Harry Everett Smith Part 2
6/25/24
Heya! I’m back! You may have noticed I totally blew my 31 weeks in a row newsletter streak. Well the Harry Smith fest was one of the reasons. That weekend was day job and movies, and reading, and more movies, and meeting really cool Harry Smithophiles
The other reason being a temporary lifestyle change that took me a week of getting used to. It’s just me and the kitties until mid-July when I join to Theresa in MA for a road-trip to Michigan.
Basically, without Theresa’s work-a-holic presence I devolved into a sloth-like creature incapable of writing my SubStack. I played some music and stuff but mostly binge watched bad TV and ate (non-homemade) bad food.
That’s over now! I’m back with a delicious homemade dinner (spicy red lentils with rice and otto’s sausage) mowed lawn, tart cherries harvested, weeds wacked and a recap of the Harry Smith Weekend.
I’ll return this Sunday with the regular newsletter. Thanks for those who noticed its absence, that’s always nice.
Also the ghost of Harry Smith really fucked with me on this one. I lost photos, Substack went down, lots of things. Sorry Harry. I’m choosing not to think he doesn’t approve but its a good way for me to know he’s still out there! And if he doesn’t approve, well who cares, he never did!
Another note: All film clips were shot behind a baseball hat so the light didn’t mess with other people, that’s why they are, let’s say, imperfect.
Harry Smith
Last night at the Hollywood Theater was amazing.
My favorite part was when the Sacred Harp Singers stopped singing and Harry’s film continued the after a bit of silence they said “we’re gonna do one more.” This felt like all of the things I’ve read about the film screenings Harry had when he was presenting them himself, the haphazard nature that makes it special and real.
When I was 29 I saved up half my salary at a tech job with plans to take a year off and write the Great American Novel.
(I took that year off and I wrote and wrote and floated tubes down the river and napped a lot. Four different uncompleted novels later I’ve still not finished or given up.)
It was around this time I spent $75 on the box set of The Anthology of American Folk music. I’d never spent so much on music before.
I’d heard of it and knew it was affiliated with Folkways and the Smithsonian Institute. I knew of its reputation as the blueprint for people like Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead.
What I didn’t know was anything about its creator Harry Smith. That changed with the collection of essays that accompanied the CD release from 1997. Harry’s combination of scholarship (source notes and bibliographies) occult symbolism, and hilariously dead pan song synopsis struck all the right chords for me.
And the music, oh my god. I bought a banjo and vowed not just to learn how to play it but learn every banjo song on the Anthology. Of course the second I realized just how many different tunings were involved that idea got abandoned. Now I just write my own ditties aspiring to the clawhammer styles of Clarence Ashley, and Buell Kazee.
During that wonderful, workless, year of attempting to write a novel I made it a point to avoid reading fiction and just read biographies. James Joyce by Richard Ellman (a big mistake for an aspiring novelist,) Neil Young’s killer bio called Shakey and most notably Marcel Duchamp’s bio by Calvin Tompkins
.
I took a dada and surrealism class in college and fell hard for Duchamp. Unfortunately I did a paper on him before I found out that my professor was close friends with his widow and actually helped assemble his papers after he died.
My paper was slashed full of red with the word “wrong” all over it. But I still got an “A.” She said I understood what he was all about despite getting some facts mixed up.
I read everything I could get my hands on, by and about Marcel Duchamp. One of the scholarly texts I read was called Alchemist of The Avant Garde by. It posits that Duchamp hid his alchemical symbology in codes to be deciphered and that his work was rife with these codes. He always denied any Alchemical intentions. Like any true Alchemist would.
Flash forward a few years and I became aware of American Magus, a sort oral biography of Harry Smith. The subtitle is “A Modern Alchemist.”
Interesting.
Another love affair ensued. I kept reading about Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular, Think of the Self Speaking. I watched his films that were available on YouTube.
Duchamp and Harry Smith lived in Manhattan at the same time. Modern scholars used the term Alchemy to describe their works. Were they aware of each other? I went back through my Harry Smith books for clues.
When Smith hit New York in 1951, he ended up on the doorstep of poet Lionel Ziprin, one of his earliest protectors, a job Ziprin tired of quickly. Ziprin said Smith had come to New York for three reasons: “To see Marcel Duchamp, to see the Baroness Hilla Rebay of the Guggenheim Museum, and to see Thelonious Monk”
Smith’s magnum opus, Mahagonny, which you should all go see at the Clinton Street Theater tomorrow is subtitled :A mathematical analysis of Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass expressed in terms of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.
From an interview with Jonas Mekas by Kevin Arrow…
KEVIN ARROW (MIAMI RAIL): The whole idea of Marcel Duchamp, mathematics, and The Large Glass sideswipes everything—I was trying to wrap my head around Brecht and Weill and was then trying to decipher the Duchamp reference and I don’t even know where to begin.
JONAS MEKAS: That’s Harry! That film is pure Harry. Don’t ask me about meanings!
“Harry may have said there
was a connection between these two works, but I can’t see it,” says Mekas.
“The only insight I could offer is that one shouldn’t try to interpret
Harry’s Mahagonny by comparing it with the Brecht opera, because, as The
Large Glass is shattered, Harry shattered Brecht’s original. He didn’t
interpret Brecht’s opera, he transformed it. He basically used that piece
of music as a launching point into a work of his own.”
Tom Crow, director of the
Getty Research Institute, finds the film’s link with Duchamp less of a
stretch. “Brecht’s Mahagonny is a parable of capitalism’s destructive tendencies,
and Smith created a fairly literal interpretation of that, but at the same
time, Mahagonny is evocative of The Large Glass in that both are about
interruption and disharmony. I wouldn’t have pegged Smith as a Marxist
or a Duchampian ironist, and it seems impossible to combine those two things
in a single work, but Smith believed any conflict could be resolved through
a visionary grasp of harmonic relationships.”
What was I supposed to do with all of this esoteric knowledge about these two titans of 20th century art? I didn’t want to teach. I didn’t have anything to add to their scholarship.
So I started writing a novel that has a character who travels between the worlds of Smith and Duchamp, unaware that these two eccentrics are in the middle of altering the history of art as we know it.
Like many of Harry Smith’s projects this novel is a work in progress over decades. It may turn into something completely different.
In Szwed’s 2023 biography Duchamp has 10 entries in the Index. Maybe I was getting somewhere, I thought But no, not really… here’s an excerpt:
Harry has a way of connecting me with people.
(AROUND HERE I LOST MY PLACE IN MY PAGES AND AD LIBBED UNTIL THE NOVEL EXCERPT)
11 years ago there was another celebration of Harry Smith to mark what would have been his 90th birthday and the release of The Anthology of American Folk on vinyl thanks to Mississippi records, and Eric who last night said the Anthology inspired him to become a professional mix tape maker.
I couldn’t have been more excited. The fact that a local record label that I loved and respected was releasing the world’s greatest mixtape on vinyl and it was happening in my town was very special.
At the Hollywood Theater they showed many of the films I’d only seen on YouTube. Musicians played songs from the Anthology.
Rani Singh did a Q & A afterwards. I was able to ask if there was any evidence that Harry finally met Duchamp. She said it was unlikely as they moved in very different circles.
We were invited by Rani to join her at the Moon and Sixpence. I was pleased to have a little chat with her and buy her a beer. I met a group of artists who invited me to read at a salon they were hosting. I read a piece from that novel in progress involving Harry, which I’ll read tonight.
In 2023 I found out there was going to be an extensive Smith retrospective at the Whitney that coincided with a family reunion back in NJ.
I got to see original artworks he didn’t lose or trash and snippets of Mahagonny for the first time. I was in heaven.
6 months later I’m working at my library job when Katherine, who I never met, is checking in one Harry Smith book and checking out another.
I broke the library intellectual freedom protocol by commenting
“oh Harry Smith, he’s my dude.”
Katherine and I exchanged info and she invited me to speak and read poems at this here event and help promote the other Harry Smith events around the city.
Today’s event centers on Harry Smith’s relationship with the Northwest.
Harry left the West Coast for the East and I did the opposite. But clearly some portion of his ghost remains in the town where he was born, the town I’ve spent my adult life in, and that ghost keeps getting more powerful as we spread the word.
Here’s an excerpt from the novel I spoke of and a poem that is a mash-up of his song synopsis from the Anthology and the inventory of items he’d collected included in the book American Magus.
Novel Excerpt (circa 2005)
Harry sat cross-legged on the floor, his back resting on the couch. His eyes were closed. His coffee table was pushed away from the sofa, atop it were a series of mismatched candles in various states of extinction. The afternoon sun, though fading, was enough to nullify the candle light. A pigeon walked around on the open window sill above his sink. It shat twice. The sill was slick with shits past. Harry could smell the rain, and reminded himself to cross-reference the weather chart he’d begun making a few weeks ago. It was on a piece of butcher paper shoved into the 1947 Farmer’s Almanac.
Harry’s eyes flipped open and he jumped to his feet. First he attacked his wall of records, throwing 78’s around the apartment, until he came upon one by Bascar Lamar Lumsford. He put the record on the phonograph and Bascar began moaning about how he wished he was a mole in the ground. Next, Harry went after a stack of boxes in the corner. The first one he opened contained piles of tarot card decks, which he started unloading and placing in neat stacks beside the box. Gradually the stacks became less neat and in danger of toppling.
-Where the hell is that hermaphrodite? Where the hell?
He was into another box, this one containing string figures tied to sticks. Bascar wished that he was a lizard in the sun. Harry threw the string figures back into the box in a manner that made it impossible to close. He set the box on a recently toppled stack of tarot cards.
-Ah, ah yes.
The third box yielded a framed picture of a naked hermaphrodite which Harry brought over to the couch, pulled the coffee table close and placed the 8 x 10 atop it. He sang along with Bascar.
-Oh Tippy wants a nine dollar shawl, oh Tippy wants a nine dollar shawl.
-Now what did I want this ugly thing for? Harry said aloud.
He grabbed an empty milk carton and hurled it at the pigeon. Not entirely empty, in it’s whirling flight it sprayed milk across the brown carpet and black kitchen tiles looking much like bird shit. The carton nearly found it’s mark and landed in the sink, the pigeon abandoned the window sill with a squawk.
The photo of the hermaphrodite was black and white. The pose was awkward, her face cherubic. Aside from her penis she was all woman. She was young, just barely pubescent with budding breasts and a tuft of pubic hair. She stood on a cloth-covered pedestal, arms raised, palms out and fingertips curling back towards her crown.
-Oh Tippy let your hair roll down, Tippy let your hair roll down, let your hair roll down and your bangs curl around, Tippy let your hair roll down.
The line caught Harry off guard as he stared at the dark curls that hung on either side of the angel’s face. He snatched up a white paper bag from a pile of debris just beyond the table, tore it open and flattened it out knocking a candle over. Extinguished, it smoked and dripped wax onto the carpet. He sketched a stylized copy of the photograph, adding esoteric symbols to the corners and dark shadows behind the figure. He leapt up and put the needle back to the start of the record.
Harry concentrated on her face, yes, that’s right Tippy, he whispered. Her features were emerging from the charcoal smudges. He squinted, making his marks more precise. He had a thing for noses, the longer and straighter the better, noses from the Parthenon. Athena’s shnoz was the stuff dreams. Tippy’s face became marble and he paused above her eyes, wanting so bad to go back in time and look upon the painted eyes of statues now blind. He gave her pupils after a split second of difficult decision making. How many day’s labor amounted to nine dollars, he wondered. How much toil for her shawl? Tippy was young for sure. Very young, virginal.
-Oh I don’t like the railroad man, no I don’t like the railroad man, well the railroad man will kill you when he can and drink up your blood like wine.
-Oh yes!
Harry danced around the table holding his portrait aloft.
-Yes Tippy we’ll drink up your blood!
Harry tacked the sketch above the light switch by the door, and still dancing, found a jug of wine in a cupboard, uncorked it, and leaned back for a healthy swig, much of it dripping down his chin onto the collar of his t-shirt. Harry twirled around, tiptoed across the room dodging books, boxes, tarot decks, and record sleeves to replace the needle yet again. He spun around three times then abruptly stopped with his face inches from his sketch and yanked it from the wall. He wiped his chin with the coarse paper bag and then held it to the flame of a wick that sat in a pile of melted wax. As the paper caught fire he tiptoed to the sink and dropped it in. Once it was consumed he turned on the spigot extinguishing the embers. He closed the window, returned to the couch, and blew out the candles leaving the apartment in darkness.
Harry Smith Poem (2024)
Smell of mildew, no visible staining-
Gaudy woman lures child from playfellows
Stabs him as victim dictates to a Ukrainian
Wooden bear and woodsman toy, the
wife’s logic fails to explain strange bedfellow
To drunkard.
Scorning offer of costly trapings.
Ceramic lid shaped like an elephant.
Father find’s daughter’s body with note.
Ditch digger Shocked at Mickey Mouse Playing Cards.
Young agriculturist neglects seed, Sicilian tarot.
Discouraging acts of God and man, convince farmer
of positive benefits of urban life. Friendly
dictators, can’t sleep dreaming, Sea World
Fish, single girl dressed fine, ceramic knife rest.
Expressman you’ve gone wrong moved girl when
I was home. Poster - Grateful Dead -
Albert dies preferring Alice Fry, Animal
Domino, Manufacturer’s proud dream
destroyed at shipwreck! The naughty
nineties a saucy popup book for adults
only Georgie runs into rock after mother’s
warning a Ceramic eggplant and
Plastic mumblety peg mistreated with knife
going back to Baltimore, 4 satin dice and
your fingernail, present joys passing fast
heaven at last.
Land where no light, iran-Contra scandal
trading cards, pharaoh's daughter opened ark,
the universe, the big bang, starburst, galaxies,
star death, the end of the universe.
Must Jesus bear cross? Cross for everyone,
plastic halloween horn shaped like a skull,
jack of diamonds known from old, rob pockets of
silver, gold.
Times ain’t like they used to be, burlap slippers and
barks shoes, never let one woman rule mind,
Donald Duck on a rocking horse, drink blood like wine.
Next Sunday if the weather is good, wooden chicken with
a wheelbarrow, 50 miles of elbow room, can’t sleep
dreaming, can’t wake crying. Tell about meatless,
wheatless days, biscuits thin, gin fine.
Poor boy long ways from home, cloth with Marcus
Garvey, cloth with Malaysian puppet, See my grave is
kept clean.
There will be a part 3. Too many people I need to give credit to, links to, photos of, thanks to. But See you on Sunday or before for the Skullcrushing Hummingbird standard missive!
rawhide :26
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_pMUBfvCPM