The Big Picture and the Closeup

The visual is Vladimir busking with his saxophone in a park. The song he plays is the first song we got to know him with at the outset when he was a musician in a Russian circus band. In that milieu the melody (no doubt by design) sounded cheerful but superficial. Now, played solo with lots of jazz riffs, it sounds distinctly mournful and much more profound. Michael Rod leaves pauses between the phrases, which begin to be filled in by singer Chaka Khan, singing a song called Freedom.

I needed to unpack things. I needed to clean things up. And Gladys pitched in. It was strange that someone who could generate such chaos in any space she occupied could somehow help bring order to mine. But she did.

Anyway, the cumulative effect of the buzz wearing off, much loneliness, much busyness, and a therapy group taking exception to my way of getting better was that I spent much of that summer in bemused solitude. Alone at night indeed. And yet it was an incredibly rich time.

As the sun was sliding down the horizon, carrying her away, the song in my cassette player was Teach Me Tonight, in Al Jarreau’s then-recently-released version. I kept replaying it, and it made me feel a little better.

The vines and the telephone wires and the guitar strings are all one in a dazzling poetic metaphor, all ligatures that simultaneously vibrate in a siderial harmony and draw the lovers together. And that was exactly what it felt like: that the two of us were being drawn to each other by invisible and harmonious forces.

The cave journey Vollenweider and friends charted out felt less sinister and dangerous than the cave journey the programmers responsible for Adventure contrived, but they each appealed to the same place in my head. Jointly these two creations, the game and the album, served as the perfect expression of the computer journey I embarked on at that point. You venture into mysterious places, develop new skills, and bring back all sorts of treasures from those mysterious caves we now call cyberspace.

The bargain I’d made with myself at the beginning of all my running around was that anytime I wanted to I could always turn around and rejoin my life’s earlier course. But when I decided I wanted to, I found anger was blocking that path back. These songs may not have been precisely applicable to our situation, but they were precisely applicable to my mood. I knew how things were supposed to go, and if they weren’t doing that, there had to be an explanation, and I was going nuts trying to find it.

Things that help in the strange ecology of the contemporary serious drama: rolling premieres, black box theaters, foundations, and residuals. But in consequence the reviewer may have to go guerilla. As seen with Detroit, The Train Driver, and Bullet for Adolf.