A director's final scene
Derek Jarman's Garden
By Derek Jarman, photographs by Howard Sooley
Overlook Press, 144 pages
After the late filmmaker Derek Jarman ("Caravaggio," "Blue") learned that he was HIV-positive, he moved to four-room Prospect Cottage, set on a bleak expanse of shingle facing a nuclear power plant in Dungeness, Kent. This book records the slow blossoming of an extraordinary garden in that unlikely place. Jarman built stone circles with flint scavenged from the nearby seashore and austere sculptures out of the rusty and weatherworn detritus of neighboring fishermen's tools. He found the native weeds "spectacular," and Howard Sooley reveals them to be just that in his lush, yet restrained, photographs. In serene prose and poetry, Jarman records the shifting colors of sea kale, dog rose and viper's bugloss, as well as the darkness of those days when "a letter falls through the door," announcing the death of yet another dear friend. Shrinking from sentimentality, Jarman (who said of the AIDS Quilt, "I shall haunt anyone who ever makes a panel for me"), fashioned an exquisite, wistful and tenacious paradise in spite of death. "I would like anyone who reads my book to try this wildness in a corner," he writes. "It will bring you much happiness."
Maya Angelou
"Miss Calypso" (Scamp/Caroline CD)
On the cover of this recently unearthed artifact from 1957, an aspiring young singer named Maya Angelou strikes a voodoo priestess pose next to a campfire, one long leg poking brazenly from the thigh-high slit in her strapless red gown. Hot-cha!
Yes, this is the same Maya Angelou we now know as a distinguished woman of letters, the same Maya Angelou who delivered the soul-stirring poem "On the Pulse of the Morning" at President Clinton's inauguration, the same Maya Angelou who sings with little kiddies on "Sesame Street." "Miss Calypso" (re-released on CD by the madcap archivists at Caroline Records) is hardly a campy skeleton in the closet, though.
Angelou's only recording from her short cabaret career is a well-crafted and intelligent collection of Afro-Caribbean folk songs, including several of Angelou's own compositions ("Scandal in the Family," "Mambo in Africa"), which she sings in a deep, strong voice that's both fierce and joyful. The fact that Angelou is accompanied here by a couple of Hollywood studio session men on bongos and guitar doesn't make her foray into roots-music any less authentic sounding. Call it Odetta meets Harry Belafonte.
