Mr.
Crutcher,
My good
friend and co-conspirahort, Mr. Webster, assures me that lunacy is but extravagant folly, and I for one . . . (if you use
contiguous skin cover instead of avoirdupois as a measure) . . . will happily
invest in wild foolishness at the drop of a Mardi Gras bead.
Searching For Sugar Man and its subject Sixto Rodriguez
are amazing on so many levels. His music was singable and powerful, great to
many who heard it, but it couldn't break through and become broadly popular in
the United States. Dylan already occupied that niche, had already gathered that
population of fans.
Instead, incredibly, Sixto’s songs, his CDs, catch on like wildfire in
1970s South Africa where people are suffering under the tyranny of apartheid. A
large group of people there need a voice, a poetic rallying cry that symbolizes
their frustrations and dreams, and Rodriguez speaks their language. He becomes
hugely famous in that country and never knows it. As we watch, we find in Rodriguez
a man genuinely worthy of admiration. A man able to live the values he
espouses. Humanly holy.
And as writers, painters, singers,
musicians, many of us hope to well-represent our values and the people we
respect, the situations or events that inspire us . . . we want to do them
justice. We want to place in public consciousness the vision we ourselves hold
dear.
When we write about the mentally ill, we want readers to see how
admirable people can be who live productive meaningful lives in spite of their
personal difficulties, in spite of social stigma. When we write about troubled
teenagers who have no adult they trust and who have to more fully develop their
own inner resources, we are hoping readers see how amazing and admirable
at-risk youth can be.
Along
with astonishment, the predominant emotion I felt watching Sugar Man was humility. An artist
like Sixto Rodriguez is not that common in our hype-filled, image-conscious,
publicity-hungry world. Makes me hope to write my talk and live my write.
As
for you, to paraphrase Steve Landesberg, honesty may be the best policy, but
lunacy may be a better defense.
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