Encountering the unexpected

Savannah, Georgia is renowned for its visual beauty and ambience - Live Oaks dripping with Spanish moss, gaslit streets, beautiful squares...

 
But what is its sound? Rob Gibson, director of the annual Savannah Music Festival, spoke inspiringly of the music of the South as he introduced the Sweet-Singing Harmony Harmoneers at the festival last week. 'We believe gospel grew up in Georgia,' he said. I'll write more on the festival later in The Podium. But for now, let me just note that anyone interested in the history of music in the past 100 years could do worse than immerse themselves in the aural ambience, too, of the South.

I flew from Savannah to California, the 'left coast' according to some Georgians. I think it's part of the wonderful kaleidoscope that is America. And even here, there are details you don't expect, such as the Victorian district of LA, only minutes from downtown.

I can't help thinking of the people who frequented these streets in the years before freeways and movies, some of them having ventured across the Wild West from the East, well before that great flowering of the music of the South.

Back to reality

The Washington Post contributor Jonathan Capehart was on Morning Joe this morning when the discussion turned to the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida. Here are the things I was told not to do as a young black man, he said, adding the preamble, 'Now this is America': 1. Don't run. 2. Don't run in public. 3. Don't run with something in your hand.

Maybe you now see mixed-race couples on TV advertisements here or on Home Buyers International, something that wouldn't have been seen, say, 30 years ago. But maybe there's still a ways to go.

Back to Savannah

I caught Greyhound back to Savannah this afternoon.

and loved the driver's spiel:

We got seatbelts. You can use them if you wish. I can't force you. Aint no drinkin'. Your profane language? Keep it in your head. We have decent men, women and children riding with us today, thank you sir, thank you ma'am.

After all that, there were only about four people on the bus, but I got here.

The King Street

Scene in King Street Charleston last night

A man stops me and says, 'I'm X. I'm XX years old. I'm homeless. This all I got.' (He indicates the pack on his back). He says, 'I don't want to beg and I'm not begging. I hope you will listen to me without laughing as the people down the road did. Like I said, I'm not begging. But I'll polish your car, wash your windscreen, clean out the interior, but please - I'm not begging - for a few dollars.'

(Above is King Street.)
I said, 'I don't have a car, but I'll give you a couple of dollars.' He stands back and explains, 'Now, let me explain why I'm standing over here - so you won't think I'm going to snatch your wallet.' I give him the money. And then he says, 'Thank you. Now may I ask, did I offend you in any way by asking you for money?' I said no. And he said thank you again. I said 'good luck' and he was gone.

This evening as I was walking back up King Street, a fiddler busking in a doorway stopped playing and asked me about the book I was carrying under my arm. I said, 'It's The Dream of the Red Chamber. It's the greatest Chinese novel.' 'How old?' he asked. I said, 'Around 1760.' He asked if I was English. I said no. He said, 'I know folksongs in a number of languages. I can sing you something in Swedish.' I said I was hurrying back to do some work. He asked what I do, and I told him I write words for music. He then asked if I'd heard of Alfredo Le Pera, the greatest writer of tango lyrics (wrote lyrics for Carlos Gardel), and then he recited from memory a poem about a man returning to a village where his first love lived. I was quite taken by the idea of this guy giving me a one-man recital in King Street at night. Mind you, he then said, 'You don't often meet Australian writers.'

Little things I have learned:

- You don't need to wear sunglasses here, even though it's bright.
- They have rocking chairs in the waiting areas at Savannah airport.
- Stephen Sondheim is a lingua franca. When I was at a Savannah high school with some opera singers last Thursday, and they announced that they were going to sing some Sweeney Todd, the kids all cheered.
- This is a land of whole hog. This high school I'm talking of is a public performing-arts high school. You have to audition to get in. After the opera singers had finished their recital, the kids offered their wares in exchange. A quartet of teenage boys got up and sang some barbershop quartet numbers they'd been rehearsing. Then the entire choir sang us the Lutkin Benediction - 'The Lord bless you and keep you...' They encircled us. The guests on either side of me wiped away tears. The opera company director who sat next to me said, 'That's America for you. We don't just do some of it; we do all of it.'

Hundreds and thousands.

We have enjoyed catching the train across the United States - that way you get a sense of the scale of the country. I noticed last night though, as I stepped out of the Savannah airport terminal, that what you get flying is an immediate fragrance of a place. As I walked out at Savannah, I noticed a fruity, salty odour.

I also noticed, travelling down from Chicago to Savannah at midnight, that America is brightly lit.

This is Chicago. In the distance, Lake Michigan. But it's bright lights all the way down, with occasional little puddles. It's not like Australia where there is an ocean of black either way you look. I couldn't think of a more graphic illustration of the size of the country and its population. They remind me of the 'hundreds and thousands' we used to sprinkle on cake.

'...the other side of the sphere'

Coming back here via California partially prepares you for a return to Australia. California has a fair smattering of eucalypts and other Australian natives. Bottlebrushes flower there at the same time as they do here. But Australian natives do not form part of the general flow in the US, and though Los Angeles, hot as it is, may have plantings of Tasmanian Blue Gums, nowhere did I see Angophora costatas (Sydney Red Gums, in the background here). Angophorae costatae (if that's the plural) and scalloped sandstone - that is definitely a Sydney look.

We met a children's book editor from New York on the plane. She was coming to Sydney for her fourth visit. We asked her what she would be doing? Visiting an old friend of course, but going to see some shows, and shopping... Shopping? A New Yorker comes to Sydney to shop? Yes, she said and when asked to elaborate said Australia has great magazines. It hadn't occurred to us.

It is nice to find the familiar made newly-familiar, nice to hear anew Australian accents (or should Oi say Austrayan?), even nice to see pests like Indian Mynahs (pests in Australia) on a fence.

Finding plenty there - a return to Oakland

Gertrude Stein, who lived in Oakland in the late 19th century, once famously said 'There is no there there.'
Actually I reckon there is plenty there. And we have enjoyed the past few days wandering from Piedmont Avenue to the Lions Pool in Fruitvale, three gullies over. We have enjoyed learning from plaques along the way about the Chochenyo or Huichiuss Indians who once camped at the corner of Trestle Glen and Lakeshore Avenues, availing themselves of plentiful food at the head of what is now Lake Merritt. We have seen with our own eyes the truism that Oakland has almost equal proportions Hispanic, African-American, Asian and Caucasian in its population (the Oakland-East Bay Symphony recognises this in programs for Persian New Year, Chinese New Year...) We have enjoyed the glimpse of perhaps grander days as we walked past the great old Dream Palace cinemas, which in old black-and-white photographs have trolley cars trundling past them. This:

and this:

and Thomas Pflueger's wonderful old example of Depression-era fancy, The Paramount.

The whole Bay area is exciting though. People talk about San Francisco's 'eclecticism'. I think it engenders a touching whimsy, particularly say, in the Mission District where you see spectacular murals on garage doors, walls and back gates.

Not far from here are beautiful old Victorian homes, built in the 1880s, which were not dynamited, as were the buildings in this area of Valencia, to halt the fires following the 1906 earthquake. Perhaps because 'newer', these buildings have not been kid-gloved as old buildings but treated almost as blank canvasses for wonderful flights of imagination. They're just as much tributes to human artfulness and charm as faithful preservation, as in this side wall of a women's health centre,

painted by

which treats the theme of women's health to a particularly vivid epic sweep.

The whole Bay area is a series of micro-climates we were told yesterday. We had a vivid experience of it as we emerged from overcast fogginess on the east side

to sunny streetscenes not very many minutes later.

The variety and extremes may be something Bay dwellers mention in passing, but they must contribute to San Francisco's excitement greatly.