Episode 116: In Protest, Indecent, And In America

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• Musician Marc Ribot Looks To The Past For Answers To The Present

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  Marc Ribot is one of the world’s most acclaimed guitarists. Over the course of his 40-year career he’s worked with Elvis Costello, Elton John and Norah Jones. His latest album “Songs of Resistance: 1942 to 2018,” features protest songs ranging from World War II to the present. Ribot features several guest vocalists, including Tom Waits, Steve Earle and Fay Victor.

  Ribot has no trouble remembering how far back his activist roots go.

  “It goes back to when I was, I think, in second or third grade and they canceled ‘The Soupy Sales Show‘ on television,” Ribot told WPR’s “BETA.” “I organized a walkout for my second-grade class. I was a little mystified about the workings of power; somehow, I thought that my teacher could make ‘Soupy Sales’ go back on the air. It wasn’t successful but that didn’t stop me.”

  Since then, Ribot has been an outspoken activist and a community organizer for such causes as affordable housing and musicians’ rights in the digital age.

  His new album, “Songs of Resistance: 1942-2018” started percolating in November 2016.

  “It was immediately inspired by the election of (President) Donald Trump,” Ribot said. “I was actually working on a different record with my band Ceramic Dog at the time. I guess the thinking was for us that the world could live without another recording of songs about me fighting with my girlfriend for another few years while we dealt with these more pressing problems.”

  Ribot was also inspired to create “Songs of Resistance” because he noticed that a lot of political movements lacked a musical component.

  “I remember being at Occupy. It was rumored that they were going to be evicted by the police. And so there we were at 6:30 in the morning and everybody was milling around half-conscious and waiting to be arrested or whatever was going to happen. And people were nervous and trying to get ready and they were in need of a song but there was no common song they could sing,” Ribot recalled. “I was wishing people knew ‘We Are Soldiers in the Army,’ which is the song that people in the Civil Rights Movement traditionally sung, often while they were being arrested, because that song helped make people brave. The act of singing together helped give people courage. And it also let people know that they’re not alone. The people in the paddy wagon could hear the people in the street, the people in the jail cell can hear people in other jail cells. And it also lets us know that we’re not alone in history. We have some pretty good company back there.”

  One of the songs on the new album is called “Bella Ciao” and it features Tom Waits.

  “‘Bella Ciao’ is a World War II-era song of the Italian partisans, the ‘partigiani,’” Ribot explained. “As with everything else on the record, my goal was not to do an archivally correct version. It’s usually done as kind of a really uptempo, high-spirited march. First of all, I wanted to translate it into English because I wanted people to understand it. The lyrics to the song begin:

  ‘One fine morning, I woke up early
  Bella ciao, Bella ciao, Bella ciao
  One fine morning, I woke up early
  Find the fascists at my door.’

  “I wanted people to understand that other people had had a kind of rude awakening before in the past and this was their song. In fact, it’s about a very intimate moment. It’s about somebody saying goodbye to their husband or wife,” Ribot said. “It’s without question a political song but it’s also an intimate song. And I think Tom (Waits) related to that.”

  One of the original songs that Ribot wrote for the album is called “How to Walk in Freedom.”

  He explained the inspiration behind this song, which features Fay Victor and Sam Amidon.

  “Wish fulfillment, it’s just naked wish fulfillment. It’s the theme of the record — that we’re interrogating the past, where I’m asking the past to give us a clue of what to do now,” Ribot said. “One thing that I’ve noticed is that in a lot of Civil Rights tunes and a lot of other songs, there’s the act of walking — walking together. And somehow walking together is a radical act. When you think who can you walk to, where can you walk, and what you can sing while you’re walking, you can make some progress there.”

  Listen to Ribot’s full album below:

• Director John Waters Takes His Demented Imagination Into The Art Gallery

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  John Waters has been called all kinds of names throughout his career: “Pope of Trash” and “Prince of Puke” included. That’s because he is famous, and infamous, for his transgressive cult films. Movies like “Multiple Maniacs,” “Pink Flamingos,” and “Female Trouble.”

  But Waters is also an artist.

  The Baltimore Museum of Art is hosting a major retrospective for its local boy who’s made good. Or bad. Or both. It’s called “Indecent Exposure” and features Waters’ art including photographs, sculptures and videos that he has made since the early 1990s.

  The exhibition includes some of Waters’ earliest visual art like “My Little Movies.” These are small photographic prints arranged in specific sequences. Waters took photographs with film of images that were playing on television in real time, without stopping or freeze-framing the TV.

  “They weren’t digital,” Waters told WPR’s “BETA.” “Digital doesn’t work. I still have tried it off the TV screen with digital. It doesn’t work right. It just doesn’t look right to me. It doesn’t have that amateur kind of feel. It doesn’t look like an early underground movie. It doesn’t look like somebody snuck in and made a piece of art in the middle of the night in a closed theater where they put the print on themselves without asking or hijacked the projectionist.”

  Waters used these images to create storyboards that tell a narrative. Sometimes the images are from his own films and sometimes the images are from other directors’ films.

  “It’s like a snipe hunt,” Waters explained. “I think up the narrative of each piece before I ever do them. So I guess you could call it the dreaded conceptual art. And then I have to find the images for each thing to be able to tell the story. Sometimes it doesn’t work and I take those images and I keep them. I have many, many little envelopes of different subject matters or backgrounds. And then I write with them and I edit with them, with those pictures to tell a new story. So something I took that didn’t work might end up, you know, 10 years later in another sequence that I’m using to tell another story.”

  An example of John Waters’ “My Little Movies” works is called “Facelift.”

  “There’s a movie where Elizabeth Taylor gets a facelift and her stitches kind of look like my mustache, I noticed,” Waters said. “So I edited back and forth like so it’s Elizabeth Taylor, me. And then I turn into her and get a facelift and she has my mustache. So it’s kind of morphing other images into a completely different narrative than there was in the original movie.”

  Waters enjoys the solitary practice of creative visual art and finds that it presents a different creative challenge than collaborating with others to make his movies.

  “It’s very different. I was trying to tell a story in a quicker way. Talk about the high concept. You know, it’s like two frames. That’s it. But it’s also something that you’re going to look at forever if you have it hanging in your house. So it’s very different from even a cult movie. People might have seen it 10 times. They don’t look at it every single day of their lives when they look up from their bed,” Waters said. “So I tried to imagine that too — pieces that wouldn’t always be something that people would want to hang over their sofa. Because my collectors, they understand that I’m satirizing the whole art business in the first place.”

  When exploring different mediums, Waters draws a distinct boundary between his film career and his visual art career.

  “It’s different because in the art world, the only obscenity left is celebrity. And I hate celebrity artists, so basically I try to debase that and ruin my celebrity. But at the same time, I’ve never given an article in like say ‘People’ Magazine or something, where I routinely do, you know, press for the movies … I like to keep them very, very separate,” he said. “Many people that are fans of my movies probably don’t even know that I have that, even though there are four art books out about my work. I guess it gets less and less like that. But still, I like to keep it separate because I think it is a very separate thing. I think it up in a whole different place. I still collect art, I still go to art galleries all the time, and it’s just as important to me. But it’s different.”

  All images provided by John Waters and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

• Comedian Maeve Higgins On Her Journey To America

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  Irish comedian Maeve Higgins always dreamed of coming to America, settling in the Big Apple and becoming a famous writer.

  “I think I was drawn to come to New York, which is still a big comedy center, and I had a romantic idea of being a writer in New York City,” Higgins told WPR’s “BETA.”

  At age 31, she began to find her options in Ireland a bit limited. So, riding the success of her Irish television program, “Fancy Vittles” and a best-selling memoir, Higgins made her move.

  “I really moved for the same reasons a lot of immigrants leave, which is opportunity and adventure,” she said.

  Higgins has captured that adventure and her musings on living in the United States in her book of essays, “Maeve In America: Essays by a Girl from Somewhere Else.” That title also doubles as the show title for the podcast she launched, “Maeve In America: Immigration IRL,” after arriving here.

  At first, Higgins balked at the idea of doing a podcast, which she felt was just another box every comedian had to check.

  “I certainly had offers before. I never wanted to do one that was just like comedians talking about how they got started in comedy or whatever. I think that ground’s well-trodden,” Higgins said.

  So, she pivoted to something a little more familiar. “Maeve In America” focuses on the immigration experience in the U.S. with each episode featuring a different personal journey.

  “From a storytelling point of view, if you leave one place and start a whole new life in another country, then instantly there’s a story there,” Higgins said.

  Higgins felt a certain camaraderie with her guests, because their path so clearly reflected her own.

  “When I first moved here, I was really drawn to other immigrants because when you’re new in a place and you’re trying to find your feet, the other new people, they’re a great comfort to you,” Higgins said.

  While the reality of New York City is of a cross-cultural melting pot, the depiction of it in the media that Maeve soaked up back in Ireland was not so.

  “Forty-five percent of New Yorkers are born in a different country, but I don’t hear them,” Higgins said. “I only hear American voices on a lot of media like podcasts and TV and radio. So I thought it’d be cool to have a platform where immigrants got to tell their own story.”

  Her sharp observational instincts, necessary for her career as a comedian, serve her well as a host. Higgins shows a remarkable ability to pull out poignant stories from her guests. She credits that to what she sees as a dying skillset — small talk.

  “What I love to do — and I’m sure it’s probably from being Irish — is to wander around in conversation and not be so direct,” she said. “You get to know (people) in more subtle ways.”

  She witnesses or is a part of too many conversations today that revolve around what you do, who you know, but not who you are.

  “These kind of direct questions that I feel are designed to put me onto whichever shelf I belong on, status-wise or work-wise,” Higgins said. “(New York) can be quite transactional. Interactions with people are like, ‘Are you important or not?’”

  That categorization can surface in the immigration process as well and can ultimately be just as limiting.

  “It made me question how come I’m allowed to be here and there’s an astrophysicist sitting in a refugee camp in Jordan who’s not allowed to be here,” Higgins said. “It also made me think about how we categorize people.”

  Higgins — who is in the U.S. under an “individuals of extraordinary ability” classification — said that ironically the longer she stays in the U.S., the more it mystifies her. She hopes that being an outsider can offer her a unique perspective and voice.

  “It’s useful to be on the outside looking in, I think,” she said. “It certainly helps me to understand the place a little bit more — both here and back in Ireland — when you have that distance. I feel like I can see Ireland more clearly from here, too. It’s made me a bit of an outsider in Ireland where I grew up and spent most of my adult life.”

  In her typical fashion, Higgins jokes about her mixed feelings about being an outsider in two countries: “I have that Irish ability to always be like melancholy and happy at the same time.”