American Crow

Maria Schneider nails the moment

Watching the aforementioned Karoline Leavitt at the White House Press Conference, I saw moments of what Maria Schneider identifies as'...Curated Rage' . I think Maria has found a way to respond symphonically to the messes we are in, and the album to which this is an addendum, ‘Data Lords’ , advances on what is sent to discomobulate us. In Robert Bly’s poetry the Crow is a bird of concerned, existential reconnaissance, and in parallel process I guess this is why Maria’s piece starts out temporising before the performative insistent bludgeon that you also find in Shosta’s Lenningrad Symphony ( I remember being, was it, Trombone 8 in a rendering where the relentlessly crescendoing side drummer was about 11 years of age). The writing is deliberately regressed and all the more powerful in its impact and resolution, and I guess Maria has a handle on the ‘Cycle of Aggression’ which is instructive to play alongside the boyish impetuosity of Hegseth and Rubio, notwithstanding the lingering notion that Jon Voight has sat them down with Leavitt and taught them all to look and sound a little more ( not very much, let’s face it) like grown-ups. But the clean-up is above their heads.

This has been an Imperialist trope for centuries, of course. The British Empire had moments of gallantry but exponentially more of crass ignorance which sadly outweigh them in the review rhetoric. A few years ago I remember coming across an exhibition of sepia photographs of World War 1 where the Tommies had the savvy and emotional intelligence to help their Muslim colleagues - multicultural endeavour well under the media radar of its day- make and adopt places to pray amid the trenches. 30-odd years later, my Dad had to discreetly bend Queens’ Regulations and learn Hindi from the Chaiwallah so that his troop would not get lost in the jungle on exercise. In the end the Japanese were thwarted by a female warrior from a community up in the surrounding hills. This aspect of knowing the turf, knowing the local heartbeat is out of fashion again, or is arbitarily commandeered by whoever might be suggesting that the CIA book the Kurds to lead an Iranian uprising. Intel , like proper Journalism recognises that localities are not monolithic any more than hillscapes or jungles are. Secterianism is less prevalent than the ‘…Beautiful’ unity of a population in forbearance of whatever the next wave of imperative or risk is (I’m quoting an apparently punchdrunk ex-Iranian functionary shifted to academe speaking on Al-Jazeera) . somewhere in there is the essence of persia’s vast cultural and scientific achievement, but layered in the equivalent of ‘patriotic’ bathos.

Mind You, some of the actual sentiment floors the hard-baked sometimes. Watching the current incumbents I’m reminded of the 5 star American general who improbably visited the dusty outpost of Graffenwohr in the BAOR. We had trudged-me on seat-of-the-pants Viola- through our mess orchestra staples like the discombobulated ‘Boulevardier’ and selections from’Rose Marie’ and I think must have had some latently swingy in the pad, in that said General laid his mess jacket on the back of a chair, loosened his tie and took over the drum chair in the metier of Gene Krupa, including an unassumingly killer solo. That’s the kind of shock and awe we need right now, nothing more. There would be a chair for him in Maria’s combo, I’m sure.