Thailander

Thailand’s Highlands? No… neither the rugged hill vantages of the Hmong or the Karen, nor the borders-encompassing danger zone known as the Golden Triangle. But listen, my children, and you shall hear instead of the midnight ride of… well, maybe I should set the scene a bit first:

In May of 1986, early on the around-the-world journey that took me to Fiji and Burma and back to Turkey and Europe, I was traveling through parts of Thailand, riding on one of the remarkable long-distance “night buses” that carry folks up, down, and across the Kingdom, from Koh Samui in the far South, to Bangkok mid-country, to Chiang Mai in the North.

Packed with cheap tourists and restive Thais, sleepy children and surprising good cheer, these express buses hurtle down the black-as-pitch two-lane roads--head-lit juggernauts scattering produce and pedestrians, leaving small cars and big distances in their wake, stopping only when the driver needs to relieve himself--or a serious roadblock interferes...

So we're barreling along, blasting down the night, when suddenly the driver stomps

on the brakes, and we rock and shudder to a stop, some ways short of a makeshift barrier. (Later I realize that he was leaving room to maneuver--meaning: attempt to escape.)

And then we wait... nervously... because the roadblock may be manned by bandits, or rebels--or the Thai Army looking to capture bandits or rebels. Though the driver tells us later that there were bandits on this same stretch of road just the night before, we’ve come upon a patrol of soldiers, and in the low-power lights aboard the bus we see they are mostly nervous young conscripts carrying rifles and machine guns. A few Thai men must show their papers, and a couple of hippie tourists have their carry bags inspected.

This was right in the time frame when pot smokers caught on the nearby Malay Peninsula were subject to quick execution. But no illegal substances or suspicious citizens are found in this search, and after some threats and flashlights shown into sleepy eyes, we are told to get on down the road. Our driver knows an exit line when he hears it. He maneuvers around the slight barricade, and on we roll.

Soon he is talking--a Thai man near me translates--mocking the kid soldiers and making us travelers feel less threatened; and about then he reaches up above his view mirror to a small-screen TV set I hadn’t really noticed, turns it on, and shoves in a

VHS or Beta cartridge. (I don’t remember having encountered such an electronic distraction before; I don’t think most airlines--or travel buses--had made the move to multiple or even single viewing screens yet… or maybe, more likely, I was just blithely ignorant.)

Murky darkness on the set and a narrator speaking Thai cause my attention to wander, but loud stadium rock draws me back. “Hunh… sounds a bit like Queen,” I mumble. Then: “What the…?”--we’re witnessing swords brandished in a vast parking garage, and a fight to the (very weird) death--and suddenly it's Scotland

centuries ago: braw laddies, bricht kilties, draid claymores an’ a’. But all this time the characters have been yammering in Thai, with no subtitles in English, French, Scots Gaelic, or otherwise to help make sense of the film’s skittery action.

“Now what… gee, that guy in the fancy clothes looks like… wait, it is, it’s Sean Connery! What in the world is he doing in this sword-totin', time-hoppin' obscurity?”

But enough of the blow-by-blow description. Many moviegoers will know by now that our driver was small-screening a duplicate videotape print (very likely bootlegged) of Highlander, the genre-mixing adventure film fated to become a cult favorite, a “franchise” picture generating four or five sequels. But back then when I quizzed other travelers or native residents from Thailand to Denmark, no one had a clue as to the mystery movie I'd become obsessed with: Ed’s Fantastical Swordfight Feature.

After a while I was starting to believe I’d dreamed it, fitfully asleep after the roadblock. But late that fall, when my future wife and her kids had come over to

spend the winter in Portugal’s English-touristy Algarve region, I noticed a newspaper ad for a movie called Highlander, starring Sean Connery and Christopher Lambert (who?), playing at a nearby theatre--in English, without Portuguese subtitles even.

Whoa back, Buck! The weird night came roaring back: this sounded too similar not to be possible, and too possible not to be viewed, so off we went, driving 20 miles east to Albufeira, stocking up on hot popcorn, and settling into the plush seats. And there it was at last,

Scotland and savagery, Manhattan and MacLeod, the Kurgan and the Quickening--making more sense this time, albeit still the sort of violent flick that guys flock to and gals scoff at (as happened with our foursome that day).

I didn’t care. I was vindicated. If the film later turned out somehow to be more significant than the sum of its crazy parts, well, so be it. Here’s what I mean… some of what I’ve learned since:

Highlander was released in March 1986 in the U.S.--after I’d left the country--and then not until August in Europe; I don’t know the Asian release date but there couldn’t have been legal videocassettes by April. Director Russell

Mulcahy probably wouldn't have cared; he was happy just to move up from MTV vids to a career-making Hollywood feature. Ditto Christopher Lambert who went from brooding unknown to brooding star (for a time and a shot at Tarzan/Lord Greystoke). And Connery? He simply clicked his Spanish bootheels together and jetted, laughing, all the way to the bank and then straight on to his semi-retirement property on Spain’s posh Southeast coast.

A quarter century later, the sequels and TV versions and cult-film write-ups and long-threatened remake of the original... none of them

matter really. I inadvertently saw a stranger version--had it quickened into me, as it were--during an odd, discomfiting night in Thailand, going nowhere fast. And remember…

There can be only one.
* * * * *
(...except when there are four--Spivey Bros. Barbecue Sauce; next time!)

Reconstruction in Glass

Here's the conclusion of the Civil War-related tale introduced last week (in the blog post just below this one):

IV. Contrabands

Now in the scorching late summer, he works among wraiths. When he moves, the humid air clings to his flesh; and when he is still, his spent breath and rivulets of sweat condense on the burned glass plates overhead. He sees coils of shadows drifting within
grays of shifting shades… hears always the clamor of guns and terrible cries of the wounded, the proud insistent voices of freed slaves calling out: “Freedom! Freedom will reign, come heaven or come hell!”

And Jefferson finally shouts, “Let be! Yanks nor Rebs got no truck with me!

‘Federacy make me out a monkey man, say I belong to whoever pay to run me… but the Union come down on Spivey land like Pharoah’s army. Trample my garden! Strip out the smokehouse. Torch the Big House jes’ to hab themselves a cook-up… till nothin’ lef’ but columns an’ the chim’ly.

“I was true free then, me an’ thousands other black folks, could tag on after Sherman man-army. Call us Contrabands ‘cause we could join on in, burn an’ loot some ourselves, tie those Yankee rails into ribbon-bows.

“But I ain’t that--I quit an’ I walk to here. What I want with some dam’ war now?”

V. Dreams

The shadowed, sullen plants rest, listless in the heat. And one night he dreams…

A younger, taller Jefferson walks, alone, through swathes of lobelia and loosestrife and feverfew. He breathes honeysuckle and sweet magnolia. Massive white columns stand blocking the sun, and in their shade the sightless bodies from the glass move as easy as Jacob’s ladder in a breeze--swaying, talking among themselves, their bodies full of light now, wounds radiant, bright as noontime; only their dark-streak faces resist…

The many voices blend one into another, a chorus puzzled, angry, mourning: Where is this? Who am I now? What did we die for? No one remembers. Our graves lie ill-tended. Our only memorials are glass. Discarded.

Forgotten. Sold as scrap. Where we wait now, the sun bleaches out blue, and black, and gray, rain washes our stories away, the years erase all detail, from the imperfect surface of our lives, the fading record of our deaths… in heart’s ease we disappear…

And he wakes to a crisp fall morning.

VI. Clear Glass

Ghosts and memories gone silent, he cuts away dead blossoms, prunes sagging stems, tends the mulch of summer’s end--chopping old beds, turning the composted heap. As he labors row on row, he speaks softly to the stilled growths: “Crop field or

battlefield, garden or grave, what I do here is what you are. Whatsoever get lef’ behind as waste still turn to chalk and good humus.”

He takes a deep breath. Autumn’s rich, ripened smells rise fresh in his nostrils, and he imagines the final breath of every soldier fallen in the War, collecting in drifts of cloud, changed to air again by the Lord’s own greenery. Squinting up at the blurred glass, he lets black loam slip from his fingers. Saying:

“This the light too, the darkes’ part. See, life be only what the light make of it, and every kind of pain melt in the sun. Jefferson Spivey, free man--that’s me. And when I pass, this earth here remember you, your scars and hurt come to clear at last.”

He re-turns the soil.

Fans of Ken Burns' Civil War series may recall a brief sequence near the end when the Narrator mentions glass negatives showing battlefield scenes that were sold as scrap, many of them ending their days as replacement panels in greenhouses—where the sun would burn away the negative images. The story haunted me until I wrote this… fragment of a short story, or prose poem, or historical remembrance. (Next time: an Asian Adventure becomes... Haute Culture?)

Panels Toward a Reconstruction of Glass

In honor of July 4th and “The Colonel,” my father, USAF officer E.G. Leimbacher—who would have turned 95 yesterday—and another USAF Colonel, our younger son Christopher Michael Wilcox, I offer this fragmentary short story, or prose poem, or historical remembrance, occasioned by a brief passage near the end of Ken Burns’ magnificent work The Civil War. This is the first part of two, and I’ll say more about the source next time.

* * * * *

I. 1872

Late that summer he became aware of shadows, ghostly figures flickering, blotches of black and gray stippling the lilies and hothouse blooms.

The glazier’s man had come, knocked out the cracked greenhouse panels, and replaced them with panes of glass so strangely patterned that Jefferson finally scaled the garden ladder to learn their secrets. The streaks muddling the glass, the marks and

shapes that ruled the humid air below, up close proved translucent: soldiers in uniform, all grays and silvers, their faces the burnt-cork black of minstrelsy. A few stood in formal poses, frozen in a dark time, but more lay sprawled and torn, limbs mangled, the unknown dead on bloody ground, their hollow-eyed skulls staring a thousand years.

It was the War again.

II. Baltimore

A man free and whole, he had walked all the way north from Georgia, shedding each clot of red clay as it dried, clear on to Baltimore… where he just stopped. Saying right out loud to no one: “This’d be far ‘nough.” Thinking: Lord hab mercy, some Union towns look close-on South.

Plain “Jefferson” he’d been until the day in ’64 that Bluebelly sergeant said he’d need a second name to gain a share of forage. So he added “Spivey,” reclaiming the ground that held his people fast for a hundred years.

Thinking: But I was actual born that first day, January 1863, when Mist’ Abraham reckon every one of us, house or field the same, free forever. An’ I know it right then. I could read some an’ shape my slave name letters too. But be free? I dassn’t yet. Bossman dogs speak louder.

III. Seasons

“Our conservatory is rich with promise,” said Mr. Caldwell, “and my wife’s gardens annually blessed with God’s bounty. We cultivate order, Mr. Spivey; we ask that you

help maintain it… A beautiful setting, is it not?”

“Yessuh, it surely is.” But thinking, surprised: It don’t come up to home.

He buried that notion in moist loam, to toil among beech trees and roses, attending each summer’s inclinations and, within the glittering hothouse, shaping off-season riots of color from roiling orchids and flowering japonica. He made each early morning his green-up time—hard at work before the heat inside turned all hellish, and while the light (“my Southun light,” he’d insist with a grin) was all a glory. The glass magnifying yet attenuating, he’d chase that changing light day by day, packing dark soil down to the roots, snipping bits of green shoots and buds, grafting plant upon plant in unusual pairings, growing bulbs and exotics… and older, seven years almost, his life as ordered as the gardens in their cycles.

IV. Contraband

Now in the late, scorching summer, he works among wraiths…

(To be continued)

The President's Lady

In election season I probably get 10-20 political solicitations a day, most of which are deleted immediately. But once in a while I glance through something from MoveOn, or the President, or a petition forwarded by some friend. Michelle Obama is not only the Mistress of the White House, but a Mistress of Messaging too. (Tea Partyers and racist Repugs, that word has several meanings other than the one making you salivate.)

Some days you just gotta go with the flow. This is what I emailed to Obama headquarters a while ago:

Hello... Whoever.

I realize Mrs. O will never read this, but I just made a small donation, and decided I might also vent a bit. I am one of the many disappointed liberal/progressive/very-anti-corporate, displeased-with-Demos-too worker bees who fill this land of the fraud, home of the brazen chicaners and banksters. I wouldn’t vote for a Righty Repugnant if I were on fire and he was right (of course!) there holding a bucket of water in one hand and a fire-retardant blanket in the other!

Yet of course I am exaggerating. There have been many decent members of the GOP in the past, those fiscally conservative, Midwest-styled Moderate men and women who are so sorely lacking today—the House full of trash and the Senate full of aristocratic refuse(rs). So we elected a fine man, a prof and orator who sort of rose from the streets... but who turned out to be badly advised (by old boy insiders who should have been ostracized), or ineffectual, or too aloof from the fray for too long. Yes, the President has been trapped by economic Fate, battered and obstructed and subjected to racist vilification. But he hasn’t really fought back either; he seems intent on just holding the moral high ground and keeping the dirt off his hands and still-buttoned shirt sleeves.

You of the campaign, using the First Lady again, mailed out a splendid family photo along with the usual plea for support. This note (plus donation made) is in answer to the long letter and photo caption ostensibly written by Mrs. Obama. She makes reference to the magic words of campaigns everywhere: “real and lasting change.” A year into the first term I too pondered that phrase, and I dreamed up a nice-looking t-shirt that I gave to friends and strangers alike; it showed a giant buffalo nickel encircled by these words: “I voted for real change, not nickel-and-diming.”

And here are a couple of excerpts from the credo statement I wrote to hand out with the t-shirt; sadly they’re still pertinent today:

“...We’re trapped in this Grim Regression, praying for a Progressive President to arise—not retreat or appease—an F.D.R. full of stubborn spirit, a leader burning with the fire of M.L.K. and the hard grit of L.B.J., active and involved rather than aloof and above the fray, a scrapper who’ll kick ass, not kiss it, who’ll chop the neo-cons and turncoat ’dogs and conman Republican’ts right off at the knees!

“Over the past 30 years, Reaganomics and misbegotten corporation-funded administrations have ruined manufacturing, devastated the unions, outsourced the nation, and decimated the middle class...

“It’s time. No more pharma liars and Goldman Sachs cheats, feckless conniving Supremos and ‘best Congress money can buy.’

Yes, we backed a brilliant orator who brought us this far, but now we need an arm-twister and angry do-er... an activist President who stands with us and for us!”

I don’t think I’m the only worn-down citizen who feels this, even while continuing to vote Democrat. So please, Mrs. Obama, if you do see this note—on behalf of all us confused and disaffected--give the President a hug and a kiss and, please, a whole lot more gumption.

All best regards, Ed Leimbacher

* * * *
Some reading this may recall that ailing poet Robert Frost tried to read a new poem at Jack Kennedy’s inauguration, but had to settle for reciting his classic “The Gift Outright” instead… which states midway, “Something we were withholding made us weak…” But our embattled President actually reminds me of a different Frost work. If I may wax fanciful, he stands on the verge of the ocean of our nation’s problems, but so far seems unwilling to do more than wade the shallows, “neither out far nor in deep”—when he needs to jump in with both feet and swim hard for the horizon, ignoring sharks and storm-surge and other struggling swimmers, if he really wants to save himself and his beautiful family and the rest of US from drowning.

(Photo copyright Luke Sharrett and The New Yorker.)

Gil: Still Cool

Gil Evans, the brilliant, self-effacing, stubbornly dedicated arranger/composer, died in 1988, but admirers of his recordings and students of his amazing re-imaginings of other composers’ work, whether Tchaikovsky’s “Arab Dance” or Parker’s “Donna Lee” for the Claude Thornhill Orchestra; Gershwin’s “Summertime” or Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez for Miles Davis; Weill’s “Bilbao Song” or the Willie Dixon Blues-assembly known as “Spoonful” (and howled by the Wolf) for Gil’s own bands--or for that matter his famous tunes like “La Nevada,” “Flute Song,” “Hotel Me” (with Miles), “Zee Zee,” “Las Vegas Tango”—marked the Evans Centennial on May 12th of this year. And they… I should say we, because I am one and we are many… we have great cause for celebration.

One of our number, a young composer named Ryan Truesdell, protégé of composer/bandleaders Bob Brookmeyer and Maria Schneider and sometime Jazz musician, was curious about one long-lost work of Gil’s, inquired about it to the Evans family, was given access to great heaps of paper (scattered across the U.S.) representing Evans’ accumulated life’s work, and gradually found a treasure trove of unknown arrangements, some never used, others played but unrecorded and forgotten, from the five decades of Gil’s life in Jazz.

Ryan searched for all the elements for 15 or 20 of the more intriguing, found nearly every chart for those arrangements, and then applied to the ArtistShare program, which helps musicians raise the money for projects adjudged worthwhile, and which also provides a shared-ownership record label to present the results. But most of the production money comes from fans of each artist, who are invited to “participate” at contribution levels ranging from the price of a single CD up to several thousand dollars. (More about that below.) Among previous ArtistShare successes are award-winning albums by Maria Schneider, Jim Hall, Bob Brookmeyer, Pat Metheny, the Clayton Brothers, and other less familiar names.

With this Evans hundredth-year project, simply titled Centennial, the combination of splendid subject, important discoveries, applicant’s proven experience (and connections), and willingness of Evans fans to cough up some serious money carried the day; and so last fall Truesdell assembled a modern Evans-styled orchestra made up of New York’s top Jazz band musicians (including a few who had played for Gil), and they recorded ten of the best or most interesting arrangements, with pride of place, the opening track on the terrific resulting album, given over to “Punjab”--the missing tune that began Ryan’s unplanned quest--revealed as quintessential Sixties Gil, a wandering and wailing (piano and alto sax, respectively), 14-minute, tabla-driven journey, past Bangalore and the Hindu Kush to regions unknown… or, if I exaggerate, just think of an open window with a view of the richly exotic East, and then look beyond. (That tabla, by the way, was Truesdell’s own shrewd addition to the Evans arrangement.)

Complexity and a sheath of eerie dissonance mark Gil’s revision and extension of Kurt Weill’s “Barbara Song,” the ten-minute earlier version of which had appeared on the Individualism album. But Gil revisited and re-arranged it for a 1971 Berlin concert of his compositions; allowing for plenty of the Evans-patented, unresolved, hovering chords, the new version also leads to a more driven and insistent second half. Truesdell in turn has allowed the “Orkester Neo-Gil” (I made up the name) to wind and find its own way, like an Evans band of the later Seventies, through colors and silences and drifting solos, and with a vibraharp guiding the arrangement--in place of the original’s startling piano cues and Wayne Shorter’s haunted, lyrical tenor--providing a musical spine that seems to rattle a bit like the skeleton-ribs vibes in some Thirties b&w cartoon. (Anyone confused by that sentence, mea culpa, and be assured that the resulting 12 minutes of “Barbara” may well be the CD’s piece de l’existence.)

There are many other gems here—a beautiful expansion of “The Maids of Cadiz,” once a trim highlight of Miles Ahead; three delicate but craftily constructed vocal tidbits, two meant for Thornhill and the third for Astrid Gilberto years later, plus a peripatetic fourth chart maybe played by both Tommy Dorsey and Les Brown (think of all these as small steps on the path of a scufflin’ arranger); a three-tune Evans medley, a melange of meandering melodies meant to nudge his players into leading from within; plus the late-evening chart that Brookmeyer remembered playing during his brief time with Thornhill's band, and that he recommended Ryan track down as well. (It was “How About You.”)

All the tracks merit further attention, but I want to discuss participating in ArtistShare instead… because I did.

I had purchased direct from the organization some excellent CDs by Schneider and Hall, so I received email notice of the Evans/Truesdell project, with an invitation to help make it happen. “Wow,” I thought. “…If I only had the money.” As the saying goes, Be careful what you wish for…

A day or two later, I heard from my friend Ken Wiley, radio station KPLU’s Sunday afternoon deejay, playing the whole history of Jazz for 30-plus years now. Ken wanted me to help him sell some duplicate Mosaic-label box sets on eBay. (He proudly owns no computer.) I’d have done it as a favor, but he insisted on splitting the money on any sales made. Long story short, the collectors were buying; Ken made out like a band leader, and I fell into a first chair spot. Suddenly I had some discretionary money. I hemmed and hawed and then went ahead, sending the cash for a Bronze-level participation.

Each project sets its own definitions for rewards and, I suppose, light responsibilities—for example, buttonholing other fans to contribute or to join. The Evans project so far has posted well over a hundred videos, downloads, interviews, caches of session photos, rough mixes, reports from Ryan, and more—all available to participants only (but that includes single CD buyers too). Each of us also received a Signed copy of the Evans biography by Stephanie Stein Crease, and one or two peripheral notices from Ryan. Also per the system, the big-bucks Silver or Gold-level participants might be invited to recording sessions or club dates; and all of the "metal" bearers have their names listed prominently on the elaborate double-fold digipak (which also comes with separate burnt-umber booklets housing Ryan’s informative liner notes and session-musician photos). Altogether, First Class treatment and a First Rate experience… and with Gil Evans involved, one can claim to be contributing, however slightly, to the serious History of Jazz.

Meanwhile the Centennial disc keeps spinning and gleaming. Chords hover and solos turn sharply. Trombones bark and trumpets sound, saxes swirl and woodwinds moan. There’s tuba and tabla, bass clarinet and clarion bass, horns a-French and flutes afloat, oboes ever and—oh, man—all over his drum kit, the great Lewis Nash. Ryan conducts with assurance, Frank Kimbrough channels Gil at the piano, altoist Steve Wilson hard-charges inside and out-... and together they transport the band from the lost history behind to the Free Territory ahead.

Spread the word, shout it out, write it on the walls:

Evans Unearthed… Gil Lives.

Under Reconstruction

Uh, that would be me, not the website. I figured this silence might be deafening someone, or at least defining me not as I would like to be known. So here's an interim dispatch from the front... or, I should say, from a region of the body politic further south:

The pinched-nerve pain persists, in the lower back and elsewhere. Makes focussing difficult. I nod off at the keyboard from pain meds and can't sit for long comfortably, anyway. But I'm hopeful nonetheless. Some days are better than others, and I'll soon be getting a cortisone shot in the lumbar part of my spine.

Meanwhile, during this unwanted break I'm actually working on three different mini-essays at once, so there are new posts on a Jazz celebration, a cult film, and a slide guitarist all looming.

As Ahnold accidently threatened, "Ah'll be Bach." (My, my. Imagine all those Messes and Fugs, Gould-plated yet, if it were so.)

It's Turk to Me

“YOHHHG-JIAH! YOOHHHHGG-JI-AHHH!”

That was one of many street cries we’d hear—some daily, some less frequent; some intruding through the curtained glass-wall front, straight into our second-floor apartment, but others faint and far off like a distant train whistle.

We were living in Turkey then—it was the mid-Fifties—in the old, old Aegean coastal city known as Smyrna for well over three thousand years, one of Christianity’s original “Seven Churches of Asia (Minor),” with another, Ephesus, just down the road. In 1900, say, the city was still a generally peaceful mix of young Turks migrating from the dusty countryside; longtime resident Greeks, many of them well-to-do merchants; and a small colony of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain hundreds of years before.

But in the post-Ataturk nation--more secular, with most Arabic connections denied, and a new Westernized Turkish alphabet and language created--the city’s name had been modernized by deleting the end syllable and adding a new beginning (was it perhaps symbolic?), creating the harsher-sounding urban destination “Izmir.”

The population for this major seaport city, spreading out from a sweeping crescent of harbor, was already around 300,000 by then, but has since expanded explosively to four million and counting. The sounds and street shouts we heard are drowned in traffic noise now—a great clatter and clamor… fewer cries and whispers.

The called-out, cajoling offers of the horse-drawn carriage drivers (who occasionally came riding to the rescue of threatened young Americans) have given way to honking, tires-squealing taxicabs. The music drifting from windows and doorways sounds generic Western now, rather than harem-shrill Turkish or the haunted strains drawn from bluesy Greek rembetika. (Early singer Rita Abadzi was a Smyrna native.) Muezzins high in the minarets today need loudspeakers to call the

faithful to prayer, where their voices in older times, rising and falling rhythmically, were alone sufficient.

The old Bazaar, a dark, crowded maze of shops and stalls, coffee houses and blind alleyways, still exists, but now selling machine-made rugs and cheap gimcrack knockoffs from China instead of brass bells and camel saddles and coffee thick as sludge. The camel trains hauling trade goods are gone, and the beautiful pebble-front, two- and three-story apartment buildings—lost in the rush of Metro trains and a modern international airport, and the crush of massive eight-floor, Soviet-style housing blocs that push out in all directions.

Revisiting Izmir 30 years later in 1986, the only wandering street vendors I saw involved parked-all-day handcarts with young guys boredly hawking shishkebabs, or the Turkish equivalent of gyro wraps, or melting ice cream. Long gone, it seemed, were the whistling knife sharpener with his foot-pedal grindstone wheel, and the old man singing out his willingness to gather all your discarded books and newspapers, and the big-voiced vegetable seller busy letting everyone within a two-block radius know which fruits and vegetables were fresh that day and right there for sale on his produce-piled-high wagon pulled by a rough-and-ready horse.

My own favorite, back in the fondly remembered Izmir of the Fifties, was the peripatetic yoghurt seller, roaming the city with a heavy yoke on his shoulders and two big buckets dangling down, hollering out “YOOGGHHJIAH” and slower, stretched-out variations of the same. You could buy a small paper-cup’s worth or fill up your kitchen container, and the only flavoring came from a honey jar he carried along too. Rich, creamy, and with the honey, a treat nearly as special as ice cream…

So here we are today, going on three decades farther on, and the supermarkets and TV ads of the wider world tout, not just yoghurt, but specifically Greek yoghurt.

Huh? What makes this yoghurt Greek? The goats or cows or, I don’t know, penned sheep maybe, deliver the same milk wherever they are (barring agriculture conditions), and they don’t recognize national boundaries. In fact, I think they graze on any available grass-without-borders.

I also sampled and examined single-serving containers from a couple of different U.S. companies and found some data of interest. One offers Greek yoghurt (“Greek style,” they say) originating in Montlake Terrace, Washington; and another hails from New Berlin(!), New York. One calls itself “The Greek Gods” (Pomegranate represents

Apollo), while the other bears the distinctly non-Greek brand name Chobani. And if the Greeks do have a process for their word (extra straining to insure less liquid and more protein), the Japanese-sounding, German settlement, Greek-insistent product has 3g of Fat, 160 calories, and 14g of Protein, while the “stylin’” one’s same-size serving holds 17g Fat, 230 calories, and 6g Protein. (In comparison here’s a plain, unGreek yoghurt with 0g Fat, 120 calories, and 12g Protein; tastes just fine with a dab of honey.) Both brands offer a mild and tasty product enhanced by fruit flavoring, or some fruit jam in the bottom of the cup meant to be stirred up into the unflavored yoghurt.

Which of these is more faithfully, maybe poetically, Greek? It’s true that the Greek

people suffered occasionally when the Ottoman Turks ruled a vast, lazy, Eastern Mediterranean empire that included Greece--and then more certainly, murderously so, in 1922 when Ataturk’s army drove the Greeks residing in Izmir and elsewhere literally into the Aegean Sea. But the yoghurts of both lands are very much the same. Only paid company scientists and (m)ad men and women care to define (or invent) such specious claims.

Yoghurt from a streetseller in Izmir 50-some years ago vs. yoghurt sold in Seattle today? I suppose it's a wash, aside from advances in sterilizing and mass producing,

but my memory says different. That yoghurt cup you’re pretending makes for a yummy lunch? Well, it may be Greek to you, but it’s Turk to me.

But better yet might be the world remembering that yoghurt too is Gaian first. One world… one yoghurt.

* * * * *
It occurred to me today (three days post-post) that I missed a chance to more deftly make the point (split infinitive be hanged). So...

Insisting that Greek yoghurt somehow tastes better than Turkish is tantamount to claiming that Jewish olives grown "inside" the infamous barrier Wall taste better than Palestinian ones grown on the other side... when what the two sides really need is for one or the other to offer an olive branch.

Got Me in Its Spell

Some damn slice of Spam shows up on my computer almost daily, for a nothing called Magic Jack; never opened a message so I have no idea what that is, nor do I care. But that word “Magic” has been haunting my brain like the words to some familiar song.

As a result, lately I’ve been thinking and remembering… magic sets and birthday magic shows, a happy family staple of mid-20th century America; King Arthur’s mentor Merlin perennially revived in books and movies; Sinatra’s versions of “Witchcraft” and “That Old Black Magic”; Ingmar Bergman’s superb black-and-white film starring a youngish Max von Sydow as The Magician, and the recent, and decent, bit of full-color trickery called The Illusionist; innumerable novels of the world incorporating anything-may-happen “magic realism,” versus John Fowles’

creepy Greek Isles sojourn titled The Magus; the ubiquitous wizards and fannish wannabes brought together by mania for the Harry Potter saga and The Lord of the Rings; the inescapable illusions of Houdini and his modern-day descendants, the “Davids” and “Chrises” appearing and disappearing near us all.

Among the hundreds of references and memories circling in my brain, one stands starkly lit and alone, a late-Seventies television commercial. Ridiculous that such a thing can still command one’s attention (anything short of Kate Upton engulfing a burger, anyway!) 35 years later, but such is the case. And from that case, his special holding cell, comes the scary ventriloquist’s dummy of the thriller flick

simply titled Magic (starring Anthony Hopkins and Ann-Margret).

The dummy, in a tightening close-up of its neck and head, a continuous 30-second shot, mockingly intones a scary bit of verse, something along the lines of:

Corpses are blue,
Blood is red;
Magic is fun…
You’re dead.

Then the eyes roll up in its head, and End.

Whoa, Nelly! That one hit me straight on, and it was just as disquieting the few times I caught it again. But Magic the film pretty much stiffed, and the commercial vanished into the graveyard of dead TV spots. Yet the memory lingers on… (It’s possible that I’m misremembering the verse recited. In a 30-second You Tube upload the dummy practically smacks its lips saying, “Hocus pocus, We take her to bed; Magic is fun, We’re dead.” But I like my version better, seems more likely to have satisfied the television censors of 1978!)

Anyway, such were the forms of magic lurking in my head when I wrote this odd poem many years later…

Svengalied

She vanished me. Now you see

me nought. A mesmer’d man,
a cache of bewilderment, I was
convenience of coyntage only.

What began as parlor tricks—
my slide of hands upon her
sequined gown, and nothing
up my sleeve—became a mixed

preponderance, a legerdemain
of lust, and I masterfully mis-
directed. Pick a night, any
night, any night at all; feigned

rings linked, fingers palming
balls, miraculous escapes.
Found coin did multiply her
‘til she worked my enabling

cards with a consummate skill;
no one discerned the mage
in her rough magic… (Oh, teller
ensorcelled! Oh, Circean tale!)

For as I too quickly learned,
the trick is sold when the trick

is told. Wands become wilted
flowers; fair-color silks turn

mourning doves; and love dis-
appears up its own frayed rope
once the abracadabras have
all been said, and no rabbits

in the rigged hat remain. My
heart is black stone now
without illusions, much harder
words unpenned--who’d deny

such grievance?--as I saw my
self in half, my voice thrown
far, full past some dummy man-
drake’s raw unsevered cords.

* * * *
Hoist with his own petard? Maybe... so long as you know that petard does not mean "rope."