Searching for Sugar Man ... and that guy Rick
There's a random guy in the Rodriguez documentary who says the most profound things about life, art, and making a difference
One of the first things I did when I got Covid was watch Searching for Sugar Man again …
See what I did there? I let you know that I’ve had Covid without announcing that I’ve had Covid — because no one cares anymore. The pandemic is over, they say. We’re all immune, they reckon. Nope. It’s still around, it’s still nasty, and vaccinated or not, it puts you on your back for days. I’ve avoided it for the entirety of the pandemic so far, which turns out is easy to do when you never leave the house. But for that strategy to work indefinitely, everyone who lives with you can never leave the house either. But they do leave the house, because they have regular jobs … and it was one of them who brought the coronavirus home.
This is also an apology of sorts, for not writing much in the past few weeks (months?). Because I’ve had Covid. And also the dog was put to sleep, if you remember. Those two things alone — the dog and Covid — were enough to derail me for almost two months.
Anyway, I wasn’t so derailed during my Covid sickness that I couldn’t watch Searching for Sugar Man again, as I lay in bed half delusional from the fever. It was on my mind because the subject of the film, the American musician Rodriguez, had died the week before, and in my fever state I wondered about how his life had turned out after the documentary, which you’ll remember won an Oscar in 2013.
I’d also read that the documentary’s director, Malik Bendjelloul, had killed himself in the years following the film’s success. And I suppose the confluence of those two threads, the death of Rodriguez, and the suicide of the Oscar-winning director, made me ponder my own existence, particularly now there was no dog to keep me company as I pondered such things, and while the coronavirus did spiky protein stuff to my throat and bronchial tract.
But to the documentary itself, and the purpose of writing about it (other than as an excuse to let you know I’ve had Covid and to apologise for my lack of Substacking).
You know the gist of it, I’m sure. If you don’t, the film follows the search by a couple of South African music lovers to find out the truth about the apparent horrific death, onstage before an audience, of an American musician, Rodriguez, who was massive in South Africa in the 1970s, on the back of just two records. The pivot of the search comes when they discover he isn’t dead at all, but has been living in relative poverty and obscurity in Detroit, where he works construction and hasn’t been a performing musician for decades.
That’s where Malik Bendjelloul takes up the “search” (which is really just a framing device to tell the remarkable lost and found story of Rodriguez), tracking Rodriguez down to his home and reconstructing the story of how his fledgling music career ultimately faltered, whereby Rodriguez never enjoyed the kind of fame and fortune that his success in South Africa had suggested he would have.
I’d watched the documentary a couple of time before, so my attention this time around was captured by a construction worker colleague of Rodriguez, who appears in the documentary for the first time around the 53 minute mark. His name is Rick Emmerson, and he’s introduced to flesh out the contemporaneous details of the Rodriguez story, because the man himself isn’t particularly talkative and is only begrudgingly taking part in the film.
Emmerson is something of a poet himself, and becomes, for me, the star of the film. Just an ordinary guy, a construction worker, true blue collar Detroit dude … but a vessel for some extraordinary musings on life and a reminder that ordinary people have the capacity to speak transcendent truths.
He begins with some thoughts on Rodriguez back in the day, on the worksite, and how he stood out from the rest.
He approached the work from a different place that most people do, he took it very, very seriously, sort of like a sacrament. He was going to do this dirty, dirty work for eight or 10 hours, OK, but he was dressed in a tuxedo. He had this kind of magical quality that all genuine poets and artists have, to elevate things, to get above the mundane, the prosaic, the bullshit, all the mediocrity that's everywhere.
I found this comment challenging, even in the midst of a Covid fever. A calling, perhaps. The idea that people with the ability to express things have been tasked with raising people's vision beyond the here and now, with all its limitations. The idea that words, or music, or food, or images and paintings, can help people see beyond the barbed wire of a toxic world to a greater sense of what the world is and can be.
Emmerson continues about Rodriguez, explicitly referring to him as "the artist".
The artist is the pioneer. Even though his musical hopes were dashed, the spirit remained, and he just had to keep finding the place, refining the process, of how to apply himself. He knew there was something more. It was the early '80s. He wanted to do something, do something righteous, make a difference.
I love that word 'righteous'. If there's one thing I got from 10 years of theological studies it was the freedom to reclaim some of the beautiful words of my faith upbringing, which had been rendered anaemic by the religiosity of their application in a fundamentalist church. I came to realise words like righteous are bigger than how narrow-minded fundamentalists use them, and in the right hands they can be saturated with meaning. And in my journey, the word righteous was given new life in the discovery that in the scriptural sense, righteousness is an act of grace, something bestowed on us from beyond ourselves. Self-righteousness, the act of judging our own actions righteous, is anathema to its true sense. And I think Emmerson gets that about Rodriguez when he says the artist wanted to do something righteous. He’s saying that he wanted to create in a way that was about something else, something bigger, less about himself and more about the other — something bestowed with grace and beauty as if from another place.
And that's it for Emmerson, as far as the movie is concerned … until near the end, around the 1 hour 20 minute mark, where he makes a return and says the following:
What (Rodriguez) demonstrated very clearly is that you have a choice. He took all that torment, all that agony, all that confusion and pain, and he transformed it, into something beautiful. He's like the silk worm, you know, you take this raw material and you transform it, and you come out with something that wasn't there before. Something beautiful, something perhaps transcendent, something perhaps eternal. Insofar as he does that I think he's representative of the human spirit, of what's possible. That you have a choice.
How amazing to be remembered as someone who transformed his hardship into something transcendent and eternal, something that reminded others of the freedom of choice they have as well, even in the face of similar hardship — that the human spirit is capable of contending with the limitations of our lives and experiences, the brutality of our current world, to stay connected to something greater and beyond ourselves that makes it all worthwhile.
Ah, there it is ... the reason it resonated so much with me while I lay sick in bed of a disease that's killed so many and continues to do so, but hasn't been able to diminish humanity's hope and its continual drive towards life and more life.
The human spirit. Which keeps finding a way.
I wrote most of the above several weeks ago, but didn't feel like putting it out there … because of the dog thing, mainly, and also the Covid, and a few weeks of trying to remember what the purpose of being “out there” is.
In the meantime, things have changed in the world and the human spirit is being tested again, especially in one part of the world — the part of the world where it always seems to be tested the most. Palestine.
For much of this week I've been talking with two Palestinian journalists in Gaza, reporting first hand on the deaths of innocent Palestinians. Let me just say that I was as shocked and abhorred by the Hamas attack on Israel as the next man — and that Hamas surely knew what Israel’s response was going to be. However, with every passing day of that response comes a greater awareness of the breadth of suffering that response is inflicting on the innocent — people caught in the crossfire, who just want to go about their lives in a peaceful way like the rest of us.
This week I’ve been writing a fact-check for Australian Associated Press on a claim by Israeli authorities, a piece of misinformation that’s now been spread across Facebook, that footage of a child killed in the bombing of Gaza was of a doll, not a real boy. I tracked down the journalist who shot the footage, a guy called Momen, and a second who took photos of the boy wrapped in a shroud outside the hospital morgue, a guy called Mohamed. They each sent me unpublished (and distressing) photos of the corpse, and there's no denying it — the boy, a four-year-old called Omar, was no doll.
Anyway, the last time I spoke to Mohamed the ground invasion was 25km away from his location and the bombs were falling "everywhere". In amongst our WhatsApp chat, he wrote three words that will stay with me a while: "Remember me plz."
A plea from a guy I barely know.
Remember me please.
That's the human spirit right there, clinging to a shred of hope that perhaps, if what he fears is about to happen does eventuate, he’ll at least be remembered by a stranger on the other side of the world.
So, for Mohamed’s sake, we keep striving towards something beautiful, something perhaps transcendent, something perhaps eternal.
Your writing helps us see the world differently. A true gift.
You are a writer. You have a voice. Thank you for still writing.