Hamilton review, and a preview of something else

Finally listening to Hamilton proved inauspicious: the bird signs were two fallen out of the nest. One stuck in the straw still hanging from the pipes by a foot, the other, almost fully formed, had landed on the pavement, still moving slightly, breathing and looking around, but unable to stand on large spindly feet. It stretched out and died within an hour of when I found it. I didn't know what to do when I realized it was alive, and I don't know what I'll do with it now, either. The ones that fell from the other net after the wind and in the water bucket by the window were both dead when we found them and are buried in shallow graves by the bougainvillea corner, marked and covered by bricks. Mindful of what happened to the chicken chicks, I didn't try to give this one water (they drowned overnight, the kids said) but that was the only thing I even thought to try to do. I tore up paper and shifted the live one onto a new nest before shaking the other one down with a broom, not touching either. I might not eat much meat for awhile--or much of anything, really. There was a cockroach stuck in my water bottle, so even drinking is a little nauseating now, but a can of beer seemed safe, so I'll likely have another soon.

The musical reminds me of Corbyn's play about Lincoln, written in iambic pentameter a decade or so ago when he was living in New York, waiting tables. How many iambs went into Hamilton, I lost count, but it has a classically sure hand behind it; it's cool that the writer also plays the lead. His eyes, in the video of the opening number, blaze all around, as if blinded by the lights into wide circumspection. Interesting, too, that all the parts are historical figures, white, played by contemporary artists, non-white. The message there is clear enough: white people are history, and not even fit to tell it. It is exactly the liberation so devoutly desired by Joyce--the escape from history's nightmare--and exactly the premise upon which we read the great books ahistorically. Most importantly, in the space created by the music and dance, even the pallor of the intellectual lead is jarring--it is a stage and a songbook made for non-white interpreters only. Miranda, mirando, would be appalled to see a white actor gesticulate, a white body in motion. The accents of whiteness are reserved for the register of imitation in Jefferson and black comic relief in King George, safe butts of the joke, whose humor is all very large-hearted, whose message is ultimately that of every great story, human, and not narrow.

It seems inevitable that everyone should love it, and that even now the imitators are at work to duplicate it--a sequel about Burr, side-lights on the whiskey rebellion, Civil War musicals, all seem obvious and especially so when the demand is stratospheric. Audiences who can afford the tickets, of course, are probably not going to be qualified to create anything comparable--the only group more resented for all pop-cultural purposes than white people is the rich--but this music has already penetrated all through the internet, top to bottom, and across the skin-color spectrum. So even now, industrious spoken word poets are no doubt raiding the shelves of local and college libraries, checking out the juicy biographies of American yore, oppressors and heroes, and sharpening their quills, sampling their tracks.

I told Brian the other day I wanted to make some art with him--what could be more timely than opera, a Gesamtkunstwerk, to ride the zeitgeist? Adaptations of Sufjan's Age of Adz or the Residents for live theater, or, less potentially litigious?, a Narrative of the Life staging--it's Harriet Tubman replacing Jackson on the $20, so maybe this is the time period to focus on--or something to do with the Federalist Papers or de Tocqueville? At any rate, it should be based purely on the great works themselves, that is, ahistorical, with imaginations and anachronisms filling in the rest. Making the Constitution the main character, and arranging the play accordingly--in any case, a kind of dialogue, a dramatization of dissenting voices nevertheless aiming to accomplish something real, thus capable of seeking compromise. On the other extreme as texts go, something like the musical Brothers Karamazov, so massive and complicated that putting it onstage would necessarily simplify, schematize, yet we could preserve the essential contradictions of the universal story--and what music it would be! Smerdyakov on his guitar in the backyard by the gazebo--what an image to put a play around!

If its power to inspire is any measure of a work's worth, Hamilton is likely to be a masterpiece. A drop in the bucket, beside all the pecunious praise heaped upon it, but baseness oblige.