Our Man in Havana
Remembering The Familiar
Mark Rushton’s Interpolation in the Arts is a weekly email on Substack where I talk about my ongoing work as a recording artist and visual artist.
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This week’s topics:
Pollen Season
Your Man in Havana
Roger Eno + Kate St. John - “Our Man in Havana”
Pollen Season
Pollen season is always trouble. Trees are the worst for me when they wake up. Then another wave when the leaves appear, which is right now. Then it’s manageable until everybody forgets to mow down all the obvious ragweed in the late summer. It makes doing anything with audio a little difficult, and that’s the kind of week I had.
I don’t take anything. I’m not on any drugs. I do take quercetin, a processed plant flavinoid, and it helps. I also take Vitamin C, and that helps with the worst of the itching. You could never get me to take Benny Drill or any of the patented things again. No thanks. Too many side effects.
Now it’s time to talk about something else.
Your Man in Havana
A couple weeks ago, the phrase “Your Man in Havana” randomly entered my head. I asked the word robot about it and the program said I was likely thinking about the 1958 Graham Greene book “Our Man in Havana”.
I was not thinking about this book as I rarely read fiction, but I asked further about the plot of the book. The story is set in pre-revolution Cuba and follows the life of a British ex-pat vacuum cleaner salesman who is recruited by the British Secret Service to act as a spy. The salesman accepts the job, but has no information to report. To keep his job, and earn money, he fabricates intelligence reports, invents agents, and creates elaborate schemes. His fictional reports eventually lead to real-world consequences, putting him in unexpected danger. It sounds like the kind of thing that would interest me.
While I don’t have any time to read, I do have a commute where I can listen. I was able to determine that an audio book version on CD of Our Man in Havana was released a while back, read by Jeremy Northam. After emailing my library, they found the CDs in another state and I received them via inter-library loan. I had to bump the audio book CDs of Bill Bryson’s “In A Sunburned Country”, which I had started this week and were discovered by me at a charity shop for 49 cents. A total score.
Books on CD are the best for me. So are inter-library loans. I would prefer not to wait 24 weeks for the Libby streaming version of something like “Hope for Cynics” since there’s no CD version available, but I guess I have to get in line for some titles. Are we not putting all audio books on compact disc anymore? Why is that? I don’t mean to be cynical.
Roger Eno + Kate St. John - “Our Man in Havana”
Actually, I am aware of the title “Our Man in Havana” because it’s the opening track to the 1992 album “The Familiar”, by Roger Eno & Kate St John. I owned the CD a long time ago.
“Our Man in Havana” is a kind of “light modern classical” track that has e-bow guitar by Bill Nelson, one of my favorite musicians.
”The Familiar” led to the creation of the group Channel Light Vessel, featuring Roger Eno, Kate St. John, Bill Nelson, plus zither player Laraaji and a cellist. They released a couple of albums in the mid 90s of mostly-ignored hybrid classical / ambient-ish / art-rock - some tracks are instrumental and some have vocals. I think the Channel Light Vessel albums still sound fantastic today. Seek them out.