Thursday, August 27, 2009

A few days ago my friend Hilary sent me an email about the passing of her young friend. Carlos Alvarez died a week ago of a heart attack. He was 29 years old.  He died doing what he loved: dancing.  As Hilary tells me, “Carlos was a truly an inspired dancer, artist, chaos-embracer… who had been straight for the last two years and had turned into an organic farmer.”  Hilary explained that someone at Alvarez’s memorial recounted the young dancer’s meeting with Joe Strummer:

“I would have to say my favorite memory, would be bearing witness to the one and only Mr. Joe Strummer of the Clash, bowing down before Carlos, actually getting down onto his hands…and knees, and licking Carlos’s boots, right there in front of everybody.  That is how impressed this man, who had seen it all, was with Carlos Alvarez’s dancing.”

This posting is supposed to be about Joe Strummer, a quick thumbnail sketch of the musician and man.  Yet, I could find no better representation of the Joe Strummer who first moved and inspired me, first when I was 12 years old, a son of immigrants living in the Philadelphia area, then to share the story of a late young artist who made Strummer drop to his knees in praise.

Strummer’s legacy is a powerful one, reverberating throughout the world just as if his faithful Telecaster has been left plugged in while leaning against a stack of amplifiers broadcasting on a global bandwidth.  Everyone stills hears Joe Strummer and more importantly are still moved by him.  The journey that began when I first heard “Clampdown” with it’s message that there are no obstacles only opportunities and indeed there was power in positive-thinking has lead me to encounter a “community of rebels” everywhere I travel as we near completion on the film Let Fury Have the Hour.

Joe Strummer’s ever-present Telecaster guitar, which he performed with for over twenty-five years. Photo taken moments before Strummer took the stage at St. Anne’s Warehouse. April 2002. Photo: Antonino D’Ambrosio

Writing about Joe Strummer has less to do with summarizing his myriad accomplishments like leading the best rebel-rock-band–of-all-time or his efforts on behalf of Rock Against Racism, his work with Amnesty International and to a larger extent the global human rights movements.  It’s the Carlos Alvarez’s of the world who followed the lead of Joe Strummer and the Clash and then tried to go further, higher, and deeper.  It’s about redemption and never giving up.  It’s about believing, as Picasso famously said, that art is the lie that shows us the truth.  It’s about dismissing the game of politics and reveling in the beauty of humanity.  It’s about rejecting the idea of success or failure and getting up each day and just trying.

Maybe Strummer’s first-ever published words about his work with the Clash sum it up the best:  “I think people ought to know that we’re anti-fascist, we’re anti-racist, we’re pro-creative.  We’re against ignorance.”  (from the introduction of Let Fury Have the Hour).

I leave you with this—not a eulogy for Carlos Alvarez or Joe Strummer—but a challenge to come together and not shrink in the face of the cowards, hucksters, and reactionary scoundrels who push us backwards.  It’s time to stop looking above for heroes but from side-to-side, at one another, our neighbors, and communities in countries around the world.  We are all in this together and we all posses the power to be heroes.  And that’s exactly what Joe Strummer believed.  Carlos Alvarez knew it and lived it.

There are those that struggle one day and they are good.  There are others who struggle a year and they are better.  There are some that struggle many years and they are very good.  But there are others that struggle their whole lives and these are the heroic ones.
–Bertolt Brecht  (epigraph from Let Fury Have the Hour)

Antonino D’Ambrosio, Colli Al Volturno, Italy–Philadelphia, PA–Brooklyn, NY

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