Walking the Berkshires

Shelter From the Storm, or an Idiot Wind

Today is a day for vinyl.  Not that I don't appreciate the unblemished, airbrushed clarity of digital sound, and the convenience of on-demand MP3s, but today is a day for dusting off the 33 1/3 rpm relics in the attic, jamming open the windows, and letting those blown speakers on the old Hi-Fi belt out in analog glory.  It is Spring, you see, and for us folks on either side of forty days like this were made for speakers aimed outdoors, for tweetering vocals and thunderous sub woofers and days of youth raging against mid-life crises and blowing away the years' accumulation of dust.  It is a defiant sound, and it takes me back to my glory days, alone now with my rake and the house to myself before wife and children return from a week in Vermont.  Time to peel back a couple of layers and let the sounds soak through to places far away and long kept at arm's length.

"Suddenly I turned around and she was standin there
With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair.
She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns.
Come in, she said,
Ill give you shelter from the storm."

So it's Bob, and not from the extraordinary Blood on the Tracks but the grinding live version on Hard Rain.  My LP of the former, brilliant album remains with an old flame and I've never bothered to replace it.  I'm partial to this version of the song, anyway.  You can hear it live on YouTube here if you'd rather not take my word for it and want the full effect.  Click on it, let it fire up, then come on back and keep the soundtrack going.  Otherwise, this is not going to make much sense.

I can tell you, it made my feet shuffle and my arms lift when I set the stylus to the groove on the attic Hi-Fi, in that place where we banish old love letters and obsolete technology, and stacks of records seldom played but too much a part of our former selves to be abandoned.  And who's to gainsay me today, with the house to myself and a warm breeze blowing through the open windows, if I rock out like a fool to the strains of my youth, to this Idiot Wind?

"I've heard newborn babies wailin like a mournin dove
And old men with broken teeth stranded without love.
Do I understand your question, man, is it hopeless and forlorn?
Come in, she said,
I'll give you shelter from the storm."

So I let the music wash over me, those blown speakers and that scratchy needle picking at the chords of mystic memory until the scab peels and the blood runs.  I am young, and in love, and long-haired and vulnerable, and the sun pours down like honey and the wind is my lover's kiss.  I am half my age, and I remember days when all that mattered was friendship and youth and a summer breeze and a woman's touch.  When I turned a blind eye to our depression, to the siren's warning, and I loved and lost and loved again.

"In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes
I bargained for salvation an they gave me a lethal dose.
I offered up my innocence and got repaid with scorn.
Come in, she said,
I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Different songs take me down different paths.  This one takes me to the summer of my nineteenth year, a neo-hippie free fall through feelings too intense, at the end, for her and me to bear.  But that was still a glorious summer, and here after all these years life has resolved in a newfound friendship, which means there is something to be said for growing up, after all.  Thanks, frumiousb.

I've long since given away most of my bootlegged Grateful Dead tapes, but kept the vinyl.  Up next after Bob is some Janis - Take Another Piece of My Heart - and some Taj Mahal - Ain't Gwine Whistle Dixie from The Real Thing, the live at the Fillmore double LP, and some Jimi - Fly On, Little Wing - and The Clash.  Going fast, now.  Billy Bragg, and the Pogues - Rum Sodomy and the Lash - and R.E.M. because no one who came of age in the 1980's is without Murmur or Reckoning somewhere in their stacks of vinyl, and then to the songs I've kept, that made the transition from my youth to middle age and from analog to digital.  Richard Thompson, Juluka, and, yes, Led Zep.  But that takes me all the way back, to that first wet teen-aged kiss and fumbling hands in a field of stars.  My much younger, awakening self.  I don't take a tour through that adolescent time very often, anymore, except when I look at my children and imagine them as the teenagers they will be, all too soon.  I can't wait for them to come home.

"Well, I'm livin in a foreign country but I'm bound to cross the line
Beauty walks a razors edge, someday I'll make it mine.
If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born.
Come in, she said,
I'll give you shelter from the storm."

It's a beautiful day.  There's a tear in my eye.  And I am dancing in the backyard, spinning with the needle of the world.

"Brush Up Your Shakespeare"

More than anything else in English literature, the works of William Shakespeare seem to offer limitless opportunities for reinvention and reinterpretation.  For such canonical material, it is remarkable how freely Shakespeare is adapted and transformed on stage and screen.  Compare this phenomenon to any other great work and the resistance that inevitably greets even modest tinkering with plot and character.  "St. Peter" Jackson took substantial liberties in his film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and met considerable resistance from Tolkien fans - though mercifully cooler heads prevailed and we did not have to endure the extremely bad idea of Aragorn engaged in combat with Sauron "in the flesh" before the Black Gate at the climax, and so a CG troll stood in for the Dark Lord in post production.

What is it about the Bard that lends him to such adaptation, more often than not in fresh and revealing ways and not mere parody?  I'm not satisfied with the standard explanation that the "universality of his themes" makes these 400 year old plays relevant to modern ears and audiences.  Anyone who recalls struggling through even the relatively straightforward "Julius Caesar" in High School will also recall that the interpretive footnotes take up more of the page than the actual text and are ultimately more a distraction than a means to engage with the plays themselves.  It's all very well for cracking codes, and it keeps Associate Professors of English gainfully employed and off the streets, but if Shakespeare is really universal then we ought to be able to relate to a performance "full of sound and fury" and find significance.

Which, of course, is what playwrights and filmmakers have done with this material in countless and striking ways.  There are, unquestionably, Shakespeare purists, but sometimes even these take daring steps, such as those who perform the plays with the original Early Modern English pronunciation, rather like performing Bach on period instruments. 

Borrowing liberally from Shakespeare seems fitting for the works of an author who made free use of other material, and when artfully done the result can be a splendid reinvention like Kurosawa's Ran (1985) or  West Side Story (rather than, say, William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1996), with its rumble on Verona Beach and uneven casting).  Anachronisms often work in productions of Shakespeare, but tend to succeed best when not merely a communication devise aimed at getting teenagers to buy movie tickets.  One thinks of Kenneth Branaugh's Henry V (1989) with it's gritty, slow-motion battle sequence deeply rooted in the time period of Agincourt, yet his narrator Derek Jacobi appears in a dark trench coat.  This one modern element sets the film apart from other, less successful recreations of the events described by Shakespeare that emphasize realism.  Polanski's Macbeth (1971), or the treatment given to Hamlet in Royal Deceit (1997), may well be true to history but they lose something in bringing the Thane of Cawdor and Prince of Denmark down to the level of mere petty lords mucking about in their squalid kingdoms.

Among my favorite and most divergent riffs on Shakespeare are films that manage to be cleverly  irreverent and illuminating at the same time.  One of these is Scotland, PA (2002) - in which my boarding school roommate David Wike has a minor role - and features Mac and Pat Macbeth scheming to rise above their bottom rung jobs at Duncan's Diner in the 1970s.  The weird sisters are three hippies, Christopher Walken plays Officer MacDuff, and the soundtrack is all Bad Company.  It makes no pretense of high art and actually works better than other more serious attempts at placing Shakespeare in other time periods (A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999) comes immediately to mind).

Ian McKellan's screenplay and brilliant depiction of Richard III (1995) is one of the very best examples of Shakespeare re-imagined in another time and place: a highly stylized and eerily familiar jazz age Europe under a fascist Duke of Gloucester.  The opening soliloquy is delivered 15 minutes into the film in which Richard drives a tank through the wall of his enemy's headquarters and then addresses the assembled royals at a victory ball.  There are wonderful nods to history, both of the 1930s and the War of the Roses, including the metamorphosis of the seated boar motif worn by the historic Richard's retainers into the swastika-like emblem of his black shirted legions.

Richard III is fertile subject matter for Al Pacino's wonderful film Looking for Richard (1996).  It is as much a documentary about actors and acting as it is about Shakespeare's play and how audiences receive it.  For that same reason, my favorite Kenneth Branaugh treatment of Shakespeare is not his flamboyantly flawed Hamlet (1996) but his inspired and often comic treatment of an church production of the play in In the Bleak Midwinter / A Midwinter's Tale (1995).

The key to Shakespeare's plays may simply be to remember that they are theater and theater is an interpretive medium.  Nothing is static, not even texts, and the test of a great work may be that it continues to inspire re-engagement and recreation even if some of those inspirations fall short of the mark.  I feel the same way about cover songs, especially those taken out of their original contexts (Dread Zeppelin; Hayseed Dixie, Richard Thompson's medieval reworking of Oops I Did It Again), but that's another story.