Sam For President
thoughts on art, politics, shadow puppets, and joy
“Sam for president!” someone shouted out between songs last Friday night at the Anthem concert hall on the Wharf in Washington D.C. It was fitting given the season (a Presidential election year) and the place (our nation’s capital). It made the singer-songwriter known as Iron and Wine laugh. It made me and my husband laugh, and it felt good to laugh.
I’ve known my husband Jonathan since I was not-quite-fourteen. When I was around seventeen, we started going to concerts together, mostly in and around Houston, where we saw bands like REM and Radiohead and others whose names even I can’t remember. We haven’t been dedicated concert-goers in our almost twenty-eight years of marriage, but we’ve enjoyed many of the smaller kinds of shows we like best. We still talk about shows by Elvis Costello and Bon Iver and how we sang along with The Decemberists on the University of Chicago campus the night before the nation voted Barack Obama (a University of Chicago professor and our neighbor a few blocks over) into the presidency.
Music and politics: these things were on my mind Friday night as I listened to good songs accompanied by viola and upright bass. The music rose against a visual backdrop of intricate shadow puppetry created live by a performance collective called Manual Cinema.
If you are thinking of children’s puppet shows, think again, and imagine intricate papercuts, three projectors used simultaneously, and live choreography timed perfectly to the music. Even when the songs seemed sad or angry or complicated, even when the shadow-puppet wolf caught the shadow-puppet rabbit, we smiled because playful creativity almost can’t help but spark joy.
Was the audience member serious when he shouted “Sam for president”? Not in a literal sense, no. That’s why everyone laughed, even Sam Beam. But in another sense, I think he probably was quite serious, and I felt the longing that shadowed the joke.
We may not be serious about a singer-songwriter for president, but while I listened I began to wish that some part of what we were experiencing in that concert hall could infuse our political process. Why can’t politics inspire joy? Why can’t government be a realm of creativity and imagination? When we cry out for a musician we love with a political slogan, maybe we’re crying out for less doom and gloom and division and more shared delight.
Some of the songs were sad. More than a few were very serious. Hard realities and serious matters deserve the full attention of our whole selves. This means, I think, that we can’t face them without creativity, without imagination, and without some space for joy.
Is there no room for beauty in government? Maybe there should be.
Maybe there is.
Iron and Wine has been writing and releasing songs for twenty years, but his familiar hit “Autumn Town Leaves” makes me long for fall.
Light Verse is Iron and Wine’s latest release, but isn’t Weed Garden a great title? I might write about my own weedy garden soon. And if you want to read more from me about the wonderful, fruitful line between wild and cultivated you might like to check out my essay “The Art of Wildness” in my latest book Seedtime and Harvest.
And have you pre-ordered my new book? It’s out this October!