Larry Womack: Scenes From a Class Struggle Starring Marianne Faithfull

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I love Marianne Faithfull with a truly irrational passion, but had decided to skip this show. It is southwest of San Jose, in a suburb of a suburb known as Saratoga. In the past, I have flirted with ideas of attending Lucinda Williams and Leonard Cohen shows in the same town, but each time concluded that the journey was just too long. Faithfull plays San Francisco or Oakland most every year. Is one more show really worth the bother?

Then a friend alerted me to the availability of comp tickets. Ticket cost hadn't even been a factor in my decision not to go, but (as anyone who has ever worked in media can tell you,) the psychology of the free ticket is strange, nuanced, mysterious and powerful. Suddenly, I'm in.

The drive to the venue is a peculiar and almost singular experience. We pass through a residential neighborhood that screams of conspicuous -- but for the most part tasteful -- consumption. Mansions are packed together, as if trying to elbow one another out. It crosses my mind that some parts of Saratoga (current median sale price $1,586,750) make Brentwood ($1,677,500) and the Beverly Hills ($1,355,000) look like dumps. Still, most of the people in these houses probably wish they lived in Los Altos, where people no doubt dream of living in Atherton or Ross. There are signs indicating that a free shuttle stops at the end of a couple of the drives to deliver occupants to the venue. This makes me assume that parking at said venue is more limited than I will later discover. There is no parking near these stops for out-of-towners. We park at the local community college, where a shuttle is waiting to deliver us to the show, which is taking place on a hill far overlooking these mansions, mini-mansions and other forms of domestic immodesty.

Unaware of the shuttle situation until it is too late, we arrive after the show has started. She has just finished a performance of Cohen's Tower of Song. I kick myself for having missed it. If only I had been aware of this shuttle situation a few hours earlier...

The venue is gorgeous, but only filled to around 40 percent capacity. This is very different from The Fillmore or Yoshi's, where she sells out and often does multiple nights. But, then, you can only fit so many homes of a certain size directly under any venue. From the seats, it doesn't take long to gather what Faithfull, from the stage, cannot: that the crowd is composed almost entirely of season ticket holders. A Faithfull audience is usually significantly more mixed: young, old, goth, bougie, punk and chic. This crowd is much more homogenous. It is a bit like a very high-end concert in the park. Only, instead of a local Journey cover band, we have Edina Monsoon's God. Most live within earshot of the venue and just popped out for a few drinks and a little music in the evening sun. They are Berkeley hippies turned San Jose networking gurus, with their second wives and teen children in tow. Many come in not-quite Hawaiian shirts, khaki shorts and Sephora sunscreen. A few have beach towels that suggest not that they intended to picnic but that they just emerged from the pool. Some of the more adventurous attendees are probably thinking about smoking a little pot when they get home, but would never dream of doing it here.

Faithfull finishes the lead single from her most recent album and proceeds to address the audience. If you've ever seen her live, you know that the opening numbers are not her friend. She seems nervous and a bit stiff through the first two or three songs of a show. At that point, you can almost see her think, Yeah, I can do this, as she eases into a more confident groove. She has now calmed, but rather than reassured, she seems... baffled. Who are these people and what are they doing at my show?

She cracks jokes and smokes a cigarette. For obvious reasons, I am reminded of Marianne Faithfull's Cigarette, by Gerry Gomez Pearlberg. I am also reminded of a tale someone once told me about a shopboy who unwisely confronted her for lighting up near the Gucci. I can't figure out if tonight she is the shopboy or the Gucci. I suppose she's really herself. The crowd is responding well to her casual banter, and she knows it. There will be more--much more--of it to come. She announces that she isn't promoting an album so she can do, "whatever the fuck," she wants. She intends to do a lot of covers and a few obscure tracks.

She cradles us into She, a song she wrote with Angelo Badalamenti. It's lovely. It suits the venue perfectly. Her performance is flawless. The audience borders on intrigued.

Then, she tells them all about her post-pop-starlet days living as a junkie on the remaining half of a bombed-out wall in London, "shooting smack." A wave of Is she serious? washes over the crowd. Yes. Yes she is.

During that post-Stones, pre-Broken English time, Faithfull recorded an album that she's never been particularly fond of, given its associations. She intends to perform a song from it. I hope for Lady Madelaine or Dreaming My Dreams. No. She sings Rich Kid Blues. Rich Kid Blues.

Well. That was awkward. A woman sitting near me -- and there aren't many of those -- looks personally offended.

Sister Morphine, a song she wrote with Mick Jagger, somehow comes up. They know it, as any audience of a certain age would, from the Rolling Stones version (which was released after her version was pulled, because only boys were allowed to sing about drugs). She does not intend to perform it. In fact, "I spit at the very mention," she says--and does.

She then explains, with a heavy seasoning of black comedy, that the next song is about the victims of Sweden's forced sterilization program, which continued 30 years after the Nazis taught us that such aspirations were perhaps not particularly noble. In the '90s she read a piece about them in the New York Herald Tribune. The list of target "undesirables" included addicts, the promiscuous and those who displayed "vagabond ways." I can't help but get the impression that the woman slightly to my right in the row in front of me thinks this isn't such a bad idea. Faithfull's irreverent set-up might excuse some uncomfortable giggles when the song opens with, "Oh, doctor please / Oh, doctor please / I drink and I take drugs / I love sex and I move around a lot." Which is, by the way, the greatest album opening since, "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine."

Luckily, the pianist screws up. Badly. She excoriates, he sweats bullets, and they start again from the top of the second verse. The fog lifts, a bit. The audience knows that it's okay to laugh when something like this happens, so they do.

Her next song is the reason they're here, though they don't know it until it begins. As Tears Go By, perhaps the first Jagger-Richards composition, was written for her in 1964. (Its status as their very first seems to be disputed by the Wiki Gods, but is by now pop canon.)

Aha! Now, they know her.

She name-drops Nick Cave, who co-wrote the next song. They do not know him. I am filled with righteous indignation.

She momentarily forgets the name of the album the forthcoming song is from. It is 2004's Before the Poison, undoubtedly my favorite Faithfull disc. For some reason, I am reminded of how much I love its cover art, which calls to mind the fantastic tracks "No Child of Mine" and "Last Song."

She might have done better to explain that this song, Crazy Love was inspired by Les enfants du paradis. Probably not, though. I remind myself that I must upgrade my copy to Blu Ray. The crowd doesn't give the song the reception it deserves, but seems to like it well enough.

A lightheartedly bitter John Prine song gets the audience once again on her side. Of course, this cannot last.

She announces that she will be performing a Randy Newman song (Newman will be performing at the same venue in a few weeks). Political Science probably would have gone over like free weed, but she's going with In Germany Before the War. The song presents the crimes of Peter Kürten, Vampire of Düsseldorf (or, rather, his fictionalized portrayal in Fritz Lang's M, which I also remind myself to upgrade,) as a prologue to the rise of the Nazis. "I'm looking at the river," it explains, "but I'm thinking of the sea." It is a beautiful, chilling and brilliant song. It often crosses my mind when I read the news.

You can probably guess how that goes over. People are wandering out. The man in front of me is checking his email.

Things are about to get a whole lot more surreal. Her cover of John Lennon's Working Class Hero, ironically enough, gets the evening's best response. Everybody in this crowd knows it, of course. The major theme of the song has always struck me as being the trauma the artist endures throughout life, but it is rather difficult to shake the class themes in this situation. You would think a bit like, "You think you're so clever and classless and free / But we're all fucking peasants as far as I can see," might hit a little too close to home, but they cheer it. The crowd rocks (relatively) out as she continues, "There is room at the top they are telling you still / But first you must learn how to smile as you kill / If you want to live like the folks on the hill." We are literally sitting on a hill above that hill, with the folks who live on it.

She jokes before the next song that she has forgotten where she lives. "Oh, that's right," she quips, "I live in Paris." I wonder if this means she's figured the crowd out when it is revealed to be The Ballad of Lucy Jordan. It opens, "In white suburban bedroom, in a white suburban town," where a woman is going mad because, "At the age of 37 / She realized she'd never ride / Through Paris in a sports car / With the warm wind in her hair."

Only then do I realize how very, very few non-white people are in the audience, and that they all appear to be in the few, scattered groups of young people from out of town.

She closes the set with "Strange Weather", a song about the awkward distance between humans that may well describe the evening. She leaves the stage to applause that is enthusiastic, in a what-the-hell sorta way.

There is an encore. "Well, that was odd," she laughs as she re-emerges. "But I enjoyed it. I really did." Having not ridden up with the crowd, she still can't figure out what these people are doing here. "Oh, I know," she speculates. "I did that festival." She is referring to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, where a few years prior she dropped the astonishingly NSFW Why'd Ya Do It on a completely unsuspecting audience, savoring each profanity as she did. It was amazing. I wish she'd do that again, right now.

Instead, she closes with Boulevard of Broken Dreams. It's lovely. The remaining audience seems to enjoy it, but has mostly checked out.

The shuttle that takes us back to the parking lot is one of those limo hybrids, with a curvy couch for seating, napkins tucked in wine glasses and champagne flutes for more than it could possibly seat, and bottles of water sporting the company's logo suspended in deep wells of fresh ice. It's tacky, in that it has an uncomfortably Vegas feel, but I cannot deny that it's also exceedingly comfortable and infinitely better than the itself rather nice mini-bus that took us up. Facing the long ride home, I find myself wishing it stopped at the end of my drive.

Someone on the shuttle wonders aloud what Faithfull's net worth is. A satirical article is pulled up that reports Faithfull has Madonna-like "endorsement deals with CoverGirl cosmetics... the 'Fat Faithfull Burger' chain... a Football Team... her own brand of Vodka (Pure Wonderfaithfull - UK), and is tackling the juniors market with a top-selling perfume (With Love from Marianne) and a fashion line called 'Marianne Faithfull Seduction'." Everyone agrees it isn't true, but in this setting, no one gets the joke.

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Nikolas Kozloff: Snowden Affair Highlights Epic David and Goliath Struggle Between Quito and Washington

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If there was any doubt that Ecuador's pugnacious President Rafael Correa would back down in the rapidly escalating diplomatic spat over NSA leaker Edward Snowden, recent events will certainly put such notions to rest. Thumbing his nose once again at the Obama administration, Correa has just announced that his government will unilaterally give up special U.S. trade preferences under the so-called Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act or ATPA. Originally, the measure was designed to counteract drug-trafficking by providing export opportunities to poor Andean nations. Under the act, Ecuador exports billions in tax free goods every year to the U.S. including tropical fruits, flowers and petroleum.

After Correa audaciously offered to provide diplomatic asylum to Snowden, the mainstream media, legislators from both sides of the aisle as well as conservative think tanks called for Ecuador to be punished for its impudence and cut off from the ATPA. Correa, however, says Ecuador will not submit to such "blackmail" and threats. Hardly intimidated by the Beltway establishment, defiant Correa has announced for good measure that he will send the U.S. millions of dollars for use in human rights training. Taunting Washington, Ecuador's Minister of Communications declared that the money could be used to avoid "espionage, torture, extrajudicial killings and other acts that denigrate humanity."

For Ecuador, the Snowden affair has all the elements of an epic David and Goliath story pitting the Colossus of the North against a small and impoverished South American nation. While it's unclear how the Snowden imbroglio will play out in Ecuador itself, many will surely rally to Correa's defense. For decades, Ecuador has smarted under Washington's influence and ongoing CIA intervention [for a further accounting of such history, see my earlier article here]. As a result, fiery populism plays well here.

Nationalist Backlash Against the U.S.?

Furthermore, Ecuadorans have little regard for "neo-liberal" style economic austerity which exacted a heavy social toll on the country and contributed to chronic political instability. Indeed, it was precisely such political instability which propelled leftist Correa to power in 2006. Since that time, the maverick politician has challenged Washington in the military, diplomatic and economic spheres, and now seems poised to inherit the South American populist mantle from recently deceased Hugo Chávez.

To be sure, Correa hardly ingratiated himself with Washington when he harbored WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a man who has spent more than a year holed up at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London. However, unlike Snowden, Assange is not a U.S. national and has never been formally charged by the Department of Justice. By offering to shelter Snowden, Correa has signaled that he is willing to take an economic hit over ATPA and the President also risks further opposition from his country's powerful export elite. Just how did we get to this point?

U.S. Business Lobby vs. Correa

Correa's recent moves cap an action-packed year of diplomatic friction. Indeed, as early as last August I wrote that U.S. business groups had lobbied the Obama administration to cut off trade benefits to Ecuador. The indignant companies had been spurred to action after Correa tried to hold Chevron responsible for its oil damage in the Ecuadoran Amazon. However, Quito's harboring of Assange probably added ammunition to ongoing lobbying efforts. Eric Farnsworth, Vice President of the Council of Americas, a group representing U.S. companies doing business throughout the hemisphere, told Reuters that Correa's harboring of Assange was not "a move destined to win many new friends in Washington." Moreover, the President of the National Foreign Trade Council brazenly remarked that the Assange imbroglio "would provide the excuse (to suspend benefits) if the administration is looking for one to do it."

In Washington, the Ecuadoran Ambassador grew puzzled by the business lobbying. "Ecuador is the only country in the Andean region with zero coca cultivation," he said. While the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Foreign Trade Council and the Business Roundtable alleged that Ecuador had violated investor rights, there was no specific explanation for cutting off trade preferences. Ecuador, the Ambassador argued, had observed proper protocol in regard to all its pending investor disputes.

Back in Quito meanwhile, the Ecuadoran business sector was also growing jittery. A full 350,000 jobs depended on ATPA, including the flower industry, broccoli, tuna and other sectors. Fearful lest Ecuador lose its special trading privileges, businessmen alerted Correa to the risks of harboring Assange. Correa, however, was hardly impressed and remarked that if he were reelected in the upcoming presidential election he would never knuckle under to economic blackmail. "Let them have their ATPA," the feisty President declared, "and we'll give them a few million dollars for a course on ethics and human rights."

Emboldened Correa

In February of this year, Correa got his wish and cruised to electoral victory. Feeling emboldened by his new mandate, the President said that ATPA had turned into a "vulgar foreign policy instrument: if you behave well, we continue the agreement; if you behave badly, we take away the privileges. We can't continue to live like this." Preparing his countrymen for a possible cutoff, Correa remarked that regardless of ATPA Ecuador would continue to export its goods to the U.S.

The economic impact of an ATPA cutoff, Correa has argued, would be minimal and amount to less than $24 million in losses. What is more, Correa adds, the government is prepared to provide economic support to vulnerable industries such as fresh roses, canned tuna and broccoli. Not everyone, however, is reassured by the President's words. Indeed, the President of Ecuador's Agricultural Chamber told the Associated Press that loss of preferential trading provisions would exert a heavy toll. The flower industry, he said, "constitutes an escape valve from social pressure, unemployment and under-employment."

Beltway Backlash

Fast forward to the Snowden scandal, and it was not long before the Beltway establishment began to threaten Ecuador with retaliation. Take for example hawkish Florida Republican Senator Ileana Ros-Lehtinen who declared that Correa's conduct would not stand. Democrats, however, have proven equally bullish. Sandy Levin, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, said that if Correa offered asylum to Snowden there "would be no basis" for renewing trade preferences. Another Democrat, Senator Bob Menéndez of New Jersey, chimed in for good measure, declaring that Washington was ready to punish Ecuador if Correa chose to snub the colossus of the north. Joining in the fray, conservative Heritage foundation has also been leading the charge against Quito.

The Snowden affair has also generated a heated debate in the media, and predictably enough Fox News has weighed in against Correa. The Washington Post, too, has gone on the war path, remarking "when it comes to anti-American chutzpah, there's no beating Rafael Correa, the autocratic leader of tiny, impoverished Ecuador." Mincing no words, the Post adds, "as it happens, the preferences will expire next month unless renewed by Congress. If Mr. Correa welcomes Mr. Snowden, there will be an easy way to demonstrate that Yanqui-baiting has its price." It turns out the Post has long been on Correa's case: a year ago, the paper issued an almost identical threat when Correa was considering its asylum request for Julian Assange. Commenting on the Post's relentless Ecuador bashing, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting muses, "it's good that someone at the Post's editorial page knows how to copy and paste."

Hardly amused by the Post's ongoing campaign, Correa has taken to Twitter no less in an effort to counteract the mainstream media. Tweeting to his million followers, Correa said the media had put up a smokescreen and was doing its utmost to distract the public from Snowden's main disclosures. In Quito, members of Correa's own Aliaza País party have backed up the President while echoing his nationalist rhetoric. The political opposition, meanwhile, argues that Correa is hypocritical for offering asylum to Snowden while simultaneously cracking down on free expression at home.

Correa's Gamble

Having opened a veritable Pandora's box of trouble, can Correa thrive and ride a nationalist wave of indignation, or will he be brought down by domestic and international forces? Perhaps, Correa reasons that Ecuador had little chance of having its ATPA status renewed, and so Ecuador risked little by beating Washington to the punch. Nevertheless, Correa has galvanized the American establishment against him yet further, not to mention Ecuador's export elite.

The Guardian of London suggests that Correa is also putting great strains on his own political coalition, with some leftists embracing Snowden and other centrists fearing economic and diplomatic fallout. "Some in the government," the paper writes, "are believed to be annoyed that Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who has sheltered at Ecuador's London embassy to avoid extradition, has seized the limelight in the Snowden saga." According to the paper, Assange caught Quito by surprise when he recently announced that Ecuador had provided Snowden with a safe-conduct pass to travel from Hong Kong to Moscow.

By offering shelter to first Assange and now Snowden, Correa has embarked on a high stakes game. The pugnacious president is constantly upping the ante, casting Ecuador's plight as a David and Goliath struggle against the odds. So far, playing the nationalist card has suited Correa well, though Ecuador's President may find that playing with fire carries significant risk.

Nikolas Kozloff is the author of Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left. Follow him on Twitter here.

Follow Nikolas Kozloff on Twitter: www.twitter.com/NikolasKozloff

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