brief encounters #9: elvis at the jewish museum
Elvis Costello gets ready for his show at Bethel Woods on July 20 (courtesy Elvis Costello/X)
This past week, Elvis Costello played Radio City, opening for Daryl Hall. He was scheduled to perform with his band the Imposters, but bassist Davey Faragher and guitarist Charlie Sexton were out sick, having “fallen afoul of a bad piece of fish,” so Costello proceeded with two of his original Attractions cohorts, drummer Pete Thomas and pianist Steve Nieve.
The third song in their set was “No Flag,” from the 2020 album Hey Clockface. “I’ve got no religion / I’ve got no philosophy / I’ve got a head full of ideas and words that don’t seem to belong to me,” Elvis sings. “No time for this kind of love / No flag waving high above / No sign for the dark place that I live / No G-d for the damn that I don’t give.”
A few years ago, I was walking through a nearly deserted Jewish Museum when I came upon the installation “Personas: George Segal’s Abraham and Isaac,” which is centered by the 1978 monumental plaster, cloth, rope, metal, and acrylic sculpture Abraham and Isaac (In Memory of May 4, 1970, Kent State University), a depiction of a knife-wielding Abraham about to kill his son, Isaac, who is kneeling at his father’s feet. Nearby is Kent State photojournalism student and Pulitzer Prize winner John Paul Filo’s iconic black-and-white shot of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the dead body of college student Jeffrey Glenn Miller, who had been killed by police; Vecchio’s hands are outstretched in desperation, her mouth letting out an agonizing cry that, though unheard, pierces through one’s soul.
Screening on a small monitor on the wall by the entrance was an excerpt from a Michael Blackwood documentary in which Segal, a New York Jew who passed away in 2000 at the age of seventy-five, discusses the work. As I was watching, I heard whispers. On the other side of the space were two people reading about the piece.
I instantly recognized them: Elvis Costello and his wife, Canadian jazz pianist and vocalist Diana Krall.
My initial thought, and I wasn't necessarily proud of it, was, What is Elvis Costello doing at the Jewish Museum? Isn’t he antisemitic?
In 2010, Costello supported the BDS movement and canceled two concerts in Israel. “There are occasions when merely having your name added to a concert schedule may be interpreted as a political act that resonates more than anything that might be sung and it may be assumed that one has no mind for the suffering of the innocent,” he wrote on his website. “I must believe that the audience for the coming concerts would have contained many people who question the policies of their government on settlement and deplore conditions that visit intimidation, humiliation, or much worse on Palestinian civilians in the name of national security. . . . It is a matter of instinct and conscience.”
Shortly after that, he told a reporter from the Jerusalem Post, “I know people in Israel are working at their jobs day to day and answering to their own conscience. I think it’s naïve to presume that they all have the same opinions, just as I reject their presumptions about me.”
One of my first published articles was a review of the 1982 Elvis Costello and the Attractions album Imperial Bedroom. I had seen Elvis Costello and the Imposters play in the pouring rain at SummerStage in Central Park in July 2003. But his 2010 declaration stuck in my craw.
Back at the museum, Krall noticed that I had spotted them and immediately got protective of her husband as I considered my own presumptions about Costello. But mostly, I was happy that he was there, believing that he was unlikely to be there if he were antisemitic. (No, I am not going to get into a discussion here about how one can be pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel without hating Jews.)
Costello, who was born in London and has lived in Vancouver and now New York City for many years, started walking over to the monitor where I was watching the film. Krall was keeping a close eye on me.
Elvis sidled up next to me to check out the documentary.
Elvis Costello performs at the Gramercy on February 22, 2023 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Readers of Mad Transit know that I don’t take selfies with celebrities and don’t ask for autographs; however, I often do engage them in conversation that is not obvious or worshipful, which has a way of opening them up, from Mikhail Baryshnikov and Liam Neeson to Laurie Anderson and James Karen, among so many others.
As I leaned in to say something to Costello, Krall started to head our way to rescue him but then stopped and turned away when she saw that I probably wasn’t a stalker.
I told Elvis that we have a good friend in common, and when I gave him her name, he began gushing about what a fabulous person she is, putting an arm around my shoulder and pulling me a bit closer. He asked my name twice, telling me he was going to text our mutual friend to say we met. I mentioned what a powerful Segal exhibit this was, he agreed, and that was it. I went my way, and he rejoined his wife.
On February 22, 2023, I saw Costello conclude a ten-night stand at the Gramercy Theatre, in which every show boasted a unique setlist with a different group of musicians; I no longer had any presumptions about where Costello stood on Israel, so I had no problem going to the show, with a guy I went to Hebrew School with. The three-hour show with the Imposters was revelatory as Elvis tore through thirty songs, with Costello and longtime Dylan sideman Sexton shredding on guitars. On the eighteenth song, “The Man You Love to Hate,” from 2022’s The Boy Named If, Costello sang, “I’m a one party state / the man you love to hate . . . The country that I loved / is just a problem to solve / until we all disintegrate before / the man you love to hate.” It might not be about Israel and Palestine, but it made me think about the controversy nonetheless.
About a half hour later at the museum, I was wandering around when I saw Costello examining Israeli-born American artist Abshalom Jac Lahav’s ongoing series, “48 Jews,” small portraits of such famous Jewish people as Anne Frank, Alan Greenspan, Lee Krasner (as Marcia Gay Harden), Monica Lewinsky, and philosopher Noam Chomsky, who is strongly against Israeli policies that repress Palestinians but does not believe that BDS is the answer.
Abshalom Jac Lahav, Bob Dylan, oil on canvas, 2007 (Purchase: Fine Arts Acquisitions Committee Fund / © Abshalom Jac Lahav)
Costello paused for a moment, took out his phone, and snapped a picture of Lahav’s painting of Bob Dylan, the Nobel Prize winner who has had a fascinating relationship with Judaism and Christianity and whose 1983 album, Infidels, deals in part with Israeli history; the album cover and inside sleeve feature photos of Dylan in Jerusalem.
(Barely tangentially, Elvis ended the Gramercy show I was at with an extended bluesy version of “I Want You,” not the Dylan classic but his 1986 tune from Blood & Chocolate, with a snippet of the Beatles’ “I Want You [She’s So Heavy].”)
On the 2012 Amnesty International fiftieth anniversary album Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan, Costello covers Bob’s “License to Kill,” from Infidels, singing, “Now, he’s hell-bent for destruction / he’s afraid and confused / And his brain has been mismanaged with great skill / All he believes are his eyes / And his eyes, they just tell him lies / But there’s a woman on my block / Sits there in a cold chill / Saying, Who’s gonna take away his license to kill?” That’s some heavy stuff. (Krall is also on the record, playing “Simple Twist of Fate.”)
Costello generally ends his concerts with his beloved version of Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” in which he proclaims, “As I walk through this wicked world / Searchin’ for light in the darkness of insanity / I ask myself, ‘Is all hope lost? Is there only pain and hatred and misery?’”
The answer is no, as Lowe and Costello keep telling us, because there is always peace, love, and understanding.