52nd City

Barack Obama and the Man Who Carves Cranes

Compliments of frequent 52nd City contributor Chris King and his myspace page:

Barack Obama and The Man Who Carves Canes

By Chris King

When I climbed into Frank DiPiazza's vehicle, really cool music was spinning out of his stereo. Warbly pulses of melody played on the musical saw. Frank is cool, I thought. Not for the first time.

"Have you heard this, the 52nd City CD?" Frank asked. "'Sound'?"

Of course, I had heard "Sound." It's a homegrown, St. Louis thing. Good friends of mine run the operation at 52nd City. I had produced a track on the CD and received a contributor's copy of it. It's an ambitious journey in sound that goes everywhere, sometimes within a single track, and for some reason this musical saw piece – Track 11 on the CD, a collaboration between Derrick Mosley and Eric Hall situated deep within a suite of collaborations by Eric and friends – wasn't yet printed on my memory. But it certainly was an evocative and haunting piece of music. St. Louis is cool, I thought. Not for the first time.

"I've got a song on the CD," Frank said, jumping ahead to his track, "A Simple Song." Though it is an aching solo acoustic track, just Frank strumming a guitar and singing, he used a band name, Cold War, for the artist credit.

"That's funny," I said. "I started to write a review of this CD, just to send to my friends, one of my fake praise releases, but it was too self-absorbed. It's like I know every single person on this record, and that's all I could write about, how I know all these talented people and how lucky I am to know them. Before I gave up on finishing the piece, I actually wrote that there were probably even more friends on the CD, lurking under band names I didn't recognize. And there you are!"

Frank's song is raw and powerful. I asked him to turn it up.

I had known Frank since he was a very young man, an impetuous kid from New York who fronted a band called The Imps that my old friend and colleague Adam Long had produced. Adam has keen, picky ears and no taste whatsoever for rock music, but the year he produced The Imps he ran around giving a copy of their record to everybody he knew, he was so excited by it. I still have the record in my collection, and once in a blue moon I pull it out and still enjoy listening to it. It's one of those local records which, given the right push, shown the right outside interest, taken on the road for the right unexpected industry hand-off, maybe could have done something. Oh, well.

Now Frank was, among other things, a photojournalist, which explained what I was doing in his vehicle today. He had drawn the assignment to shoot pictures of a guy I had profiled for St. Louis Magazine. The subject of my story, David Goodwin, apparently had switched cell phones, leaving no forwarding phone number, so we were driving to his house in the States Streets neighborhood down by the river, hoping to catch him at home.

"So, how is the movie going?" Frank asked me, to keep the conversation rolling as we drove down to the river.

I explained that the movie, actually, was why I knew David Goodwin existed and that he carved these meticulous canes. The guy who had set out to shoot "Blind Cat Black" with me, who goes by the artist name Chizmo, dropped in on David one day when we were in his neighborhood scouting locations for the movie. David is the father of Chizmo's girlfriend. He lives in a spooky 18th century stone house on far south Minnesota, which we seized upon as the location for the hotel where our hero, played by Toyy Davis, turns a trick with The Dirty Old Man, played by Don Erickson. While we were shooting that scene at David's house, I saw all these hand-carved canes lying around. Given that he also needed a cane to walk, I figured there was a story in him. I was right. Now he magazine needed a picture to go with that story.

David was, in fact, home, though not for long. He had sold the old stone house nd was packing up to move away. But, today, he was still there and his canes were still there, and Frank set about photographing the carver and his canes in a way that would look evocative in a full-color mainstream magazine.

Frank first thought to use a battered and dirty U.S. flag as a backdrop for the hot, until I suggested it might offend some readers, since the flag had not been properly maintained, and some people get touchy about that. It was fitting that e had focussed on the flag for a minute, though. As Frank and David moved outside onto a balcony, to take advantage of the natural light and a neighbor's gritty brick wall, I went down to Frank's vehicle to sit in the quiet and wait for a call from a man who is running for president of the United States.

"Did Barack call yet?" Frank asked, when he returned to the vehicle after wrapping up the shoot.

"No," I said. "His press agent called to say he's running late."

I really was waiting for a call from Barack Obama. When I can, I do quirky features for St. Louis Magazine, to earn some spending money and to write about the interesting non-black people I know. I earn my living editing an African-American newspaper, The St. Louis American, and Congressman Wm. Lacy Clay's people had patched me together with Obama for an exclusive interview to preview his appearance in St. Louis the following day. I had been surprised to learn from Obama's press secretary that I was the senator's only St. Louis interview today, which in the competitive news business could be considered a big deal. It meant, for one day, at least, we would be ahead of the daily paper, the big radio stations and the local network news stations.

Obama finally did call, and he gave me ten minutes which I used to ask all of the questions you would expect from a black newspaper in St. Louis reporting on a black senator from Illinois running for U.S. president and coming to St. Louis to raise funds. His responses, also, were what you would expect if you know anything about the guy and his platform. I liked his answers enough that I found myself volunteering the information that he had earned my vote. Universal health care, early childhood education, energy efficiency and alternate fuels, a serious approach to climate change and let's get out of Iraq? Obama is cool, I thought. Not for the first time. Where do I sign up?

Frank pulled over and parked near our newspaper offices, so I could finish the interview before getting out of his vehicle. I had asked if Frank would take pictures of me on the phone with Obama, and indeed as the candidate talked about health disparities and the academic achievement gap, Frank was a flurry of activity, running around and shooting from all sides an unremarkable-looking person hunched around a cell phone, scribbling cryptic notes on a pad of paper, with "Sound" by 52nd City faintly playing along as the soundtrack.