Wayfaring the Labyrinth > Broonzy, Crane, Lewis/Clark, Fiddler, et al

'Jefferson insisted that simply making the journey and finding the (Northwest) passage was not enough. As one historian has explained, The eighteenth century believed perhaps more strongly than any other that travel makes truth.' - As quoted in the essay 'The Objects of Our Journey', by James P. Ronda (The University of Tulsa) in Lewis and Clark, Across the Divide

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From NPR's Fresh Air, In Big Bill Broonzy's Blues, Brothers Find a Way to Sing:

'... my band had a gig opening up for Black Oak Arkansas, and about an hour before we went onstage, a Cadillac pulled up with Lightnin' Hopkins' cousin Hoppy Hopkins driving, and Joe Turner got out and Lee Allen got out and they came up onstage and played with us, out of nowhere.' - Phil Alvin

What I wouldn't give to hear Big Bill Broonzy croon Backwater Blues or Lightening Hopkins gravel through his tune My Babe. (Not mentioned in the NPR episode, my favorite, Big Joe Williams: Down in the Bottoms and Blues Left Texas).

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I can describe New York light mostly in the winter because it's like - it's like my favorite thing. You move from light to dark. You know, you move from a brilliant splash of sun to kind of like a midnight shadow, you know, and you watch the sun come up in east and go down in the west in New York, and it's like, you know, it just looks like welding sometimes it's so beautiful.

It's stunning mainly because it's moving through all of these buildings, you know, and it bounces through windows and off windows and down into the street. It's - and it's always changing, which is quite wonderful unless you happen to be photographing something, then you want to hurry up so you get it the right way. But it's just as stunning.

- Cinematographer, Gordon Willis ('The Godfather', 'All the President's Men', 'Manhattan') on the subject of New York light.

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While reading 'Repose of Rivers' in The Complete Poems of Hart Crane, I flipped back to the introduction to reread critic Harold Bloom's words and remembered (with some reassurance that I am not insane -nor alone- because of my dislike of T. S. Eliot's poetry) that Bloom wrote:

The glory of The Bridge (1930) is its ambivalent warfare with The Waste Land, without which Crane would not have been the miracle he was. I say this most reluctantly, having loved Hart Crane, Blake, and Shelley since I was a child, and having loathed Eliot endlessly, even as I involuntarily memorized every line of his poetry.

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From Claire Ittner (I stumbled across her essay while perambulating the web for info on Giacometti):

He did not create his art as a means of accomplishing his goal, whether that goal involved an awareness of humanity’s isolation or not. His art was his goal, and he ardently sought to capture his way of seeing. His vision was in no way objective; it was undeniably shaped by Giacometti’s personal experience.

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Fiddler abides:

When Jerome Robbins became our director, he told us this story. He said when he was 6, his parents took him to that part of Poland where their ancestors came from, and even at the age of 6 he remembers it being a very emotional experience. Then, during World War II, as he read about the extermination of these little villages by the Nazis, he was certain that the village that he had visited when he was 6 was one of those villages that had been obliterated. So when we gave him the opportunity to direct Fiddler, he said, 'I want to put that culture back on stage. I want to give it a theatrical life of another 25 years.' He was being modest, because now it's almost 50 years and it's still going strong. But he was a man obsessed with restoring that culture. He did enormous research. I think [Robbins], more than anyone else, is responsible for the success that Fiddler's had. - At 90, 'Fiddler' Lyricist Tells His Story, from NPR

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Wayfaring the Labyrinth is my semi-regular posting of interesting discoveries stumbled upon in my own library or the world's wildy web (topics are usually literature, art, music, and/or food); the real purpose of this series: breadcrumbs for my forgetful mind.