The World is a Ghetto
Handel’s ‘Messiah’ makes way more sense as a gospel-tastic refugee story
Jack Maeby and Moon Machar
Sitting here as a septuagenarian human afterthought in my tenuous observation post overlooking the cancerous black heart of a global criminal empire as it nears its centuries-long goal of total conversion of the seething, unruly horde of humanity into a compliant mass of permanently leveraged serfs who pay through their noses for the right to be either slowly euthanized or violently exterminated, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to shut the fuck up and take it.
And I’m not even a hapless prole of the Levant, eastern Europe, western, central, southeastern and oceanic Asia, Africa, or south and central and Caribbean America, subsisting precariously along some war-torn, economically strangled front line of the empire’s mopping up operations.
I’ve been a thoroughly pissed off closet anarchist since I was a disaffected preteen in the early 1960s, fending off repeated efforts to enlist me into the administrative node of the brutal white ruling class into which I was undeservingly spawned. I ended up a lifelong chickenshit critic of the criminal power structure and, as a late-blooming investigative journalist, intermittently succeeded in exposing and even curtailing a small number of their nefarious projects. But I was and remain a tiny, inconsequential fly in a planet-sized tub of nasty, viscous ointment, and even the little that I managed to “achieve” led to no permanent change in any status quo, while managing only to attract threats to my life and a reputation in the NSA’s Utah-based supercomputer as somebody to watch.
Yet, my cold jaundiced heart still seems to exhibit a pulse from time to time. I ventured up to Portland, Maine this past weekend on the invitation of two of my very best and oldest friends on the planet, Jack Maeby and Carol Tanzman, who despite being as potentially old and in the way as I am, are still waging cultural war on the empire. With a shoestring budget funded by an unlikely combination of hard-won grants and cobbling together a stunningly talented group of artists, musicians, poets, singers and nonprofit arts organizations, they were able to manifest one of the most emotionally and intellectually stimulating works of stick-in-the-eye repudiation to the empire’s global fascist end game that I’ve ever witnessed.
It was a soul-searing, gospel-inspired, radical re-engineering of Handel’s Messiah, rehearsed and staged by the seat of the pants and performed in a beautifully up-close, personal and gloriously analog manner in the former St. Lawrence Church’s parish hall in the Munjoy Hill neighborhood of the city, which has been converted into an intimate 100-seat theater.
As in an AME church service, the altar-like stage was quadrisected into Jack Maeby’s crack trio (piano/organ, five-string bass and stripped-down drums) on the far left; a fabulous, sonically diverse quartet of gospel singers on the far right, a preacher/poet lectern on the near right; and a dramatic area at the center in which mute actors pantomimed vignettes of refugee terror and diaspora before a series of masterfully curated background slides. Despite the alleged lack of rehearsal time, the music, action and poetry alternated perfectly into a seamless, swelling dramatic arc that managed to instill a sense of hope and kindness arising out of evil and tragedy without relapsing into the stifling emotional extortion of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” to herd the audience back into the clutches of God’s chosen empire. They left that shit out on purpose as, according to Jack, “there’s nothing to celebrate.”
You said a mouthful, my friend.
The requisite dose of righteous refugee anger and pathos was supplied by the wonderful Sudanese poet and actress Nyamon Nguany (Moon) Machar, whose words and delivery struck lightning bolts of hard truth into the hearts of the mostly white, liberal-trending audience. Not to be outshone, the visceral one-two punch of the band and the singers (the vocal and instrumental arrangements were spectacular examples of why gospel music can break into the human soul like nothing else in the universe) drove the narrative inexorably forward, leaving me and the cadre of weekend pickle ballers surrounding me in the audience in barely disguisable tears.
And no ICE goon squad showed up, which was a plus.
Anyway, it was a transcendent experience, and one of the four performances was filmed by a pro crew with three cameras. Hopefully the thing will translate to the small screen enough to make the sort of dent in your armor that it made in mine.
Meanwhile, I’m back in the heart of the beast, reading/hearing all about our current administration’s strange and resoundingly unsolicited initiative to get the rest of the American bourgeoisphere besides rich people and actors hooked on Ozempic.
It didn’t take a Nazi-adjacent “health” influencer to convince me that that shit is POISON and will fucking kill you. If you really want to fix your general health a little bit, just do some of what this nice old Irish fart says. Nothing is going to keep you from dying someday, but you might as well give yourself a chance to go down swinging. Good luck, and don’t let my shitty attitude depress you: