Word: hobo
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Recipe for theatrical disaster: take a moldy 19th century German opera about a Faustian pact with the Devil and turn it over to a composer of hobo rock, a legendary writer from the Beat Generation, and a director who specializes in performance pieces for the art crowd. But don't go away. A pop opera of very odd sorts called The Black Rider is a triumph for its three collaborators, Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs and Robert Wilson...
...songs take chord structures simpler, even, than Lois Maffeo's--simpler than anything; sometimes only two chords will do for a whole song, switching back and forth in sinuously uneven rhythms like the ghosts of hobo-laden freight trains switching tracks. There are no guitar "pyrotechnics" allowed, or even possible, here; there's not even much distortion, despite the Sub Pop name on the label (though recording at AmRep Studios in Minneapolis must have helped to put an electric edge on the guitar sound, an edge that's developed only since last year). Rebecca Gates' playing has to carry...
...picture: the glamourization of lawbreaking as economic hard times hit; New York City as a laboratory for the new relationship between Washington and local government. The people interviewed are not, by and large, major players but ordinary folks -- former sharecroppers, union organizers, journalists, a White House butler. ( PAUL EDWARDS, HOBO, reads one onscreen identification, surely a TV first...
...adoption is invalid, she tells Daddy Warbucks, because he doesn't have a wife. The rest of the show is devoted to marrying him off and extracting him from the tentacles of the adhesive and ambitious commissioner. Along the way father faces financial ruin, daughter runs away and turns hobo, a potential wife plots to murder both, and Franklin D. Roosevelt gets, as he drolly hums it, "all dolled up" for a soigne soiree on the Staten Island ferry...
...Huckleberry Finn anyway? The most celebrated hobo hero in American literature took on a new dimension when Shelley Fisher Fishkin, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, unveiled the research that went into her forthcoming book, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices...