#735 My First Concert- Felisberto Hernandez

#735 My First Concert- Felisberto Hernandez

You can practice all you want, for years on end. Your technique could be perfected and your understanding of the music impeccable.  In the comfort of your own studio you may be the greatest musician ever, but unless you can overcome the nerves of stage-fright, you will never be as good as you think.

This is a charming and all-too realistic look into the fragile nerves of a first time performer. Having been a musician myself, I am very sensitive to these feelings. The days leading up to the performance is a steady roller coaster of emotion that Hernandez writes perfectly. Here are just a few of the telling quotes in this story:

“Rounding a corner I saw my name written large on two huge posters stuck on either side of a cart, and felt even more miserable. If the letters had only been smaller, perhaps less would have been expected of me.”

“I distrusted myself that morning and started going over my program like someone counting his money because he suspects it has been stolen from him during the night, and I soon found out I didn’t have as much as I had thought I did.”

We see the performance, and thankfully is wasn’t a disaster. The lighter moments on stage make for a great tension/release. I love using both a coffin and cannon as metaphors for the piano.

Rating: 9-8-9-8 Total= 34

#250 Will the Circle Be Unbroken- Henry Dumas

#250 Will the Circle Be Unbroken- Henry Dumas

This is a story about the power of music. Probe is a musician playing in a closed off all-black club in Harlem. No outsiders allowed, the power of this music was known to do some serious damage to those outside the circle.

Probe is prepared to play the Afro-horn, one of only three in the world; It is his birthright. “Probe, since his return from exile had chosen only special times to reveal the new sound. There were more rumors about it than there were ears and souls that had heard the horn speak.”

Beyond the social commentary here of protecting culture, keeping the richness of your artistic identity locked in a circle, are truly amazing descriptions of live musical performances:

“The blanket of the bass rippled and the fierce wind in all their minds blew the blanket back, and there sat the city if Samson.”

“Inside the center of the gyrations is an atom stripped of time, black. The gathering of the hunters, deeper. Coming, laced in the energy of the sun. He is blowing. Magwa’s hands. Reverence of skin. Under the single voices is the child of a woman, black. They are building back the wall, crumbling under the disturbance.”

Rating: 8-8-10-8 Total=34

#170- The Human Fly- T.C. Boyle

#170- The Human Fly- T.C. Boyle

With a name like the Human Fly, you’d expect Metamorphosis, and then when you get a Kafka quote at the head of the story, its from The Hunger Artist. Then you start reading it and it’s about a circus performer pushing the boundaries of his daring and you think about First Sorrow and the trapeze artist that wants to stay on his trapeze a all times. Cleary this is literary tribute to Franz Kafka.

This homage comes in the form of an inside look at the world of a low-level entertainment agent. At this moment, he had three clients: “A nasally infected twelve year-old with pushy parents…a comic with a harelip that did only harelip jokes; and a soft rock band called Mu, who believed they were reincarnated court musicians from the lost continent of Atlantis.”

That was until a man dressed in a red cape with a swim cap walked into his small back office. The man was Zoltan Mindszenty aka. La Mosca Humana, the Human Fly. He wanted to be famous. He had already gotten press for his public climbing stunts in Mexico, but wanted exposure here. He began by hanging himself 21 stories above the street in a sack.

“As it turned out he, stayed there, aloft for two weeks. And for some reason—because he was intractable, absurd, mad beyond hope or redemption—the press couldn’t get enough of it.”

Sounds like a familiar mix of modern reality TV and David Blaine. He survived the stunt, and a few more before taking one step too far. But he did become famous. Boyle, like many writers seem to have a love/hate thing for entertainment agencies. They can be

“…a mercenary, a huckster who’d watch a man die for ten percent of the action.”

While they always disdain the agency or the business, the agent themselves seem to be written with a more gentler pen, be it respect, empathy or just pity, who knows?

Rating: 8-7-8-7 Total= 30