TMursddy, September 9, 1976

THE MICHIGAN DAILY

Page Five


Thursday, September 9, 1976 THE MICHIGAN DAILY

Silent sho
By ANN MIARIE LIPINSKI
EPULLS the imaginary baseball cap down to shade his
eyes, then turns to show his full profile to the imaginary
batter. His knees bend, he crouches, then begins dropping and
retrieving a fabricated ball into a fabricated mit. He squints,
purses his red-glossed lips, then winks at the non-existent catch-
er. Slowly, he begins rotating his pitching arm in a ferris
wheel ipotion. Around once, then again, faster, then again and
again until an exaggerated, lightning-quick snap of his wrist
sends the ball whistling acros the invisible field.
A quick pirouette in his black Capezios and he's the batter.
His fingers wind and curl around a bat you cannot see, his
jaws race up and down as if nursing a mouthful of tobacco.
He hauls his arms back, then smack! The ball he sent to him-
self seconds ago is now sailing out into center field. Another
complete turn, another reincarnation, and he is dancing with
his eyes and mit raised to the sky, positioning himself for
the catch. Heaving his weight from right to left, pumping
his arms up and down, poking at the sky, he snatches the
ball with his mit. Another pirouette and he fancies himself the
umpire. le tosses an extended thumb over his shoulder, and
calls the batter out.
"I'm not as out of shape as I thought I was," Seth Krugaliak
says, breaking the silence. He smiles and the white pancaked
face crinkles. He's pleased with his performance.
SETH IS A MIMIST; a master of silence and exaggerated
motion, a visual teller of tales.

and

tell

"It's total freedom," he says, describing his art. "I find
it the least constricting of all theatre because it's bare
and essential. No barriers of language, semantics and words.
It's you communicating with the most important language there
it - your body."
Seth, a University junior, has studied and performed mime
and pantomime for six years, and for three of the last four
years he was an active professional. ("I performed for pay
so I guess that makes me a professional.") For the past 12
months, however, he's admittedly gotten a bit rusty devoting
time to his job as a car salesman and to getting through school.
"But even when I'm selling cars I can study and practice
mime," he adds quickly. "You can tell a lot by the way a
person stands or sits. I can tell a lot of times when a sale
has been made before there's been any verbal agreement. You
have to intimidate sometimes and I know when to intimidate,"
he says, angling -sharply forward in his seat to illustrate his
point. "And I know when to be passive, when not to express
any emotion at all."
SETH SEES HIS BRAND of performance mime as a bit re-
moved from the popular, commercial lot. He recoils at the
thought of using any props in his act, and is loath to invite other
min iists to share the stage with him. The only company he al-
lows are stage lights "to set moods."
See TO SETH, Page 9

Seth


 Sllvertones:
By ELAINE FLETCHER ner that cc
IT ALL BEGINS on somebody's back porch, and string-
with two pimply-faced youngsters, a har- to him the
monica and a steel string guitar. As one to his mike
strums out the tinny sounding chords, the upon then
other croons an old Huddie Ledbetter tune. though the
After hours of futile effort, they give up and mouth. Ste
go listen to a record. George's,I
But some don't quit so easily. And for a few, admires.
like the members of a local band called Silver- "I'm into
tones, the first night on the porch marked the into Muddx
beginning of a whole new career. into xo al
"I joined my first band when I was 17 and
a half years old," reminisces guitar and har-
monica player, Steve Nardella. "And I quit
work shortly thereafter (he had quit school
the year before). I think I was supporting
myself on $25 a week in those days."
For the Silvertones, the starving artist days
are gone forever-well maybe. They are book-
ed up three, sometimes four nights a week
at local bars like the Blind Pig, Mr. Floods
and Second Chance. "The average band pulls
in $150 a gig," says Carl, the blonde and blue-
eyed string bass player. "It's enough to live
on," Steve adds.
Still the band members look on at their mod-
erate success matter-of-factly. For them it
seems to be one tune blended into a long line
of jams-beginnings and endings, openings and
closings .. .
DOWN AT THE Blind Pig on a Saturday
night, the corks pop out of the wine bottles
with an extra measure of force. Drip, drip,
drop, wine flows over the cups, while the crowd
piles in, one on top of the other to sit in a
state of musical siege for the next few hours.
Only a little while before, the basement room
was half empty; the beams on the ceiling and
the concrete walls stood out cold and stark
despite their layer of black paint. It could
have been anybody's basement.
Now the crowd lends the room a hint of
warmth, while the band turns the basement
into ,a bar. A collective breath is taken as
the Silvertone musicians ramble onstage-not
a big breath, just enough to fill the lungs, blues whic
breath to hum, and to holler-for more music. fluence an
cause that'
THERE ARE FOUR band members, four Though
difrent faces and sets of aspirations, images of
"Though sometimes we add a tenor sax," time artist
string bass player Carl Hildebrandt tells me established
beforehand. Plump, boyish-faced George Be- retain a v
dard fingerpicks the lead giutar, while Steve fession tha
chords another. The drummer, Tom McDer- nowhere f
mott, hides back in the corner. for the Bl
In a clear, carrying voice, the big-framed counts Stev
George begins to belt out his specialty-a most recen
mixture of blues and rock music called rock- another mi
abilly. He smiles easily in a country boy man- a band cal

eating out swing n' blues

omplements his denim shirt, pants,
tie with clasp outfit. Standing next
other lead, Steve, crouches close
as he sings. Every word is chewed
spit out with a serious grimace, as
lyrics were too hot to keep in his
ve's voice is dustier, rustier than
like those of the singers he most
all kinds of blues," says Steve. "I'm
y Waters and stuff like that. I'm
group blues like the Dominoes, jump

up, I hung out for a while, got into my guitar
and then started a band called the Vipers.
That lasted a year after which the bass and
drums split to go out east. That was when me
and George got together with Tom and Carl
and started the Silvertones."
HE'S GONE THROUGH three bands in six
years but Steve seems to take transitions
as a matter of course. "Music's the only thing
I can do," he says shrugging his shoulders.
"Wien one band breaks up the only thing left
hr Iue is to go out and start another."

mostly the urban style blues that came about
when the black folks moved north and got
into electric instruments." Despite the clear,
high vocals and stepped up beat, the ancient
blues' lyrics remain an integral part of their
tunes: "Well I tried to please her, but it only
made her mad. She just turned on my money
and, everything I had. Oh it's a no good
de . . . al, when your baby don't love you no
more," croons George in his silver-tongued
tones.
SEATED WITH RAPT attention on the hard
wooden benches, the audience beats out
the rythms, rapping, tapping, slapping a hand
against a hip. How did the band become fa-
miliar and popular? Steve had mulled over
the question earlier. "It was just by sheer de-
termination. We stuck it out and we starved
here for two or three years. But you know, all
the while we were playing, getting better. We
played the free concerts, we played every-
where in town. But Flood's was the first place
(for a real job). Flood's and the Ark."
Now that Silvertones is booked a month
and a half in advance and the musicians have
time to contemplate more than the next day's
bread, their thoughts have turned towards the
long term future. But where do you go once
you've toured all the local bars 12 times
around?
The minstrels of old, merly slung their packs
over their backs and took to the road. For a
modern day musician it's not that easy.
"I really dig living here," remarks Steve,
"because you're always in contact with crea-
tive people. Still there comes a time when you
have to think financially of where you're go-
ing. I'm not getting any younger, pushing 30,
and I have to think someday about getting my
shit together more than this, have to go to a
bigger place, a bigger town."
"I'd love to get a record cut," he adds wist-
fully. "But I can't see anybody that would
want us, not because of our talent, but because
of our commercial potential."
"Not that we don't have commercial poten-
tial," he adds quickly. "I think we do. But the
whole music industry is so corrupt, so tied up
by a few people, that unless you're a complete
puppet, you can't do anything."
The band members seem to agree that al-
though Ann Arbor's bars demand enough live
music to put food in the mouths of those aspir-
ing young musicians who possess some degree
of talent, the music "scene" is not that big.
Nevertheless, if the Silvertones do leave Ann
Arbor, "and you could call it more of an
aspiration than a plan," confides Carl, they'll
probably leave together. To go where?
"Maybe we'll go east, maybe we'll go west,
maybe we'll go south," he answers, with a
grin. "We don't like to commit ourselves."

Tom, Steve, George and Carl

Ralph

Watchinthewo
through stained glass
By SUSAN ADES
PIECES OF A STAINED glass figure lie on a monk's work-
bench as he stabs with a poker at the coals in the belly
of a seething furnace. Methodically, again and again, he ex-
tracts his glowing tool from the fire and with it fastens the
lead-rimmed puzzle pieces together. With the last fusion of
joints, he wipes his own sweat from the brow of his creation
and holds the work up for the first time - light strikes glass,
colors explode and a Saint is born.
Commissioned by no one but the Church, for nowhere save
ornately-spired, cooly mystifying cathedrals, the medieval
monk could imagine no other context for his work. Stained
glass had only one purpose. And for centuries, the Church and
commissioned craftsmen worked intimately together to trans-
late the Bible into living color, splashed on churches the world
around.
But Ralph Stevenson, is not a monk; in fact he's a refugee
from the "system". A contemporary artist who dabbles in
stained glass, he has never executed a cathedral window and
is free to unleash his secular imagination on the medium.
Something has changed inthe stained glass discipline over the
centuries. The art has been delivered to the people.
Soldering iron in one, hand, coil of solder in the other, Ralph
bends over a five-piece rainbow-colored butterfly that he'll
eventually peddle at the Farmer's Market. "I come from a
strictl' working-class, hunky background so for a change I'm
looking for entrepreneurship," he says.
AN APPRENTICE to the trade, Ralph steps inside the work-
shop in his Maple Street apartment. Behind him he drags
a box full of finished products, from which he pulls, like a rab-
bit from a hat, a small stained glass treasure box. "They're
my best sellers," he says with a nod.
See FROM BEHIND, Page 9
1--~~ ~~(1

h contain more of the big band in-
d I'm into early rock and roll be-
s blues with clearer lyrics."
the word musician conjures up
footloose vagabonds, many small
s stay put in one town once they've
a good local reputation. Still they
agabond air having chosen a pro-
at leads from certain nowhere to
or certain. "I came to Ann Arbor
ues and Jazz festival in 1970," re-
ve, embarking on a chronicle of his
t adventures. "We, that is me and
usician, gigged around then started
led the Boogie Brothers. That broke

The Silvertones spend little time expounding
on their musical philosophies but they do have
a few goals in common. "We just want to
make it hot," says Carl. Hot music, hot for
the audience so that they will sit up, take
notice and respond.
But it isn't until the band is a few chords
into the first song that I begin to understand
just what the Silvertones' "hot" music is and
what it is not. It is not the moaning, groaning,
wallow-in-the-mud-blues that the Pig is famous
for. It keeps a quick, slick beat. It rocks.
"Everybody has some idea of an old black
guy sitting out there with a guitar playing the
blues,". says Carl. "But the blues we play is

T[he Artist the English Dept.

By JEFFREY SELBST
"J'VEi GOTTA SAY the Hopwood contest
brought me to Michigan, for one thing;
another thing was just simple luck," Jim
Paul, Hopwood winner and published poet,
as well as English teaching fellow, re-
flects. "As for the writing program here,
it hasn't been that consistent with my ex-
pectations."
The University's writing programs have
been praised and pilloried, but one thing
is sure-it has produced many famous and
fine writers. Philip Roth once attended
school here, as have X. J. Kennedy and
Arthur Miller. But Michigan's graduate
programs seem to be designed to produce
critical scholars and not writers, or so
Paul thinks.
He sees himself as a bit of an anarchist
in the English department, making stu-
dents try to think, as well as disciplining
them to the rigors of writing. Students in
his classes have been asked to turn out
two poems a week.
He studied under John Barth at the
State University of New York at Buffalo,
and found the class intimidating.
" DON'T KNOW that . . . senior faculty
(like Barth) are the best kind of people
in inspire young writers," he says, ser-
iouslv. "We were all just terrified, intimi-
dated out of our minds.''
But. he thinks, most beginners have an

mantac and faraway, and this is one of
the problems that he, as a teacher, must
surmount. "If you're talking from your-
self, you're going to be talking with your
most powerful voice. With a teacher like
Barth, he enforces that faraway ideal
upon you, so you feel that you're never
really getting down to things."
That, of course, could be solved by in-
stituting a program of Master of Fine
Arts at Michigan, forming a community
of grad students in writing who could
work with undergraduates who are excited
with the prospect of putting words artis-
tically to paper,and yet not Working under
an author whose aura of fame precedes
him or her down the block,
To Paul, poetry is a broadening kind of
exercise. He is currently working on a
doctorate in English, yet finds that it
occupies but a small part of his horizon,
in terms of intellectual and emotional
thought. "My thesis is here," he says,
gesturing with his hands to indicate a
narrow middle section of the air in front
of his face, then he breaks into a grin.
"But all these poems are happening out
here." le indicates the rest of infinity.
It can be very discouraging, to send
one's pieces around from magazine to
ma gazine, until one of them finally hits.
The New Yorker, the prestigious maga-

crack. Yet Paul will have some poems
published there in September.
HIS POEMS ARE not written to order,
though he kind of "misses the days
when poets could attach themselves to
estates and write occasional odes to birth-
days and stuff like that."
"That poem that the New Yorker took is
a poem on the equinox-the autumnal
equinox-listening to the thunder, con-
ceiving of the thunder as some kind of
great wheel rolling across the sky which
has some relation in a kind of wierd hear,
a kind of clock work arrangement-which
of course it did. I was thinking, kind of
spinning a fantasy out of it that it sounds
like a great big wheel rolling in a groove
across the sky, and then I said, that's a
neat metaphor, and b a n g, suddenly it
wasn't a metaphor, because of course
it is a machinery in a physical sense.
That's the way things take off for me.
I'll spin something, and just sort of send
a taproot down."
A poet rarely explains how he puts a
poem together. In an essay, written for
rare public consumption, Edgar Allan
Poe showed step-by-step his construction
of The Raven. In his classes, Jim Paul
could likely do the same. It takes a com-
bination of hard work, language facility,
and drive to write. It takes a certain
spark to write well.

Photography
by

Steve

Kagan

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