"The Sandpiper"—at the Henry Miller Memorial Library

In the history of artistic events at the Henry Miller Memorial Library—which has encompassed everything from the intimacy of poetry readings to the senses-wide-open theater of the Big Sur Fashion Show—the most memorable events are those joined at birth with the wild coast itself.

You can watch The Sandpiper anywhere. But why?

Every other venue in the world (including your own living room) ties for second place is comparison with watching The Sandpiper on the big screen under the redwoods at HMML.

Thursday, August 28

8 PM

Henry Miller Memorial Library

The Sandpiper won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for Johnny Mandel's and Paul Francis Webster's "The Shadow of Your Smile" (aka "The Love Theme from The Sandpiper")—and the song also won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year in 1965.

You can both listen to and watch the visual and sound poem of the opening credits and music here...

And/or...you can step outdoors (if you live in Big Sur) or drive up (or down) coast and join us in the place itself.

Richard Burton's elegant Welsh/British tones are dramatic and theatrical. But no more dramatic and theatrical than the coast itself. And from the homage to Jeffers through the vignettes of people and places on the coast, Burton's prelude is a fit depiction of a place and time.

"It must be wonderful to live in such a place...forever."

Robinson Jeffers' "The Coast-Road"

At a time when the collapse of the highway can feel like disruption, it's good to remember that for many on the coast the real and permanent rupture came when the highway was built in the first place.

"Bridge in Rocky Creek Canyon" by Horace Lyons — in "Jeffers Country: The Seed Plots of Robinson Jeffers' Poetry."

The Coast-Road

A horseman high-alone as an eagle on the spur of the mountain over Mirmas Canyon draws rein, looks down

At the bridge-builders, men, trucks, the power-shovels, the teeming end of the new coast-road at the mountain’s base.   

He sees the loops of the road go northward, headland beyond headland, into gray mist over Fraser’s Point,

He shakes his fist and makes the gesture of wringing a chicken’s neck, scowls and rides higher.

                        

                                              I too

Believe that the life of men who ride horses, herders of cattle on the mountain pasture, plowers of remote

Rock-narrowed farms in poverty and freedom, is a good life. At the far end of those loops of road

Is what will come and destroy it, a rich and vulgar and bewildered civilization dying at the core,

A world that is feverishly preparing new wars, peculiarly vicious ones, and heavier tyrannies, a strangely

Missionary world, road-builder, wind-rider, educator, printer and picture-maker and broad-caster

So eager, like an old drunken whore, pathetically eager to impose the seduction of her fled charms

On all that through ignorance or isolation might have escaped them. I hope the weathered horseman up yonder

Will die before he knows what this eager world will do to his children. More tough-minded men

Can repulse an old whore, or cynically accept her drunken kindnesses for what they are worth,

But the innocent and credulous are soon corrupted.

                                                                              

                                                                       Where is our consolation? Beautiful beyond belief

The heights glimmer in the sliding cloud, the great bronze gorge-cut sides of the mountain tower up invincibly,   

Not the least hurt by this ribbon of road carved on their sea-foot.