![]() ![]() I’m afraid of neither my country nor its government, nor do I consider myself an exile. He is more explicit in a letter from New York to his friend, Dimitris Vernikos, dated April, 1968. The details, you see, are far more poetic than the times we lived in under dictatorial duress. I was a world traveler, from California to Rome, in self-exile for tax reasons but with a perfervid passion to meet new faces of different languages and descent. However, on other occasions, he isn’t so cynical. When I settled my debt, I returned around 1972, he admits. They discovered that I owed the Inland Revenue approximately 3.5 million drachmas. I lived there for about six years, the years of dictatorship, for purely tax reasons. He didn’t take advantage of the “coincidence”, on the contrary he brought us down to earth at every opportunity. The junta found him putting on with Melina Mercouri and Jules Dassin Illya Darling. He merely turned to advantage his sudden fame and devoted himself to a poetic internationalism, thus establishing inside him a most creative cosmopolitanism. Hadjidakis had no qualms about selling the copyright of Never on Sunday. The success of Six Folklore Paintings awakened dealers, variety shows, puny musicians, tourism, and the impelling “Greek passion” of our internationally famous personalities, then came the film Never on Sunday that gave the finishing blow to what was a folk song. In fact he didn’t deny that he was partly responsible for this. It wasn’t just that winning an Oscar identified him with a genre of music that he considered inferior, but that it boosted the country’s touristic image, which he considered as secondary to its deeper nature. This is yet another reason why he would have preferred not to become famous with the song Never on Sunday, and here again he is politic. But before this could become spiritual essence, tourism came along, and the industrialization of picturesqueness commenced. We needed to find the humble, the insignificant, and the everyday on which to hang and be reconciled with our smallness. What was it that thwarted the natural process of popularity in postwar Greek society? Hadjidakis hadn’t the slightest doubt: ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |