|
Description
CHAVEZ RAVINE: A Record by Ry Cooder. Produced by RY COODER, with LITTLE WILLIE G., LALO GUERRERO, ERSI ARVIZU, DON TOSTI, FLACO JIMENEZ, BLA PAHINUI; 66 minutes; CD with 15 tracks. New York: Nonesuch / Perro Verde Records, 2005. $20.98. Nonesuch 79877-2.
CHAVEZ RAVINE, 1949: A Los Angeles Story. By DON NORMARK. 144 pp.; ills., index. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 0811825345; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0811840573.
CHAVEZ RAVINE: A Los Angeles Story. Directed by JORDAN MECHNER; produced by JORDAN MECHNER, DON NORMARK, ANDREW B. ANDERSEN, and MARK MORAN; photographs by DON NORMARK; music by RY COODER; narrated by CHEECH MARIN; 24 minutes. Oley, Pa.: Bullfrog Films, 2004 (featured on PBS Independent Lens, 2003). $195.00 (VHS), ISBN 1594582459; $195 (DVD), ISBN 1594582467.
Music is history. It's a form of history, a vernacular form, and the experience and the knowledge contributes in various ways such as in the ability to play instruments and the ability to write songs about your life. It's songs about something that you know deeply, something about our world and the people here and what they were like.... [Chavez Ravine is] my fantasy about a community. --Ry Cooder, Nightline, 2005
Each of us has personal benchmarks, things we look forward to, whether professionally or socially: family peregrinations; arrival of the last volume of Don Meinig's Shaping of America quartet; the explosive great-shouldered entry into the plaza of the first of six Victorino Martin bulls; screening of a new film offering from Quentin Tarantino, however quixotic and deviantly self-indulgent; the rare great and much-anticipated celebratory night out or, I remember from my own youth, the lingering pleasures of a determinedly odd meal in an exotic clime; contained glee at opening a new John Le Carre cold war novel; the delight of sitting down to read a Pauline Kael film review in The New Yorker. Honest writers in our academic midst share feelings about multifarious activities they favor as practitioners in the evolving cult of geography: those include life lists, regions revealed, an exhortation to urban "lurking," and--still a personal favorite--Yale University geographer Stephen Jones's embrace of an Islamic-inflected pairing of "bread and hyacinths" (Jones 1952, 543; Lewis 1985; Salter and Meserve 1991; Ford 2001, 381).
Slowly, geography is coming back to the senses. Nonacademic geographers, but acute observers among us, including Rebecca Solnit and Diane Ackerman and Simon Schama and a growing delegation of social historians and landscape analysts, make an excellent point: The senses are not to be trifled with. Skilled landscape percipients argue that education should require adept field geographers to cultivate more skills than just a cloistered critical reading of orotund texts in a carrel (Corbin 1998; Ingold 2000; see also Carter 2002; Garrioch 2003; Anderson 2005; Hudson 2006). If societies go through eras when different senses are given primacy, there's no doubt that, in this time of iPods and MP3 files, it is sound--and for right now particularly music--that's in the ascendancy: A stroll down any street from Modesto to Manhattan shows people walking, rushing, running, biking, driving, in a cocoon of sound but profoundly cut off from the world. If the earbud or headphone wearers are happy to wall off excess world noise the better to concentrate on rhythms in their middle ears, there are plenty of teachers and friends of landscape who find such self-selected insulation quite maddening. After all, while someone outside perambulates from Point A to Point F, those white earpieces block off a rich reality of ambient noise and pose a certain hazard to the listener, who is rendered unaware. Especially music, with its all-absorbing qualities and seductive lyrics or beat, can make the other senses seem maimed or malign (Sacks 2007). What's unusual is to have an album that exhorts the attentive listener to look more closely at the surrounding landscape, to watch for change and corruption and enriching life that can loom anywhere.
THE ACOUSTIC TURN
And now there's the pressing of a recent Ry Cooder CD, a compilation--of a sort--that emphatically reminds us that music taps a folk tradition that is among history and geography's strongest and most vital currents of activist expression. Chavez Ravine: A Record by Ry Cooder is partly a revisiting of tradition; it "quotes" from Don Normark's wonderful photographic study, Chavez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story (1999) (Figure 1), and from essays by Dana Cuff (2001), and borrows and recasts various songs of California's vibrant Latino-Chicano-Hispanic-Mexican-Pachuco--Zoot Suit culture. The initial song, a spare rumba, takes its title from a comment in Normark's book that the three communities (La Loma, Bishop,... |
More articles from The Geographical Review
Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Eco-Development 1800-1950.(C..., July 01, 2007
Looking for additional articles?
Click here
to search our database of over 3 million articles.
|
(critical%20essay)%20%20&position=1)