BABETTE

Photo credit: Eric Smiley. Note RR signal lantern on left from Babette’s collection.

This November I was honored to be hosted by the Queer Resource Center at Portland Community College to give a quest lecture on Babette and her life. This was the most appropriate setting for such a talk so far, as my professor taught at PCC for over forty years and fiercely considered this career dedication as her true life accomplishment.

As visual aides, I brought a box of railroad spikes that Babette collected during her travels from every corner of the works, all carefully lacquered and labeled with location and dates, besides maps, the painting of her grand chateau in southern France and a slideshow. With this accompaniment, I documented her unique life from its mysterious origins in Yakima to youth in Europe and later adventures worldwide.

My audience mostly consisted of PCC writing students, whose professors brought their whole classes, as well as several others who either worked with Dr. Ellsworth over the decades or were influenced by her teaching. After my lecture was completed and I finished fielding questions, many of these old acquaintances came up to me and told me their stories, some funny, some tragic, but always emotional. Several of these individuals had seen a newspaper ad I took out promoting the event and were overjoyed to finally hear more about a beloved educator from their past. I was also humbled to hear from young queer students who found inspiration with Babette and her story. It’s those kind of reactions that make all the hard work it took bringing my book to life worthwhile.

One October day in 1956, the grand house on Tolman street that I would later share with Babette, played host to a TV star. “Howdy Doody”, the first major American television program aimed at children, featured a mute clown named Clarabell, whose voiceless antics delighted viewers until the show went off air in 1960. Clarabell was played by a succession of actors in studio, but for live performances, a man named Edwin Alberian often donned the trademark suit, wig and greasepaint. For the TV show itself, he portrayed a comic character named Professor Gusbags.

Ed Alberian was an old Moravian college friend of Billie Shoemaker, later to become Babette’s second wife. When he came to visit Portland, Alberian brought his clowning gear and put on a show for the neighborhood children in Eastmooreland, by Reed College. In this photograph, he can be seen with Sallie, Billie’s daughter.

My website is not ordinarily used for record reviews, but after paying over $100 dollars for an album, I’d better have an opinion about it, and yes, this does involve Babette. First of all, this isn’t just a record. It’s a sensory explosion influenced by the bloody conflict surrounding Rhodesia’s 1964-79 transformation from white minority rule into what became the black majority controlled nation of Zimbabwe. A PASSAGE TO RHODESIA arrived in the mail with two CDs, a DVD, a hardback coffee table style book with pictures and lyrics, a 10” picture disc with two non-album tracks, two double sided posters, three reproduction vintage postcards plus one sticker and a unique metal medallion emblazoned with the seal of Rhodesia. The only missing thematic element might be scratch-and-sniffs that reek like AK-47 gun oil or a pack of mangy hyenas.

Barraged by all this paraphernalia, listening to the music almost seems like an afterthought. Because Jerome Reuter, the highly prolific musician behind ROME, has gone through many shifts since the first release in 2006, I wasn’t sure what to expect, from deathfolk electronics in earlier works to the more acoustic direction later, or even his discordant, personally angst ridden turn on the last full length release, HELL MONEY in 2012.

The first track, “Electrocuting an Elephant” provides several minutes of dark ambient atmosphere. No real variation there, as ROME albums usually open using similar material, often accompanied by sampled vocals to set a mood. What surprised me immediately afterward, however, was “Ballad of the Red Flame Lilly,” a rhythm heavy song that is probably the best dancefloor selection since “A Legacy of Unrest” off 2009’s FLOWERS FROM EXILE. High praise. Next up is “One Fire”, an even more brilliant stompy track, but afterward the discotheque closes down. The remaining songs are more sparse, similar in style to ROME’s first installment of DIE ÆSTHETIK DER HERRSCHAFTSFREIHEIT (A CROSS OF WHEAT) the triple album from 2012. With minimal acoustic hooks and tinkling piano keys, the later songs on RHODESIA hang together, memorializing the trauma of an unbalanced social order disintegrating.

One of Jerome Reuter’s greatest talents is combining insightful lyrics alongside sometimes awkward rhymes, but woven amidst melodies that make the listener turn away cynical ears. Consider, for instance, these lines from “A Country Denied”: This is no time for amnesia / And what glue could hold us together now / If not the soil of Rhodesia? It barely works on paper, but by the time Reuter sings: Now we’re sleeping in circles / On the stones of Silverstream / Under nectar-weeping trees / Through blood-curdling screams, I’m bound hand and feet under the spell of his guitar and deep, Luxembourg-accented voice.

Despite being focused around a particular historical event, as so many ROME albums are, A PASSAGE TO RHODESIA is quite non-specific lyrically. As my roommate Däv Oh, a fan of the band, pointed out following his first listen. “It’s kinda just, blah, blah, blah, Rhodesia…et cetera.” That’s a fair criticism. Besides various words that could be associated with Africa in general, such as mentioning leopards, crocodiles and jungles, the only difference between ROME songs about the Rhodesian Bush War and those off five previous albums inspired by the Spanish Civil War, is that here the word “Rhodesia” appears quite often. It is sometimes metaphoric, but never in ways that would preclude a real change in meaning had “Catalonia” been substituted and the song added to NOS CHANTS PERDUS from 2010.

But, here’s the difference. NOS CHANTS PERDUS is only one of five albums about the Spanish Civil War and almost nowhere among them occurs any specific mention tying songs to the actual conflict. The sole exception is A CROSS OF FLOWERS, from the final series of DIE ÆSTHETIK DER HERRSCHAFTSFREIHEIT, which contains: ich verblute in Spaniens Sand (I bleed in Spanish sand) but only stacked between twelve other lines mentioning geographic regions outside of Spain.

What Jerome Reuter succeeds at is glorious ambiguity within a masculine shaped universe. His songs speak to the tragedy of men at war– they question their cause, wish only for a quiet night of sleep, yet keep trudging, bloodshot eyes fixed ever forward. One could easily imagine old veterans from all sides of the Spanish and Rhodesian wars shedding tears at such poetry as: And we walk in stray shafts of light / To the pyre glade / The plea is still in your eyes / What a fine father you would have made, from “The Pyre Glade” off A CROSS OF WHEAT, just as much as: But we were fighting on the wrong side of a loosing war / And time has made orphans of us all / Has made cripples of us all, from “A Lullaby for Georgie” off A PASSAGE TO RHODESIA. The music on this record simply conveys raw nostalgia and regret. Reuter doesn’t want to pick sides and moralize. The closest he comes is through a photograph reproduced in the lyric book. It shows a white soldier’s arm tattoo with a cheerful cartoon elephant and the text: “RHODESIA is super.” One of the included posters slyly reworks it, now reading: “To some, RHODESIA was super.”

This sentiment reminds me of Babette’s perceptions, as someone who fondly remembered WWII-era Europe being the best time of her life. Indeed, much like Rhodesia’s past can be selectively recalled by European-Africans, my professor looked back on her youth in Vichy France as a grand time for idealistic individuals from around the world to join forces against the British Empire and Stalinism. Yet even Babette could sympathize with other sides in these conflicts, as her later associations with East German communists indicated. I suspect she might have appreciated A PASSAGE TO RHODESIA. In all these swirls of gray, sometimes the only thing that rings true is the timbre of Jerome Reuter’s guitar.

One of Babette’s favorite themes in her classes was the First World War. She often bemoaned how otherwise educated Americans possessed very little knowledge about the conflict and was pleased that when I substitute taught one of her classes, I used the opportunity to lecture on it. Recently, the 100 year anniversary of WWI’s beginning has brought renewed attention to this hugely consequential clash of nations.

A favorite section of Babette’s library was devoted to a gigantic eight volume series titled “Le Panorama de la Guerre.” She described how it was originally published in magazine sized serials that could be bought weekly, and then bound up in book form for free to subscribers who acquired the whole set. “Of course, in 1914, no one imagined it would fill so many volumes!” she laughed.

One of these subscribers was Babette’s French aunt, who collected them all throughout the war and eventually gave the set to her husband, an officer who spent most of the war as a German prisoner. In fact, my professor recounted that her aunt claimed the poor man died in bed while reading it. Looking at the inscription from 1918 inside the first book’s cover, it’s interesting to note that Babette’s adopted mother, Germaine Bonnefont, also signed it.

The books remain an important testament to a war that even a century later, reverberates modern times, as borders drawn by imperialist victors through the Middle East disintegrate and tumult rocks Eastern Europe. Below I’ve reproduced some of the most fascinating illustrations.

Babette’s French uncle in Ingolstadt POW camp during WWI.

Serbian women drill with rifles in self defense batallions

A caricature of the German Kaiser Wilhem II

German soldiers advancing through Belgium are depicted abusing civilians, even kicking a dog!

The French augmented their troops with forced conscription throughout North Africa and Algeria in particular

An idealized battle scene

A few weeks ago I got an e/mail from Emily Jaceks, the host of a central Washington television show called “Good Morning Northwest.” She invited me to come on air as a guest and be interviewed about my book. This seemed like a logical next step in promoting Babette as my professor loved the east side of both Oregon and Washington. We picked May 16th as the date and I made arrangements for a lecture later that same day at a bookstore called “Adventures Underground” in Richland.

I didn’t know what to expect, never having been on TV before. I drove down to the studio and was admitted by a harried looking technician. He ushered me into a waiting room with a huge flat screen against the wall. It was filled with commercials, then abruptly Emily Jaceks appeared to narrate a news story. Afterward she introduced the weatherman for a brief segment, followed by more commercials. Almost immediately the weatherman appeared in the doorway, hand outstretched in greeting. He offered advice to help me relax and suggested I sit down. Did I really look that tense? I probably did.

Before long I was escorted down a hallway to the studio. Emily Jaceks stood in front of a blue screen while I was positioned behind a desk with bookshelves as a backdrop. Before long she came over and began the interview. I don’t remember much of what I said, except at one point declaring: “I hope people get out of my book that, at the end of the day, people are still just people.” Awesome. Turn a camera on me and I start quoting Depeche Mode songs.

However, it seemed to go well. Afterward I gave Emily a copy of my book and one of the cameramen snapped a photo of us. Here’s a link to the interview

Later that afternoon I drove down to Adventures Underground, where not only had they put up posters promoting the event, but sidewalk chalk even! I can’t say enough good things about that place. It’s a book/record/comics/gamer/event space with an awesome staff and super personable owners. Check them out if you’re in the tri-cities! I’d write more about the rest of the trip but it involved a burned out clutch, tow truck, closed repair shops and unexpected delays. Let me just say, the tri-cities are a lot more fun if your vehicle doesn’t self destruct.