"Planet Drum" (1991), Mickey Hart and Fredric Lieberman

Mickey Hart, drummer for the Grateful Dead since 1967 in its many incarnations, should know a thing or two about percussion.

Now 65, he's participated in various projects at the Smithsonian Institution and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, among others, including studies in the role of music in healing and health. Hart's 1991 book, Planet Drum: A Celebration of Percussion and Rhythm, which he co-authored with Fredric Lieberman, is a wide-ranging survey of the big beat heard around the world and its place in history and culture.

Percussion is an old, old sound that goes way, way back: the big bang at the beginning of the universe is "beat one;" the rest, according to Joseph Campbell quoted here, is "a fragmentation in the field of time."

Long before rock'n'roll records were smashed and trashed because of their prinmitive beats, Buddhist monks coming into Tibet performed their religious practice without drums -- to distinguish themselves from the magicians and shamans of Bon, an older Tibetan religion and its drumming rituals given by the gods.

"Tsong Khapa asked Chumbu, 'Why do you use the drum? You know we don't use drums because that's the way of shamans.' Chumbu replied, 'I do it for Mahakala. He likes it.' Tsong Khapa was not convinced. He said, 'Try not using it for a while, and see if there's any difference. Personally, I think it's a superstition, and you don't really need it.' So Chumbu stopped using the damaru. But he felt unhappy and never saw a trace of Mahakala. Everybody was miserable. When Tsong Khapa returned he asked, 'Was there a difference?' Chumbu replied, 'There was a great difference! Mahakala didn't like it, and I don't like it. So, please, let's go back to using the drum again.' Tsong Khapa then reinstated the use of drums again in ritual."

Congas played by Francesco Aguabella, 1988

It's myth-making on a grand scale, and stories like this run throughout Planet Drum's pages: the Buddhists learned to incorporate the power of rhythm (and symbolism) in the instrument called the damaru. The book quotes Buddhist teacher Tarthang Tulku:

"Buddhists don't get hung up on ancestral things. But an important reason we use bones -- human and animal -- in instruments such as the damaru, the thigh-bone trumpets, and in implements such as skull bowls, is to serve as continual reminders of impermanence and the immediacy of death. You know that death is close by, and death is an advisor. And you realize that your own bones will eventually be like this."

The full-page photo of "Priscilla," a 37-kiloton atomic bomb tested in 1957, brings home this point in an unexpected way.

While including an atomic bomb may be a stretch, it emphasizes Hart's busman's holiday of drumming that takes on all forms in Planet Drum, from the Russian bell called Tsar-Kolokol ("emperor of bells") to the rattle of sistras in Eithopia. It's a big, sometimes dizzying tour, both in time and place.

Ethiopian musicians playing the sistra, mid-1980s.

The book is a museum of photographs -- a bit jumbled at times, with timelines and text splashed across the pages -- but the scope of the book underscores the universal uses of sound and rhythm throughout human history: from the beginning, a mother's heartbeat is the first rhythm we know. In life, in religion, and in war, the beat strengthens ritual, enhances enjoyment, inspires devotion or fear.

"Just what do we find so attractive about rhythmically-controlled noise? Part of the answer is found in the nature of percussive noise. Loud! Sudden! It trips the switches in the oldest part of the brain, the part that quickly reacts with a fight-or-flight program, stimulating the release of adrenaline ... we never feel so alive as when the adrenaline is flowing."

Hart calls drumming "our musical skeleton key" -- an appropriate metaphor for someone still Grateful after all these years, in whatever shapes the Dead are still performing. It's almost April -- another spring season, with warm weather and green days ahead; time to celebrate renewal, rattle those pots and pans, time again to shake that old bag of bones. Twirling is optional.

(Images from Planet Drum, 1991)

"Memories, Dreams and Reflections" (2007): A 2009 interview with Marianne Faithfull

Listeners unfamiliar with Marianne Faithfull may wonder what all the fuss is about: her voice seems like a ruin, and her songs are a gothic landscape of unfulfilled longing. Yet it's just these qualities that long-time fans find redeem her pop-star past and underscore her singular career as a singer, fearlessly chain-smoking her way from songs by Harry Nilsson to Nick Cave to Bertolt Brecht. She's a one-woman Weimar Republic of a chanteuse, and with the current economy in its tottering, sorry state her music sounds as timely as ever, and just as dark.

At 62 (can that be right?), Marianne continues to record 45 years after "As Tears Go By" was an international hit in 1964. This year she returns with a new album reuniting her with producer Hal Wilner, who first collaborated with the singer on 1979's Broken English. The April 2009 issue of Interview magazine features a talk Faithfull had with the writer Evelyn McDonnell, whose line of questioning is heavy on the Stones references and high on the decadence image, which the singer doesn't exactly discourage ("I don't do much that is decadent in my life. But I still am decadent. It's a state of mind.")

It's a pose she wears well, and with some cause; she is the grandniece of the writer whose own descriptions of decadence took on the family name in the term "masochism," Leopold Sacher-Masoch. But she's become absolutely at home in her world-weary persona, like any rock star who can slip in-and-out of character, and certainly the audience for Interview can live vicariously through a brief retelling of Marianne's own wobbly past.

" ... people will think what they think, and sometimes some of it will be really bad shit. But I don't think my fans want me to be anyone else. I couldn't anyway ... it is a persona, but it doesn't look like a persona because I've been working all my life to get my persona and my true self a bit more together, so that I don't have to pretend. And now I think I've done it."

McDonnell doesn't do anything to explain this appeal to decadence (you either enjoy Marianne's voice and songs -- and I do -- or you find them inexplicable), but the interview does trace a line from past to present with a directness that Marianne finds astonishing in the telling: how did I get here from there?

It's an old twist on the celebrity tale when Ms. Faithfull -- after being at the center of the cultural '60s storm, thanks in part to the Stones' manager Andrew Loog Oldham -- admits that "(I've) learned to live life as it actually is, which helps a lot ... it's wise to try to be realistic." You can take that remark at face value, or it can serve as the ultimate cautionary tale of wretched excess survived, from the co-writer of "Sister Morphine."

The new attitude is a good way to sell albums and books, too, if after all Faithfull has gone through in her life she's still astounded by the presumptions and attitudes of others. Speaking of her shock at a director who wrote a script based on Faithfull, her 1994 down-and-out, rock-life autobiography, she then laughs: "I didn't realize they could do that -- that they would just buy a book title and then make it all up."

Even more astounding is the fact it's Carrie Fisher who explains the wicked, wicked ways of Hollywood to her: "She said, 'You know, you may think that your story has been degraded enough' -- which I do think, that in my life it has been quite degraded enough -- 'but there are people who will want to degrade you more.'" Later in the interview Faithfull comes back to the topic of the director and the fabricated scene:

"I did assume that anybody who wanted to make a film of my book -- and this guy is very well-known and very respected -- would do it because they wanted to and because they liked me. But I was completely wrong. He just wanted to put me down. He thought I was not only a prostitute in the time when I was living on the street, but a prostitute in art, which I'm not."


Her 2007 autobiography is called Memories, Dreams and Reflections; it's "a nice little book" in contrast to her earlier memoir, of which she says now, "everybody said I should do it -- get it out of my system. So I did." The new album is a collection of cover songs ranging from Billie Holiday to The Miracles to Merle Haggard. And there's Randy Newman's "In Germany Before the War," a Brecht-like sketch about the shopkeeper and his "girl with hair of gold" who meet by the river and dream of crossing the sea to America.

The song has a hint of Faithfull's own family history here; her Austrian mother married a British officer and they escaped to London during World War II. "All the way through these songs," Faithfull tells the interviewer, "there are one or two lines that, if I'd put them together, would make my story. I like that. I believe we have to have a story and we have to express it, and I've got one."

(Photographs from the April 2009 issue of Interview by Paolo Roversi)

"For the Love of Books" (1999), Ronald B. Shwartz

Here's a grand rainy-day idea: Ask 115 writers to write about their favorite books. What author wouldn't spend five or six pages babbling on (okay, carefully crafting) a reply about some obscure title they obsessively read as a child, or the effect of a book casually chosen that hit them like a thunderclap? Which writers, exactly, did they desperately first try to mimic? With some choice replies achingly absent -- no one expects J.D. Salinger to break his career of silence at the age of 90 -- For the Love of Books is still a fascinating and sometimes confounding pleasure.

For the Love of Books collects the stories of these 115 writers' literary educations: some are funny, many serious, and a great number surprising. John Barth's love of fable underpins his mention of The Thousand and One Nights; I wasn't expecting Kurt Vonnegut's debt to The Book of Genesis: "It's very interesting to have an origin myth, and I certainly wouldn't want to live without one." More than a few replies are echoes of near despair: books in which the writer finds a talent so monumental that they almost gave up their own writing altogether. And many of the replies open the reader to authors whose works may still be a puzzle, or yet to be read. From Pete Hammill comes mention of an unfamiliar novel also noted by Barth and Thomas McGuane:


"Epitaph of a Small Winner, by Machado de Assis, is another great novel, set in Brazil and written in Portuguese. I have maybe seven different versions of it. What's extraordinary is that it was written more than a hundred years ago yet it's so incredibly modern. First, the writing is so clean, and so about life -- it's written from the point of view of being dead. And it also has this very modernist sense that there is a collusion between the writer and the reader that's directly in the text. It's the kind of book I am incapable of writing. ... (Machado) was trying to capture, it seems to me, some essential truth about human beings ... he's saying that individuals are capable of stupidity and folly but then, in the end, you cherish them anyway. There's a warmth to the book, a kind of awed sunniness in Machado that I personally connect to."


Elmore Leonard admires Hemingway, but admits cheerfully that "Papa was the wrong guy to imitate"; then he discovers his narrative voice in the books of Richard Bissell: "The novel that hooked me was High Water. The story is set on a tow-boat pushing eight barge-loads of coal from St. Louis to St. Paul, up the Mississippi on a flood tide." What Leonard learns from the rough-and-tumble characters of Grease Cup and the Ironhat is to develop affection for his characters, and not to take writing books too seriously: "I've learned it has to be fun or it isn't worth doing."

John Irving admires the Dickensian novelists Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Gunter Geass ("I even gave Owen Meany the same initials as Oskar Matzarath, in homage to the master"). No surprise that Frank McCourt recites the opening questions from the catechism of the Roman Catholic Church. A surprising number list The Great Gatsby and Look Homeward Angel. Of Thomas Wolfe: "not much talked about these days," Sven Birkirts notes, "and the consensus seems to be that the novels are word-zeppelins, acres of hot air over which an outer skin has been stretched ... " Still, it was Wolfe's "cloud of romanticism (that) persuaded me I wanted to be a writer -- a novelist." Wolfe's "word-zeppelin" of a book also makes the lists of Mark Strand, William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut.

From John Updike to Dave Barry, even a random glance at For the Love of Books will reveal some gem: Gertrude Stein gets her expected, modernist due, and then there's the fond mention by one author of Archie comics. (Guess who.) The book is a joy-ride through contemporary literature: you may not understand Pete Hammill's esteem of Bomba, the Jungle Boy at the Giant Cataract, but here he is describing the excitement of meeting a a mutual fan:

"There couldn't be two American writers more different than me and Louis Auchincloss, but we know each other and we both have this Bomba, the Jungle Boy thing. Not long ago I ran into him in the middle of some big event at the Museum of the City of New York and he says to me, 'Pete, old boy. Do you have Bomba, the Jungle Boy at the Swamp Death? I just found a copy.' The people in our immediate vicinity thought we were insane or putting them on. But it was dead serious."

In his introduction Ronald Shwartz admits that compiling this book, while a work of deep interest and literary pursuit, was not easy. "Some correspondents were just this side of surly ... some were demure, like John Gregory Dunne ... then there were those who declined, redeclined, then acceeded, then redeclined again, and finally succumbed over the course of nine months." One of the more fascinating aspects of the book is the bibliography, which lists all the titles mentioned in the text, as well as who recommended them.

It's the reader's own to discover who likes what, who disparages whom, and who at the age of fifteen found a copy of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio translated into Hebrew. And some contributors just can't leave without a slash of the poison pen; On the Road gets a faint-hearted pass by the curmudgeonly P.J. O'Rourke: "not very good, either ... but so completely American that, by comparison, Walt Whitman sounds like a windy, ancient Greek. Made me think even I could write." Take that, Jack!

Martin Mull: "Paintings Drawings and Words" (1995)

Some books are so eager to become part of a collection they literally jump off the shelf and hit the reader on the head. Martin Mull's Paintings Drawings and Words fell off a high bookcase at a library sale while I was trying to pull away its neighbor -- Paul Bowles' The Spider's House. Both books, of course, wound up being worth the combined, exorbitant $1.00 price.

Mull is one of the Hollywood people for whom the glare of the spotlight is a welcome help to finding one's glasses, but not much else. Because of his relatively low show-business profile after abandoning a career as stand-up comedian and recording artist, Mull has been able to pursue a career as a painter, with years of exhibits to his credit.

Bedroom Scene (1992), Martin Mull

His television appearances -- as a late regular on Roseanne, The Ellen (DeGeneres) Show, and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, as well as recurring roles on American Dad and even (yes, really) Sabrina the Teenage Witch -- belie his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and he's been quoted as saying everything else he has done in his life has simply been to support his painting.



Paintings Drawings and Words is a large-format catalogue of Mull's work to 1995, accompanied by essays on art and work in his typically self-effacing style. Discussing originality, he has the smarts to quote Jean Cocteau ("One has to be very careful with originality or one may appear to have a brand-new haircut and a brand-new suit") and the honesty to claim "The Piano Lesson" by Henri Matisse as the single painting that has influenced his work.

"Though the gravitation was probably driven by nothing more sophisticated than 'I don't know about art, but I know what I like,' hindsight suggests that the deceptive simplicity of his work and the promise of accessibility and understanding that it afforded were a major motivation as well. I was hell-bent to learn picture-making from the best picture-maker I could find ... by virtue of his astounding visual intelligence, Matisse was the most important painter of the twentieth century."

When Mull, then a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, finally sees "The Piano Lesson" in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, he calls it a "confrontation rather than surprise encounter." After years of seeing the "postage-stamp sized reproduction" in art books, the original painting's size -- eight-and-a-half by seven feet -- made his knees go weak.

As a student, he was so impressed by its striking simplicity and color that it became "the perfect classroom" for what even Mull now claims was "an arrogant and ill-founded pursuit, doomed from the outset." Matisse's genius, he writes, was a learnable theorem that would reveal itself as a reward for diligence, determination, and patience.

"It has taken me nearly thirty years to realize that my original, mistaken premise -- that diligence, determination, and patience could ultimately deliver up a painter's genius -- was only slightly askew. The truth is that diligence, determination, and patience can deliver up a specific painting's genius --that magical and intangible quality that enables a painting to make music. Recently I have attempted to tap the feelings that attended my first viewing of "The Piano Lesson" as inspiration for paintings of a similar subject.

Study for The Dinner Guest (1993), Martin Mull

Although working from a preconception, even one as vaporous and esoteric as those memories ... I have made what I currently consider to be some of my better paintings. This is not to say I have accomplished what I set out to do. That is going to take a lot more diligence, determination, and patience."

In 2004, "Admissible Evidence" was Mull's seventh solo show in New York. His most recent paintings evoke a 1950s suburban childhood, darkened with what one reviewer calls "feelings of loss, disconnection, and fear" -- exactly the emotions most children feel when they sit for an hour in front of a piano. It seems Mull has internalized the experience of "The Piano Lesson" after all, if not its genius.

"Mexico South" (1946), Miguel Covarrubias

A map of Mexico, as illustrated by Miguel Covarrubias

Mexico South is one of those truly rare finds at a library book sale. For fifty cents I discovered in this lavish, out-of-print volume the ancient culture of Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec -- the area shared by the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas -- in the writing of a witty and charming guide, Miguel Covarrubias, one of Mexico's premier twentieth-century artists.

Covarrubias in his various careers was also a filmmaker, ethnographer, linguist, and commercial artist who created covers for many magazines. He spent years researching the ancient Olmec culture, documenting the land and the people of Tehuantepec, as well as its seven languages. And this was only one of his cultural studies; his 1936 book, The Island of Bali, is still in print, and was just republished in 2008.

Young tehunas carrying flowers, illustration by M. Covarrubias

Mexico South is filled with Covarrubias's own colorful paintings and detailed photographs. It's a travel book of the researched, historical past and the busy, daily life in the area stretching the 117 miles at Mexico's narrowest point between Juchitan on the west and Coatzacoalcos on the east.

He illustrates the region's ancient history and details the peoples' complex relationship with the Spanish conquistadores who transformed the culture in the 16th century. These ideas are part of a larger Covarrubias theme, which he developed over years: that the Indian cultures of Mexico became a dynamic force on Pacific Ocean civilizations as far away as Easter Island.

Chiapas (detail), by M. Covarrubias

While some of his speculations have been described as the ideas of one who "talked too much, knew too much, and felt too deeply about his subject," some of Covarrubias's ideas have since been proven to have some basis in fact. In Mexico South, the study of the Tehuantepec festivals show how much the ancient religious beliefs melded with the Catholic, Spanish rituals of holy days and the role of the saints in daily life.

"It is difficult to understand the religious outlook of the people, and, for that matter, of most Mexicans, if measured from the orthodox Catholic point of view. The Indians first became Catholics at the point of a sword and they ended by sincerely believing in and loving the saints, not only because they found moral comfort and spiritual glamour in them, but also because the religious ceremonial provided an outlet for drama and fun.

... the Indians had a sumptuous and intensely dramatic ceremonial of their own before the coming of the Spaniards, with much music and dancing, with luxurious pageants and awesome rites staged in an outdoor setting of ample plazas, platforms, pyramids and pennants. ... Esoteric mysticism was one of their strongest traits, and in many instances their religious concepts coincided with those of their conquerors."

Although Spanish Catholics discontinued the festival of Mardi Gras for a time during the 1700s in New Orleans, in Tehuantepec the spring festivals surrounding an area's patron saint took on some of the trappings familiar to anyone on Bourbon Street: brass bands, parades of colorful, decorated floats, food and trinkets tossed from a great height to a waiting -- and mostly drunk -- crowd below. Here's a description of the end of the Spring festival in Jucatan, which the author witnessed:

"The climax came when the clarinets announced the regional tune of Tehuantepec, the Zandunga. Cymbals clashed; the saxophone and trumpet and four clarinets played as if each man was playing for himself, a pandemonium of flowery variations punctuated by the stately, awkward beats on the bass drum.

The band then played a diana to announce the culmination of the entire feast; the time had come for the Tirada de Fruta, the fruit-throwing ... A group of handsome girls appeared at the end of the street. They bore on their heads brightly-colored xicalpextles, lacquered gourds full of fruit, cakes, and clay toys, topped by a monumental arrangement of tissue-paper flags cut into lacy patterns. It was a luscious spectacle of reds, yellows, black and gold , the little flags fluttering overhead.

The girls climbed the church steps to the roof, the bells tolled rapidly, firecrackers exploded, ragamuffins took positions. The flute and drum played an exciting "war" theme, and fruits of all sorts -- mangoes, bananas, large pineapples -- and toys began to fly down from the roof. ...

Bowl after bowl of fruit was emptied into the mostly-drunk crowd; coconuts and pineapples added a touch of danger to the sport. The excitement lasted until the last xicalpextle of fruit and toys was emptied. Then everybody went home to rest, some with bruises and bumps but proud of their prizes, not because of their intrinsic value, but because they were captured so dangerously."

Covarrubias ends Mexico South on a somber note. When he was traveling and writing after World War II, Covarrubias was aware that Fascism could easily take root in the unsettled politics of Mexico and its poverty. "Fascism lies defeated and broken in Europe, but it survives in the New World. The native variety is run on a more modest scale ... it's ideal of society remains the pattern of a docile and serviceable lower class of pious, ignorant, and contented peasants ruled by that privileged triumverate: the Church, the Military, and the Landlord -- or his modern counterpart, the business executive." More than sixty years later, the threat of Fascism has receded while the poverty remains, even as American corporations find in Mexico a labor market expanding with the ever-increasing speed of the 21st century.