A Writing about Kostas Mandouthakis

Writen by Paul Campanis (the elder) as told to Paul Campanis (the younger)

Introduction
Kostas Mandouthakis is this marvelous human. He represents what I find
most attractive about the Greeks. It is curious how things go upside down so easy
and so fast. A few years ago no-one heard of my island Nisiro. Now people want to go.
The main plaza of the harbor village, Mandraki, is all music and tables to sit at.
Noise. Kostas Mandouthakis, the poet laureate of our place, casually approaches
with the guitar.
"That is how it begins Paul..." (as father tells his son the story)

I'm sitting quietly at my uncle Frantzis's restaurant, outside the door,
and he starts. I can't see him. He's off a ways. He plays all sorts of
songs. The canned music over the various loudspeakers from different
little restaurants and coffee places is as loud as ever. His parea, his
crowd, is talking and laughing. Occasionally they sing a few snatches of a
song they especially like, but mostly they drink the fare before them,
nibble on something, scratch, guffaw, and then steal a peek at the miracle.
At Mandouthaki. They photograph it in their minds, so they can keep it,
an icon for the soul. This vast and grand man, resolutely singing. Not
belting them out like he was on Broadway; just a man singing with the
plain but lovely voice we have been hearing for years, since he was a young
man serenading the beauties of the island.
I must qualify "vast." He is not big and not small. He dresses pretty
smart, neat, and simple. I mean he doesn't look like hell, as I often do,
like a bum, a sober one. He smiles constantly, but it is a real smile.
Very plain but nice. His hands are beautiful, long fingers. His voice is
smooth and sure. He's home and there's no question about that. It's his
joint. His obligation is to pierce the darkness with his song, but it does
not appear to be done out of any sense of urgency or divine direction. He
sings because he has to , to end our loneliness. He sings for the
hellovit. I dwell on this matter because it ties my little story together
for me. Mandouthaki sees himself as a piece of the pipeline. He
approaches his mission with no quile or artifice or inflated sense of duty.
He was with his boys at the plaza called Ilikiomenous, which means
belonging to the old ones. His slow style is that of the dilettante just
out for a look-see. It seems he is always on vacation and has time for a
person when they appear. I remember his tiny house. We climbed a stair to
the bedroom where he said to sit on the bed. This is where he was born and
where he slept as a child. He pulled a few books out and read his poems
about the village and the people. One about a beauty he courted, my aunt
who lives now in Brooklyn. Kosta's like that. He remembers everything
with the same care and love he puts into his song. He shares song and poem
with such tenderness, as if he is gifting you and he is.
Mandouthaki is kind. He does not grab the microphone or yell over to
Sotiri to turn the blasted music down. He knows the Greek passion in him
will evaporate in the air of the evening. His gift to the night will blend
with the sea breeze. It is a disposable act he is committing, but he
chances it will be heard.
His Greekness comes forth in his delivery and in his bearing. His
performance is quietly heroic. Greeks are that way.
The muted message is the price he pays, we pay, to exercise the voice.
Maybe only a few will hear Mandouthaki. I do. He sings on, unheard, a
creative voice with the old songs we carry to our graves and beyond.

"Paul I guess we are cooking and this is how it ends"

What counts is the music, not whether it is heard by many. We pay a high
price for virtue. Not only may the song go unheard, but we may be
ridiculed, too. Like Mandouthaki we keep singing our song, under the
loudspeaker music, over the loudspeaker music, strumming the heartbeat of
our grandparents, listening to the sea in between stanzas of the song. We
know the life here in this earth is really not complicated. A simple act,
sanctioned by all, including the gods, may at some level be the most
subversive thing anyone can do. The ultimate subversive is Mandouthaki, if
I carry this train a bit further. Because we listen to his songs, our
songs, over the commercial ones, the latter are negated, destroyed,
ridiculed, x-ed out, expunged from memory. With a modesty of an "aw
shucks" variety, he rids the place of the tourists and the glib coffeehouse
proprietors, counting money and how many planes arrived yesterday on the
island of Cos, or when the boats will start arriving today and did Stavro
clean well this time under the tables. And so on.
The dead in the graveyard turn their good ear to hear his strong melody
down a ways where they are building the new shops. That'll cover up the
cemetery, shield it from the promenade, the walkway. The tourists will
have a place to buy a thing and won't have to see our dead lolling about in
front of their gravestones, prodding one another with "look at the fat one
with the lobster skin and the short pants." The graveyard listens to
Mandouthaki, down the road a bit. The sea sounds, a bird sings, a
motorbike whines, and Mandouthaki sings of love and loneliness, of joy and
fun. It turns out he's the villain of modern times. He sings and draws us
from the modern radio sounds. We thank him for his songs on the island
that August years ago, that night when most of the tourists had left for
the summer, but he was there to dispell any further notion that the
Greekness had succumbed to the modern way.

I hope you like it. A few lines got messed up for spacing. I don't know
why. It is just regular text, nothing more. I love Mandouthaki very much
and hope you can get some of what I feel.