A Room with a View

Lately, I've been listening to a lot of Sufjan Stevens. We're now a decade into the world wide web, and whenever someone gets into something, it's possible to learn even more by heading to a browser. I remember the "good old days" when it took forever to load a webpage. Back then, you only had Mosaic, and Mosaic wouldn't display a page until all the images were downloaded, and it took a long time to download. It was awful.

In the ten years since, search has become better (thank you, Google), and internet speeds are much faster. And finally, there's so much more information out there.

Now you might wonder who Sufjan Stevens is. Given that I didn't know who he was two weeks ago, I can't say I know him that much more. Sufjan is a singer-songwriter who was born and raised in Michigan. Sufjan, which seems to be pronounced Soo-fee-uhn, is an Armenian name, so he says in interviews. Stevens, I must admit, does not sound at all Armenian.

Armenian names usually end in -ian or -yan. Thus, you have Armen Keteyan, or Atom Egoyan, or his wife, Arsinee Khanjian. This is not just a few names ending in those sounds, but almost everyone I've seen without fail. It's possible that Stevens is short for something like Stevanian, or that his mother is Armenian, but his dad is not, or that he wanted a unique name, and changed it as an adult. Honestly, I have no idea.

Sufjan is something of a folk singer. He seems to have some ties to religious singing, yet, his songs have enough appeal that they have crossed over into the indie music scene. Just as Amy Grant crossed over from contemporary Christian rock into pop rock, Sufjan seems to have done something similar. Except, you have to realize that indie rock is perhaps not all that accepting of religion (I'd imagine). Even so, they are appreciative of good music, and Sufjan seems more than capable.

Sufjan has an ambitious project, which may be criticized for its ambition. He wants to make an album for each state in the Union. That's fifty states. He's just completed state number 2. State number 1 was Michigan, which is where he was born. State number 2 is Illinois. His songs have elaborately long titles, such as: The Black Hawk War, Or, How To Demolish An Entire Civilization And Still Feel Good About Yourself In The Morning, Or, We Apologize For The Inconvenience But You're Going To Have To Leave Now, Or, 'I Have Fought The Big Knives And Will Continue To Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!' or A Conjunction Of Drones Simulating The Way In Which Sufjan Stevens Has An Existential Crisis In The Great Godfrey Maze.

At this rate, he'd be 75 before he finished all the albums, assuming he completed one a year. As it turns out, he composes songs for several states at a time. Even so, it's very possible he'd grow weary of this idea after a time. His approach to this project seems very much akin to Charles Kuralt visiting tiny towns throughout the country.

Not surprisingly, many songs deal with the salt of the earth, the everyman and everywoman, the working poor. After all, did Kuralt go out and interview the rich and famous? He was trying to get a flavor of living in the United States. Was it any surprise that many of these people were not wealthy? There's something about poverty, and the lack of mobility, and the adherence to tradition that seems to tie one down to one's location.

Once you have wealth and mobilty and houses, you begin to become more generic, like every other wealthy person. You're displaced from your surroundings, transcending it. Occasionally, what the wealthy do seems to cross class lines and have some appeal to the mainstream. America's Cup is a sport indulged by millionaires who hire talented designers to design fast boats to be sailed by well-funded boatsman, so they can reap the glory that their money has bought. Horse racing is similarly expensive. For some reason, people don't follow the rich, because they seem to have too much. We celebrate the poor because, well, who knows?

Now, I know, it sounds biased to say that. But the poor would be the first to tell you that they wish they could live a better life. Being poor is not all it's cracked up to be.

In my search on the web, I came across this article:
The Lord God Bird. The ivory-billed woodpecker, a species long thought extinct, has been rediscovered near Brinkley, Arkansas. There are efforts to protect this bird, and tourists, especially birdwatchers, who want to travel to this poverty stricken town to see the bird.

Now NPR is a relatively snooty news station, which specializes in telling stories that no one else ever seems to think to tell. Two people from NPR wanted to go to this town to interview the folks there about the bird, but they also wanted Sufjan Stevens to write a song about this bird. It is both an elitist and a homespun notion, wrapped into one. On the one hand, the reporters are probably well-educated, fairly liberal. They may be fascinated how poor Southerners react to the newfound fame of this bird.

On the one hand, there are people, especially hunters and the like, who find the preservation of birds and such despicable. How can people protect birds when they should protect people? Note that the answer, why can't people learn more in school so they can get out of their state of poverty doesn't arise. People are already in the class that they're in.

But the locals begin to realize that this rare bird might make them money. Brinkley is perhaps much like many other small,poor Southern town. Nothing much distinguishes their town from the next. Now, here comes a bird that people thought had been extinct, and it appears in this town. Are the townfolk surprised at their good fortune, that some animal that is gone is back again? Do they welcome this discovery like astronomers welcome a tenth planet?

No, they don't. They like the bird for what it symbolizes. Tourism. A way to make their town stand out, when so many people find it so hard to make ends meet. These are exactly the kinds of towns that were hit during the hurricane, and this story came out some two months ago.

And so there are these reporters, and the reporters are well-educated, one would imagine, and they must think, well, these people don't understand what the bird is really all about. They see it as some economic opportunity, and some see it as a nuisance, that bothers their traditional desire to hunt.

And what of Sufjan? The story seemed to be about how Sufjan goes about writing his song, at least, that's what the teaser suggested, and yet, we learn nothing of the kind. We hear the product of the songwriting, which is a beautiful song dedicated to this bird that was once considered some kind of god, perhaps by the native Americans. What does Sufjan really think? Is he humble as the people who he writes songs about? Is he more like an academic who learns about the people, and writes songs about it, in a fashion similar to Paul Simon's ode to South African singing, Graceland.

Sufjan has toured, promoting the songs from Bring on the Illinoise. It's a quaint title, that sounds as if it were made by some local high school, that wasn't particularly clever. In his stage production, people are dressed up in cheerleader outfits, and it resembles a pep rally. Is this a celebration, or a gaudy display? Does Sufjan see himself like some Alexis de Tocqueville, the Frenchman who travelled the United States some hundred seventy years ago, when the country was barely sixty years old. Or perhaps like Anton Dvorak, who wrote New World Symphony also from a visit to the United States to listen to native American music.

Sufjan tells stories in his music, though I must say, I don't much listen to lyrics. It's not that I don't care about his lyrics, it's that I just listen to music to listen to the music. On rare occasion, I might read the words, but they often mean very little to me. The stories he tells are the stories of the state, informing us about the key aspects of history and location and economics and even religion.

I'd like to sit down and figure out who Sufjan is, and what he's all about. Right now, I listen to the songs, and appreciate both its simplicity, and its complexity. He's unlike the polished futuristic soundscape that is Radiohead, which uses a whiny voice, and otherworldy sounds. Instead, he uses banjoes and additional vocals to create hymn-like songs of elegant, understated beauty.

After listening to the NPR piece, I found it a brilliant symphony of ideas, feelings, and emotions, that could be read at so many different levels, from the desire to gain some fame, and make some money off the ivory-billed woodpecker, a name that some natives can barely remember, to the discovery of this bird by hopeful ornithologists, to the reporters that thought it interesting enough to report, to their recruitment of Sufjan to write a song about this location, to Sufjan himself, who found the idea compelling enough to write a song, about a place he's never visited.

It's an odd jumbo stew of intellectual diversity, seeing the same event through different eyes. It is Rashomon writ large, where the differences in account is due as much to class differences and backgrounds as it is to just simple differences. Do you focus on the bird, the economics of the bird, or the people who live where this bird lives? The interpretation all stems from your economic standing, and your occupation. Reporters see it one way. Waiters and waitresses another. Songwriters another. Each picking the part that interests them the most. Each getting out of it what they want.

In an odd way, Sufjan is the odd man out in this story. What on earth does he have to do with the bird or the people of Brinkley? And yet, the same can be said of the reporters who tell their story. Why are they there? Because they find this story interesting to tell, perhaps on the many levels that I found it fascinating to listen. Yet, that's exactly what Sufjan is trying to do too, in his own medium. He is entertaining, while informing, while trying to capture a sense of the place and the bird, and ultimately becomes the glue that ties the parts of the story together.

This is, in no small part, brilliant. A small story, told large. Its poignance is perhaps even stronger after Hurricane Katrina, because you begin to think about the kind of people who have been affected by the disaster, and yet, really, if you're anything like me, you realize that as much as we want to help, the world lived in by the poor in the South is so far removed from the world I live in. Even if we share in common language and perhaps even sports, there's so much else that separates us, and yet there are people out there, like reporters, like songwriters, that try to bridge this gap, even when the reality may be that they're just as far as we are from this experience.