We had quite a contrast this weekend. Since Saturday was rainy and Sunday was a family day – Fathers’ Day – we spent an hour or so going over what Amazon Prime and Hulu and Netflix had to offer, and chose two. The first we watched was “Paterson.”
It should be called a jewel of the small movie genre. Purposely humble in every way, it is about a bus driver named Paterson in Paterson, New Jersey, who also is a poet. We first see the city that he drives through and his home, both deteriorating remnants of an older and more prosperous past, both strikingly reflective of the sort of old, early industrial ugliness that only the Northeast can offer. As the camera panned around, in fact, this is exactly what I said to my wife.
This was exactly what we were supposed to think, so that we might be shown how wrong we were. For Paterson the man, we find that he loves his city of Paterson. There, he has his eccentric but beautiful wife who he adores; there he has the old buildings and the old mill waterfall and all those interesting people who are unknown but live lives full of drama and hope; and there he has those people of Paterson from the past, from comedian Lou Costello (Who’s on First) to poet William Carlos Williams, who everybody at least once knew, all of whom rose to the top despite the apparent dreariness of their hometown. There he also dreams and writes poetry purely for the sake of the craft and for the doors to other realities that words can open.
It is a beautiful movie, full of the small magic of all lives, and of a love that transcends the ordinary. Please see it.
Then came Sunday, with a dramatic change in the weather and a dramatic change in the venue that we let into our house, the Hulu series, “Yellowstone,” starring Kevin Costner. There, the scenery is of mountain Montana, vistas that are grand beyond most dreams. And here the protagonists (of the series) are just as grand or are trying to be, almost everyone clamoring to claim swaths of the vast acreage for the expansion of their own egos. Costner is the main man, a cattleman with a ranch the size of Rhode Island, with a need for power and control just as big. He is joined by his troubled grown children who have been molded by his heavy hand, and confronted by his enemies, who want the same acreage and power that he has and is trying to keep. One is the Indian leader raised in the city with bitter racially-charged political views who wants it all, everything, for his tribe and, really, for himself; another is the realtor who wants it all to become staggeringly rich off the little people from elsewhere who long to share at least a little bit in the grandeur of the mountain and prairie fastness, a grandness that their increased presence will belittle and even destroy.
Might I add that this is a drama about unhappy people who need so much because they are fundamentally unhappy? It is as well-done drama, so well-done that I found it difficult to watch. I am now back to reading, but I get glimpses of it as I pass through the TV room where my wife continues on with fascination. I guess I have become soft in certain ways in my old age.
Which I find odd since I am still a hard-ass in so many other ways. Let me take a few paragraphs to demonstrate this as part of my own story.
It begins with a group practice for the music that we will play and sing for the upcoming Retreat in our local Catholic church. In this, I am the guitarist for lack of anyone else who wants to do it, as I have been for the past five (I think) retreats as well, making me a polished pro in the field of guitar/religious musicology. So confident am I, in fact, that in the last two retreats I played unpracticed but well-known songs for the chorus and the audience to fill in the dead-spaces left as people came back to the main space after workshops and such done elsewhere. One of these filler songs was “Kumbaya.” Little did I know the trouble that this song would cause.
I first became aware of its “demon” presence as I left the church after mass just this past Sunday. There, a friend on the retreat committee and someone in the know told me, unprovoked, “Do NOT sing “Kumbaya” again at the retreat. People hate it.” To which I was amused once again at the superstitions and idiosyncrasies possible in church communities. In light of my amusement, I replied with the politically incorrect phrase, “Really? Well, that’s gay!”
No, what I said last has nothing to do with the drama to come, except for its political incorrectness. This little show happened two days later at practice, where for the first time we were to go over music for the Mass at the end of the retreat. Here, we would be joined by two other singers and a piano player (can’t play guitar at mass. Don’t ask why), and as we were about to start, the prohibition of the song “Kumbaya” came into conversation. The regulars thought the prohibition odd and stupid, but one of the new singers, a young woman and teacher at the Catholic school, chimed in to disagree. “I believe they are correct in stopping this song. This is cultural appropriation! (of black music by white people, as if I need to explain that these days).
To which an older lady, once a teacher at the school herself, and I broke down in derisive laughter. You have got to be kidding! Said the older teacher, “we are too complex a society in America to shut out this or that cultural contribution. That’s just ridiculous! To which I added, “Then we have to eliminate rock and roll and most pop music because these have black roots.” The younger teacher sputtered, unable to reply, whereby the older one started to add more comments. At this, the younger began to turn red with anger, and so I said, “Forget about it. We can’t convince each other,” which I knew all too well from previous encounters over things “woke.” And so we did, spending the next hour and a half singing other people’s music regardless of cultural appropriation.
But it did not end there. After we had finished practice and were packing up, the younger teacher said, from out of the blue, “I feel very hurt that you laughed at me,” to which the older apologized. I did not. Rather, I said, “No apology from me. This racial stuff has been drummed up to replace class as the engine for Marxists trying to tear our culture and nation apart. It is dangerous and immoral and must be stopped.” To which the younger left without comment, and the rest of the older people, who had remained silent, vociferously agreed with me.
To which: which one of our stories above is the most Real?
In the first, we have the unlikely situation of a man in a low-status job in a low-status city who is in love with both his wife and his life. He sees the beauty, as well as the drama, in the common- and even the less-than-common; in the second, we see people in a beautiful setting. Most of them are rich, but they and everyone around them are miserable; and in my story, we have a typical drama-free setting suddenly upended by minor drama over a current political controversy. Of course, mine is the real: no author would try to sell a book or movie based on something so petty and unpleasant.
Mine speaks of the normal drama most of us have in America, but in its way, is it not more like the over-the-top “Yellowstone” in its over-sized proportions? For this is what we often do: take a pleasant situation and mess it up. I do not put any blame here; rather, we have all been pulled into a controversy that is makes little sense in the richest, fairest, most diverse nation in the world. This, along with many other controversies we are involved in, should not exist. We should be happy, but like those living in rustic mansions amid the splendor of the Rockies, we are not. Mt story is most certainly the most real story, but it is also one that is fit for drama queens and soap operas world-wide, where unnecessary messes are produced for the sake of ratings. Only here, we are not arguing for ratings.
Yes, mine is the most real, and perhaps “Yellowstone” the next, but I’ll take the world and world-view of “Paterson” any day. This world can be had by us all, not because the world we experience is perfect or lovely, but because our attitude towards it can make it (nearly) perfect and lovely. And, as “Paterson” shows us, if we are pure in this desire, we will have help along the way.
[Spoiler Alert – go no further if you want to see the movie and be surprised]
Here is what happens: Paterson keeps a single notebook where he writes his simple but poignant poems. He usually keeps it well-hidden, but one day he leaves it out on an end table, and the household dog chews it to bits. Several years of his work have been destroyed and his heart is broken. He goes to the park that has a view of the waterfall to meditate on his misery, and is met there by a stranger who is obviously Japanese. This man is a poet himself, and has come to Paterson to see the home of William Carlos Williams. He asks Paterson if he is a poet, and Paterson answers, “No. I am just a bus driver.” “Ah!,” says the Japanese, “very much in the way of Williams!” We understand from this that it is in the common things where the poet finds the greatest beauty and wonder. Then, as the Japanese man leaves, he gives Paterson a present: a blank notebook. “Ah ha!” he says with a smile. We are to understand that the best way to start over is with a blank slate, our troubles released. In our openness, beauty will find us again.
So I pray for an end to drama and for the simple appreciation of what we have. In America, we can all live in our own Rocky Mountains, or with the poetry of Paterson, New Jersey. Both are here, and both are waiting to be opened by our wonder and with the help of our better angels. Come by us, my Lord, come be us.
We had quite a contrast this weekend. Since Saturday was rainy and Sunday was a family day – Fathers’ Day – we spent an hour or so going over what Amazon Prime and Hulu and Netflix had to offer, and chose two. The first we watched was “Paterson.”
It should be called a jewel of the small movie genre. Purposely humble in every way, it is about a bus driver named Paterson in Paterson, New Jersey, who also is a poet. We first see the city that he drives through and his home, both deteriorating remnants of an older and more prosperous past, both strikingly reflective of the sort of old, early industrial ugliness that only the Northeast can offer. As the camera panned around, in fact, this is exactly what I said to my wife.
This was exactly what we were supposed to think, so that we might be shown how wrong we were. For Paterson the man, we find that he loves his city of Paterson. There, he has his eccentric but beautiful wife who he adores; there he has the old buildings and the old mill waterfall and all those interesting people who are unknown but live lives full of drama and hope; and there he has those people of Paterson from the past, from comedian Lou Costello (Who’s on First) to poet William Carlos Williams, who everybody at least once knew, all of whom rose to the top despite the apparent dreariness of their hometown. There he also dreams and writes poetry purely for the sake of the craft and for the doors to other realities that words can open.
It is a beautiful movie, full of the small magic of all lives, and of a love that transcends the ordinary. Please see it.
Then came Sunday, with a dramatic change in the weather and a dramatic change in the venue that we let into our house, the Hulu series, “Yellowstone,” starring Kevin Costner. There, the scenery is of mountain Montana, vistas that are grand beyond most dreams. And here the protagonists (of the series) are just as grand or are trying to be, almost everyone clamoring to claim swaths of the vast acreage for the expansion of their own egos. Costner is the main man, a cattleman with a ranch the size of Rhode Island, with a need for power and control just as big. He is joined by his troubled grown children who have been molded by his heavy hand, and confronted by his enemies, who want the same acreage and power that he has and is trying to keep. One is the Indian leader raised in the city with bitter racially-charged political views who wants it all, everything, for his tribe and, really, for himself; another is the realtor who wants it all to become staggeringly rich off the little people from elsewhere who long to share at least a little bit in the grandeur of the mountain and prairie fastness, a grandness that their increased presence will belittle and even destroy.
Might I add that this is a drama about unhappy people who need so much because they are fundamentally unhappy? It is as well-done drama, so well-done that I found it difficult to watch. I am now back to reading, but I get glimpses of it as I pass through the TV room where my wife continues on with fascination. I guess I have become soft in certain ways in my old age.
Which I find odd since I am still a hard-ass in so many other ways. Let me take a few paragraphs to demonstrate this as part of my own story.
It begins with a group practice for the music that we will play and sing for the upcoming Retreat in our local Catholic church. In this, I am the guitarist for lack of anyone else who wants to do it, as I have been for the past five (I think) retreats as well, making me a polished pro in the field of guitar/religious musicology. So confident am I, in fact, that in the last two retreats I played unpracticed but well-known songs for the chorus and the audience to fill in the dead-spaces left as people came back to the main space after workshops and such done elsewhere. One of these filler songs was “Kumbaya.” Little did I know the trouble that this song would cause.
I first became aware of its “demon” presence as I left the church after mass just this past Sunday. There, a friend on the retreat committee and someone in the know told me, unprovoked, “Do NOT sing “Kumbaya” again at the retreat. People hate it.” To which I was amused once again at the superstitions and idiosyncrasies possible in church communities. In light of my amusement, I replied with the politically incorrect phrase, “Really? Well, that’s gay!”
No, what I said last has nothing to do with the drama to come, except for its political incorrectness. This little show happened two days later at practice, where for the first time we were to go over music for the Mass at the end of the retreat. Here, we would be joined by two other singers and a piano player (can’t play guitar at mass. Don’t ask why), and as we were about to start, the prohibition of the song “Kumbaya” came into conversation. The regulars thought the prohibition odd and stupid, but one of the new singers, a young woman and teacher at the Catholic school, chimed in to disagree. “I believe they are correct in stopping this song. This is cultural appropriation! (of black music by white people, as if I need to explain that these days).
To which an older lady, once a teacher at the school herself, and I broke down in derisive laughter. You have got to be kidding! Said the older teacher, “we are too complex a society in America to shut out this or that cultural contribution. That’s just ridiculous! To which I added, “Then we have to eliminate rock and roll and most pop music because these have black roots.” The younger teacher sputtered, unable to reply, whereby the older one started to add more comments. At this, the younger began to turn red with anger, and so I said, “Forget about it. We can’t convince each other,” which I knew all too well from previous encounters over things “woke.” And so we did, spending the next hour and a half singing other people’s music regardless of cultural appropriation.
But it did not end there. After we had finished practice and were packing up, the younger teacher said, from out of the blue, “I feel very hurt that you laughed at me,” to which the older apologized. I did not. Rather, I said, “No apology from me. This racial stuff has been drummed up to replace class as the engine for Marxists trying to tear our culture and nation apart. It is dangerous and immoral and must be stopped.” To which the younger left without comment, and the rest of the older people, who had remained silent, vociferously agreed with me.
To which: which one of our stories above is the most Real?
In the first, we have the unlikely situation of a man in a low-status job in a low-status city who is in love with both his wife and his life. He sees the beauty, as well as the drama, in the common- and even the less-than-common; in the second, we see people in a beautiful setting. Most of them are rich, but they and everyone around them are miserable; and in my story, we have a typical drama-free setting suddenly upended by minor drama over a current political controversy. Of course, mine is the real: no author would try to sell a book or movie based on something so petty and unpleasant.
Mine speaks of the normal drama most of us have in America, but in its way, is it not more like the over-the-top “Yellowstone” in its over-sized proportions? For this is what we often do: take a pleasant situation and mess it up. I do not put any blame here; rather, we have all been pulled into a controversy that is makes little sense in the richest, fairest, most diverse nation in the world. This, along with many other controversies we are involved in, should not exist. We should be happy, but like those living in rustic mansions amid the splendor of the Rockies, we are not. Mt story is most certainly the most real story, but it is also one that is fit for drama queens and soap operas world-wide, where unnecessary messes are produced for the sake of ratings. Only here, we are not arguing for ratings.
Yes, mine is the most real, and perhaps “Yellowstone” the next, but I’ll take the world and world-view of “Paterson” any day. This world can be had by us all, not because the world we experience is perfect or lovely, but because our attitude towards it can make it (nearly) perfect and lovely. And, as “Paterson” shows us, if we are pure in this desire, we will have help along the way.
[Spoiler Alert – go no further if you want to see the movie and be surprised]
Here is what happens: Paterson keeps a single notebook where he writes his simple but poignant poems. He usually keeps it well-hidden, but one day he leaves it out on an end table, and the household dog chews it to bits. Several years of his work have been destroyed and his heart is broken. He goes to the park that has a view of the waterfall to meditate on his misery, and is met there by a stranger who is obviously Japanese. This man is a poet himself, and has come to Paterson to see the home of William Carlos Williams. He asks Paterson if he is a poet, and Paterson answers, “No. I am just a bus driver.” “Ah!,” says the Japanese, “very much in the way of Williams!” We understand from this that it is in the common things where the poet finds the greatest beauty and wonder. Then, as the Japanese man leaves, he gives Paterson a present: a blank notebook. “Ah ha!” he says with a smile. We are to understand that the best way to start over is with a blank slate, our troubles released. In our openness, beauty will find us again.
So I pray for an end to drama and for the simple appreciation of what we have. In America, we can all live in our own Rocky Mountains, or with the poetry of Paterson, New Jersey. Both are here, and both are waiting to be opened by our wonder and with the help of our better angels. Come by us, my Lord, come be us.
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