because of our Leonard Cohen suggestion (Democracy, below), and we should have tipped you off earlier, because it does ease the anxiety level to hear, say, Ray Charles singing Hit the Road Jack or Curtis Mayfield landing on We Got to Have Peace.

Scatter does occasionally recognize a fellow-Scatterer — in this case it’s Richard Kessler, who writes the Dewey21C blog at Artsjournal. (We often look over the Artsjournal blogs, btw.) In his latest post, Kessler discusses how he came, finally, to enjoy Steve Reich. The key paragraph:

The first time I remember really finding my way with Reich’s music was at a dance performance. There was something about following the dance, the visual aspect, that allowed me to take the music in, in an entirely different way. I wasn’t listening for a certain progression, a certain phrase, a certain architecture–all the things I had been trained to listen for in music, but instead I felt the music, took it in–allowed it to wash over me. Watching the dance made it possible. It was as if a switch was flipped.

But the trip to that moment and then his circling back to his main concern, art education, is, well, quite a scatter. We are big Reich fans, too, and when we hear something by Philip Glass that we really like, we often discover that it’s really by Steve Reich. (Aw c’mon, that’s mean!)

Studs Terkel, who died last week at 96, practiced an engaged, passionate kind of journalism, the kind that fights for and celebrates the little guy against the big guy, the kind we don’t see much of these days as the “profession” has “professionalized”. And it does have its limits — that radical a reduction of the doings in the monkey tree is bound to leave some things out and to become predictable after a fashion. Except that Studs explored the particular manifestations of the little guy and his (or her) struggle against the bully, the boss, the powers that be, the particular stories, the particular characters, and suddenly predictability wasn’t an issue. Scatter friend Tim DuRoche remembered Terkel, the urbanist, on his Burnside Blog at Portland Spaces. William Grimes’s essay in the New York Times is also well worth a read. The Chicago Tribune (in
Terkel’s hometown) also remembers him at length.

We are reading Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and we finally figure out why. Chabon is coming to Portland to speak as part of Congregation Beth Israel’s 150th anniversary. His speech (5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 23, 1972 N.W. Flanders) is entitled, Imaginary Homelands: Themes of Jewish Identity in Popular Fiction, which fits nicely with the The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which is about an imaginary Jewish homeland in Sitka, Alaska. My favorite part from last night’s reading: The bad guys have tossed the unconscious main character, Detective Landsman, into a detention cell which contains a child’s wastebasket. Gradually, Landsman’s comes to.

“Landsman stares at it for a long time, thinking about nothing, thinking about children’s garbage and dogs in cartoons. The obscure unease that Pluto always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horror of Goofy. An invisible gas clouds his thoughts, exhaust from a bus left parked with its engine running in the middle of his brain.”

Oh, yeah.