His pitches were comets from distant and never imagined galaxies. They were rockets, they were bombs, they were terrifying, curving flourishes that made you think you were watching the astonishing dazzle of an alien technology. It was a new kind of physics, one that allowed him to perform stunning feats that lifted us from our lousy, mortal shells,.
He was a blazing fire, a goddamned Demi-God.
Fernandez died in a boating accident on Sunday at the age of 24.
( This is a photograph of Dee Gordon, Jose Fernandez’s teammate. Gordon is known for his speed, not his power, and he is so thin and little that he truly looks like a child out there amongst the gigantic professional athletes. On the first game back after his friend’s death, in his first at bat, he hit a home run, and as he circled the bases he wept like a boy. As he said later in an interview, “I ain’t never hit a ball that far, even in batting practice. I told the boys, ‘If you all don’t believe in God, you better start.’ For that to happen today, we had some help.”)
Three times, Jose attempted to defect from Cuba to the US unsuccessfully, and after each failed attempt he was put in prison where, still a boy, he shared space with hard and dangerous men. In 2007, at the age of 15, he made the crossing successfully, but not before somebody on his boat was washed overboard. Fernandez, operating on the pure instinct of a boy that age, when right and wrong seem clear, and your body, your entire life, is still radiant and unlimited, dove into the night waters to save the person. He had no idea who had been swept into the ocean, and with each stroke he took, an eight-foot wave grabbed him, lifting him up into the shifting darkness above, before splashing down and submerging him again. The person, somewhere before him, bobbing in and out of sight, was his mother. He got to her, told her to hold tight to his left shoulder, asked her not to push down, and slowly swam her back to the boat.
Imagine that.
Imagine doing something so great with your life.
His baseball career was short and beautiful and joyous. It was something to behold, each start an event I got excited for, anticipating it the same way some other people might anticipate a new Game of Thrones episode or a Bruce Springsteen concert.
He was, in a word, awesome, and his death was a tragedy for the communities he lived amongst, and even beyond, even to a 50 year-old white guy living in Toronto who found himself trying to explain to his wife why he’s crying about the death of some pitcher on his fantasy baseball team.
The boat Fernandez was on the night of his death was traveling around 55-60 mph. He was with two of his friends, both around his age, and it was late. It would have been dark, black even– nothing but the feel of water beneath and sky above. Everything beautiful, the wind and spray and stars in his face, infinity spreading out in all directions…And Jose Fernandez, soon to be a father, moving into the future with such velocity, confidence and hard earned momentum… And then the boat hit a rock jetty and all three of the men died on impact.
Just like that.
They would not have known what had happened.
Our lives are so brief.
We’re all speeding through the dark, the beautiful and the damned, alike, each one of us luckier and more vulnerable than we could ever imagine.
]]>Live, his songs become crazed, feral creatures. Having broken free of their studio imposed straightjackets, every piece he plays becomes bloodthirsty, an unpredictable, ever escalating apocalypse unto itself. Honest to God, his shows are as much of an assault as they are anything else, and you always feel a little bit like you’ve just born witness to a terrible crime.
Bent and crouched low at the edge of the stage, his black-clad arms waving and pointing to the summoned crowd, Cave was a spidery prophet. The stories he imparted all carried danger and urgency, more condemnation than warning. It was primitive, as if shadows of incredible passion and horror were being cast angrily upon the wall, and there was an utterly brilliant, almost supernatural feeling to it all.
Behind him and singing in support of all this was a small choir assembled from grade 5 and 6 students at a public school here in Toronto. There’s really no conceivable way that they could have known anything about Nick Cave or had a clue what they’d gotten themselves in for when they signed up to sing with some pop star at a downtown concert hall, and I could not stop imagining what was going through their heads. It must have been traumatic and nightmare-inducing, like seeing a train, gloriously in flames, skidding off the tracks and shuddering toward you at a million miles an hour, while you, pitifully, tried to pedal away on your bicycle.
Astonishing, just astonishing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdau-45Rpxc
(Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds performing Stagger Lee in Montreal March 22, 2013)
(My brief 10-second video of him performing the same song in Toronto the next night. Note the bad seats.)
]]>She looked a little bit like a turtle, and as she stood there on the platform she reached her hand back into the car, which was then received by the hand of a tiny, incredibly ancient Asian man, who also looked a little bit like a turtle. Delicately and with her guidance– his skin as thin as dried paper– he emerged onto the platform like royalty. The woman then let his hand go and hurried off into the day, her lack of sentiment somehow beautiful, even inspiring.
A thin, teenage Indian boy sat beside his mother. Plugged into his iPod, his body language was awkward and secretive, as if attempting to fashion a world that was impenetrable and separate to his square mother. He pulled out a Burger King Whopper from his knapsack and a boyish smile began to accidentally illuminate his face. His mother’s eyes– instinctively falling on her boy– began to smile. He was too skinny and needed to eat more, she thought to herself.
Nearby was a large and pretty young woman in a flesh-coloured dress that she somehow managed to spill both in to and out of. A gold necklace with the name Chloe, written in kind of perfume bottle script, hung from her neck. She had narrow, concentrated eyes and toenails painted the colour of bubble gum. Intensely focused she was playing a game on her iPhone, furiously thumbing the screen, the tip of her tongue protruding just a tad through her teeth.
At Rowe Farms on Bloor Street Rufus Wainwright was idling through the various products they had for sale, lingering on the organic milk. Which one to pick? He couldn’t decide. He couldn’t have seemed any more bored–ennui poured off him like humidity, like song.
An elderly woman was standing in front of me at the cheese shop. I asked her what sort of cheese she thought I should buy. She was utterly thrown by the question, but after she had made her purchase and regained her composure, she took the time to pause before leaving, “ You have a nice cheese, then,” she said to me.
Back on the street a beautiful young woman in a pretty pink dress was being pushed along the sidewalk in a wheelchair. It was so sunny and clear, and the light was catching her hair in ways that made it appear to glow. There was something holy in that moment, and everybody on the sidewalk seemed to understand this. Like pedestrian clutter, we all parted and stepped back as they passed, each one of us smiling and nodding, murmuring our small gratitudes.
]]>The other guitarist, who resembled a shorter, plumper version of Amy Winehouse, looked like the sarcastic one in high school. Filling out the trio was a bearded hipster, who played the drums in the background.
Pared down, they played the sort of music you’d imagine listening to as you drove across America getting a tattoo in each state. But then, springing from the percussive spine of their sound, the music would take jangled, angry flight, as if tacked on to suggest an emotional and unpredictable complexity beating within. In short order it became predictable and I began to feel old, imagining the lives of the performers in 15 years. Would the lead singer have named her daughter Peggy Sue, and now a schoolteacher, surprise her students by knocking a song out of the park at a Christmas assembly?
First Aid Kit took the stage to the enthusiastic applause of the 500 or so people who were there. The band is comprised of two Swedish sisters, Johanna and Klara Soderberg. They’re young and beautiful.
Johanna, the older of the two, is tall and thin and dresses like a pioneer. Klara, the propulsive force of the band, is broader in stature, sporting candid black banks and introspective, watchful eyes. There’s something spooky sweet about them, and they have gorgeous, mesmerizing voices, so pure as to feel like the girls are antennas that pick up divine currents inaccessible to the rest of us.
They became “stars” four years ago (when they were just 18 and 15) after they posted a song that they covered by Fleet Foxes on YouTube. By far, it’s been the most successful thing that they’ve ever done, proving much more popular than any of the more polished or managed material that’s followed. Unlike this video, which felt incredibly sincere and intimate, the girls seemed like they were playing roles on stage, that they were being handled by people who had told them that they knew what it took to “make it” in the music biz. It was a little bit demoralizing, actually.
Seeming still so young and optimistic, the show sometimes had the feel of attending a Christian campfire sing-a-long. They just didn’t own the experience of their songs, and they seemed at their best covering material written by others. Watching, I longed for them to return to their unselfconscious states when they were at their most beautiful best– as perhaps we all were– before we knew who we were to become and before people started telling us how best to get there. I wanted to return to the past and stumble upon their video afresh—delighting in the potential of two unexpected and radiant girls, mysterious wonders of nature, singing as if for their pleasure alone.
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