LOVE IS NOT A VICTORY MARCH

On Saturday night I heard a singer/songwriter cover "Hallelujah".

I heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music do ya?

I've heard the song many times in many iterations.  There's the original Leonard Cohen version, of course, and the Jeff Buckley, which is phenomenal.  I remember the song played over the final credits of Julian Schnabel's movie Basquiat (a flawed but good movie, I still contend, despite the historical irregularities and art hysteria.  For more on Schnabel see this post.)  I once heard a Balkan gypsy band cover the song at the Ukranian National Home in the East Village, and I have sung it myself, looking out at Manhattan and at the river, when I could still see those things from my living room windows, while my boyfriend accompanied me on his classical guitar.  Our audience was ourselves, some unwitting neighbors, and my cat who, if asked the question at the end of the stanza quoted above would answer if she could:  No.  No I don't care for music.  Thanks for asking.

It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall and the major lift
Its a cold and its a broken Hallelujah!

There's a long tradition of Jewish songwriters writing Christian spirituals.  Summertime was written by a Jew, after all.

I always loved this part:

Baby I have been here before
I know this room, I've walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you.

I used to live alone before I knew you--we're in a world, as my last writing teacher would say.  And the world has things in it that are hard to understand, things like The Lord of Song and oblique sexual references and the problems of songwriting.  But it also has people who know rooms.  People who sit on chairs.  People who have histories that are filled with things we all understand like loneliness.  I used to live alone before I knew you.

She tied you
To a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

It is a beautiful song, which is why I've heard it so many times in so many ways.  And there is something so therapeutic about singing Hallelujah over and over again, unapologetically, as if speaking to  the Lord of Song or love or something or someone equally big and important.  But there is something that is also sad about it.  I think it is the quietness of the droning repetition that makes it seem like whomever the singer is addressing is not listening, is gone.

THE PRODIGAL PRODIGY

From a NY Times review of the Julian Schnabel retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1987:

These works suggest that Mr. Schnabel's primary gift may be very different from what it has been generally thought to be.

Schnabel made a ton of dough in the 80's during that Mary Boone era, the artist as rock star era, when Jean Michel Basquiat was in a Blondie video, when people wore Vivien Westwood and piled into bathroom stalls two and three at a time in places like Max's Kansas City and the Tunnel and Mr. Chow, to hoover cocaine and comment on each other's fabulousness.

At least, that's how I imagine the era from pictures and movies and books like "Bright Lights, Big City" by Jay McInerney. I wasn't there. In 1987, when Schnabel was already established enough to have a retrospective at the Whitney, I was nine. I was busy deflecting mockery for my backwards shorts (I always had trouble with shorts) and sneaking around the neighborhood with homemade maps pretending to be teen detective Encylclopedia Brown.

But back to Schnabel. The thing about Julian Schnabel is that his rise was the most meteoric, his paintings the most expensive. He didn't have the dignity that comes with early death (Basquiat, overdose, Keith Haring, AIDS), so there he was, rich as a sultan, as his famously broken crockery-enhanced paintings mocked from the walls of upper east side townhouses, huge and dark and, if I may be so bold, ugly. He compared himself to Picasso, he walked around in pajamas. Maybe it all came too easily for him, or maybe there was a kind of buyer's remorse. It's like digging up an old Cabbage Patch doll and thinking, "My mother waited in line, all that time, for this?" In any case, the critics turned against him. Schadenfreude ruled. People wanted to see this cocky artist, this rock star; they wanted to see him disappear.

And for awhile, he did. And then he started making movies.

Last night I saw The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a movie about a glamorous man at the height of his career, who suffers a massive stroke that leaves him unable move or communicate except through the movement of one working, blinking eye.

A movie about one blinking eye, and I was completely transfixed. The visual quality of the film, a kind of love poem to the power of imagination and memory, spoke to me and my own experience, despite its apparent departure from the experience of this poor blinking frenchman.

Glamour struck down, reborn as something more human, more sublime. There is an understanding that comes with failure.