When he doesn't show up, the audience becomes a mob. Django's walking on the beach, minding the priorities of a gypsy mother. "How can a man be so irresponsible?" they ask furiously, as, just a few miles away, he watches a gull silhouetted against the dim fire of the setting sun, the smooth horizon belying the violence of the sea. In the morning he will coax that horizon, that sun, that gull from the strings of his Selmer-Maccaferri, painting broken pictures with wounded hands.
You shouldn't listen to the music here and now. It does no good to ask what the music means today. You have to hear the music when it was written and where it was written. You have to be in England before the war, in Paris when they invade, in Italy after they leave. What does it mean to be a gypsy playing illegal jazz for a Nazi official for whom listening is just another in a long list of crimes, easily the most forgivable? Is it betrayal to entertain the invaders while your people die in their concentration camps? What kind of man does that make you?
Another night. Another angry crowd. "The nerve of the man," they say, disgustedly. Later he would say he was smelling the dew. How could a man be so flawed?
How could he not?
Hello, friends. How are you today?
Later. Love.
