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| A Soundtrack for Human Tragedy ~ Tribute to Hubert |
| band: Kronos String Quartet |
| Album: Requiem For A Dream |
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SOUNDTRACK FOR THE MOVIE
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
COMPOSED BY CLINT MANSELL
FEATURING THE KRONOS STRING QUARTET
IN MEMORY OF CUBBY
Ring around the Rosies
Pocket full of Posies
Ashes Ashes
We all fall down
~ Anonymous
Being an artist doesn't take much, just everything you got. Which means, of course, that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it's no big deal. They are one and the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it, I transcend all this gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to be that that is worth the price of admission.
~ Hubert Selby Jr.
Hubert "Cubby" Selby Jr. has been an American icon known and respected by other writers and a select cross-section of the reading public since the publication and prosecution of "Last Exit to Brooklyn" in 1964. Selby's depth and scorching honesty triggered a Billy Graham crusade against his novel for indecency, and raised the ante for a generation of new novelists and poets. While others wrote metaphors, Cubby wrote words with the visceral punch of a mugging on a merciless street in a dark New York borough. The depth of his descent into the soulless fog of addiction shocked Amiri Baraka (née Leroy Jones), and stripped him of all the niceties of self-delusion popular in new novels of the time. His description of addiction might leave track marks on your arm as you confront the rush of adrenalin that comes through the haze at passing a point of no return with no alibi or savior to keep your world from imploding into a simple prayer for death. He has lived a life so far down the rabbit hole that few writers dare to imagine and fewer still have reached in their darkest memory. But what makes his writing irresistible is a rhythm cold and accurate as a percussion symphony played with switchblades on garbage cans in a dark alley. When asked what had influenced his writing, he replied, "Beethoven."
ENTER young Darren Aronofsky, a movie maker fresh from the success of his first black and white movie "π," with the green light to bring Cubby's Requiem For A Dream to the silver screen, and the choice of soundtrack music becomes a spiritual challenge. A long list of warhorse film composers drop from the list unworthy of the challenge. To set this story in a polite sonic world of tried-and-true drama would be an atrocity. The music associated with Cubby's world is in the language so deep it has been set to music on the page as pure and perfect as Tennessee Williams or W.H. Auden, who once refused an offer to have his work made into a song with the words, "I thought I already had." By some miracle, a composer worthy of the task was found in little known Clint Mansell, whose choice of musicians included The Kronos String Quartet as the casting coup that would make his task possible.
Mansell has a gift. He seems to understand the law of opposites. Any good musicologist knows that "Ring Around The Rosies" was a song about the Black Plague, that "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was a Civil War protest song, and "Row Row Row Your Boat" is rumored to have been written as a prelude to a suicide. The darkest moments of panic in Mansell's score resemble colliope music or children's songs. He understands. That's the law of opposites. The effect is terrifying.
The Kronos Quartet is holy. A soft spoken David Harrington leads the group as a kind of monk in service to the music and a servant of the sounds never before heard outside the imagination for over 35 years and more than 640 premiere's of pieces by living composers. The usual suspects among fine musicians might not have the courage to feel Cubby's story. A host of lesser interpreters might have reduced the import of this Requiem to some public service announcement against drugs. This story demands the music march into hell, with a starting point somewhere about 10 minutes before the tragic end of Midnight Cowboy before it blows out the ballasts and dives through the hell of Jim Carroll's Basketball Diaries to all points Danté while keeping the rhythm of a mugging in the back alley. The actors chosen include Ellen Burston whose love of pure acting made her the mistress in charge of The Actor's Studio since no less talent would be worth a damn. I will slight the actors here full knowing they have got their due from scores of other writers. The musical for this story was worthy of it's subject, and that is a minor miracle. I'm here to write about that music.
THE SOUNDTRACK
A TV ad for Happy Tibbons self-improvement course begins the DVD. I was ready to return the disc. The movie begins with Harry stealing his mother's TV, with her locked in the bathroom sliding the key to him from under the door afraid of her own son. The Kronos plays the warmth of chords tied to some of the higher numbers in the overtone structure, over a cadence of time passing toward a tragedy through ore seem and fire seem where darkness is a punch to the gut. This rhythm grabs the listener by the hand like handcuffs to a guard heading down a long hall toward death row. Gentle human warmth instructions this string and electronic intro as though boarding a train that others will witness as a wreck you can't stop watching though you want to look away. Lust, drugs and desire sink like hooks into the flesh of each major character as a deep heavenly drone worthy of La Monte Young brings humanity to the horror of consequences and truth. The machine is wound up like some Greek tragedy where choice isn't a factor the gods having spoken. Consquences are the events of this story. Consequences already set in motion. Choices long past gone. It won't end until lives are lost. They are lost already but for the execution.
Selby's novel has a soundtrack all it's own. The words he writes capture the pace of the drug, the mood, and the approach of a catastrophe for each character. But occasionally he has another soundtrack. In Requiem there is this magic two page description of a shooting gallery beneath New York. He tells the reader there is a transistor radio echoing down there, but doesn't name the song. In those two pages, a good reader can identify not only which Rolling Stones song is playing but which lyric matches each paragraph through the scene. Selby was always aware of the sound his characters were experiencing. Clint Mansell managed to find the inner rhythm in the heartbeat of these people Selby created. Their dizzying thoughts expressed in repeated phrases in Selby's prose are somehow matched by Mansell's score for this movie. This is a story of the destruction of souls, with no main character left dead except in his or her spirit. This soundtrack played without the images has the tug of a person in distress being pulled helplessly to a moment of life changing truth. That this soundtrack retains it's humanity throughout this slaughterhouse of consequences makes it a minor miracle. It carries the message that good but flawed people who we love will reach a point of no return.
I'm watching the movie and listening. The soundtrack is the inner nightmare with dialogue spoken like a lyric, with images cut like visions on meth in that state where nothing is more than an image of an experience half remembered as it happens. Jennifer Connelly looks into the camera and says: "Wanna waste some time?" No human could resist that temptation. She hands the camera three pink pills. We have in us the seeds of the destruction we are about to witness. Our fates are sealed.
Cubby called himself a scream looking for a mouth. He was a gentle, frail man with a temperament and constitution formed in a tubercular ward where ribs and chunks of lung were removed from him to save his life, and morphine saved him from the pain while addicting his soul and body to a hollow manifestation of need searching for a fix of poison. As "Bookworm" Michael Silverblatt says in the Selby biopic, "America is a happiness factory," and Selby wrote from the darkness of an American Dostoyevsky though I believe from a bleaker aspect and a more palpable depth.
Divorced from the movie on a date this music can prompt vivid recall of the movie, as a memory of something experienced. My date said, "This is the part where . . ." as though the music was the movie. The story could be re-experienced with gut wrenching force through the flow of this album. It was magical but a little intense. (Next time I think I'll play some Pheobe Snow.) The geometry of human need expands by a power time and time again. Destruction is as inevitable as the fate of Oedipus after the oracle, but the story won't alter for good behavior. No moral. No O'Henry rags to riches. No "happiness machine" ending to tuck you in after the story is told. The Kronos has cut their teeth on madness as deep as The Berlioz "Symphony Fatastique" at least a mile beneath "The Valley Of The Dolls."
There's a documentary of Hubert Selby Jr.'s life called "It'll Be Better Tomorrow" as good and accurate as anything I've seen. Cubby lived for decades clean and sober before his death in 2004. He had been thought to be dying for 50 years. He was known in recovery circles as "the thing that wouldn't die." He was the literary luminary who scared Howard Rollins with his writing and his driving. He was a man whose greatest nightmare was to die without leaving anything worth remembering. He will not be forgotten.
Composer Clint Marshall and The Kronos String Quartet have created a music to fit the task as a soundtrack for this story. It's beautiful. The music is bracing and human throughout. The Kronos chose a theme from this movie as an encore for their last performance in Cincinnati at Music Now after 20 years away from this city. They chose the piece because someone was whistling the tune in the lobby during a quiet spot in the previous performance. This music has become a part of our collective consciousness. The story is an urban legend used to caution teenagers. "You're moving to that city to lose your arm like Harry," was once told to a junky son doing a geographic on his addiction. Cubby was proud that his story had become an urban legend, and part of the language we use to describe irrevocable consequences in a society built on denial.
I met Cubby briefly, and heard him read once in Marina del Rey. He was a sober man ravaged by medicine, multiple surgeries, addiction, and life without excuses. He told Jerry Stahl that when you quit the drugs and alcohol you find out how dark you really are. He was an inspiration as a man without illusions. This soundtrack, that movie, those actors did him justice.
This review is written in memory of Hubert "Cubby" Selby Jr. (July 23, 1928 - April 26, 2004). He was the thing that wouldn't die. Honestly.
I have always felt outside and then the more I look at the world I think maybe it's a better place to be. Do I really want to be a part of what's going on? Yeah I guess I know I've always felt that way. I would have to say yeah, I guess I've always been an outsider who wished to hell he wasn't.
~ Hubert Selby Jr.
The photograph above is copyrighted and was taken by Mark Savage for his work called "Souls & Passions, The Poets of Los Angeles." This photograph is used with permission from the artist.
www.SoulsAndPassions.com
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