The Eastside View

On the trail

2012-01-30T10:34:00.001-08:00

Eastside Road, January 29, 2012—

Lindsey on the trail

ON THE ROAD AGAIN, as you see. The last week of January is so often a beautiful false spring here in the Bay Area; ornamental plum trees begin to blossom to everyone's consternation — So early! It's never happened before! (You hear this every year.) And our feet begin to itch, so I strap on the boots that have served me so well, and hoist a practice pack onto my back, and set the iPhone trail-tracker, and off we go.

Today's hike — it was a bit too strenuous to be called merely a "walk" — took us through oak hillsides above Lake Sonoma, the artificial lake formed a number of years ago when one of the last of the Corps of Engineers dams was built in the great Northern California water project. We protested the building of Warm Springs Dam at the time, to a great extent because it interfered with local rights to the environment that had been in place long before the coming of Europeans to the continent. And I'm sure we had ethics on our side: but I wasn't so sure, yesterday, that I wasn't selfishly happy we'd lost the fight.

The Visitors Center at Warm Springs Dam is closed at the moment — for renovation, the sign proclaims, but in today's economy you never really know why these facilities close. But the Corps of Engineers, which apparently maintains not only the dam but also the fish hatchery at its foot, maintains its own headquarters across the road from the Center; there you can get trail maps, and advice, and I suppose news of any recent threatening activity: poison oak, rattlesnakes, for all I know cougars.

We drove up Skaggs Spring Road to the South Lake trailhead; only three or four other cars were there on a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon. The trail leaves from the south end of the parking lot. For the most part it's a one-man-wide trail cut into contours on the hillside, which drops steeply from Skaggs Spring Road down to the lake: you never come near the water, though the trail drops and climbs frequently, quartering the contours, crossing narrow freshets at times. It had rained last week, and the trail was soft underfoot, muddy near the freshets: we saw footprints of people, dogs, raccoons, pigs.

No animals to be seen, no birdsong. Soft air; fragrance — a sudden vanilla surprise, and the nearly constant scent of oak and duff. A few wildflowers — those tiny white ones we called filaree last weekend; and low-growing Baby Blue Eyes; and of course the magnificent madrone, some of them too in bloom.

Thanks to technology — MotionX-GPS on the iPhone — I can tell you we covered 4.84 miles in an hour and forty minutes, not counting rests, and that our altitude ranged from near 975 feet at the parking lot down to 650 feet, with a number of ups and downs along the way, for a total ascent of 943 feet, descent of 929. A good first workout for the year. Until July 27, you can see the map here.

Asides on an Ebay Oboe

2012-01-20T20:10:00.001-08:00

AS I KNOW I'VE mentioned before — ah yes; here it is — my instrument in high school was the noble bassoon — partly because as a young child I'd loved both Grandpapa in Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf and the Sorcerer's Apprentice as brought to me by Walt Disney in his Fantasia, partly no doubt because the band teacher, Kenneth Knight of loving memory, has a bassoon at his disposal but no one willing to learn to play it.

One of my best friends at Analy Union High School was Merton Tyrrel, and he played the oboe. I always respected him for that, and for other things: he was handsome, self-controlled, well-spoken, intelligent; he seemed a good oboist, and of course he got a number of leading passages in the arrangements our concert band played at the annual spring concerts. (In the fall season we converted to a marching band, setting our double-reed horns aside in favor of sturdier things like saxophones.)

When I left home for college I no longer had the use of a bassoon, and I gradually lost interest in playing a musical instrument. For a while I made a scanty living giving private lessons in the recorder, but that didn't seem to count. Years later I played bass drum in a community orchestra organized with federal FEMA funds during one of the more enlightened recessions we had in those days, but that didn't last long. Nor did my participation in the Mills College orchestra put together by the late Sally Kell, for whom I played on the college bassoon, a wheezy instrument that I could barely negotiate through von Weber's Peter Schmoll Overture.

I always wanted to learn the oboe, but never did. Oh, I could play a C-major scale on it, faking it from bassoon fingerings, but that was about all. A few years ago we were in town killing time: Lindsey and our daughter Giovanna had gone on to the bookstore; I stopped off at a curious music store I'd never investigated, since gone out of business. I noticed an oboe in a display case and couldn't help betraying pleased surprise.

Oh, you play the oboe? the lady behind the counter asked. No, I answered, in a rare expression of incompetence. I used to play the bassoon, but that was fifty years ago.

Can you put it together, she asked. Yes, I can at least do that: and I carefully assembled the pieces, noting it seemed to be in good condition.

Can you at least show me what it sounds like, the lady asked; I've never heard an oboe. No, I said; I'd need a reed to do that. Well, here's a reed, she said, Go ahead and play it.

I moistened the reed in my mouth for a minute — it was a new one — and carefully fitted it to the oboe, fingered what I thought would be a G in the first, easy octave, and made a terrible squawk. Oh, the lady said, That's what it sounds like.

Well, not quite, I said, and continued to experiment a little. G, A, B. G, F, E. After a while I managed to play a scale, and continued up into the next octave a little way. I was surprised I could almost seem to play the thing.

If my wife were to come in here, I said to the lady, and hear me playing this thing, she'd turn around without saying a word and walk right out. I put the oboe back to my lips and played the scale again. Lindsey walked into the shop, looked at me, turned around without saying a word, and walked back out.

That must be your wife, the lady said; and I swabbed out the oboe, took it apart, and put it back in its case. How much, I asked. Oh, said the lady, I think I could let it go for seven hundred fifty.

Too much, I said as much to myself as to her, and left to rejoin Lindsey and Giovanna.

FOR A FEW YEARS afterward, every month or two, if we happened to be walking past a music shop, I'd say to Lindsey I think I'll just step in here and see if they have an oboe I can afford. You'd better not, she'd always say: but I generally did. They never did, of course. You can't buy a decent oboe for less that a thousand bucks, and then you don't know what you're getting.

Then, last summer, I took the plunge and rented an oboe to see if in fact I really wanted one. I played scales; I played simple tunes; I made up simple tunes, always practicing, if you can call it that, when Lindsey was out of the house, aware the sounds were pretty painful to hear. At one point I decided to take a lesson.

The teacher looked at me dubiously: a man in his late seventies taking up the oboe. Can you make a sound with that thing, he wanted to know. I looked at him with a little bit of contempt, I'm afraid, and fitted the reed, and played a two-octave C-major scale.

Can you play it in tune, he asked next, trumping my contempt with a finer because more justified attitude of his own. No, I had to respond; but I can try to do better. But the cheap plastic oboe I'd rented was not much fun to play, and I was always fearful: if I crack it, or break it, it's going to cost me a lot of money, at least twelve hundred bucks, and I'll have this cheap plastic thing on my hands. My thoughts went back to the music shops.

Then, last Thanksgiving, when we were visiting Giovanna up in Portland, I took a look on Ebay and there was an oboe, as is, nearing the end of its auction period, with hardly a bid on it. It was a wood oboe, grenadilla to judge by the photos; the key mechanism seemed intact, and it was nestling in a battered leather-covered case that reminded me of the Linton bassoon-case I'd carried back and forth to school all those decades ago. I took the plunge, and was surprised, pleased, and a little ashamed and embarrassed when I won it, for only a couple of hundred dollars.

When it arrived it looked fine, just like the photos, but was of course unplayable: the pads covering the tone-holes nearest the reed all leaked. Nothing for it but take it into town to the repair shop, hoping for the best. It was early December, and I wouldn't know anything for weeks: the only local woodwind repairman was busy with all the fixes needed for local Messiahs and Nutcrackers and carolers. I tried to put it all out of my mind.

Then, day before yesterday, while we were on a hike in the hills near Sonoma, my iPhone rang: the oboe was ready for me. The remainder of the hike grew both easier and more tedious; I could hardly wait — to see what I had, and to learn what the price tag would be.

He'd had to replace nearly every pad. Made of leather, they're a favorite food of a common household insect. (I've learned they also like the horsehair on violin bows: you have to keep these things in the light, just like a woolen sweater, if you don't want them eaten away.) He'd also cleaned out all the keywork, whose bearings had gummed up over the years. No telling when it was last played. His work cost a little more than the oboe itself had: but for a relatively modest amount I had a fine, solid oboe, much more responsive than the plastic thing I'd been renting, more rewarding to play — and my own.

Now of course I have to play it, every day or nearly so, to justify the expenditure. I reason this will be good for me, physically, firming my breath control and of course my lips, exercising my fingers and wrists beyond the familiar constraints of the computer keyboard. Perhaps even training my ears to adjust to equal temperament as I learn to shade each of the thirty or so notes I'll be playing, each requiring a slightly different approach with fingers, lips, and throat to bring the oboe's instinctive sweet natural tuning into the one-interval-fits-all attitude that's constrained "classical" music for the last three hundred years.

It already has me thinking about music, and listening to it, with renewed ears. Last night, for example, we went to a high-school concert of chamber music. Students of varying degrees of competence played jazz, chamber music, wind transcriptions of varying degrees of competence. Perhaps because this was in Berkeley, it all seemed extraordinarily democratic, leveled. "Classical" music was dragged down from its pedestal; vernacular music was nudged out of the cashbox.

Four ambitious girls tackled the first movement of Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" quartet, and showed me for perhaps the first time just how dangerous and exciting the development section of a sonata-allegro movement is, with passages careering through remote keys, like an enormous cruise ship coasting too close the hidden reefs.

Another quartet, dressed in leather and hiding behind very dark glasses, stalked onstage carrying saxophones, acknowledged the audience with a bit of defiance, and proceeded to a stately, respectful rendition of Bach's "Air for the G-String."

We all too often experience music only through performances by professionals. Amateurs, even beginning students, when they play for us, remind us of the difficulties, the complexities, the intricacies of musical ensembles. Music of any culture fills a societal need, investigating co-operation, sensitivity, awareness of others while concentrating on one's own task, juggling understanding of received cultural inheritance with the "values" and imperatives of the cultural present.

Even my solitary exploration of my oboe enlarges my engagement with the other-than-me, as my brain and my breath and my fingers work the mechanics, the ratios, the sounds, trying to find a way to make the tone even, in tune, pleasing — in a word, just.

Pirandello's ashes

2012-01-15T17:23:00.001-08:00

For a little project I've been working on I turned to the remarkable story of the ashes of Luigi Pirandello, the great Italian novelist and playwright of the early 20th century. I present the story here, as written by Filcusum on the blog Il Mestiere di Leggere and put into English, after a fashion, by Google Translate:

When he died on December 10, 1936, the children found half crumpled piece of paper in which Pirandello had written: 'I. Both let pass in silence my death. Friends, enemies that prayer is not talking about newspapers, but it does not even mention. Neither preacher nor equity. II. Dead, I do not get dressed. I s'avvolga naked in a sheet. And no flowers on the bed and no lighted candle. III. Chariot of the lowest class of the poor. Nude. And no one accompanied me, neither relatives nor friends. The cart, the horse, the coachman stop. IV. Burn me. And my body just burned, or left disperse, because nothing, not even the ashes, I would like to advancing me. But if you can not do the cinerary urn is taken to Sicily, and in some rough stone walled countryside of Girgenti, where I was born. "

Points one, two and three were executed to perfection, with great scorn of the regime of Mussolini himself-says-he wanted to do a great funeral fascist regalia. Prior to respect the wishes expressed in the fourth point, instead, spent decades and adventures, mishaps and adventures, and worthy of Pirandello's own pen. Let's proceed in order.

FIRST FUNERAL-Two days after his death in a chariot of the lowest class of the lowest class, a case brought to the crematorium. But no one heard her to indulge his desire to spread the ashes to the wind, a practice unheard of in those days before it illegal and opposed by the Church. The ashes were then collected in an urn and taken to the Roman cemetery of Verano, where they remained for eleven years

THE SECOND FUNERAL-After the war, in 1947, the mayor of DC Girgenti, in the meantime become Agrigento, Lauricella, claimed the honor for his city to give Christian burial and funeral and solemn to the ashes of the illustrious countryman. He turned nothing less than the Democrat chairman of the board at the time, Alcide De Gasperi, who - despite the considerable difficulties still faced in transport - earned an American military plane for the transfer from Rome to Agrigento. To accompany the remains of the great dramatist was appointed Professor. Gaspare Ambrosini, known Pirandello and pirandellologo and future first President of the Constitutional Court. Place the ashes in a precious vase of the fifth century BC greek imballatolo well and good, shock-proof, in a wooden box, the plane was ready to go when a dozen people-all-came to Sicily ' plane shortly before takeoff is requesting a ride. The teacher, aware of the serious problems of displacement of the time talking to the pilots of the 'Air Force and obtained consent.

As they settled, someone asked what was in that box Ambrosini slung so well, having received an explanation and said: "Pirandello, what he had asked that his ashes were scattered to the wind? It is not that fate has decided to please him today ... .. "Calo an eerie silence, while the passengers were looking at each other, and under the seats got up forefinger and little finger of one hand. Then, as the propellers began to turn, one of them asked to get off. Ambrosini spoke with the pilots, they suspended the procedure and the passenger fell off. Needless to say, one after the other followed him also the other nine. At this point, the pilots are suspicious and asked the teacher explanations. These gave her, repeating several times the word superstitions, that the two drivers repeated as an echo, exchanging knowing looks. So it was that the two suspected ancestors were from Sicily, or Naples, claiming various reasons, refused to leave.

To Prof. Ambrosini, accompanied by his inseparable case, we have to get on a train was waiting for a full day of travel. Everything would have gone smoothly if awakened from a nap, he had not noticed that the cash was gone. The car tried to train and finally found it in the middle of four individuals who had used as a table to play cards. Unaware, of course, to make a game "with the dead", and dead: a Nobel Prize. Comunqe both recovered. Finally arrived in Agrigento, the Odyssey of the case was not over yet. The bishop of the city Giovan Battista Peruzzo refused to give his blessing to a greek vase. No blessing, no solemn funeral: all the propaganda and political organization set up by DC Mayor went up in smoke. At the last moment, when the waiver of the funeral seemed inevitable, the bishop was persuaded to promise the blessing if the box with the ashes had been housed in a coffin Christian. But Cassamortaro of Agrigento had coffins ready, we had to settle for a small white coffin, of those children. But the case did not fit there. Then it was necessary to extract the jar and secure it to fit inside the small coffin. And so it was that finally Luigi Pirandello had his second funeral. In full regalia, as he never wanted.

THIRD THE FUNERAL. The vessel greek and his ashes were kept in the birthplace of Pirandello, waiting for the planned memorial dedicated to him was made in the locality Chaos, just below the famous pine tree to which the playwright was so fond But you know how things go in Italy, the work was finished only fifteen years later, in 1962. And so it was that the ashes of Pirandello had their final arrangement, and their third funeral. These civil and religious authorities, and cultural figures such as Salvatore Quasimodo, Leonardo Sciascia, an aluminum cylinder which had been emptied the ashes was first blessed and then walled up inside the monument.

EPILOGUE. But there's more. It is said that the charge of the transfer, an employee of the town known as Dr. Zirretta, had to sweat seven shirts to complete the operation. After so many years, twenty-six to be exact, the ashes were calcified within the vessel. Armed with chisel Zirretta, helped by a couple of assistants, reduced them again and poured the powder in the metal container. But the container was too small. It advanced a fair amount. What to do? He must have a light bulb turned on in the mind of the employee of the town of Agrigento. A light bulb, brilliant. He took the ashes left, poured in a newspaper and headed for a cliff nearby, overlooking the sea. But did not have time to get there: a gust of wind carried away the ashes. And so it was that the last will of Pirandello - my body just burned, were both left-release (at least in part) compliance.

All's well that ends well, you say. But it is not over yet. Because in 1994 it was discovered that the famous greek vase of the fifth century, preserved in the Museum of Agrigento St. Nicholas, still contained some 'ash of Pirandello. Evidently Dr. Zirretta chisel had not worked through. It was decided to refer the remains of the remains of Don Luigi examination of DNA. And, surprise, it was discovered that only a small portion of those ashes belonged to the Master. The remaining, most of that is, to other bodies, non-identifiable, which evidently had been cremated with him in 1936
Comforted by the science we can now say, Pirandello, who are and are not those ashes of Pirandello. And that metal buried in the urn of Chaos, along with Pirandello there are many other unknown people, the nobodies. As one said, no one hundred thousand.

Which Google Translate might better have translated
Uno, nessuno e centomila
, the title of perhaps the master's greatest novel. But why quibble after such a marvelous story?

Back to the source

2012-01-09T22:30:00.001-08:00

Eastside Road, January 9, 2012—

ALMOST EXACTLY TWO YEARS ago I posted an incomplete blog here. I was reminded of it today, when I got to thinking about exactly the same thing. Odd, that a profound feeling should emerge twice in the same season, two years apart. Then, it was because… well, you'll see. Today, perhaps it's because I'm thinking about a little trip we'll be taking in a few weeks, or maybe because suddenly there's been a raft of pop-journalism stories about Places You Should Visit. (One of them, according to one list, is Oakland, California. Well, why not.)

I'll begin by simply restating the two-years-ago post:

Sites

Eastside Road, January 29, 2010—

THERE ARE PLACES we have visited on various travels that have seemed very special, from a "medicine wheel" at 10,000 feet in Wyoming to the Fontaine de Vaucluse in Provence; from thestone-age city at Filitosa in Corsica to the Canyon de Chelley in Arizona. What all these places have in common is the not-verbally-articulable meaning they seem to offer to our visit: they speak to us, silently, about something we recognize without understanding, without even in any ordinary sense knowing.

I think about these places a lot, under any circumstances; but I've been thinking about them especially recently since I began transcribing my journal of a trip we took through Corsica and Sardinia over twenty years ago, in 1988. Here you have a photo of the spring at Su Gologone, in Sardinia. As these places go, the places I'm discussing I mean, it's pretty well manicured, turned almost into a park, with carefully planted willows and — hmm; what are those white-barked trees in a row? — and stone retaining walls and carefully graded walks contained by concrete curbs. Turn away from this view, though, and look out across the pool toward a grassy clearing among the trees, and we feel we're looking at a site that's been here relatively uninflected by recent human attention. It might have looked much like this a thousand years ago, two thousand, ten. This may be merely sentimental: even so, the feeling's worth thinking about.

Why does the place seem familiar, though I've never been here before? There are sensations here common to other such places: the calm air within these trees; the sounds of the water; the soft feel of the calm air on my skin. The place conspires to distract me from more specific and immediate issues: the car I've left in the parking lot, the few

AND THERE the blog post stopped, mid-sentence, and I have no idea where it was headed. And I've learned over the years to abandon these things: you can't retrieve them, certainly not at this distance. But as I say I was thinking along the same lines today, more specifically about pools: it's interesting how many of these profoundly moving sites have been at pools. Let me add three more:

Fontaine de Vaucluse: we visited this place quite a number of years ago — I'd always wanted to see it, but had somewhat feared the experience. Would it be the romantic, isolated, poetic place I'd imagined, and I'd imagined Petrarch writing about? (For to tell the truth I've hardly dipped into the great Italian sonneteer.)

The approach warned against this noble conceit. Many cars. Down-at-the-heels tourist café. Worst of all, rock climbers hanging from ropes and things, directly over the source. But none of this cancelled the curiously atavistic quality of actually seeing this miraculous place, where a river — the aptly named Sorgue — pours out from a large, mysterious hole at the base of a granite cliff. You can see Moses at work here, if you're biblically oriented.

The Fount of Arethusa: at the edge of Ortigia, the island just next to Siracusa, an improbable pool of fresh water not twenty feet from the salt Mediterranean, celebrated by poets from Virgil's time to ours. Like the Fontaine de Vaucluse, this is a much-visited site. The first day we saw it a woman was selling ices from her bicycle, and a group of high-school girls was listening to a lecture about the pool and its history and hydrology, in German, from a serious-looking young man in wire-rimmed glasses. As you see here, the site hasn't changed a lot in the last hundred years.

Cascade Vaimahuta, on the north coast of Tahiti Nui: Is it twenty years and more since we were there? Here's the journal entry:

Took bus around past Point Venus to Papenoo to see waterfall, walking to it a couple of miles up a paved road past little farm-settlements, with small offerings of fruits or eggs on forlorn tables for sale to chance bypassers; walked back to blowhole Arahoho; then hitchhiked back to Arue, catching a ride on the back of a pickup, shared with a grinning urchin who got out halfway there; bus back to Papeete.

It was our last day on the island, and the excursion could have cost us a lot: at the pool we remembered our plane would be taking off in a couple of hours. We were stunned to realize there was no return bus for many hours, and we were lucky to catch that ride.

Nothing to be frightened of

2011-12-30T13:21:00.001-08:00

So many books read this last year, so few of them commented on here. End-of-year reflections will haunt me for the next seven weeks, I'm sure — I'll be too busily distracted for them after that — so I won't anguish over my failure to share notes on Frederic Tuten, or Patrick Leigh Fermor, or Carolyn Brown, or Patti Smith, to cite only the most impressive of the authors I've learned from recently.

Instead I'll concentrate, for the moment, on a book uniquely appropriate to the season: Julian Barnes's Nothing to be Frightened Of (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). Barnes is better known as a novelist, I suppose, at the present moment at least, with his A Sense of Ending on the lists: I haven't read that yet, partly because I wanted to approach it through this earlier book, which is not fiction but memoir, meditation, and criticism — a conflation-medium I'm particularly attracted to these days. (One's late seventies launch an autumnal mood.)

Barnes was the second son of two teachers of French and French literature, and that language and literature are central, it seems, to his address to life, its observation and discussion. Nothing to be Frightened Of is a contemplation of a selected history of man's meditations on death — not many women's such meditations, be it noted, though a few do turn up — as a way, no doubt, of pinning down his own view of the matter. A consummate writer, Barnes writes, I believe, as the best writers do, in order to discover (or at least approach) resolutions of his own confusions, or misgivings, or as a friend said this morning apprehensions, about the subjects at hand: and what greater subject than death?

Death; dying; God; religion. Someone asked Thoreau, as he lay on his deathbed, if he had made his peace with God. "I hadn't realized we'd quarreled," he replied — at least that's how I recall the line. Googling it just now, I find it often quoted, but the source never cited.

(I do, though, find two other nice deathbed lines: When Voltaire was on his deathbed, a priest abjured him to accept Christ and renounce Satan. Voltaire replied, "Father, this is no time to be making enemies!"
As Talleyrand lay on his deathbed, he cried, "I suffer the torments of Hell!" A friend (I forget his name) sitting up with him replied, "Already?")

Barnes loops gracefully through confrontations with these four principal themes (death; dying; God; religion; remember?) and more; interweaving funny stories about his childhood and his philosopher brother (who, oddly, lives at the near geographical center of France in order to teach in Geneva); and considering similar confrontations by a number of minds of the highest ranks. The book is not indexed, which is a major flaw — especially in a book with the imprint of Alfred A. Knopf! — but my endpaper notes will provide an idea:

36 treacherous memory
38 childhood memory
40 Montaigne
47 Renard
54ff god out of art (art sans god)
61 fear of death (thanatophobia)
83 S. Maugham
86 Daudet: adieu, moi
95 Flaubert
97-8 d. of Daudet; of Sand, Braque
99 Title!
107 either you or I
108 Critics
117 The dead appear to the dying
121 Chabrier
124 Wharton, James, Turgenev, Falukner
132 Stravinsky
134 Edm. Wilson
138 memory is identity.
166 last words. Hegel. Dickinson.
185 meaning
189ff problem of eternal life
193 Rossini
195 Goethe
202 Shostakovich 14
209 flux

That last note, of course, sums it all up. There is nothing that is fixed, as Heraklitus famously noted. Acceptance of death, which is to say acceptance of life, is acknowledgement of flux. If it's true, as Emerson notes in his essay "Circles," that

…this incessant movement and progression, which all things partake, could never become sensible to us, but by contrast to some principle of fixture or stability in the soul. While the eternal generation of circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides.
—quoted by Ross Posnock in his review of American Nietzsche by Jennifer Ramer-Rosenhagen, The Nation, Nov. 21, 2011

it is also true that these principles of fixture are site-specific to "the soul", are individual and unique and not fungible, are there for purposes of convenience only: and life (and its apparent extinction) are not there for convenience. Emerson goes on to note "Life is a series of surprises": those who yearn for stability, certainty, reassurance, are denying the essence of life.

Barnes gives a good deal of attention to Jules Renard, "one of my dead, French, non-blood relatives," known to students of elementary French in my day (the 1950s, in this context) simply as the author of Poil de carotte but much more significant (and influential
on literature) as a memoirist. Clearly Renard has been a muse for Barnes, providing him with both details for contemplation and a model for its practice and expression.

Such influence or inspiration is linked, I think, to the subject at hand, for what Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence" (in a book by that title, which I haven't yet read, perhaps fearing to be influenced by it) — the fear or apprehension that influence will dull individuality — is related to the apprehension of death. Both are rooted in a mistaken notion of identity, which notion is one of the most seductive, therefor sinister, of the "principles of fixture" Emerson concedes to us.

I sometimes think we are, at best, like books. I bought this copy of Nothing to be Frightened Of at Title Wave, the deaccessioning outlet of the Portland (Oregon) Public Library, and I'm off this afternoon to lend it to an ailing friend. Human thought about existence and its consequences, from Epicurus to Shostakovich, go with the book, with Barnes. I'll print out a copy of this post and tuck it into the endpaper: perhaps it will be read, perhaps not. So it goes.

Query

2011-12-29T23:57:00.001-08:00

Looking at what you've just done, the critics ask what's in it for them, for their immediate entertainment or information; and maybe -- maybe -- what's in it for their moment.

The historians will ask how it continues what you've done before, and how it fits into your era.

But you, why have you done it?

Twelfth Night

2011-12-17T09:14:00.000-08:00

Pasadena, December 17—

MY FAVORITE OF ALL Shakespeare plays — I know, it's a ridiculous formulation — is Twelfth Night. It has some of the most affecting poetry; its large cast includes some of his most memorable, complex characters; the narrative is interesting enough on its most literal level (even after all these viewings), and Is particularly rich with extended meaning.

Last night we saw a fine performance in A Noise Within's new theater here. Julia Rodriguez-Elliott set her production in a (probably) pre-Castro Cuba, which mostly worked just fine. (Short Cuban dance numbers replaced Shakespeare's songs.) Twelfth Night always suggests Sicily to me — Viola is from Messina, as I recall — and Cuba is our Sicily, in a way: exotic, free-wheeling, fantastic.

I peck these comments out on my iPad keyboard without time for extensive discussion, so won't go into detail. anoisewithin.org will provide the credits, and I'll simply note here each actor seemed well cast and approached the assignment with intelligence, interest, skill, and sympathy; "small" roles were as beautifully and tellingly fleshed out as big ones.

(This meant, for example, that Antonio was able to emerge, correctly, as the pivot on which so much extended meaning of this great play turns.)

The company is still tuning its approach to this spacious yet cozy, beautiful new venue, but there's no doubt of the outcome. We like the hall, the company, the seriousness of purpose and the vitality and humor of approach and achievement. What will tonight's Desire Under the Elms be like?

Satyagraha

2011-12-07T23:32:00.001-08:00

Wow: Googling around while relaxing in that twenty minutes before bedtime I find this:

Se Reich e' l'Haydn del minimalismo, Adams ne e' il Mozart, gia' teso ad un geniale, e talvolta irriverente, superamento del classicismo.

The other night we went to the "Live TV broadcast" or whatever they call it from the Metropolitan Opera to the local charter-school auditorium, rather an ambitions building, of Philip Glass's opera Satyagraha. If Reich is the Haydn and Adams the Mozart, then Glass, at least in this opera, is the Verdi of minimalism. No: let me quickly amend that. In some scenes he's the Verdi; in others, notably the great closing scene, he's one of the Richard Strausses.

We saw the opera once before, and can't remember where and when. Probably the San Francisco Opera production, though my visual memory of the event suggests a different house. This season's Met production is very different, what you might call second-generation Robert Wilson, tricked out with immense puppets and aerialists and such. It's hard to tell from the absurd film-as-cosmos style of these movie-theater broadcasts just what the impact in the real theater might have been: the film production alternates between close-ups, long shots, and side-to-side pans, sometimes in a tempo so quick and a sequence so unpredictable and chaotic as to leave at least this onlooker physically confused.

I've railed so many times about these collisions of scale — the amplified string quartet as loud as three Wagner orchestras; the soprano's face as big as four billboards — that I hate to harp on it yet again. But this is a serious matter, folks: scalar confusions of this sort not only physically confound the audience's entrails, throwing them into a nauseated discomfort warning of impending doom; they also misrepresent the point of the message at hand — in this case, a very beautifully conceived and proportioned masque representing Ghandi's discovery of his purpose, the principle of nonviolent resistance, the forward-looking triumph of good sense and comprehension over stubborn authority and oppressiveness. Glass's opera is all sensitivity, grace, introspection, receptivity; this video production of his opera lurches, insists, moons, cajoles.

The singing was mostly first-rate. I don't know if anyone could have bettered Richard Croft's performance as Ghandi; that closing scene, though long, floated beautifully; it was hard to let it go.

But what must poor Phil have thought of the Met's including long excerpts of Wagner's Ring in the second intermission? I suppose you can argue there's historical precedent here; two centuries ago it wasn't uncommon to play comedies in the intervals of opera seria. But Wagner?

Recognizing the Midtone

2011-12-02T12:32:00.001-08:00

Berkeley, December 2, 2011—

SITTING IN A CAFÉ over a cappuccino I have no time to write here properly, but I want to call attention to an important paper by my friend Douglas Leedy, who as well as being a composer of significant and often beautiful music is a scholar of the first rank.

His area of specialization is of course music, and his knowledge of the subject extends far and wide. He has at various times and places been a player of French horn (including stints with symphony orchestras in Oakland, California, and Caracas, Venezuela); a keyboard player (chiefly harpsichord); a conductor (chiefly of music of the Baroque era); and of course a composer.

He made extensive visits, often amounting to residencies, in Poland, India, and Venezuela. He has taught at Reed College and the University of ~~Southern~~ California in Los Angeles, where he founded the electronic music studio.

In recent years he has pursued an intensive study of ancient Greek, which has led him to conclude that among the early Greek poets, certainly through Pindar, poetry and music are essentially synonymous; and that our fuller understanding (or, better, awareness) of their work requires an attempt to reconstruct the sound of their sung poetry.

This has led him to a determined, highly disciplined, and to my limited understanding quite persuasive account, still evolving hence not yet publicly available, of exactly how to go about singing Homer today, accompanied by instruments readily available in our own time.

Alas, I can't share his Reconstructing Greek Music yet. I can however announce that an example of Leedy's thorough scholarship and gracefully persuasive writing on another subject is available.

Recognizing the Midtone addresses a musical interval important throughout history and across continents but lost to the familiar Western European "classical" tradition. Leedy presents an abstract of his essay:

Recognized as a melodic interval in the musical scales of the ancient Greeks, the three- quarter tone, or so-called “neutral” second, is a fundamental melodic interval, along with the tone and semitone of the Western diatonic scale, in present-day musical cultures that extend eastward in an arc from northwest Africa along the Mediterranean to Egypt and the Near East, the former Burma, much of southeast Asia, and Indonesia. For this interval, which is incommensurate with the tone and semitone (and which is, for example, considered to exert a powerfully expressive effect in classical Arab melody), the more autonomous name of midtone is here proposed, along with a parallel renaming of other “neutral” intervals. An overview of the use and significance of the midtone in a number of musical cultures is presented, with references to recordings, published studies, and musical notation, as well as to its occasional, exotic appearance in Western classical music.

I am pleased to have participated a bit in the presentation of this important essay, and I hope that its online publication will be followed by other papers of his.

Charles and Lindsey Engage in Dialectic

2011-11-26T14:36:00.000-08:00

For no particular reason I recalled this little poem this morning:

Charles and Lindsey Engage in Dialectic

Grizzly bear and mountain lion at play —
Crushing, his logic: cutting, her touché.
—Ray Oliver

For Daidie's Seventieth

2011-11-07T15:44:00.001-08:00

Eastside Road, November 7, 2011—

A FEW DAYS AGO friends came to dinner and to discuss a little project we're working on together; I don't want to talk about it too much at the moment as it's in process.

At one point one of them asked, point-blank, What are your three basic values? Quick, answer, don't think!

And I said, quickly, Attentiveness, Reflection, Enjoyment.

And then the other said And what are the real Indispensables?

And I said Generosity and Gratitude.

These have always seemed to me to be the minimum and necessary qualities for good life, but I was a little surprised at how readily I was able to express them. I think it was because I was already thinking, had already been thinking, if subconsciously, about the attributes I associate with a friend and colleague who had invited us to a birthday party — a seventieth. At the back of my mind I was probably contemplating the likelihood of proposing a toast to her.

We'd already prepared a card for her, with this photograph of a line of trees in our beloved Low Countries. It stands between the villages of Leuth and Zwyllich, not far from Nijmegen, almost exactly halfway along the Pieterpad, the walking path that crosses Netherlands from north to south, about 400 kilometers. I've walked past those poplars three times (Lindsey only once, that's another story), and each time they, and the path, and the canal they border, which runs along the Rhine at that point, move me tremendously. I suppose they represent for me the wonderful collaboration of man and nature, and of course they're a midpoint; they also happen to mark the boundary at that point between two nations, Netherlands and Germany. But the trees I think know nothing of that.

The road offers the same length to everyone, though some choose to walk more or less of it than others do. It takes us where we want to go, and though we could very well turn round and take it back some distance few of us ever do, and then rarely for more than a little. The sky is open to all of us, to all of us equally; and the trees in their wisdom stand on the earth reaching into the sky, as far as they know to reach, that far and no farther, to nearly the same distance, all of them. They choose, I think, to know that much, finding it essential for some reason I don't know, and finding it inessential to know more.

It was a wonderful party, and we were pleased and a little honored to have been invited.

Nearly Ninety

2011-11-02T10:47:00.001-07:00

Palo Alto, November 2, 2011–

Extraordinarily rewarding, finally moving performance here last night of Merce Cunningham's Nearly Ninety2, the final work of the American choreographer whose career, I think, puts him in the category of Picasso, Joyce, Einstein, and his own partner John Cage among the greatest minds of his century.

Cunningham died, at ninety, a few months after the premiere of this work, two years ago; and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company has been making a final memorial tour in the intervening time. (The curtain comes down permanently on the company on December 31, 2011.) The farewell tour has been unique among recent MCDC tours for its revival – "reconstruction" is their preferred and, in fact, more accurate word – of pieces from the repertory, going back to the 1950s. I think last night's performance gained from this retrospection. It's always hard to tell which of many factors is prominent in determining one's understanding, during the event, of as complex an observation of a work like Nearly Ninety2 , of course: scored for thirteen dancers, each of whom is a soloist at one time or another, its 24 sections unfold in eighty minutes, without an intermission, in a spellbinding sequence of solos, duets, quartets, and ensembles, fleetingly fast and glacially slow by unexpected turns, in a series of contemplations, I would guess, of the four elements; for this is an elemental ballet, going to the essence of what it is "about": the body in motion, which of course includes the body at rest.

This is, also of course, a matter of life and death. And, not to be recursive, that makes retrospection, especially in the contemplation of this great body of work, now closed in one very important sense, an inescapable component of responding, as an onlooker, to this performance – as it happened, the final performance by MCDC of Merce's final work, though a number of performances of other pieces remain to be given in the next two months.

I recently read Carolyn Brown's big, important, and rewarding memoir Chance and Circumstance (as felicitous a piece of writing as its intelligent title suggests), and that reading, so informative about Merce and John (and Rauschenberg and others) and about the early years of the Company, must be influential as well in responding to last night's performance. I thought I saw Merce himself, in flashes, in Raschaun Mitchell's strong, stately, athletic, intelligent performances, and Carolyn Brown in those of Andrea Weber, sober, graceful, lithe, and equally intelligent.

Brown writes often, both directly and allusively, about the possible role of "meaning" in Merce's work. (These contemplations, usually either foolish or forbidden in other commentators, are among the historically significant aspects of her book.) A choreographer cannot evade consideration of the place of sex – I refuse the word "gender" – in setting his work on his dancers, and a big part of the impact of Merce's choreography, not to mention the dancers' realization of it, has to be the expression of that consideration. Sex and Life and Death, motion and stillness: big matters, to be returned to, the fates willing, in forthcoming visits here.

Gordon Cook

2011-10-29T23:01:00.001-07:00

Eastside Road, October 29, 2011—

IT'S TOO LATE to tell you about it; the show closed today; but the work of Gordon Cook has found its way to a new home in San Francisco's George Krevsky Gallery.

Born in Chicago in 1929, Cook came to San Francisco in his very early twenties, working at first exclusively as a realist printmaker specializing in botanical subjects, moving on to figure drawing, finally, after his marriage to the painter Joan Brown, developing his unique qualities as a painter.

It does him no disservice to mention that his paintings inescapably bring Chirico and Morandi to mind. His palette, lighting, edges, scale, and composition refer to their sense of dramatic realism, enigmatic statement, quasi-enchanted awareness; but the subjects — boats in the low Sacramento Delta light, gas tanks at the Richmond refinery, even the featureless Amish dolls — all convey a sense of specific place.

Guston is here too, in the curiously vulnerable, clearly humanistic content of his images, at first encounter utterly removed from subjective emotion, later growing in sympathetic resonance.

I once had a heated discussion with Cook: I was trying to persuade him of the possibility of painting from imagination, thinking up forms, even subject-matter, that didn't exist in fact. No, he said, That would be absolutely immoral; one can't legitimately paint objects that one hasn't actually seen.

So in order to paint his stick figures, men rowing boats, silhouetted kissing couples, he first actually made them, using thin wood, cardboard, glue, and paints of course. His sculpture is in fact maquettes made for posing for their portraits: he brings the concentrated gaze of the figure-painter (and, even more, draftsman) to the contemplation of the bulk, edge, directionality, even purpose of these three-dimensional inventions.

On another occasion, shortly before his early death in 1985, I sat in on a talk he gave to a number of graduate painting students at Mills College. One asked him about the repeated canvases depicting that gas tank in Richmond: why did he paint it over and over again?

My dealer asks me that too, Cook replied. Then, more seriously: I'm just trying to get it right.

What I love about the painting of the San Francisco Bay region, at its peak, among other things, perhaps most of all, is its morality, its ethics. Gordon Cook was among the most persuasively pure practitioners of any of them. His work, like his example, is haunting, and it's good to see it out there again. An artist of enormous presence and import, clear-thinking, poised, whose work has the compact kind of energy we usually call power. The exhibition has closed; images remain on view here.

Painting

2011-10-21T12:59:00.001-07:00

Eastside Road, October 21, 2011—

The San Francisco Bay area has long been one of the most significant American locales for painting, certainly since the middle of the last century, in fact going back at least half a century before then. There are interesting cultural, geographical, and historical reasons for this; we needn't go into them here. Suffice it to point out that an unusual combination of pioneer spirit and genteel tradition was almost immediately at the center of the Northern California mentality (for a brilliant study on this theme, see William Everson's Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region); that relative isolation with occasional exposure to European Modernism allowed that mentality to respond to the local natural and societal stimuli; and that by the time of the post-world War II years, when the GI Bill allowed many gifted artists of other than rich backgrounds the time and setting for their own personal development, a génie de terroir, so to speak, had already been well developed.

My own years as an active observer of the scene, from the late 1960s on for twenty years, coincided with the tremendous expansion of the Bay Area art scene from a marginal, almost underground activity, treated seriously in the newspapers but hardly known to any but real devotees of the art, to its present amplitude, with galleries in shopping malls, art school campuses everywhere, and almost total neglect in the few remaining news outlets. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the painters who had attained their mastery in the late 1950s and early 1960s remain my heroes, artists who dedicated their lives to painting in a context of almost total neglect by all but their own colleagues.

Few of them are still living: Frank Lobdell is perhaps the last. Even among what I think of as the second generation, painters my own age, now in their late seventies, slip away with melancholy regularity. Nathan Oliveira, for example: a marvelous painter and teacher (Stanford for many years) and a very nice man. He died nearly a year ago — there's a fine obituary by John Seed on the Huffington Post website — but we saw the memorial exhibition at the John Berggruen Gallery a few days ago: it closes tomorrow, October 22, but the website will, I hope, continue to present its forty-two images of the paintings and sculpture on view for a few weeks to come.

The last works are striking: the familiar Oliveira figurative images isolated against glowing grounds in his characteristic warm but muted, sometimes even darkened oranges, reds, maroons, ochres. Many of these figures stand (or, occasionally, dance, or skate) next to a single line, an edge — shadow, or skin, or crack of light in a doorway? Others have auras, or long hair bending back from the head as if the essence of the figure is escaping toward an unknown (or, perhaps, being breathed into the figure from that unknown).

It's impossible to see these late works, I think, without musing on the painter's own death so soon after completing them. Yet earlier canvases here, going back to the 1980s, not to mention drawings and watercolors going back a further twenty years, reveal this haunting meditative quality to be Oliveira's fixation, his constant orientation to his work, as his work is apparently his constant orientation to life, to his own individualization of the human condition.

Even the work that seems to stray from this — the paintings and bronzes that seem to confront relics from neglected or abandoned civilizations, reminding me of pavements left over from ancient Mediterranean sites — even these merely extend the personal expression toward a more universalized one. Oliveira's work, like that of his friend the (still living, thank God) sculptor Manuel Neri, remind the viewer of the affinity of the Mediterranean sensibility with that of the Bay Area, as if the Californio years were not lost on our cultural inheritance, and continues to haunt if not energize this very moving work.

Last week we saw also another moving gallery exhibition, of drawings, drawings with collage, and a few paintings by Jay DeFeo, truly one of the great painter-heroes of our time. I knew her slightly; we taught together for a time at Mills College, where I sat in on her beginning painting class now and then. (Alas, I never learned to be a painter.) The current exhibition at the Hosfelt Gallery closes, unfortunately, tomorrow, like Oliveira's at the Berggruen; I'm sorry not to have been able to get to commenting on these shows earlier.

At the Hosfelt there's a particularly arresting painting, Bride, from 1986. The title has inescapable Duchampian overtones, of course; and thinking about that, and about Jay's unique intelligence which rests at the intersection of seeing and contemplation, goes a long way toward explaining the central position her life and work intuitively seem to occupy in the late-twentieth-century context of visual art, not only locally, but internationally.

Fortunately, the Jay DeFeo Trust maintains a fine website and works passionately to further awareness of this important artist whose early death — she was only sixty — otherwise threatened to leave her in obscurity in a cultural climate increasingly rewarding more trivial, flashier entertainers. The Whitney Museum will produce a major DeFeo retrospective next November; I hear it will travel to San Francisco; it will be a major, major event.

I don't like to snatch images from the Web and re-post them here; you never know what's copyright, what's freely offered for second-hand retailing. I urge any visitor here to follow up the links embedded here — even better, of course: get to the galleries tomorrow.

Nathan Oliveira Memorial Exhibition, John Berggruen Gallery, 228 Grant Avenue, San Francisco; (415) 781-4629; Mon-Fri 9:30am–5:30pm; Sat 10:30am–5pm; through October 22; catalogue available

Jay DeFeo, 430 Clementina Street, San Francisco;415-495-5454; Tue-Sat 11-5:30; through October 22

Steve Jobs

2011-10-09T23:19:00.001-07:00

Eastside Road, October 9, 2011—

LOTS OF RESPONSE in the blogsphere, in the media, even in conversation, about the death last week of Steve Jobs. There's not much question but that in death as in life he was a touchstone, just as was his computer. It's odd how passionately people align themselves for or against certain forces, which is what I think he truly was. You were either a Mac person, or you were not. Apple or PC: like Fitzgerald or Hemingway, National League or American League, in my father's time General Motors or Ford.

Since so many have had so much to say, I'll chime in, in three comments: personal, appreciative, more general.

First: I'm a Mac man. My first computer was a Radio Shack Model 100, which let me see eight lines of type at a time, no matter how much copy I'd written, and then send it, marvel of marvels, over a telephone to the office. I taught myself a little Basic with that machine, too, to use it for various other things. I even began typing out Lindsey's book on it, saving sections to tape cassettes, but that quickly grew too clunky.

So I graduated to a real desktop, a Morrow. Here I began dealing with arcane line-item entries, saving to drive A or drive B, always dealing with terminal commands. The rest of the book got typed out, and even printed, on one of those daisy-wheel jobs on paper with perforated tear-off margins. It was enough to drive you nuts.

Then, in 1986 I think it was, I bought a Mac Plus. The primary reason for this was to take a class in computer composition. Instead of terminal commands, I was mousing, pointing, clicking. I could write music on five-line staffs; I could copy sections, transpose or augment or retrograde them, layer them. I could hear the music played back on an internal synthesizer. And of course I could print it out, too.

Since I've always been intrigued by typefaces and page design, the Mac appealed to me. Soon I learned about Hypercard, and could give up Basic and design little applications of my own to handle other chores concerned with databases, calculation, design, and composition. It didn't hurt that I never had to think about computer viruses. I have remained loyal to Macintosh ever since, going through the AV series desktop, various laptops beginning with the first, and working now on an iMac, an iBook, and of course the iPhone and the iPad, which have served me well on travels abroad.

So I am thankful to Steve Jobs for having had the vision to reify, in hardware and software, practical approaches to computer-based handling of music, graphics, text layout and so on, weathering the scorn of business- and science-oriented criticism that Apple was somehow "only" about games, or art, or hobbies.

Second: Jobs himself was apparently inspired by two or three things that meant a lot to me, too (and I hasten to state that I'm not setting myself up as an unsung Jobs). He was brought up by parents who were skeptical of formal education, though in the end they helped him enter college. His own college career was similarly skeptical and cut short. (I finished, but took a number of years, and turns, before managing.) He was fond of tinkering and learned a lot about that from his dad. When he did go to college — Reed College, in Portland — he was particularly inspired by studying calligraphy.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
quoted from Jobs' 2005 commencement address at Stanford, as posted here

In this context, Lindsey brought to my attention a comment made by Malcolm Margolin in the 2009-10 Annual Report of Save the Bay:

…I think that at Save The Bay's root there was something else besides a concern for the environment — it was a concern for beauty. There was something about the fact that people looked out the window and realized the spectacular, poignant, transformative beauty of the Bay. This is what they wanted to preserve — the sense of living in a beautiful place that restored you on a daily basis — the respect for beauty. Today, Save The Bay is rooted in science, environmentalism, social concerns, social justice. But there is still the beauty that inspires this whole enterprise.
"50 Years of Making Waves," 2009-2010 Annual Report of Save the Bay, as posted here, page 6

I believe that Jobs's fundamental sensibility was that of an artist, a maker, a poet, a player; and that it was this that made him misunderstood and, to an extent, scorned by the mainstream worlds of business and the media.

Obviously the history of Apple Computing after its early successes went mainstream in its turn; it's now famously one of the richest corporations in the country. Obviously critics are justified who decry the extent to which such success exploits cheap labor, oppressive working conditions, corporate secrecy and all that. But I think it's a mistake to extrapolate from those observations the idea that Jobs was simply a hypocrite. (Nor do I, or anyone I know, have any idea the extent to which Apple's corporate decisions concerning retained earnings, global marketing and sourcing, and the like were driven exclusively by Jobs, rather than his board of directors.)

What I like about Steve Jobs is that his brilliance was fully in service of a consistent vision: the extension of technological tools to people who simply want them to work in applications concerned with art, entertainment, design, communication, and the like; rather than (more narrowly) statistics, mathematics, physics, and computation. I'm aware a number of people I know manage to use the Windows operating system, on their PC personal computers, to pursue their work in the liberal arts; I hope they realize the extent to which Apple pushed Microsoft in that direction.

Third: All that said, the tremendous, global, across-the-classes outpouring of comment on Jobs's death was extraordinary. I doubt that Jobs would have liked it much, though he might have been wryly amused. As usual, the media reacted far too heavily, too quickly: but that's in the nature of the media.

More interesting was the huge amount of popular expression of love, grief, thanks, and then to an extent repudiation. I think there are two basic reasons for this outpouring, one nationalistic, the other psychological. The nationalistic one is simple: at a time when America seems to be losing its storied leadership in can-do, inventive, meteoric entrepreneurship, it's great to be reminded of a recent personification of all that, and distressing to lose him.

Psychologically, at a time when there's so little to pin your faith on, when governments and banks, corporations, the military, even Mother Nature herself seem to be letting us down at every turn, people the world over seek heroes who manage to counter such obstacles, who rise from little more than their own ideas and hard work, who embody a kind of optimism and drive.

After Mozart it was impossible to go on composing like Mozart. Jobs was no Mozart: he was more like a Cage, a Duchamp, a Stein. He, and his work, challenged the assumptions, picked up neglected ideas and reconfigured them to useful approaches. In the course of this he attracted partisans and detractors; neither camp has much to do with the historical necessity and the eventual impact of what he imagined and achieved. What comes next, remains to be seen.

The Pleasures of Travel

2011-09-23T22:44:00.001-07:00

San Jose, California, September 23, 2011—

WE VIRTUALLY NEVER visit this city, the largest in the Bay Area, the third-largest in California (after Los Angeles and San Diego, and well ahead of San Francisco). And so I always forget how different it is from our usual haunts. The climate and demographic are different. The difference sets in as you travel down the Peninsula, whose smaller cities and towns — San Mateo, Palo Alto, Redwood City — seem more like Southern California than the Bay Area.

We're here for two nights, for entirely cultural reasons, as a friend wryly pointed out. Last night we saw Mozart's Idomeneo, a great opera all too rarely produced; tonight we go to the opening of an art exhibition for which I wrote a modest (very) catalogue essay. In between, a runout to Berkeley for an appointment; tomorrow, on our way home, a cruise on the Bay.

Before I get to Mozart, a few comments on the hotel. I keep a list of restaurants we eat in, updating it every month or so; I haven't until now thought of doing the same with hotels. We generally use Priceline to reserve hotels, because we like our hotels cheap: we sleep cheap, in order to eat dear. Sometimes we book conventionally, but we often use the blind "bidding" process, by which one chooses area, star level, and names a price, content to take what's dealt.

That's what we did this time, and the result has been rather a delightful find, the San Jose Airport Garden Hotel. This is a cluster of five or six twostorey buildings, each on the order of an ordinary Motel Six I suppose, surrounding a complex of lawns, pool, exercise rooms and the like. The "gardens" are set about with fountains and statues, and the lobby and corridors are hung with dozens, scores, perhaps hundreds of framed prints and paintings, all collected by a single former owner, a Persian with a curious eye attracted to gods, goddesses, philosophers, birds, and botany.

Statues, or at any rate reproductions of statues, reflect Greek, Egyptian, and Indian antiquity. One corridor boasts at least two dozen prints of good quality all of birds, and those on only one of the two long walls. Our own little bedroom boasts two original oil paintings, not particularly interesting: a Dutch or Belgian twostorey house by the side of a country lane and a vase of dahlias painted in high-relief impasto. But there is also quite a nice botanical print of anemones with leaves, flowers, and buds in various stages of maturity, nicely triple-matted and framed in plain oak.

The hotel has a history: it was the first Hyatt hotel in Northern California, built in the early 1960s. (So I was told by the present manager here.) It's surprising to be reminded that Hyatt hotels have not always been everywhere, and have not always been the interchangeable manystoreyed metropolitan behemoths so familiar today; a lot has changed since the Eisenhower administration.

We just came in from a decent Martini by the swimming pool. Although the cocktail hour, we were alone except for two jet-black squirrels and one grey one, tame enough to come when I called them by clack-clack-clacking tongue between teeth.

On, this evening, to an opening at the Triton Museum of Art, where Kenjilo Nanao is being given a mini-retrospective, along with Jamie Brunson and Heather Wilcoxon. I'd met Brunson many years ago; she recalled tonight that I was one of the first to review her work in the press; I liked the work here a lot — meditative yet retinally jumpy painting with very strong colors, monochrome, setting up persistent after-images.

I liked Wilcoxon's paintings too: in the Roy DeForest tradition, clearly post-Guston as well, intelligent and sassy and slyly organized behind their seemingly frenetic surfaces and subject-matter. (You can see this work at the Triton website.)

But it was of course Kenji's painting that brought us here, and they are magnificent under the strong white light in the museum gallery. As Preston Metcalf points out in the catalogue, Nanao mediates, or rather transcends the differences between, Abstract Expressionism and color-field abstraction. As I point out, the work is essentially landscape, or at least can be so read. It is sumptuous, rich, allusive, and utterly egoless, serene yet full of energy.

The main inspiration for this trip, though, was San Jose Opera's production of Idomeneo. Mozart composed it in 1780, just before his 25th birthday; it is his biggest opera, for a big orchestra, a huge cast; it is probably the last opera of its kind, to a libretto celebrating regal largesse — a piece that says goodbye to the Age of Kings.

Idomeneo was himself the King of Crete: returning from the Trojan War, victorious, he runs into a terrible storm at sea; pleading with Neptune for clemency, he vows to sacrifice to the god the first person — or creature, accounts vary — he sees on landing safe on shore. The first creature turns out to be his own son, of course: this is a version of the Abraham-and-Isaac story.

The opera was beautifully conducted, by George Cleve; very well sung, by a young, ardent cast; effectively staged; and set within a production owing a great deal to David Packard, whose archaeological enthusiasms and considerable resources combined to stage the action in quite persuasive reconstructions of the extroardinary beauties of the Minoan culture. Last year's tour of Sicily (speaking of the pleasures of travel) prepared us for enhanced enjoyment of this production, which should certainly travel to other opera houses.

As to the opera itself, it is a magnificent musical monument and, in a production like this, performed as credibly as this, a work full of matter for contemplation. We're reminded that in all ages the gods are narratives constructed by the human mind to personify natural impacts & influences on the human experience. They are organized according to the prevailing social structural needs & assumptions: i.e. tribal-pagan, regal-monotheistic, etc.

Idomeneo is a transitional and decadent narrative: why was it appealing to a late 18th c. nobleman (Karl Theodor, Elector of Bavaria), who commissioned it for performance at a court carnival? The opera is about a king who errs (though through piety), but is forgiven and allowed to abdicate in favor of the son he was bent on but released from sacrificing: aren't there interesting subliminal correspondences between this and the plot of, for example, The Marriage of Figaro? What an interesting period this was, the fourteen years between the American War for Independence and the fall of the Bastille!

Four Saints in Three Acts

2011-08-20T14:23:00.001-07:00

Eastside Road, August 20, 2011—

WE SAW the Stein-Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts last night in San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center, where it was performed by Ensemble Parallele, about which company I wrote enthusiastically here a while back in connection with the Philip Glass opera Orphée. I don't have time at the moment to write more than that I think you should see this if you possibly can; it's one of the great operas not only of the 20th century but of any, and productions are rare, and this one is worth seeing. I'll have more to say about the production, and the opera, in a few days.

Virgil Thomson on Audience Sensitivity

2011-08-11T22:37:00.001-07:00

FOR NO PARTICULAR REASON except that I just ran across it, while looking for something else, here's a piece I wrote for the Oakland Tribune on September 2, 1979:

APTOS--"Why can't musicians compose what audiences want to hear?"

The anguished question was directed toward a six-composer panel at the Cabrillo Festival here last week, and it stated a problem composers have faced for decades.
There's a continual distrust of new music. It's a joke, or it's too abstruse, or ugly. "My kid could make noises like that."

All six composers at the panel agreed that they didn't set out to compose music that audiences wouldn't want to hear. But it took 83-year-old Virgil Thomson to dissect the question with his scalpel-like intellect.

"The trouble is, 'audience' is a collective noun. You have to be very careful when you throw that word around. Audiences respond as a group. (That's why record reviewing is spiteful; because it's solitary.)"

At this point Garret List, a young trombonist-composer straddling new music and jazz, interrupted Thomson: "Who do you write for?" Thomson continued to elaborate his point:

"An 'audience' figures as sociology and economics, not esthetics."
Garret List wasn't listening. "Who do you write for, Virgil? Virgil?" He snapped his fingers to get Thomson's attention.

"No one knows what an audience is going to like," Thomson continued. "Or what a management can sell to an audience. And audiences are bullied. And we can only know what an 'audience' liked last year.

"There are fashions, trends--in orchestral tricks, or whatever--that follow unconscious folklore patterns. They are very hard to predict.'

He never let on that he'd heard List, but suddenly answered him.

"Gertrude (Stein) used to say, 'I write for myself and strangers."' List nodded agreement. So did the others.

"I am the listener I puzzle over when I'm composing," Eric Stokes said.

"Exactly," said Thomson. "And any passage that bores you a tiny little bit will bore others more. You can bet on it."

Which brought up another question: did these composers aim at complex or simple music?

"Simplicity," Lou Harrison said. "I always remember something Schoenberg told me when I studied with him: 'Nothing but the essentials."'

"Depends on the music," Thomson elaborated. "If I aim consciously it's toward simplicity where possible; but if complexity is necessary, not to fear it. I tend to think music isn't finished if you can subtract anything without injury. Music is a complex affair; the more we can simplify it, maybe, the better."

Some one asked about foundation grants.

"I think we had a more independent attitude before," Harrison answered. "Post-Depression young people can't conceive of grubbing."

The young composers disagreed. Foundation grants are "a lottery," List said. "There's not enough money."

"There are more composers now," Stokes pointed out.

But they allowed that they made a living somehow. How do composers make a living, someone in the audience wanted to know.

"The answer to that question is that it's none of your business how we make a living," Thomson replied. "How we compose is another matter."

There was laughter, then silence. Then, in a rare burst of emotion, Thomson summed it all up. He pointed toward something overhead; the small silent gesture galvanized the audience and panel.

"Calling," he announced. "We're playing a game of life or death. We must find ways of answering the calling--or choose death."

Mount Tamalpais

2011-08-05T23:38:00.001-07:00

Looking east from the Temelpa trail, Mt. Tamalpais

THE FIRST STRENUOUS WALK of the year, far too long delayed: from Mountain Home, on Panoramic Highway in Mill Valley, up the old railroad grade past West Point Inn and on up to the East Peak; then down through the garrigue on the Temelpa trail to various fire roads and so back to the starting point.

I think this took about four hours or so all told, plus a half hour nibbling and resting at the summit. Glorious views, but of course hardly any can really be photographed.

The fire roads, and the old railroad grade, are comfortable but not terribly interesting walking: but they give fine views, especially over the luminous greys of fog out toward sea. There was too much haze to see much distance: in this photo you can barely make out Mt. Diablo to the east. The narrow Temelpa trail reminded me often of walking in Alpes de Provence, except that the smell is completely different. Is the oregano and thyme and lavender in the Provençal garrigue, I wonder, feral escapees from Greek gardens of 2500 years ago? Will the same happen here, a thousand years hence?

Early August

2011-08-04T23:08:00.000-07:00

No moon. The crickets
or whatever they are sing,
mindful of Late Works.

Blue language

2011-08-01T22:18:00.001-07:00

Eastside Road, —

I'VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT language lately. No surprise there; language is one of my constant preoccupations. But specifically I've been thinking about what we used to call blue language, bad language, and its greatly increased presence in our daily life. It may not surprise you to learn that it's the Internet, and in particular Facebook, that's brought the subject so to mind.

Like many people my age, I suppose — I've long since entered my eighth decade — one of my main reasons for being on Facebook (and no, please don't look for me, the last thing I need is more Facebook “friends”) is to look in on the grandchildren. In the course of doing that, of course, I see comments posted by their friends. There are also the various nieces and nephews. And a number of them (not so much my direct descendants, I hasten to say) use language I find quite disturbing.

Now there's no question I'm a prig. I use the occasional four-letter word myself, but not that often. It still startles me to hear a woman swear. My mother never did, and the only time I've heard my wife use a four-letter word was years ago when, pushed to the limit, she suggested I go to hell. (When she pronounced the word it sounded like a place name; you could hear the capital “H”.)

I wonder as I read all these words what words these people use when they really need bad language. If they shut the car door on their thumb, for example: do they use the same word they use to describe a momentary annoyance?

I know: what most people intend these days, certainly what younger people intend, by the use of such language, is not what people of my generation or my parents' generation meant. Language changes, shifts. Declines, in fact, I would say, at least in this case. (I meant no pun there: sorry, grammarians.) But it's as hard for me to hear these words as inoffensive as it was, in remote antiquity, to hear soprano saxophones substitute for high trumpets in recordings of Brandenburg Concertos.

It's also true that people are more traveled these days, and different languages have different attitudes to this subject. The Dutch, for example, use what I think of as four-letter words to describe ordinary matters and events met in the course of daily life. They also use English four-letter words liberally, just as we Anglophones use a certain five-letter French word without really thinking about its literal meaning. I use le mot de Cambronne freely in English, but never in France, unless to say “break a leg” in French to a French performer about to go to work.

The problem with blue language is what happens in cases of linguistic asymmetry, when one party to a verbal exchange has a more liberal or a more literal relationship to vocabulary than does the other. If you call me by a name, or word, that's been internalized as A Very Very Terrible Thing to Say — “liar,” for example, was grounds for a thrashing in my childhood — it's very difficult for me to consider that you may be simply exaggerating, or in fact mis-using the word. “You lie” is used so frequently these days to mean “You're mistaken,” or even “I don't agree with your view.”

Shakespeare at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

2011-07-30T15:14:00.000-07:00

Meaning is never monogamous.
— Susan Sontag

Eastside Road, July 28, 2011—

WE SAW FOUR SHAKESPEARE plays this year at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland; all they had scheduled. OSF runs through the entire Shakespeare canon, presenting the History Plays in historical chronological order, the Comedies and Tragedies in a less orderly fashion; and the Bard represents about a third of the entire OSF rep in any given year. (The complete production history of Shakespeare is listed here.)

My college major was English Literature, but my college career was disorderly, to say the least. The last two courses I took to complete my degree were intense summer-session classes in required subjects, oddly postponed far beyond logic: English 1B, the required freshman course in composition; and a survey course in Shakespeare. The latter was taught, I remember, by a fine old-school professor. We read, discussed, and wrote about thirteen of the plays, a third of the canon, taking Charles Jaspers Sisson's edition as our text.

In that class I learned that discussion of the plays and the playwright are endless and too often pointless; we can't be sure of the texts; establishing a chronology of the plays is problematic; and the language occupies what's now a no-man's-land between late Middle English and the standard English of the 19th Century, which is what we generally read and even spoke in class. And I learned that the plays themselves, individually and taken as a canon, are fascinating: not so much for their narratives, though those are often gripping; or their ideas or values, though those have much to give us; but for their elusiveness, complexity, surprise. The plays transcend, by far, their texts.

Susan Sontag, in the essay “Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes,”

…literature is first of all, last of all, language. It is language that is everything. … Barthes's view is irrevocably complex, self-conscious, refined, irresolute… He defines the writer as “the watcher who stands at the crossroads of all other discourses” — the opposite of an activist or a purveyor of doctrine…

Barthes called the life of the mind desire, and was concerned to defend “the plurality of desire.“ Meaning is never monogamous.

—Susan Sontag: Where the Stress Falls (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001)

We saw an early play and an early late play last week, and they both concern themselves literally with desire: the two history plays we saw, from about the same (middle) period, are more straightforward, but raise problems of polyvalence that proved insoluble, I think, in the OSF staging.

As I've written in the previous three reports from Ashland, I'm not in the business here of ”reviewing“ these productions. I'm not going to go through the laborious and generally pointless (and thankless) motions of assigning adjectives to individual actors, stage designers, costumers. At the Oregon Shakespeare Festival you can take for granted the skill, range, and effectiveness of all such components; besides, OSF has a well-designed website that gives an ”overview,“ cast and production credit details, short videos about the productions, and more about each play; index webpages for each can be found by clicking on the bulleted, boldfaced •titles below.

Instead, I'm afraid I'm going to be expressing my misgivings about the general approach that OSF seems to have adopted in its productions of the work that has for seventy-five years been, after all, its raison d'être.

As I noted the other day, OSF began in the spirit of Chautauqua, that uniquely American movement of the post-Civil War period whose purpose it was to bring education and culture to relatively isolated populations. Chautauqua included speechmaking, music, religion, politics under what was often literally a big tent, which often moved from site to site throughout the summer. The movement continued throughout the first half of the 20th century in spite of more technologically advanced competition, as Wikipedia's entry notes:

…by the turn of the century, other entertainment and educational opportunities, such as radio and movies, began to arrive in American towns to compete with Chautauqua lectures. With the advent of television and the automobile, people could now watch or travel to cultural events previously available only in urban areas, and the Chautauqua Movement lost popularity.

Chautauqua still lives, though; the original Institution in the New York town that gave the movement its name still presents lecture series, musical and dance performances, opera, and theater. (A few minutes on its website make it look pretty damn attractive.)

A Chautauqua building was erected, ”mostly by townspeople“ as OSF notes, in Ashland in 1893; it was enlarged twelve years later. ”Families traveled from all over Southern Oregon and Northern California to see such performers as John Phillip Sousa and William Jennings Bryan during the Ashland Chautauqua's 10-day seasons,“ continues the OSF archive, and by 1917 another building took its place, lasting until it was torn down in 1933. Soon thereafter a young teacher from the local teacher's college thought the remaining circular walls looked like sketches he'd seen of Elizabethan theaters, and proposed a production of two Shakespeare plays in conjunction with the city's Fourth of July celebration.

So OSF is grounded not only in Chautauqua but also in the Normal School movement, which developed in this country, in the 19th century, into colleges designed for the training of teachers. In California, for example, normal schools became teacher's colleges, later the campuses of the State College system (now the State Universities).

It's probably largely forgotten today how strong the liberal-arts ideal was in the generations leading up to 1957, when the Russian space satellite Sputnik awoke the United States to its relative complacency as to the teaching of mathematics, engineering, and the sciences. Until then the primacy of the liberal arts had been pretty much unquestioned. After the Eisenhower administration, though, arts and letters took a back seat in general education, not only in advanced education, but also in the earlier years.

Where math and the sciences provide the knowledge and methodology by which society achieves its purposes and goals, however, it's the liberal arts that provide the knowledge and methodology that define and determine them. Science is knowledge: how. The arts are wisdom: why. Shakespeare's plays provide a particularly rich store of wisdom and stand, of course, at the center of English literature, perhaps of world literature, and therefore at the center of our liberal arts.

(This is probably the place for another clarifier: by “liberal arts” I mean, as Wikipedia puts it,

a curriculum that imparts general knowledge and develops the student’s rational thought and intellectual capabilities, unlike the professional, vocational, and technical curricula emphasizing specialization.

“Liberal” because derived from Latin liber, “free”: the kind of education every free person was expected to have. This brings us inevitably to a consideration of social class; and perhaps a lingering reason the word “liberal” and the values of the liberal arts are questioned is the lingering notion that they are the province of snobs, of the idle rich, of an “elite” who consider themselves above the common man.)

But we are far off track. My point is, there are those in the arts industries who recognize and lament the lack of appreciation for the arts, for the values represented by, say, Shakespeare and Mozart and let me add Velasquez, among the general American public; and those people — artistic directors especially — do what they can to bring culture to the masses. OSF, for example, produced this year's Julius Caesar as “part of Shakespeare for a New Generation, a national theatre initiative sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts in cooperation with Arts Midwest, heavily adapting the play to “decontextualize” it, as an acquaintance pointed out, from its specifically historical moment.

Other productions were similarly adapted or interpreted, often with interpolations meant to appeal to contemporary audiences by referring to elements assumed to be within their common awareness. As Shakespeare could count on his audiences knowing about the Gunpowder Plot, say, or the defeat of the Spanish Armada, so OSF counts on audiences responding to allusions to Broadway tunes, rock songs, and standup comedy acts.

The danger here from my perspective is that by demystifying Shakespeare for today's high school students — and there are many of them at OSF productions — my own attention to the plays is distracted as I puzzle over the relevance of an interpolation referring to an item of pop culture of which I am utterly ignorant. But then, this presumably is the cross the younger audience hangs on as it deals with Shakespeare's original text. I'm seventy-five years old; I've read the plays; I've seen nearly all of them (Pericles, Timon of Athens and Cymbeline have eluded me, along with The Two Noble Kinsmen).

Best of all, as no bad interpretation ever truly spoils Mozart, neither can it destroy Shakespeare. We can always return in our memory to a great production seen in the past, or turn in our imagination to a great one yet to be seen, latent in the script. For the meantime, here's what I think about this year's productions:

•Love's Labor's Lost (1594): This early play seemed to me quite effective, set on the outdoor Elizabethan Theater stage, costumed in a vague late-20th-century style. Shana Cooper made her directorial debut at OSF in this production; she was Assistant director for Macbeth and Equivocation in 2009. A complex play, Love's Labor's Lost centers on the intention of the young King of Navarre, and three of his friends, to devote three years to study and sobriety. They are immediately distracted, however, by the visiting Princess of France and her three maids-in-waiting, and the oath is soon broken.

Shakespeare provides several layers in this play, as he did in A Midsummer Night's Dream, written soon after. The trick in casting and directing this play is to individuate these layers — clowns, simpletons, rustics, wits, scholars, and the nobility — and to keep them in balance while bringing out the potential within each. Some of Cooper's concepts threatened to run away with the show, notably the entrance of Navarre and his men disguised as Russians. (They dance in, parodying the Russian Dance from the second act of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker.) But the more outrageous such bits are, the more they succeed theatrically. Robin Goodrin Nordli, as Boyet, was memorable in a scene with a Martini. (Yes, Boyet is a woman in this production.)

(Bay Area audiences can see Shana Cooper's work this fall: she directs the California Shakespeare Theater's production of The Taming of the Shrew, running September 21-October 16.)

•Henry IV, Part Two (1598): None of us eight Ashlanders — four couples who spend a week together every year to see these plays — was happy with last year's production of Part One (my comments on that production here, and note particularly the comments), so we weren't looking forward to Part Two. In the event, though, it was more satisfying. Again, director Lisa Peterson stressed the comic scenes at the cost, I thought, of the serious ones. Too, casting and direction of the supporting nobility — Northumberland, Hastings, Prince John — seemed haphazard, un-integrated.

As usual at OSF, the comic roles were often beautifully characterized, often through small details; but the Cheapside elements — Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet — were pushed nearly to burlesque, and the induction scene, with Silence, Shadow, Feeble, and Bullcalf, drowned the poignancy of mustering in further burlesque. (Again, however, the acting was superb.) I can see how this approach will attract audiences looking for laughs, but I'm not sure I see those audiences made aware of the darker side of the play. We'll see what happens next year in the conclusion, Henry V, a particularly dark play if you look between the lines.

•Julius Caesar (1599): like Shana Cooper and Lisa Peterson, Amanda Dehnert is a newcomer to OSF, having previously directed only All's Well That Ends Well here (in 2009). This was definitely a concept production, compressed and tightened to emphasize the muscles of betrayal and conspiracy; it reminded me of the similarly compressed Macbeth that opened this intimate New Theater back in 2002. That's fine: nothing wrong with adapting Caesar to such a concept. But setting the title role on a female actor seemed to present more problems than insights; and making her dream in Japanese seemed downright silly — why do this, if not simply because you have a dramatic Japanese actress on hand (the one-named Ako, memorable in last year's OSF Throne of Blood)?

The intent seemed to be to contrast Caesar's dreamy eloquence with Cassius's brutality and Brutus's political pragmatism, inherently an interesting idea except that Caesar's military successes are thereby cast into some doubt — though here too if the intention is to show up the unthinking support the citizens give him/her, the play gains both complexity and relevance to the present day. But in the end concept seemed to me to outweigh integrated presence; I felt that I'd seen interesting conversations about Shakespeare's play, more than a persuasive production of the play itself.

•Measure for Measure (1603): Disclaimer: I think this one of the greatest of all Shakespeare's plays, bringing to the familiar ideas and gimmicks almost a uniquely successful and persuasive degree of balance, thoughtfulness, and dramatic expression. You know the story: Duke, for motives never clearly stated (probably because they are complex and conflicting), absents himself, leaving his friend Angelo (never a name so ironically chosen) in charge; Angelo metes harsh justice, though himself both a past offender and a present hypocrite — possibly against his will. The play is a bookend to Merchant of Venice, with Isabela taking on Portia's role; and the oddly tangential ending recalls those of Love's Labor's Lost and The Winter's Tale.

We saw Measure for Measure in the temporary tent-pavilion erected for productions scheduled in the Bowmer Theater, closed for emergency repairs, and it's perhaps really not fair to fault the production in these circumstances. But I was dismayed by director Bill Rauch's decision to let his concept — setting the play's underclasses in a contemporary Latino context — so run away with the serious implications of the plot. Had Mistress Overdone not been made the maîtresse of a particularly obnoxious strip club, and the interpolations of an admittedly first-rate all-girl mariachi ensemble not so often been too loud, and the distracting subtitles at one side of the stage been allowed to translate the Spanish-language songs composed (very effectively) for the show, the concept might well have worked better; and perhaps they will once the show returns to its proper stage.

LIKE ALL CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS, Oregon Shakespeare is in a difficult spot. The economy; audiences; commercial entertainment; the historical moment; technology; politics — all these things intrude, oppress, distract, sideline, even attempt to trivialize the work that is at its core. But that was true in Shakespeare's day too; in fact, much of the power of his work consists precisely in his awareness of these things, in his grasp of their being both problems and subject-matter. I worry sometimes that OSF — and specifically Bill Rauch, its Artistic Director — too often thrashes about in conscious attention to methodologies designed to approach these matters, instead of basking in the riches of the literature, the company, and the place. The approaches being found to solving problems of audience and expense are too visible; they distract from the theater. But the successes continue to outweigh the shortfalls. We'll be back next year, perhaps sooner.

•Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 15 S. Pioneer Street ,Ashland, Oregon 97520. 2012 season:

•Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet (dir. Laird Williamson), Troilus and Cressida (Rob Melrose), Henry V (Joseph Haj), As You Like It (Jessica Thebus)
•Repertory: Chekhov's Seagull (Libby Appel); Kaufman & Ryskind Animal Crackers (Allison Narver)
•Premieres: The White Snake (adapted by Mary Zimmerman, from the Chinese fable); Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella (ad. Bill Rauch and Tracy Young); Robert Schenkkan's All The Way (Bill Rauch); Universes'sParty People (Liesi Tommy); Alison Carey's The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa (Christopher Liam Moore)

Kenjilo Nanao

2011-07-29T23:39:00.001-07:00

Eastside Road, July 29, 2011—

ON NOVEMBER 8, 1986, I apparently visited the faculty exhibition of art at California State University, Hayward, as it was then known. My journal for that year contains the page reproduced at the left. I have difficulty deciphering the handwriting at this point, a quarter-century later:

                      8 NOV

Rug.
    Formative look.

       stains (?) now gone suggest 2 books —
       children's .

G A: “hybrid.”

            Merwah — shafen — palm; script

And then the sketch of what is clearly a painting by Kenjilo Nanao, who we visited today, in his Oakland studio.

Impossible to know at this remove what is meant by the enigmatic notations in that journal. The adjacent pages offer no help, at first, though now I think about it this was the time we were producing my opera, which helps elucidate the notes on the previous page:

          7 Nov

•Finishing the production

•Booking production : Franklin. V Jan ; photos.

• Little version.
     Ch grinder (p 292 - 301 - sc. 5)
     [female section] ( from H-Martin )
     Military service - suffering

10 45  M Fisher
12  Geo Gelles
2  J Butterfield
3  R Friese
4  A Rockefeller

BUT THE POINT IS that today we visited Nanao's studio, where we saw really quite wonderful paintings, and soon I will be writing about him, and them… I have been thinking about his painting , seeing it in my mind, for twenty-five years…

The Function of Poetry

2011-07-27T09:35:00.001-07:00

The Function of Poetry
For Kathryn

A man I didn't know died yesterday
His wife the childhood best friend of my daughter.
Forty years, three lives, two thousand miles
Displaced from me. We practiced different arts
And worshipped different gods; we might as well
Never have both read Donne or loved women
And children who, like Epicurean atoms,
Swerved from time to time improbably
Within a single delicate orbit.

The question is whether the conscious mind
Transcends personal narrative in death,
Whether an unknown life now completed
Enlarges ours, its end informing ours
With its own fullness through the common points
Of unsuspected anecdotes.
Narrative
Is hardly more than random noted moments
In an otherwise neglected life,
Why are we here? Lou said, to tell stories,
To keep each other entertained along
The common road we travel through this life.

—July 27 2012

New American Theater at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

2011-07-24T12:09:00.001-07:00

Ashland, Oregon, July 24, 2011—

IN SPITE OF THE IMPLICATIONS of its name, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has long been a significant proponent of new and recnt plays, as announced in the organization's "mission statement":

Inspired by Shakespeare’s work and the cultural richness of the United States, we reveal our collective humanity through illuminating interpretations of new and classic plays, deepened by the kaleidoscope of rotating repertory.

This year, in addition to Tony Taccone's important premiere Ghost Light (discussed here a few days ago), the repertory includes Tracy Letts's August: Osage County (premiered 2007), Carlyle Brown's The African Company Presents Richard III (1987), Julia Cho's The Language Archive (2009) (which closed last month after a four-month run), Christopher Sergel's adaptation of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1990), and the site-specific collaboratively developed WillFul, which opens August 7.

Of these, we saw Mockingbird and Language Archive four months ago, when the former impressed us greatly and the latter rather less. This week we've seen two others, in addition to Ghost Light — which, I'm afraid, throws a long shadow over them.

The African Company Presents Richard III seemed to me particularly weak in the theater. Of course the specific theater was the temporary tent-pavilion installed in Lithia Park while the August Bowmer Theater is closed for emergency repairs, and allowances have to be made. The tent works reasonably well, and probably serves as a reminder of the Festival's early days, back when that uniquely American institution the chautauqua was still vital. (Indeed the chautaqua idea is still alive at OSF, and quite influential in its productions of Shakespeare; I'll write about this season's examples in the near future.)

The biggest problem associated with this tent (once past the question of the discomfort of audience seating) is the acoustics: it's a dead house; after one production without amplifiction the actors were quickly fitted out with body mikes. I may be over-sensitive to the consequent problems, since I'm more an ear person than an eye one: microphone noise and imbalance of consonants and vowels to begin with. Worse, as far as I'm concerned, is the changed aural perspective: not only does the sound come from another location than the actor's, but intimacy and distance are confused. The result is dislocating, disorienting; and if that's only on a subconscious level it's nevertheless disturbing and ultimately fatiguing. (I can only imagine the effect on the actors themselves.)

Beyond this, though, The African Company Presents Richard III seemed to me lightweight, a History Channel show brought to the stage. In portraying the difficulties encountered by a black theater company producing Richard III in New York City in the 1820s it was funny, informative, and politically correct; but it didn't seem to me to flesh out its characters, to investigate narrative elements that might have proved even more interesting and rewarding. It joins an intriguing subset of OSF plays, plays about Shakespeare plays: last year we saw Throne of Blood, a samurai version of Macbeth; the previous year's Equivication also considers The Scottish Play. (In 2008 we saw The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, another metadrama.)

Much more successful, to my way of thinking, was August: Osage County. A realistic narrative drama is not the kind of play I'm drawn to aesthetically; it seems to me Ibsen, O'Neill, Miller, and Albee have pretty well exhausted the vein: but then along comes another brilliant work in the genre and you're held, in my case against your prejudices, by a writing, direction, and acting that can only be called masterful. (And the defects of the temporary tent-pavilion theater disappear.)

It probably didn't hurt that as a child I lived a hard year not ninety miles from the bleak setting of the play (Pawhuska, Oklahoma). The accents, dress, even the food depicted in this realistic production were perfectly authentic and, to me, evocative. The dysfunctional family had different problems from those I knew: it's profane where mine was religious, pill-popping where mine tended toward alcohol. But the resulting repression, evasion, domination, manipulation, and cruelty, whether intended or not (I think not), was familiar.

I recalled Aristotle's definition of tragedy the other day: I do think August: Osage County, more than, for example, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf?, conforms to the classic definition. These characters fall for no flaw of their own making, though the means by which they fall may be self-inflicted; and the enactment of their tragedy leaves the audience exhausted but, I think, purged.

I don't write these pieces as a theater critic. It's easy enough to find reviews of these productions online (though I haven't bothered this time), and cast lists and program notes are available on the well-designed OSF website. One of these days I may get around to writing about the impressive acting company OSF maintains: it's a real pleasure seeing such fine actors taking leads in one show, supporting roles in others, understudying elsewhere; and it's a pleasure seeing the results of productions with long and numerous rehearsals and runs long enough to develop fine-grained detail. This is not that day. Company information about these productions can be found on the links below:

• Tracy Letts: August: Osage County , directed by Christopher Liam Moore, through November 5
• Carlyle Brown: The African Company Presents Richard III, directed by Seret Scott, through November 5

Molière at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

2011-07-23T10:44:00.001-07:00

Ashland, Oregon, July 20, 2011—

MOLIERE'S COMEDIES ARE ALWAYS welcome, no matter the production. The jokes are always old, always funny. The politics are always old, always relevant. The productions, at least the ones I've seen over the years, are generally over the top, occasionally freighted with gimmickry, sometimes framed (in both senses of the word) with too much Concept, but Molière grits his teeth and plays right through, always triumphing in the end.

We've seen our share of Imaginary Invalid lately: along with Tartuffe and The Miser, it seems to speak to the contemporary American sensibility, at least as viewed by theater producers. Of course many, probably most of these producers feel it necessary to help contemporary audiences make the leap to Seventeenth-century France, and so we get productions like the one we saw Tuesday night, with musical interpolations inspired by Motown, and jokes about death panels and public options.

It won't surprise you to read that I have profound misgivings about these attempts at "updating." After all, Molière's relevant because he writes about eternal aspects of the human condition. I always have the nagging feeling that concentrating on the locally specific may detract from the universally constant, which is of course a greater value.

(And there are the occasions when directorial concentration on one aspect, say the comic scenes in a Shakespeare history play, comes at the cost of attention to another, say the serious scenes; throwing the entire play out of balance. This happened last night in Henry IV, Part Two: but that's not the subject at hand; I'll touch on the Shakespeare plays here later on.)

As it turns out, this Imaginary Invalid works beautifully. Molière provided his original play with intermèdes (entr'actes, interludes) and dance sequences, and the OSF production is probably right to think Aretha Franklin is closer to the contemporary sensibility than is Marc-Antoine Charpentier, who provided the original score. (And in any case, apparently only four songs have survived to our time.) Molière's comedies involve stock figures from the comic tradition stretching back centuries, and grow out of the commedia dell'arte tradition, which specialized in spicing material with topical jokes and allusions, blending the classical and vernacular — exactly as is the intention of such "updates" as this Imaginary Invalid.

We saw the play in the temporary tent-pavilion that's been installed in Lithia Park, just down from OSF's outdoor Elizabethan Theater, to accommodate plays originally scheduled for the indoor Bowmer Theater, now closed for structural repairs. (The total cost to the festival of these emergency repairs is estimated at over $2 million, according to a story in the local newspaper.) The tent's acoustics require the cast to wear microphones: this has hurt other plays, in my opinion, but The Imaginary Invalid less than others. Every member of the cast seemed perfectly cast and evenly in command of the role, and given the need to relocate the production the technical and scenic aspects of the play were outstanding. (Full credits here)

• Molière: The Imaginary Invalid, adapted by Oded Gross and Tracy Young, music by Paul James Prendergast, directed by Tracy Young: Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland, through November 6, 2011.

Ghost Light at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

2011-07-20T08:32:00.001-07:00

Tony Taccone, the stage director, artistic director of Berkeley Repertory Theatre, has written a play, Ghost Light, which we saw yesterday in its premier production here at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where it is directed by Jonathan Moscone, who as a friend and associate worked with Taccone on the concept and development of the play.

A psychological drama, Ghost Light centers on the unresolved relationship of a young man (Jon) and his memory of his father, the assassinated mayor of San Francisco, a champion of civil rights, including those we think of as "Gay Rights." That mayor was of course George Moscone, who was in fact Jonathan Moscone's father, making the "concept and development" of Ghost Light particularly complex and poignant — and, to a degree, inescapably irresolute and fluid.

Add to these qualities the theater-referentiality Taccone brings to this, his first script — the plot centers on Jon's difficulties staging a production of Hamlet — and the time-space travel negotiated onstage, with its flashbacks and journeys beyond death — and you have a play that gives you a lot to think about. Within the context of Oregon Shakespeare Festival, for example, Ghost Light fits within a cycle of new plays on "the American Experience" OSF has been commissioning; but it also falls within another cycle, of plays about theater itself in one way or another.

And within that, another sub-cycle, of plays about Shakespeare plays. Then there's the Play About Father(s), among which Hamlet stands out, of course: but so does Molière's The Imaginary Invalid, seen here last night. (I'll get to that later, perhaps.) Theater tends to be narrative; pre-Modernist theater tends to center on Search for Meaning. Aristotle famously defines tragedy:

“A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.” (Imgram Bywater: 35).
“Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action of high importance, complete and of some amplitude; in language enhanced by distinct and varying beauties; acted not narrated; by means of pity and fear effectuating its purgation of these emotions.” (L. J. Potts: 24).*

and Taccone (and, implicitly, Jonathan Moscone) clearly set out to achieve a contemporary expression of Tragedy in these terms. Contemporary not only because the elements of the plot derive from our own immediate past, but also because they involve means and meanings from our own time, as well as from the universal and even mythic content of tragedy from the ancient Greeks through Shakespeare. Here's what happens in Ghost Light: a fourteen-year-old boy is in shock following the sudden murder of his father. The same boy, thirty years later, is to direct Hamlet. Personifications from the confused memory of the murder and of his childhood — notably the boy's prison-guard grandfather and a policeman who tries to console the boy at the funeral — materialize from nightmares; another semi-fantastic personification materializes from an erotic e-mail correspondence. A costume designer, apparently hopelessly in love with the director, represents both herself, the immediate problems of the Hamlet production, and an ultimately maternal, nursing combination of consolation and urge to get on with things. (This is particularly pointed, contrasting with the fatuous offstage psychologist who begins the play's action: Aristotle's famous "catharsis" is nothing other than move-on-and-get-on-with-things.)

In a q-and-a session after the performance — such events are among OSF's many virtues — Peter Frechette, who plays a memorable (gay) film director in Ghost Light as well as the unseen psychologist, noted that the play changed a fair amount in the course of its development, and would likely continue to change as it moves through this first production. (It will travel to Berkeley Rep in January 2012, with much the same cast.) In much the same way, my take on the play has evolved greatly — and "evolution" is at the core of Aristotle's view of theater — since seeing the play, less than twenty-four hours ago.

My first impressions were of the fine grain and extensive scope of the play: too many details, too much ambition. It was like a meltdown of Hamlet, Our Town, and Cocteau's Orphée, with a little Buster Keaton thrown in, and maybe Thorne Smith's Topper. I saw references to Ibsen. Christopher Liam Moore's fine portrayal of Jon, the central character, seemed a caricature of the director Peter Sellars. The play's two acts run two and a half hours, it's bright and colorful, gunshots are fired, actors take a number of roles in some cases.

But my present impression is that this is an important play. Taccone has worked with a number of playwrights to help bring their ideas to the stage; here he seems to have worked through those experiences, and his close friendship with his collaborator Moscone, to achieve his own masterpiece, in the root meaning of the word; to effect a transition from director to playwright. I look forward to seeing the play again.

I won't comment on the play's credits here; you can find them, along with program notes, here on OSF's excellent website. The actors were superb, the staging powerful, the design, costumes, and lighting both resourceful and effective.

*These translations from Aristotle's Poetics are quoted from Ramón Paredes' essay "Aristotle's Definition of Tragedy".

A Day with Picasso

2011-07-07T16:16:00.001-07:00

Eastside Road, July 7, 2011—

IN THE SUMMER of 1916, ninety-five years ago, in Paris, Jean Cocteau took two dozen photographs of a number of friends. Sixty years later, in 1978, the Swedish-born artist Billy Klüver (1927–2004) (whose name is familiar to me from the Experiments in Art and Technology days), while he was researching documentation concerning the art community in Montparnasse in the early Twentieth Century, noticed that a number of photographs, found in various sources, fell into groups. Curious, he began investigating. Ultimately he was able to determine the sequence, location, date and time of the original exposures — and, of course, the identities of the people depicted.

Reading the most recent publication of the result of Klüver's work reminded me of one of my childhood fascinations, the recurring feature Photoquiz in the old Look magazine, which for a time my grandparents apparently subscribed to — uncharacteristically, it seems to me. Or perhaps more buried recollections of photo-sequencing components in intelligence tests I was subjected to in those days: you look at a number of photos and try to figure out the chronological sequence in which they were taken.

(Now that I think of it, these kinds of quizzes, along with the popular side-by-side “how do these differ” cartoons in the Sunday comics, all components of my childhood, are all examples, or instructions, in a preoccupation I've been developing lately concerning The Search for Meaning.)

Klüver's research was published here and there: sections in the magazine Art in America in September 1986, then in book form in German (1993) and French (1994). The American English-language edition, A Day with Picasso, was published in a handsome edition by MIT Press in 1997, then in paper in 1999. I find it thoroughly fascinating.

The book centers, of course, on the two dozen photographs, nicely reproduced — one can only wonder how much work went into restoring this ancient testimony to a summer day among friends. Eleven of the negatives survive in the Cocteau archives; another nine negatives are lost but original contact prints were also in that archive. Two photographs turned up in reproductions in old periodicals (Paris-Montparnasse, May 1929; Bravo, December 1930), and two others were found in other archives.

Some of the people in the photographs are easily identified: Picasso, Max Jacob, Modigliani. Through a series of interviews with surviving friends and associates of theirs, Klüver was able to identify the others. With the help of old cadastres and maps, and the French Bureau des Longitudes, he was able not only to determine the places depicted, and the probable camera locations, but even the time of day. Interviews and other research had already isolated the only possible date on which all but two were taken: Saturday, August 12, 1916.

(When recently did I read Ken Alder's The Measure of All Things, about that Bureau among other things, and why did I not write about it here?)

The MIT Press edition of A Day with Picasso includes as well as the photographs themselves, with nice running commentary, chapters on the methodology of Klüver's research, the dating and timing, the means whereby the model of Cocteau's camerawas determined, biographical notes on the people photographed, the Paris of the time, and the Salon d'Antin, where Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avignon (as it was then retitled) was first shown publicly — this particular group of friends and acquaintances were together to some extent because they were all involved with that exhibition.

All this is extremely interesting. History, photography, research, methodology, and the essence of Community are the matter of Klüver's book, and he touched them all lightly yet thoroughly, and reveals how History is — not made, or written, but teased out.

A Day with Picasso is still in print, as far as I can tell. Since its publication in English, editions have appeared in Japan, Korea, and Italy. Klüver's Montparnasse researches resulted also in Kiki's Paris, about the legendary artist's model Kiki (Alice Prin); it was published in the U.S. in 1989 and went on to editions in France, Germany, Sweden, Spain, and Japan. He also co-edited and annotated Kiki's own memoirs, which appeared in 1930 but was then refused entry into the U.S. If these books are as graceful, informative, and entertaining as A Day with Picasso, I want to read them.

"Writing is like the drug I abhor and keep taking"

2011-07-04T22:34:00.001-07:00

Found something new to read today here in the course of excusing myself for not having recently written. I've been not-reading Pessoa, that shadowy Portuguese master of a century ago, and this morning chanced on passage number

152

I’m astounded whenever I finish something. astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing it; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will’s surrender. I begin because I don’t have the strength to think; I finish because I don’t have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.

If I often interrupt a thought with a scenic description that in some way fits into the real or imagined scheme of my impressions, it’s because the scenery is a door through which I flee from my awareness of my creative impotence. In the middle of the conversations with myself that form the words of this book, I’ll feel the sudden need to talk to someone else, and so I’ll address the light which hovers, as now, over rooftops that glow as if they were damp, or I’ll turn to the urban hillside with its tall and gently swaying trees that seem strangely close and on the verge of silently collapsing, or to the steep houses that overlap like posters, with windows for letters, and the dying sun gilding their moist glue.

Why do I write, if I can’t write any better? But what would become of me if I didn’t write what I can, however inferior it may be to what I am? In my ambitions I’m a plebeian, because I try to achieve; like someone afraid of a dark room, I’m afraid to be silent. I’m like those who prize the medal more than the struggle to get it, and savour glory in a fur-lined cape.

For me, to write is self-deprecating, and yet I can’t quit doing it. Writing is like the drug I abhor and keep taking, the addiction I despise and depend on. There are necessary poisons, and some are extremely subtle, composed of ingredients from the soul, herbs collected from among the ruins of dreams, black poppies found next to the graves of our intentions, the long leaves of obscene trees whose branches sway on the echoing banks of the soul’s infernal rivers.

To write is to lose myself, yes, but everyone loses himself, because everything gets lost. I, however, lose myself without any joy – not like the river flowing into the sea for which it was secretly born, but like the puddle left on the beach by the high tide, its stranded water never returning to the ocean but merely sinking into the sand.

—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, tr. Richard Zenith
Penguin Books, 2003

To write is to lose myself, yes, but everyone loses himself, because everything gets lost.

Looking for anything anyone else might have had to say about these remarkable paragraphs of Pessoa's brought me to Vincent's blog A Wayfarer's Notes, which seems to be a gentle, graceful comtemplation of Nature, literature, and the human condition as lived in the English countryside. He mentions riding the bus:

I was going to talk about a bus-ride. It provided an opportunity to scribble in my notebook, at any rate when it stopped for passengers or traffic lights. These buses judder and jolt with no inhibition, setting their fittings all a-chatter in a syncopated rhythm like loose dentures. Never mind, they serve as a Whole Body Vibration Therapy for the poor and dispossessed, especially those of us with free bus passes.

We were in London for a couple of days a week or so ago, riding buses and the Underground as well as doing a few other things. Transportation in London is alarming. The noise on the Tube from Victoria to Heathrow was never less than 80 dB — we have sound meters on our iPhones — and a couple of hours in such noise and violence is enough to wear one out. (Of course the effect was heightened by contrast with Venice, where there is neither bus nor subway.)

Pessoa, I recall reading somewhere, seems to enjoy riding the tram, as much as he enjoys anything; he observes the strangers around him — ah, here it is:

I'm riding on a tram and, as usual, am closely observing all the details of the people around me. For me these details are like things, voices, phrases. …
All humanity's social existence lies before my eyes.
The Book of Disquiet, p. 253

The last ten days have been spent re-entering our "normal" life, after that five-week interruption of London and Venice. Reading and writing, not to mention conversation, have been largely shouldered aside by unpacking, both literally and figuratively, and mowing and such, and by the fatigue inevitably associated with re-entry. And when I do pick up a book, or even a blog, my attention wanders, I'm back in Venice, or in Pessoa's Lisbon. And when I do write,

I linger over the words, as before shop windows I don't really look at, and what remains are half-meanings and quasi-expressions, like the colors of fabrics I don't actually see…
The Book of Disquiet, p. 138

Venice Journal, 16: Biennale

2011-06-18T00:34:00.000-07:00

Venice, June 18, 2011—

AN OLD GUY, apparently shakier than he looks, sits down on the bench to take off his shoes. There seems to be some problem with his shoelaces: he can't get them untied. Finally, with great effort, he pulls the still-tied shoes off his feet and stows them in the pigeonhole under the bench. He puts on one of the white cloth foot-covers provided, tries to open another for the other foot, fails, tosses it in the bin of dirty foot-covers, tries to open another, succeeds.

Then he stands uncertainly in the unfamiliar shoe-covers and waits. Two people ahead of him are also waiting their turn to walk up a number of black-carpeted steps into a sort of theater at the back of which three other people gaze at a solid curtain of colored light.

It's a long wait, so he bends over, retrieves a shoe, and begins to pick at the knot in the shoelaces. He can't see what he's doing: the light is dim. He takes off his glasses, awkwardly holding them by biting one of the temples, and peers at the knot. He looks out at the sea of people waiting behind a barrier, being let in only three at a time. He seems a little embarrassed, and why not? I would be too.

The knot finally untied, the shoe back in its pigeonhole, he begins to pick at the other one, gives up, shelves it, and turns toward the waiting people. The attendant tells him he may join another couple in the theater. He steps uncertainly up the stairs, whose treads are two short for sure footing. The attendant warns him not to step too close to the light-curtain; there's a drop of several feet at the front end of the stage.

The colors seem a little grainy, gauzy, with imperfections floating across, but they are very beautiful: a constant allover intensity, imperceptibly changing through indigos, blues, deep reds. After only a couple of minutes, though, he turns to leave, weaving a bit as he approaches the steps. He motions to the attendant, who reaches out offering his hand to steady him on the way down.

Seated, he picks with irritation at the remaining shoelace, finally untying it. He puts on a shoe, begins to tie it, takes it off, removes the foot-cover and tosses it into the box, repeats the gesture with the other, puts on his shoes, manages to tie them in the dark, and walks out the exit, alone, and disappears.

That's the James Turrell installation at the Biennale. I consider Turrell with mixed emotions. His work with color and light is as pure and magical as possible, I think: but it requires a degree of focus and concentration on the part of the viewer that can only be achieved, apparently, through a great deal of audience manipulation and even more tightly determined isolation from other simultaneous experience. You have to deal with Turrell on his own terms. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, and it's far from unprecedented: Richard Wagner comes to mind. But I've never been comfortable with Wagner's demands, either.

(Speaking of Wagner, we toured La Fenice, the Venice opera house, the other day — an absorbing tour of a magnificent theater. The orchestra was on stage, rehearsing Das Rheingold, and we sat in the Royal Box for eight or ten minutes to listen. Yesterday on a vaporetto I was talking to a French woman; she said they were on their way to La Fenice for the tour. I told her about our experience, explaining that it was only an orchestra rehearsal, no singers. It's always better that way, she responded.)

The Biennale — well, it's a mess, as everyone is saying; but it's inevitable. Scores of countries have fielded hundreds of artists of varying degrees of skill and persuasiveness, most of them, to my taste and receptivity, unsuccessful. By far the majority seem to be concerned with the same problems the rest of us have on our minds: injustice, war, environmental problems, cruelty, and the like. Unlike the rest of us, they bring these concerns to work, make of them the subject of their art. To this degree they seem to me to be politicians, or propagandists, or social critics, rather than artists. Nothing wrong with politicians, propagandists, and social critics; we need them; they often improve the quality of life: but you don't go to them for insights into transcendent expressions of visual or sonic or even textual interest and beauty.

Final Cut Pro is apparently the acrylic paint of our time; a great many of these artists work in or with video, using found or stock imagery, or shooting their own, again for the most part in order to express reactions to prevailing social and political issues. I wrote the other day about having seen Passage, Shirin Neshat and Philip Glass's video of men, women, a girl, desert, death, and fire. I found it compelling: the majestic beauty of the sea and the desert, the colors, the fire all compelled visual response; the score, the rhythm of the direction and the gestures of the actors similarly rewarded the ear and one's sense of time; the theme — the inextricability of life and death in the rites of passage humans develop to confront their evanescence in the face of Nature — was just that, theme, not "message." It resonated with Quasimodo's marvelous poem, on my mind a lot during this Venice sojourn:

Ognuno sta solo sul cuore della terra
Trafitto da un raggio di sole
Ed è subito sera.

(Each alone on the heart of earth / transfixed by a ray of the sun / and suddenly it's evening)

It's asking a lot of any artist to stand next to Quasimodo, or Turrell for that matter. One of these videos, when I happened on it, was displaying a scene from Hamlet: the actor — I'm ashamed I don't know who; I've never been much of a film buff, clearly an important and skillful actor — was delivering the "Alas, poor Yorick" soliloquy. It's brave to include Shakespeare in your video, I think, but foolhardy too.

A lot has been said about the Italian pavilion; we can take it as representative of the entire Biennale. Literally hundreds of Italian artists were invited to participate, with a result reminding me of the "festivals" of "art" — photography, painting, sculpture, and other media — that used to be put on in outdoor venues by community organizations in the summertime. Or, the muses help us, of the exhibitions of amateur "art" at the county fair. There is good work here, and provocative commentary: but it tends to get lost in the jumble. And you can complain that the curator doesn't show a lot of respect for the art in the casual means employed to hang it: but perhaps respect itself is a red herring.

RIDING AROUND ON BOATS in the constantly changing Venetian luminosity has a disorienting effect on me. (Scientists might attribute this to low blood pressure.) It takes a while for reality to regain its stability. Venice is a place of façades; veined marble; hypnotically rhythmic brickwork; subtly fading and peeling stucco. On empty streets one strolls; on busy ones one dances among the terriers, babies, umbrellas, backpacks, shopping-bags, photographers, lovers. On the Canal, whether on a vaporetto or a gondola (we do take the occasional traghetto), the motion is choppy in one direction, rolling in the other.

Then there's the constant dialectic of grain and vista, detail and expanse; one's eye is constantly readjusting focus. And extend all this to an observation and contemplation of Time as well as Space — well, thinking about it is almost overwhelming. I find myself in the position I suppose many of these Bienniale artists are in, searching for elusive meaning, trying to render coherent a teeming multiplicity that threatens chaos.

You can almost understand the drive to impose order, so constantly expressed in all these churches. How reassuring it must be — particularly if it assuages any compunctions you might have about the justice of your social actions — to be convinced of a divine purpose and a divinely imposed system. And how irresolute we are, how prone to anxiety and anger, lacking that kind of reassurance.

photos from Venice (and a number of other places)

Venice Journal, 15: Further conversation

2011-06-15T00:55:00.001-07:00

Venice, June 14, 2011—

AN INTERESTING CONVERSATION yesterday with the proprietor of a glass shop on Murano. Another couple was in the shop as we entered; with them, a ten-year-old boy who was carelessly bouncing something small and unseen in his hand, palm up, tossing it a foot or two into the air and then catching it, for all the world as if there weren't thousands of dollars' worth of fragility all around him.

The couple seemed distracted and irresolute; the shopkeeper grumpy and watchful — though for some reason he hadn't noticed the boy's activity (he was at the other end of the shop). The couple left, and we greeted the shopkeeper, and it was then I described the boy's startling behavior.

But where are you from, the shopkeeper asked; California, I said. Americani? Non sono Americani come tutti gli Americani, he responed, you aren't American like all the [other] Americans. I gave my standard explanation: we're not Americans, we're Californians. You're Italian, I went on, but you don't seem like a Roman, or a … and here I trailed off, not wanting to tread on any toes.

He finally broke into a smile and the conversation was on, again in fractured and only half-comprehending Italian on my side, clear but sometimes too-quick Italian on his.

He'd had a factory, he explained, but when it was time to get out of that his wife wanted him to open a shop for her, but she never sets foot in it, he's there all day. They never leave Venice, there are the grandchildren to stay near. In any case Venetians don't travel; until recently they didn't even go to Mestre, now of course they live in Mestre, but until recently they didn't even go there, going to Mestre was like going to America. (Mestre's a ten-minute train ride, a forty-five minute walk, from Venice, at least from the near end of Venice.)

He cleared up for me the matter of the weekend's election. It was a national referendum, and as such needed a turnout of more than fifty percent of the electorate; this one cleared that requirement fairly handily.

There were four items on the ballot: a shutdown of Italy's nuclear energy industry; two items restricting private ownership of and profit from water distribution; and a repeal (as I understand it) of various recent decisions granting exemption from prosecution to certain political leaders (read: Silvio Berlusconi).

Well, as we were talking, it was pretty clear this was all going to pass, and this morning's news revealed the margin was stunning, over 95% of voters approving each of the four items. (BBC report on all this here.) Our Murano friend must be pretty happy about this, and our Veronese friends even more so; I can hardly wait to hear from R____ about this. (But he's spending the summer on a Greek island, pretty far from reality, so it may be a while before he gets to me.)

Shopkeeper seemed to conform to an Italian temperament I've seen elsewhere: a little stoic, ironic, intelligent and informed. He banters easily once he feels it safe to do so. He's pessimistic about The Direction Things Are Taking: Venetians don't care about anything but money these days; everyone's stressed out; people spend too much time with gadgets. Yet he speaks easily about driving 225 kilometers an hour when he has to drive to Naples, getting there in four hours, in a car he describes as big and comfortable, to Rome.

We were interrupted a second time: a short, chunky man, dark green heavy shirt, wearing an American Civil War slouch military cap, wanted Orange Horse. You have orange horse? (Picking up, examining, tiny glass horses, one by one.) Shopkeeper eyed him a little nervously, I thought: Careful, those are glass you know, break one and it's yours. (His English was quite good, I realized a little remorsefully; why had I been torturing him with my barbaric Italian?)

Misinterpreting Shopkeeper's oddly intense gaze, Orange Horse pointed to a button on his cap. Union, he said. Union; it's Union. Shopkeeper looked at me meaningfully, his forefinger almost imperceptibly touching his temple, and I saw clearly in his eye: e pazzo, he's nuts. No orange horse, he said, with finality, and Union Cap turned and slouched out of the shop.

THE OTHER DAY, another conversation, with a young man, French-born I think, in the Fortuny Museum. Museum: what a misnomer. This is an enchanting place: Fortuny's house, a good-sized ca' near the Rialto, probably at one time housing not only residence and studio but atelier as well.

The first floor is housing a beautifully curated show of art of the last couple of decades, interspersed with some older pieces. Giacometti's Invisible Object, for example, stood at the entrance, for the show's theme and title is TRA, Italian for “between” — and, of course, a reverse spelling of “art.” Art, the implication is, is in that space between the hands of Giacometti's sculpture.

Art pieces hung, dimly lit, carefully spaced, often close enough to begin little conversations of their own — about edges, volumes, lines, forms, rhythms, light, space. Certain pieces held their own private places: James Turrell's Red Shift, for example, a permanent installation on an upper floor.

We watched a video, Passage — I didn't take note of the filmmaker, and the catalog is neither at hand nor on line — with music by Philip Glass. Normally my patience runs out during such films, but the physical location of this room, its seating, the preparation we'd been given in preceding galleries — all set the video up beautifully; it was mesmerizing.

Soon after entering the museum this discreet young man pointed out a couple of pieces, and reminded us to take our time if we could. He popped up again, now and then, always discreetly, generally waiting for us to open a conversation about this piece or that.

I gushed, I'm afraid, about the installation. Who curated this marvelous exhibition? Oh: it was — in fact, here he is, let me introduce you — Axel Vervoordt. I repeated my congratulations to Mr. Vervoordt, who was gracious and pleased and had every right to be.

There are other aspects to the Museo Fortuny, of course, than TRA. The floor devoted to the master's own collection, with its two perfect little 17th-century Dutch paintings, its modernist pieces, fabrics and paintings and drawings by Fortuny himself, is just as beautifully installed. Instead of labels, there are pamphlets with outline drawings to guide you through what seems a private home.

According to the iPhone Biennale app,

The exhibition explores the transversal connections between history, heritage and universal wisdom, through Mariano Fortuny's rich and multidisciplinary heritage, Axel Vervoordt wabi* inspirations and the meditations of economist Bernard Lietaer, scientist Eddi de Wolf and architect Tatsuro Miki (Taro), which formed the initial basis for the series of exhibitions.

That's rather a grand ambition, but I think it works. Much of this “wisdom” is completely nonverbal: meaning without words. You either get such communication or you don't: if so, you already know it; if not, no one's at fault.

Rather like conversations in languages you don't really know.

———

*Wabi-sabi, our discreet cicerone reminded us, is the Japanese esthetic, or philosophy, or (as I like best to think of it) realization that the beauty and truth of things consists in their imperfection, their existence as affected by natural forces, their transitoriness: a perfect theme for any visit to Venice.

photos from Venice (and a number of other places)

Venice Journal, 14: Conversations

2011-06-10T14:55:00.001-07:00

Venice, June 9, 2011—

A DAY REMARKABLE for its conversations, flawed by one futility.
We set out pretty early on a fine morning, the water middling high in our Canale di Cannaregio, lifting the good ship Francesca nearly to sidewalk level. We were off in search of the French consulate, don't ask why, it's complicated and has nothing to do with Venice.

Soon enough we were hailed by a pair of handsome lads in fine 18th-century brocade suits. It's always a shock to see men wearing such finery but divested of their powdered wigs: perhaps their union rules let them get away with this, but I think it's a little déclassé. One of them was Italian, the other Tunisian; both were in the employ of a local music group, and they enticed us to do what we'd talked about doing anyhow, buying tickets to a production of La Traviata tomorrow night.

We had a nice conversation, mixing up English, Italian, and French. They were an engaging and handsome pair; if we see them again tomorrow I'll break a rule and photograph them. You see young men and women at various strategic location on the tourist routes in Venice, dressed in 18th-century clothes, pitching performances of vocal music, string orchestra music, things geared to what's presumed to be tourist taste. On a previous visit we were roped into a performance of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, and it wasn't half bad. I'll let you know what I think of this Traviata in a day or two.

On then to the French consulate: but en route we came upon a greengrocer stand in a small campiello (are there big ones?). I was attracted at first by the artichoke rounds, but there was no way they'd survive being carried around all day. On the other hand, a plastic bag of shell beans, not that's within reason.

I asked the lady running the stand how to cook them. She was short, maybe five foot four, and a little inclined to weight; but she had a handsome face and a dignified though quite forthcoming presence. She seemed surprised that I wouldn't know how to cook beans.

You put them in water, she said, in Italian, add a little oil, cover them, bring it to a boil, turn it down, and cook them until they're done. Then you salt them: not before.

Oh, I said brightly, you cook them the way you cook pasta. What an idea, she said, certainly not, of course you don't, you never put oil in the water when you cook pasta, beans are one thing, pasta is another, you don't cook them the same way.

A man I hadn't noticed before said Don't forget the rosemary. Give him some rosemary. She half-turned to shoot a meaningful glance at her partner, then rummaged around and came up with a fine healthy spray of rosemary. Oh, said I, rosemary? Not sage? I always like to add sage to beans.

You're joking, the man said, a shocked look of disbelief on his face. Sage, imagine it, sage with beans. No, of course not, this is Venice; we put rosemary in beans. You're in Venice, you must do things the Venetian way.

We thanked them both politely, for the conversation, the beans, the rosemary, the instructions, and went on toward the French consulate.

It has to be around here someplace, we said, looking alternately at the map in our hands and the reality around us. Finally, though, I stopped in at an expensive-looking hotel and asked the man at the desk.

Yes, it's nearby, no, not there where you were told, it's over near Santa Maria Formosa. I know it is, though I've never been there; I know it is, I walk across this bridge every day on my way to work, and I see the French flag flying there. It's right here (indicating a spot on the map, on a canal); I suppose you leave Santa Maria Formosa by this little street, and then turn down one of these streets.

He gave us the map and we walked away, across the campo S. Maria Formosa, down the street he'd indicated, then down the first little street to the left, which ultimately ran past rather an imposing palazzo — casa or ca', they're called here — and ended at a canal.

The main gate was open, so we went on in. No one to be seen. The front door of the palazzo was open, so we went on in there too. One of the bells at the gate had a label: Consulat de France, 2° étage, so we walked up the marble staircase, the treads a little cattawampus as is always the case in these old buildings, and found the door on the second floor.

We knocked and knocked and waited and waited; we called out; we knocked again. Finally we gave up and walked back downstairs. In the foyer I noticed a bank of mailboxes: the consulate's was stuffed with mail, obviously hadn't been looked at in days.

We looked in at a couple of churches, trying to see badly lit paintings flanked by brightly sunlit windows, and then we went to lunch. Afterward, a block or two from the restaurant, I noticed a handsome sculpture on the street, up against a garden wall. Nearby was a largish detached one-storey building; on its front door a sign: SPINGERE.

When you see a sign that says PUSH, well, you push; at least I do. It swung open and we stepped into a marvelous workshop, crowded with planks, bricks, stone, slabs of marble, blocks of granite, statues, thresholds and lintels, lathes and saws, worktables, a bedstead, assorted pieces of furniture. Up in the rafters a bicycle was hanging, suddenly making me think irreverently of the crucifixes we'd seen in the churches.

We called out — Buon giorno! Buongiorno! — but no one was visible. Finally a somewhat disgruntled voice came from somewhre at the back of the shop: Che é?Who's there? And a man dressed entirely in blue appeared, a man in his fifties, I'd say, clearly a little out of sorts at being interrupted.

Il porta dice “spingere”, I said, a little apologetically, e ho spinto. The entire conversation took place in Italian, mine quite bad, his voluble and quick and articulate and now and then ornamented with the Venetian dialect.

Yes, it says Spingere, that doesn't mean you should spinge, he said. Sono inglese?

No, statunitense. Ah, Americani, he said. No, non americani, californiani, e un altra cosa. E non inglesi; abbiamo vinto due guerre coi inglesi.

I still think of the English as the colonialists; it still annoys me that they burned our capital and especially our Library of Congress, quite deliberately. I was glad when Tony Blair finally apologized for this, but still.

The whole digression into Anglo-American relations amused the man. Ah, guerre, he said, we've had our share of wars. And, mollified, the conversation was on. He is a marmista, a marble-worker; this was his grandfather's shop; that's his grandfather's bedstead there; he's kept it ever since his grandfather died, but there's no point in keeping it any longer, he's going to get rid of it.

Suddenly he launched into a disquisition on the Venetian disinterest in its own history and heritage. They don't care about anything any more, he said, only about money, and not working too hard. It's always been like that.

He showed us a neatly stacked pile of bricks, all completely covered, like everything else in the shop, with marble dust. Look at these bricks, he said; the Venetians don't even care about their bricks. (In truth there are an awful lot of them; I'd estimated this morning that one small part of S. Maria Formosa was made of about 3500 bricks, and that at that rate the entire church must have had at least five million of them.)

Look at these, he said, they were all made here, here in Venice; look at these. Each man had to make a hundred bricks a day. He held up two bricks, one three times the size of the other. Look at these, he said; no one said how big the bricks had to be; as soon as they said you had to make a hundred a day, why, some of them began to make a hundred bricks each of them a third the size of a brick.

He suddenly handed the smaller brick to F___. This is important, he said, don't ever get rid of this, take it home and clean it with soap, not too much, don't use a wire brush, use something soft; then keep it and put something beautiful on it.

I was beginning to get, well, not bored, but restless, wondering how we were going to detach ourselves from this fascinating conversation. California had brought the subject of wine to mind, and he'd gone to the back of the shop and returned with a half-finished bottle of Cabernet sauvignon from somewhere, pouring glasses for us. He talked about the local restaurants, only one of which was maintaining any standards. He complimented the street market we've been shopping at, near our Ponte Guglie. Then another fellow entered, and he introduced him as a very important man, because he still beat out gold leaf by hand, the only man left in Venice who did.

A spirited conversation in Venexiano developed between them, and I thought of Carlo Goldoni, the playwright, whose house we'd seen yesterday. In fact the gestures, attitudes, and intonations of these two could have come directly from a Goldoni comedy: but when I said something to that effect our marmista took exception.

He seems mercurial, this man, brittle like his medium, and resistant, and set: but like the expressions we see every day carved into marble in churches, on lintels, at street-corners, he's lively, expressive, amused and amusing; intelligent; active. Another example of the liveliness of this city, so human, so fallible, so fragile, so perdurant.

Venice Journal, 13: Typical Day

2011-06-09T15:08:00.001-07:00

Venice, June 9, 2011—

WELL, YES, some of you are kind enough to wonder: but what are you actually doing there in Venice?

Fair enough: here's an account of today's activity, a typical day. It's a little embarrassing, because it's pretty haphazard. But that's how things go. I get up first, about eight, and pad downstairs to put the coffee and milk on the stove. F___ yawns and says Buongiorno sleepily. L. arrives a little later, after I call upstairs: De koffie is klaar!

Usually we have toast, made by grilling sliced bread or rolls in the frying pan, there being no toaster here. This morning there was half an almond torte left over from yesterday's special Lindsey's-Birthday-Boxing-Day breakfast, so we made do with that. Then F____ and I read half a Pirandello story to one another, and I finished reading it to myself — “Non c'e una cosa seria,” in Italian and in English translation.

Then we went out in search of the day's adventure. We walked down the Strada Nova to the Ca' d'Oro and took the traghetto across to the Pescheria, where we inspected the fish market. Everything looked okay: much cleaner than previously — word is the boys in Brussels, imposing their European Union imperatives, have ordered the seagulls and pigeons out of the market. This makes me a little sad, but I suppose it's all for the best.

Next order of business: get somehow to the Ca' Pesaro, Venice's Museum of Modern Art. This involves getting lost a couple of times, taking two or three dead-end alleys, counting Scotch terriers, marveling at oddly inscribed sweatshirts on (other) tourists, that sort of thing.

The Ca' Pesaro must be the only Museum of Modern Art all of whose paintings in the first gallery were finished before the invention of the telephone. Nor does it seem to have anything done after the end of the Korean War. There are a couple of marvelous things here: a luscious Bonnard, a brilliant Klimt, a series of impressive pieces by Medardo Rosso.

But the main gallery, filled with acquisitions from Venice Biennales from the very first year (1895) through 1950, reminds me of the sad bookcase in Portland's Powell's Books, filled with at least one book by every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, most of whom you've never heard of, and never will unless you look it up right now. Apart from the pieces just mentioned, the collection contains a few first-rate pieces by first-rate artists — a good Kandinsky, a nice Calder mobile — but otherwise hesitates between a few second-rate pieces by first-rate artists and a number of first-rate pieces by second-rate artists.

There are also, of course, plenty of second-rate pieces by second-rate artists, to be generous. But as L. said, it's good that there are such collections; the morning was not wasted. It takes a lot of stuff at the bottom, and throughout the middle too, to provide a base for the few things at the top. Besides, who are we to… but that's not really sincere, is it.

A quick sandwich and a glass of Pinot grigio at the museum café, and on to the next assignment: the ongoing assault on Venice's gelaterie. We take ice cream pretty seriously in our family; the art-and-craft of making it is as technical, complex, and privy to failure as is that of making paintings. And while we can photograph various ice creams, preserving their visual appearance quite as well as we do that of the paintings we see, we can't record their taste, smell, and texture; we can only take notes, or try to commit to memory. Rating the gelati we have tasted is therefore a fool's game: but we try. Buono, I might say, ma non ottimo; or occasionally ottimo, ma non ultimo. Now and then, though, as today, F___ and I will exchange glances over our cups — well, in fact, she almost invariably prefers cones — and simply vocalize a quiet little “hum.”

That means it's really, really good. Ultimo, in fact. Today's gelateria was one we'd run across a week or so ago, early on this visit, VizioVirtù, on the Sestiere San Polo. It's an unusual gelateria: only six flavors, and them in covered cans in the freezer-chest. They're almost invisible from the street. And it's not really a gelateria at all, but a cioccolateria whose principal product we've yet to try. (We will, we will.)

I had two flavors: peach-lemon and vanilla. I usually have fior di latte and crema; I think strong flavors mask flaws in technique and compromises in ingredients, and after all I'm not here to enjoy this stuff, but to decide which ones are good. But this time I went for a little flavor, and oh my it was ultimo.
Just before getting to VizioVirtù we ran across the Carlo Goldoni house-museum. What serendipity! (But of course that's the essence of Venice.) I'd already been attracted by the sight of a staircase behind a locked grating, and stuck my camera between the bars to try to catch it. Immediately, though, we next came to a sign and a doorway inviting us in. The large, elegantly proportioned cortile is beautifully though dimly lit: at one end, a grate over a doorway looking out onto a side canal; at the other, the staircase, open to the sky, leading up to the house on the first floor: ascending it, you realize all really Italian Italian houses begin upstairs; they're set atop stables, or cantinas, or garages, or as in this case a courtyard, empty now, but probably at one time given over to a donkey, a few barrels of wine, and a boat.

Upstairs, a nice room with a closed-circuit video introducing the master playwright to the visiting tourists. In adjacent rooms, a charming marionette theater and a few 18th-century volumes of Goldoni's plays. Alas, there's no theater on in Venice: O teatro, o la Biennale, the woman at the ticket-counter explained; it's either theater season, or the Biennale.

We stopped in on a few churches today, admiring Tintoretto and Titian and, even more, architects who remain anonymous to me. Some of them are given over to temporary displays having to do with the Biennale. We've seen half a dozen of these ancillary exhibitions so far; of them, only the Romanian one has impressed me — but I'm saving the Biennale for another day's comments, after I've seen more of it.

Getting late in the afternoon: time to find our way home. A few more twists and turns; a few streets wide enough for only one person; a few bridges looking out onto views of surprising beauty and richness of detail even if you've just crossed it in the other direction, only to find out you've taken exactly the wrong direction yet again.

We stop off to buy some guanciale and a bottle of milk, and I step into a wine-shop for some red wine. You don't drink only white, I point out to the shopkeeper, surprised that I'm not asking for my usual flat prosecco. The wine comes from carboys through plastic tubes, and is poured into one-and-a-half liter plastic water-bottles recycled for the purpose. (Usually I bring my own glass bottle in; I hadn't wanted to carry it all day today.)

The wine is delicious, fresh, fruity. I doubt it's more than 11% alcohol. It costs €1.50 a liter.

We carry it and the groceries home. I check the e-mail and look in on Facebook, then transfer the day's photos to the laptop for safekeeping, while L. makes the omelet. I make the salad. F___ goes about her clerical duties. We eat dinner slowly and appreciatively, exchanging more little “hum”s over it.

Just past l'heure bleue, when it's nearly dark, we go out for a walk. We walk past an osteria I want to go to soon for dinner: Dalla Marisa, which has a terrific reputation, but which I'd heard a week or two ago had been sold. It's late; only a couple of canalside tables are occupied, though the indoors tables are still full.

A waitress bustles back and forth, kitchen to canal, and I stop her in for a moment: Marisa, ancora cui? I ask in my broken Italian: Is Marisa still here? No, signor: un altra persona. La figlia. Oh ho: it's true: Marisa's no longer in charge; but if her daughter's taken over…

E c'e ancora buono? And is it still good, I ask, mischievously — Meglio, better, comes the reply, with a knowing smile: and I bet this is the daughter herself. We'll give it a try next week.

By now it's dark. We walk out to the end of the Fondamenta to take some last photos of the day. Down the quay to our left I can just make out the form of a man lying on a blanket on the pavement. He hasn't yet gone to sleep: he's half sitting, the back of his head resting against the building behind him, cushioned by a jacket or sweater or shirt, I can't quite make out what it is. He's gazing out over the lagoon, dark and blue and peaceful under the night sky. The the left a row of lights indicate the shoreline, leading from Mestre up toward the airport.

Here and there a bright yellow light on a pole ripples the quiet surface of the water. A small boat glides by, a faint light on its prow. Voices come across the water. We turn back to the city and take a final photo down the canal, toward the Ponte Tre Archi, the only three-arched bridge in Venice. The water laps gently against the fondamenta; the air is deliciously soft and fragrant.

Hum, we say to one another; this is truly a beautiful city, la vita e assolutamente bella.

photos from Venice online here

Venice Journal, 12bis: More Loss

2011-06-08T09:39:00.001-07:00

Venice, June 8, 2011—

ONE MORE NOTE on the subject of loss: the rhinoceros is gone.

We first saw it the day after we arrived, a couple of weeks ago. A tribute to Albrecht Dürer, I think it may have been, and perhaps the only mural we've seen in this town. I took a photo and posted it to Facebook; my friend John Whiting then worked on the photo a bit, removing the fire hydrant from in front of it.

It was on the north-east facing wall of a shed, exactly at 45.44480N, 122.32148E, a little southeast of the Ponte Tre Archi, off the west fondamenta of the Canale di Cannaregio. Close examination suggested it was painted on paper; parts of it were peeling away. (You can see this on the shed door, just below its boarded-up window, where a flap of paint or paper is detached and curling toward the viewer.)

As we walked past the shed a few days after we'd first seen it, a man in an apron was walking away from it, supplies of some kind in is hand, toward the restaurant a few steps away: Pizzeria-Ristorante Tre Archi. I asked about the painting. He confirmed that it was painted on paper which was then affixed somehow to the wall, and indicated that due ragazzi, two youths, had come by a month or so earlier, asked permission to glue the painted paper to the wall, and were told to go ahead.

What ragazzi, I asked; he only shrugged: two youths whatever. I suppose that's a self-portrait of one of them, sitting on the chair wearing what looks like a plumber's helper on his head.

Yesterday, maybe the day before, we were astonished to see that the seated figure was missing. We looked fairly closely and decided someone must have taken it deliberately. I don't know why we so quickly put this out of our minds; perhaps it was just one more visual detail lost in the daily richness of this city.

Today we noticed the rest of the mural was gone. The only thing left is the section of horn on the plywood boarding up the door of the shed. I asked at Tre Archi what had happened. The rain, they said, had finally dissolved it, or at least the glue holding it to the wall; I imagine someone somewhere managed to peel off extensive sections. I like to hope it was the artists themselves.

It's frequently said that art changes the way we view reality, and I'll certainly never look down the Fondamenta de la Crea at that shed without seeing the rhinoceros. The shed is nude without it.

Whoever the artists were, they were certainly talented. It's too bad their work wasn't more permanent, I suppose: but on the whole it's better for public art to be good but fleeting than bad and persistent. Like the Bellini, the rhinoceros stays in mind. I'm glad we had a chnace to see it.

Across the narrow Rio de la Crea from the shed there's an apartment building. On its front door, a poignant note advertising the loss of Titi, a pet cat. Perhaps the rhinoceros frightened it and it ran away; perhaps now the rhino's gone Titi will come home. I hope so. Most losses are merely Redistribution and can be got over, but the loss of a cat is a serious matter.

Venice Journal, 12: Lost, Found, Stolen

2011-06-08T01:30:00.001-07:00

Venice, June 8, 2011—

WE DO NOT TRAVEL unmindful of what I refer to as the Principle of Redistribution of Wealth, which in less generous moments I call theft and loss. Especially we do not travel to Venice without contemplating such things. The Serene Republic was built, after all, on the backs of exploited people, with stuff and money rarely contributed willingly.

Ten years ago, when we were here for a month with two other granddaughters, sharing an apartment with another couple, our friend's camera was stolen right off the back of the chair in which he was sitting while eating lunch. This was on the Fondamenta della Sensa, at the Osteria alla 40 Ladroni (the forty big thieves), which gave no end of amusement to the police when he filed his denuncio.

Loss is part of the melancholic attractiveness of this city, but sometimes Retrieval is part of the fabric. Perhaps just as often: perhaps loss is only exchange, looked at from one end, and retrieval is an inescapable half of the dialectic; perhaps Serenity can only be achieved when such perfect balances are attained in all transactions.

We were out to the Madonna dell'Orto yesterday, a very beautiful church, because relatively austere; very nicely sited, because off the beaten track at the Fondamente Nove. The name refers to a Madonna and Child found in, or retrieved from, a garden that once stood next door the church. Various accounts of many events in the long history of this place — which dates back to the sixth century, after all — disagree on various matters. One source says this Madonna was a painting; others say a sculpture. You'd think that would be an easy matter to clarify, and as you'll see, it is.

Sources disagree, too, as to whether this miraculous thing — everyone agrees it's miraculous, in one way or another — was truly lost and luckily found, or simply moved, with the former owner's permission or not, from the next-door garden.

She's off in a corner of a corner chapel, fairly unremarkable otherwise. The statue itself looks pretty old to me, and not particularly reverent. The Madonna looks like the older Gertrude Stein, after she'd put on weight; and the Child looks like Benito Mussolini. The whole thing looks Roman, somehow, and I wonder if it wasn't carved to represent some other mother and child, and has simply been appropriated, as Christianity has appropriated so many strands of previous culture, either deliberately or simply as part of the reckless, unpremeditated, even completely impersonal progress — I use the word in its most neutral sense — of history.

Like most sculpture, all sculpture if the word's used correctly, even here in Venice, the home of the Biennale with all its up-to-the-minute art (about which more later, in another dispatch), this thing is definitely solid, substantial, physical, threedimensional, Found. What remains lost is its story, so others have been fabricated; narrative, like Nature, abhors a vacuum.

DINNER LAST NIGHT at a nearby restaurant to honor a birthday. A nice, cozy, rather pretty room; a late dinner. At the next table, three young American men, frat men F___ calls them; they first got her attention when she overheard "I just can't get the hang of this Italian thing". At another, an American couple in their fifties or early sixties, apparently also celebrating an event of some sort.

We all finished at about the same time, so I was able to witness another example of Redistribution — a missing iPhone. Consternation. Where can it be. It was right here next to me. Are you sure you had it? Of course I'm sure; I was using it.

(I can attest to that: I saw semiclandestine photos being taken with it.)

By now it was late, close to eleven o'clock. Dinner is generally earlier in Venice than elsewhere in Italy. The kitchen was closed and cleaning up, the busboy was washing up some dishes, our waiter was closing out his accounts, the barman-proprietor was eyeing the whole scene with that appreciative, analytical, managerial eye that's so impressive, so admirable, when subtly and efficiently handled, as it was here.

Everyone looked everywhere: on and under the chairs and tables, in pockets and purses, on the floor. Ah, a waiter said, Perhaps it's in the tablecloth; and went to the next room where we saw, through an open doorway, a basket of crumpled linens; and where we then saw him methodically take all of them out, shake them carefully, and then sadly report the thing was not there either.

The aggrieved party was, well, aggrieved; nothing to do but fare un denuncio, file a police report. Restaurant staff looked perturbed; I thought the busboy, particularly, seemed a little nervous: and why wouldn't he be? He would of course be the first to be suspected, for at least two reasons, both contemptible. He was the only staffer not clearly Italian — he'd confused us when he offered "pepe fresca," "fresh (black) pepper": his Italian seemed unidiomatic, translated out of some other native language by way of English: and the other native language was assumed to be South Indian, by his physical appearance. Anyway, he looked nervous.

Finally, of course, the missing iPhone was found, in an upstairs pocket apparently little used under normal circumstances by its owner, and the owner was sheepish, and the proprietor was (properly, I though) rather I-told-you-so: siamo bravi; non siamo ladri, he said; we're good people (here), we're not thieves. But it had been a bit of a scare.

Back home I looked over the day's photos. Among them one I find rather touching: the first side chapel on the left, at Madonna dell'Orto, where a particularly beautiful Bellini should be hanging, and where there is now in fact only an empty frame. The painting was redistributed in the early 1990s, according to a label accompanying the photographic reproduction standing near the empty frame.

The reproduction appears to be quite faithful, though — as the label takes care to point out — a little less than life size. Light falls on it in such a way that it itself can't be adequately photographed, at least not clandestinely, with an iPhone, so you'll have to take my word for it.

Lost, strayed, or stolen, it's a memorable painting; like all memorable paintings, it haunts a peculiar corner of one's memory. I'm not a painter; I couldn't begin to reproduce it, not even sketch its outlines, from memory. I seem to see it, with my mind's eye, in terms of light and colors, vaguely distributed across its rectangular space. The blues are haunting.

Venice Journal, 11: Umbrellas

2011-06-06T13:20:00.001-07:00

Venice, June 6, 2011—

WE WERE ENTERTAINED last night by quite a lusty thunderstorm, which came on fast, lingered a while, and then moved on. You can see why the ancients assumed divinities of some sort were involved with such events: they have energy and personality; they remind you from time to time of people you know, and often wish you didn't.

This morning was overcast but did not, to my way of thinking (which I'm occasionally reminded is not necessarily always the most practical way of thinking), threatening. I wore my canvas shoes, but not my “straw” hat, which is in fact made of paper; and I took an umbrella.

Our apartment is furnished with three umbrellas, who spend their days in an umbrella-stand in the front hall. I suppose former renters have bought them when they were needed, or thought to be needed in an impending future, and left them behind, like cheap paperbacks, a third of a package of pasta, a jar of stale nutmeg. No one leaves gin behind, or Proust, or a nice prosciutto.

I have a fondness for umbrellas. More than once I've bought an umbrella here in Italy, where they often seem unusually handsome. Once in the city of Aosta, for example, when it began to rain heavily while we were in the central piazza, I saw a display of elegant umbrellas with nicely made wooden handles and really fine subtly colored fabrics, and I bought one that pleased me almost as a first-rate hat.

A week later we ate in a nice restaurant on the edge of Verona, taken there by friends who live there. It was still raining, just a bit, so I took the umbrella, and set it properly in an umbrella-rack in the foyer as we entered. After our lunch, of course, my umbrella was gone, a cheap folding Taiwanese pretense left in its place, as if to persuade me someone had made an honest mistake. I still mourn that umbrella, and Richard still kids me about it.

Three summers ago in the small town of Chiomonte it was pouring when we got off our bus and walked down to the only bar-café in town. Next door, almost, is a general-dry-goods store; in it a marvelous umbrella. When I bought it the lady who ran the store looked pleased, a little surprised, and a little puzzled, all at once: pleased to make a sale, surprised an American had come to Chiomonte to buy an umbrella, puzzled because — wait a moment — doesn't he look familiar? — yes: I had bought an umbrella in the same store years earlier.

That umbrella three years ago came in handy as we continued our stroll across the Alps. I'd wished I had one in earlier days, when it rained pretty heavily on us outside Chamonix; when it rained again, down toward Briançon, I think it was, the umbrella sheltered me, while my companions, who'd made fun of the umbrella earlier, walked in soggy misery alongside.

That umbrella flew as cabin baggage, no problem at all, from Nice to Amsterdam. There it came in handy again, of course: but the flight from Amsterdam back to San Francisco I was told it had to be stowed. This advice came at the last minute, of course; there was nothing to do but give it to a man at a counter, who tied a tag to it and claimed it would travel in perfect safety. But when I finally retrieved it three days later — it had gone off on flights of its own, apparently — it was of course bent; it never worked quite right again.

(And then, in a really terrific gust of wind on our driveway, whose weather can rival Alpine conditions from time to time, it turned completely inside out, breaking three of the ribs. I still have it, in the immense collection of Things Awaiting Repair, distributed among the attic, the workshop, and storage.)

VENICE IS NOT HOSPITABLE to umbrellas. The streets are either too narrow or too crowded to allow any but the most selfish use of them. Some streets are so narrow the umbrella must be carried tilted, or it will brush the walls on either side of the street. Wider streets are crowded with pedestrians, many of whom are armed with umbrellas which are used as much for offense as defense.

In a civil society there's a kind of ballet; a gavotte of umbrellas; they are lifted just clear of one another when their bearers meet in a confined area (which nearly all of Venice is); when necessary they'll be tilted just a bit. It seems rude to let them actually brush one another, as it is rude to cause another pedestrian to brush against a wall, or a bridge railing. And of course this gavotte is performed in a studiously carefree way: you wouldn't want to be caught actually paying attention to it. You lift, tilt, lower your umbrella to clear the oncoming traffic of umbrellas, but without actually looking at them, or at their bearers. It's a pleasant dance, and it takes your mind off the little miseries Venice rain imposes.

In fact the main reason you don't look to closely at oncoming umbrellas, apart from the danger they'll blind you with their ribs, is that your eyes are on the pavement, if you've any sense about you. The square stones of the paving have settled nearly everywhere, each following its own interpretation of gravity and the soft geology of Venetian substrates; and where they've settled the rain collects. Oh, said F___ at one point: I've forgotten the Italian word for puddle, and it's a word I really like.

Maretti, I said: little oceans. She laughed, and liked the word; but I had to admit I'd made it up on the spot. (It turns out to be pozzanghera; I can see why she likes it.) But these puddles do in fact extend themselves to near oceanic proportions, especially in the larger campi, and dodging them requires quick eyes, deft feet, and a polite disregard for such conventions as keep-to-the-right, give-way-to-babies.

Rainwear here always seems improvised — odd; rain's hardly unusual here, but tourists especially always seem to think they're in Florida. They wear shorts and tee-shirts, sandals, Panama trilbys. Then when it rains they either simply get soaked or they grab whatever they can find to protect themselves. You see the occasional garbage bag worn as a poncho, a trick we learned one day in the Alps. You see variations of very thin plastic raincoats, often in alarmingly chemical colors. I saw one woman slogging along with plastic bags tied over her shoes.

On the Piazza San Marco today we saw a couple of American tourists, the man, fortyish, fairly nondescript in shorts, a polo shirt, and rather a large paunch; his wife, about the same age, remarkable for her baby-blue frilly dress, her parasol, and her widebrimmed baby-blue hat. She was striking an attitude while he photographed her, the Basilica in the background to point of reference. The rain began to fall, lightly at first, and they ignored it.

We ducked into the Museo Correr, knowing a thunderstorm was about to break. It was torrential. I looked out a window onto the Piazza a few minutes later: they were still there, quite soggy; but you had to hand it to them; they were toughing it out.

June photos from Friuli and Venice now online

Venice Journal, 10: Sounds

2011-06-05T13:14:00.001-07:00

Venice, June 5, 2011—

WE WERE AWAKENED at six o'clock this morning by the bells in the church, just outside our window, striking the hour. At least I was awakened; I think the girls slept through. Thankfully the bells don't ring through the night: they tell midnight, then go to sleep themselves for six hours.

At six-thirty I barely noticed the single peal marking the half-hour, and fell back into my doze. But seven o'clock! On this Sunday morning, all holy hell broke loose, and the girls were as wide awake as I. The bell-tower's hardly a hundred feet from our bedroom, and I'd left the double-paned window ajar for the night; I hate sleeping in still, stale air.

This happened to us for the first time in 1974, on our first trip to Europe, when we booked a cheap hotel room in Maastricht right next to a big church. There the bells told the hours, and the half-hours, all through the night. Furthermore, they respected the maddening convention of telling each hour twice, at two minutes before, to give you warning, and on the hour, in case you'd counted wrong two minutes earlier. That was a rough night.

Here in Treppo Carnico there are three bells, pitched roughly a major second apart. The highest bell is the first to sound, and peals pretty regularly for quite a while. Then the lowest enters, going at a slightly different speed, while the other continues at its pace. Finally the middle bell comes in at yet another pace. It's fascinating to hear the overlapping cycles, to hear rhythms grow gradually more regular, then further apart: the individual pitches act like children who wander toward one another to form a trio, then apart, each at his own pace, to strike their own individualistic postures.

At the same time, of course, both within each bell and among the three of them various overtones become more and less prominent. The tonality suggested by the falling major third grows less certain as the shimmering overtones declare greater substance and interest. The shimmering becomes a buzzing sometimes; you're not quite sure those sounds are actually there, in the bells, or in the air around the bells, or in your ears. Maybe they're really only in your mind.

And the major third isn't really quite a major third. It's certainly not an equal-tempered major third; it's "out of tune", except that there isn't really any tune. And why should there be? The bells may well have been cast in different places, at different times, by completely different hands. They certainly sound as if they're composed of different alloys, cast to different specifications.

They're musical, no question about that; but the music they sound is theirs, not Bach's or Mozart's or Wagner's (God knows!) or Webern's. Xenakis's, maybe. It's clearly man-made, but the sound of this music has declared its independence from the conventions of music as most of us know it or think of it — that is, the tonal equal-tempered and rhymically rather unimaginative music of Western Europe from Palestrina, let's say, through today's rock, country-western, and concert music.

The bells continue to peal for seven or eight minutes; we try to drift back to sleep, knowing (or suspecting) they'll be at it again at eight o'clock. Then, remembering we have to be on the road at nine, we get up, dress, and go down to breakfast. Sure enough they begin again, hardly any quieter for the few feet we've added to our distance from them.

This time I record them with my iPhone, which tells me they play for seven minutes and forty seconds. At 8:38 they're at it again, a little quicker and more insistent; this time they only continue for a little over five minutes. Each of these little concerts is sonically, even musically interesting for a different reason: at first the physical sounds of the bells; then the interplay of the cycles; finally one's curiosity as to the history and intent of this custom.

In my usual town, Healdsburg, the Catholic Church replaced its bells quite a few years ago with some kind of pre-recorded bell sound. I'm pretty sure it's a recording; this was done too long ago for a synthesizer to have been installed. The sounds are played through loudspeakers, of course; they're installed up in the bell-tower and played at rather a muted volume. Still, they're really annoying. They don't have the physical substance of bells. The loudspeaker is the worst invention of the twentieth century, I think, even worse than the internal-combustion engine; the only twentieth-century invention I can think of quite as insidious and pernicious is the back-beat.

As the bells died away this morning they gave way to the sounds of birds. It's birds that first wake me every morning: here in Treppo, swifts, sparrows, and blackbirds; at our apartment in Venice, some kind of aquatic bird whose call is halfway between quack and gargle. Later in the day there's the everpresent sound of pigeons, whose slightly rhotic cooing has such an endearing quality you almost forgive the things being pigeons.

The other bird in Treppo to surprise and delight us with its sound was the cuckoo. Friulian cuckoos do not sing the falling third familiar from clocks and Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, nor do they often sing the falling fourth Mahler's more accurate ear observed. Friulian cuckoos, or at any rate those in the woods around Treppo, sing a falling major second, slightly wider than an equal-tempered major second but very close.

Perhaps because of the church bells I usually hear this as the third and second degree of a scale whose keynote is always left implied. I like this, of course, because a never-achieved implication promises continuity, even futurity. And the insistence of the cuckoo, which would be maddening if it were closer or a less interesting sound, contributes to this sense of guaranty, of endlessness.

In Australia, years ago, I encountered the bell-bird, who sings a single note, rather a resonant one, unvaryingly, frequently, insistently. The bell-bird is an egoist making its noise only to announce its presence, a presence otherwise completely unremarkable. The cuckoo is I think a poet and a Romantic, nostalgically calling over and over in the selfless hope that a resounding wood will somehow respond, contributing to an evocative universe of sound.

We heard our first cuckoo many years ago, in Norway, outside Bergen, on a walk to a stave church not far from Edvard Grieg's studio. Until then I never quite believed the birds were less than mythical, serving Swiss clockmakers and German composers with a pleasant fantasy. (No composer gets the bird quite as accurately, or to quite as poetic an effect, as Frederic Delius, in his On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring.)

Since then we've heard them fairly often in The Netherlands, in forests in the eastern part of the country. But never until now have I heard them sing descending seconds; only fourths and, very occasionally, wide major thirds.
I like this Friulian version, and hope to hear it again — preferably, next time, with a recorder handy.

Venice Journal, 9: Mozartina

2011-06-04T10:40:00.001-07:00

Treppo Carnica, June 4, 2011—

IT DOESN'T REALLY MATTER where in this world we go (though of course we're relatively choosy about what parts we visit), we find places worth spending much more time in. Carnica is one. Italy is divided into states, I forget what they're called in Italian: one of them is Friuli-Venezia-Giuliana. (That's already really three regions, I suppose, jammed for some politically convenient reason into one.)

Friuli-Venezia-Giuliana, the northeastmost region of Italy, is divided itself into a number of provinces, of which Udine is one, named after its capital city. And the province of Udine is divided into four sections — perhaps not politically; I'm not sure about that: but because of history and geography, these sections have a certain individuality.

One of those sections is Carnia, where we are. Its principal city is I suppose Tolmezzo. We went there today to visit the folk museum, but were unsuccessful: though we did have a nice coffee and a fine gelato, and made a successful ATM withdrawal, all well worth our time.

The quarters of Udine province are divided by ridges and rivers. The riverbeds suggest the rivers can run pretty destructively, and there aren't that many bridges over them. The ridges rise to pretty high passes, and the roads crossing them are slow. (Yesterday we counted a dozen hairpins on one such road, seven on another; and of course there are tunnels, retaining walls, snowsheds and the like to maintain.)

How surprising it was, then, that in the small town of Paularo, a few kilometers east of our temporary home in Treppo Carnico, there should be a museum of musical instruments: three floors of beautifully restored instruments, keyboards for the most part, apparently in homage to Mozart.

Not sure exactly where it was, we asked at a bookstore on the town's main street. A woman there looked it up on their computer, then wrote out a phone number for me. The man who answered referred me to another number: when I called it, the man who answered asked how many we were, then suggested we come at 11:30, about forty-five minutes away. We walked around town a bit, bought some groceries for our lunch, then stopped at the Mozartina, where we saw a young man in a track suit unlock the front door, close it behind him, and one by one crack open windows and turn lights on and off, up and down the three-story façade.

Finally he seemed to be done, and L. peeked into the front door: Attendere un momento, he called, Wait a minute, I'm not yet ready, and we retreated to the front yard, sitting a while on benches flanking the door.

Then he came to the door and graciously let us in. He explained, pretty much by rote, that this was a private museum, that he would guide us through it, at the cost — he seemed a little embarrassed about this — of five euros each. Then he motioned us to follow into the first room, where I was rather amazed.

The first instrument to catch my eye was a one-manual organ from the 17th century, nicely restored, the only modernization being electrically-operated bellows (very quiet, by the way), with original lead and wooden pipes. He played a short Handel prelude on this, not too badly, and explained the construction and tuning, responding well to what questions my primitive Italian allowed me to put.

From there we went on to fortepianos, harpsichords, early pianos, harmoniums, all restored with as much attention to their musical utility as their physical appearance, which was very beautiful. The instruments are displayed in rooms otherwise furnished according to both period — 18th and early 19th century — and place: this little corner of a mountainous region of what was once a backwater of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Mozart, our guide told us, had actually visited this town on one of his travels; had actually played the glockenspiel we found in its shallow case, resting on a piano in the top-floor drawing room. (Our guide picked up a couple of little hammers and had his way with a passage from The Magic Flute.)

All these instruments were gathered and restored by one Giovanni Canciani, a native as I understood it of Paularo. The house itself is from 1745; its restoration dates from just after the 1976 earthquake which caused a great deal of destruction in Udine province.

The roof, for example, is new, including its beams: but built after the original methods. The attic room is used, I read, for private concerts from time to time, and while the entire house-museum is privately owned, tours like the one we took are available by appointment.

In one room portraits of Canciani's grandparents hang, father's side on one wall, mother's on the opposite; flanking each portrait are portraits of the previous generation. There's something remarkably touching about all this, a feeling that one actually does look back into an intimate past, in a comfortable but not ostentatious home in an odd corner of an old world, one even including an occasional visit from a Mozart.

I mentioned yesterday, either here or on the eating blog, our hostess-cook-waitress reminding us that simple things are best. We're staying in an albergo, a country hotel, which is also an agriturismo, a place connected to, making use of, and seeking to acquaint the tourist with a fattoria or farm, preferably a smallholding, which maintains traditional agricultural and domestic values in some way.

All this is done with government support of various kinds. Certainly licensing and a degree of publicity; perhaps some financial support in the form of tax breaks or maybe outright subsidies — these things are complicated enough in any country, perhaps especially here in Italy. We learned last year, for example, when we stayed a couple of nights in a similar place in Piemonte, that the evening menus were actually stipulated by a regional tourist bureau: traditional dishes of the area, their roots in peasant cooking, dishes rarely met in commercial restaurants.

That may well be the case here, as the two dinners we've had so far were composed almost completely of such dishes. We've only seen such dishes in one restaurant before: oddly, in Pasadena, where they're the mainstay of Tre Venezie, whose name refers to the three regions in the Italian northeast: Alto Adige, Veneto, and Friuli-Venezia-Giulia, and whose menu is drawn from peasant cuisine de terroir.

This afternoon we walked ten minutes or so through town from our albergo to its farm, on the edge of Treppo. The main building is a barn dating from 1745 — the date's carved into the keystone over the door. Here, unlike the Mozartina, the roofbeams are the original poles, larch or spruce. The floors have been replaced, the ground floor covered with a thin layer of concrete; and the hay inside is neatly baled in cylinders.

Four cows live in a stall in the basement, alas never allowed outside to pasture, but apparently content and certainly healthy. We drink their milk — pasteurized, of course; it's required — with our morning coffee, and it's sweet. Outside,

vegetable plots — potatoes, pole beans, salad, leeks, onions — divide the space with fruit trees and, especially, grassland, which is cut several times a season for hay. A couple of men looked in on us, whether asked to by our host, or out of neighborly curiosity, I can't say. They told me that this was the way of life hereabouts until the 1950s, when the old ways were permanently abandoned by the younger generations.

Today the ways of the paisano are continued only artificially, I suppose, as a part of the agritultural-tourism industry which is becoming a significant part of the Italian economy. I can't help thinking, though, that when the good times are gone, when people are forced back to old ways, whether from war, climate change, or terminal economic meltdown, the old ways will re-emerge; they will provide the only sustainable survival. And I'm glad to see the scythes and pitchforks are maintained in good working order, alongside the walk-behind mower and hay-baler.

Venice Journal, 8: Out of town

2011-06-03T00:34:00.001-07:00

Treppo Carnica, June 3, 2011—

VENICE IS JAMMED at the moment; the apartment we've taken for the month had been previously rented for this weekend. It's the opening of the Biennale, and all kinds of people are converging on the town, for all kinds of reasons, no doubt.

Our agent had explained this to us when we took the place; we knew we'd have to give up the apartment for these few days. Our only question had been, where to go? In the end the weather told us: up into the mountains. So yesterday we dragged ourselves and all our belongings over to the Piazzale Roma whence we were shuttle-vanned to a Hertz lot north of Mestre.

There, a little after eleven o'clock, we got into a shiny black Ford Fiesta and drove up into the mountains. Most of the way we were on the autostrada, remarkable only for long code (“tails,” queues) of stopped traffic, fortunately going the other direction; and for the truck driver I watched at one of the service areas where we'd stopped for sandwiches and a coffee.

Alas, I did not catch him at one of the times he carefully poured the steaming-hot water out of the saucepan in which he'd just cooked his pasta — he ate at least two pans full.

From Udine north the road began to climb, imperceptibly at first, later quicker. The flora changed dramatically, from the lower farmland — corn, for the most part — to forest. Now and then our road bridged broad riverbeds strewn with white gravel and boulders, a narrow blue-grey stream rushing down to the Adriatic.

At last we left the highway and returned to narrower SS (strada statale, regional road) highways, one lane in each direction, well paved, the curves and grades well engineered. And finally we were in Treppo Carnica — “Carnica” both to situate the village, here in the foothills of the Carnic Alps on the Austrian border, and to differentiate it from another Treppo, Treppo Grande (though I bet it isn't), nearer Udine.

After settling into a comfortable room, whose windows look out onto a ridge to the south, we went for a short walkabout. It's a mountain village like many; we couldn't help being reminded of St. Pierre de Chartreuse, where we used to stay so many years ago. Fresh-cut grass, with alpine flowers; stone-and-plank farm buildings; a freshet pouring down the hill between neat homesteads; well-tended gardens trending, this time of year, to pole beans and potatoes.

We stopped to admire one garden, bordered by fragrant carnations and stocks but containing plenty of vegetables. Its proprietor seemed surprised we'd find it worth stopping for, explaining the flowers were there simply because she liked smelling them. It was hard to understand her Italian: the local dialect is apparently pretty forceful, elbowing schoolroom Italian out of daily conversation. It was hard to break off the conversation, partly because of that: but we continued our peregrination,

up and down steep streets, heading back to the Albergo.

Dinner was cucina povera, as described over at Eating Every Day. The fellow who owns this place is very keen on explaining his land, of which he's proud as any native son, to these visiting Californians — the more so since we have connections to the ValSusa on the other side of northern Italy, and he was visiting there just last weekend. His mother, I suppose it is, presented us with the menu, but it was spoken, mostly in dialect, and the details evaded us. It was simple and local, though, and delicious, and we slept well.

Venice Journal, 7: a dismal story.

2011-05-31T13:37:00.001-07:00

Venice, May 31, 2011—

AS MENTIONED THE OTHER day, we were at first not allowed to go out the second gate from our apartment here, which was an inconvenience: the first gate leads to the fondamenta and then, over an asymmetrical wooden bridge, to a street leading right to the broad main pedestrian street leading to the railroad station. It's convenient if you're going to the station, or beyond it to the Piazzale Roma where buses stop, and cars can be rented: but if you're going into town it forces you to take a long and boring way around.

The back gate, on the other hand, lets you out quite near the Canale di Cannaregio and its restaurants and bars; beyond it lies the old Ghetto, then the rest of the Cannaregio, on quiet streets much more interesting and relaxing than the main Rios terà S. Leonardo and Maddalena and the Vie 28 Aprile and Apostoli which the tourists walk, through markets and past trinket shops and the like, on their way to Rialto.

The second day we were here another resident of our apartment complex volunteered to let us through the back gate with her key, but I wanted one of our own, and asked our rental agent about it the next day. He decided we could be trusted to keep quiet, and gave us one, but cautioned us to be extremely quiet when we used that gate.

I have since found out the reason for all this caution, a story so grotesque and yet so banal it could only be truly Venetian, or Venicely true. I found out as a consequence of an adventure yesterday: F___ and I had forgotten to be utterly quiet on returning from an outing, and were conversing as we approached the gate.

We were quiet as I put key in lock and turned it, quieter as we swung the gate open, utterly hushed as we noiselessly returned the gate to its place, easing the bolt home. Still, when I turned around after closing the gate I was confronted by a small dark balding man frowning from underneath the fringe of hair over his eyebrows. He seemed to be dressed in pajamas and a cardigan sweater, and wore a large crucifix on a chain around his neck.

Glaring at me, he hissed at us to be quiet. Have the courtesy, he whined, not to annoy people as you enter their cortile. Had he been any bigger he'd have been menacing; as it was, he was hugely irritating. Still, he was right: we had been conversing, and we'd been warned not to do that.

But what was the reason for all this? It turns out that the man — Fabiano, his name is, I think — lives with his stepson Pietro, if that's his name, an unpleasant, irrational man who alternates between long periods of sullen silence and infrequent outbursts of nearly uncontrollable rage. The almost unbearable sadness of caring for this youth is made even worse by the family's history, for Pietro is both stepson and nephew to the little man with the crucifix.

Years ago Fabiano had married badly: unable to attract the girl he really loved, who in fact married his older brother, he settled for a neighbor's walleyed daughter. In time, though, she died, of tuberculosis I think it was, and he was left alone. A few years later his brother was killed in a boating accident, and the widow, left with a difficult son to raise, consented to our neighbor's long-delayed suit. They were married in a quiet ceremony in the parish church across the Canale di Cannaregio.

In one of his fits, though, soon after the marriage, alarmed by a sudden noise he thought he'd heard outside their apartment, Pietro attacked and killed his own mother. Fabiano was away on a business trip of some kind to the mainland, Treviso I think, and returned late that night to discover what had happened. The boy was clearly remorseful and no charges were pressed; neighbors and, I suppose, the police as well apparently felt it was a case of a family cursed with a terrible destiny, one that would inevitably exact its own punishment.

But no one speaks to Fabiano unless absolutely necessary, and Pietro is almost never seen — only occasionally as a face glimpsed at one of the windows looking out on the gate, at the rare times he's roused by the sound of the click of the lock on the gate. I still shudder a bit when we go through it, and it's not used as often as you'd expect, given its convenience.

Venice Journal, 6: cats and changes

2011-05-30T10:12:00.001-07:00

Campiella della Pazienza, Venice, May 30, 2011—

AMONG THE OTHER changes in this town, changes to be expected given human mortality and the evolution of the global economy, one has been gnawing at me particularly insidiously: The Absence of Cats.

On our first day here, a week ago yesterday, we walked across the Accademia bridge, south to north. On the way I told F____: Once down the other side, there's a nice surprise for you off to the right.

I was referring to the colony of feral cats we'd seen there ten years ago, when we spent a month here at the other end of the Cannaregio. On that visit we saw cats throughout Venice, but particularly there at the north end of the Accademmia bridge. Since then we've seen the similar colony in Rome, at the Argentina square, fairly recently: and of course idiot that I am about change and permanence I assumed they'd still be here in Venice.

They aren't. There wasn't a cat to be seen in the park in front of S. Vidal, where they'd hung out before. There haven't been any anywhere else, except for two adolescent cats we saw out for a stroll crossing a bridge in the Dorsoduro, I think, a week ago. They were so rare a sight that a native Venetian businessman bent down to pet one; and they were so comfortable with that that I assumed they were housecats out for an airing, not feral cats, not at all. (One was a nice ginger-marmalade, the other a black-and-white mackerel tabby.)

Since then, nada. Not a cat to be seen. Plenty of dogs, most of them carried about by nicely-dressed women, but not cats. We hear them at night, or one at least; at least I think it's a cat; the sound's unlike anything else.

The other day we stepped into an attractive shop next to Santa Maria dei Miracoli, a shop featuring women's clothes and accessories. The woman who owns the shop also makes costume jewelry and prints up fancy and fanciful greeting cards, many of which featured photos or drawings of cats. I mentioned that we'd missed seeing cats on our walks about town, and wondered what had happened. She explained:

A few years ago, apparently soon after our 2001 visit, an organization concerned about the health of the feral cats, having noted an increase in deaths due to feline leukemia, rounded up hundreds of cats to take care of them, and began sterilizing them and, apparently, those who escaped capture and/or leukemia as well. Since then, with the passing of time, the feral population has pretty well collapsed.

Now we have mice, the shop-owner said, quite seriously; Venice is overrun with mice. I'd rather have cats.

Me too, I said; I'd much rather have cats.

But there it is, she said; they didn't like seeing so many cats suffering, and they sterilized them.

I thought about this again this morning as I was reading, in another guidebook about Venice — we seem to read a lot of them lately — that the population of Venice is declining because it's so expensive; it's no place to raise children. Of course there are children living in this city; we see them at schools and in parks, and hear them in the streets; but there aren't a lot of them. Young couples beginning their families find life easier and considerably less expensive in Mestre, on the mainland.

But is the local human population threatened with the same fate that befell the local feral feline population? If it doesn't reproduce, and bring up a new generation, how can it remain viable; how can it outlast the life-expectancy of its own generation?

YESTERDAY, pursuing our gelato assignment, we made it a point to visit the Campo Santa Margherita again: it was on that vast expanse that we had some of the best gelato we've ever tasted, at the old Gelateria Causin. I particularly remember a rice ice cream I had in the summer of 1980, and again on another visit later.

(When were last there, in 2001, they didn't have riso on view the first day we dropped by. When I said I'd like some, Me too, the old man behind the counter said, Me too, but we don't make it any more; no one wants it. Since then my flavors of choice have been Fior di latte and Crema; L. smiles at my fondness for bland flavors.)

We'd rushed through the Campo a week ago, the first Sunday we were here this time, and hadn't seen Causin, but we hadn't looked too carefully, we'd been in a hurry to get somewhere else before closing time. We'd heard that there was a particularly good gelateria on the campo, though, called Il Doge, and having forgotten the name of Causin I thought they might be the same: but Il Doge was in quite the wrong part of the campo and, tellingly, its gelato was nowhere near the mark of what we'd remembered.

Then yesterday we were walking by and I decided to have a much more careful look. I'm sure it was at the north end of the campo, on the west side, close to that curious squared-off tower, I said, and went to have a look. There was one empty store, shuttered and padlocked, with two green awnings over its windows: the one on the right read CAFFE VENICE; the other had no lettering. At least not on first glimpse.

More careful scrutiny made me realize there were letters there, but they were backward:

AIRETALEG

and soon I realized a new owner had turned the awning inside-out to hide its former lettering. A closer look revealed the original wood sign over the door:
GELATERIA

CAUSIN

I rushed back to the tabacchi where the girls were looking at old postcards. Look at these, L. said; they're so nice. An old man stood behind the counter; he looked a lot like the guy who'd told me they'd stopped making rice-flavored gelato, ten years ago. He was proud of his postcards, and pleased L. liked them. Guarda questo, he said, Look at this, and showed us a schoolboy's notebook with the date October 1940 on its first entry. The inside cover showed a faded monochrome photo of a man in fancy uniform reviewing troops: E Mussolini, the old man said, Guarda, Mussolini, che bel un uomo.

Yes, I said, but tell me, when did Causin go out of business? Oh, a long time ago, maybe ten years ago, the old man said. The years go by, here in Venice; everything changes. What is your year?

I was a little taken aback, first by Mussolini, then by his question, and didn't quite understand. Seventyfive, I responded. He smiled dubiously: seventyfive, no, I don't think so. I'm fortytwo.

Oh, I said, what year was I born: thirtyfive. That's more like it, he said. He was sixtyseven, seven years my junior, and I've been calling him an old man.

Later on I asked a waiter standing outside his restaurant about Causin and the Café Venezia. He didn't remember any gelateria there, but said the Café had closed, oh, two years ago at least. Really, I said; and the place stands there empty, on the Campo Santa Margherita, all this time. Oh yes, he said; there isn't any business. Wouldn't you like to have lunch here? No? A drink, then? Such a nice day, why not sit down and have something?

We'd eaten lunch; it was too early for an apéritif. I shook my head and thanked him. He completely lost interest in us and turned away. At the other end of the campo a couple of kids were riding a bicycle and a scooter; earlier, two very little girls, watched by their young mothers, had been playing with a ball and a spinning-top. All is not lost here in Venice, but the last few years have been hard.

• Online photos from Venice this month

Venice Journal, 5: canals

2011-05-28T13:58:00.001-07:00

Campiella della Pazienza, Venice, May 27, 2011—

BECAUSE OF WRESTLING with Italian, French is momentarily away from my brain, and I can't recall the art-talk for the painter's device for connecting foreground to background in his painting. Is it simply passarelle? Don't know; don't remember; doesn't matter.

It is of course one of the things that attracts me to these views down canals from bridges. Venice, being built on hundreds of little islands, all separated by canals of various widths, has a lot of bridges. We're standing on one here, hard by the Oratorio San Giobbo, on the penultimate northwest island of the Cannaregio. I've gone out for a short walk, but I'm headed for home, as it's beginning to rain. Perhaps you can sense, from the photo — not a very good one, I'm afraid — that the sky is heavy and overcast; there's not a breeze to be felt.

Most canal-bridge photos from this town feature buildings; many feature people. I tend not to take pictures of people. After an early trip to Europe, back in the 35mm slide-show days, I bored a few friends with an evening of photodocumentation; at the end, one friend asked: But, Charles, are there no people in Europe? Well, yes, there are; but in those days I felt it improper to photograph strangers. Now, of course, cameras are everywhere and there is no privacy in public (why should there be, anyhow?). I'm less hesitant to take a general shot with people in it, but I still don't like focussing in on an individual.

And in any case the function, or one function at least, of the still photo is to freeze a moment. We could be standing on this bridge, looking up this canal, now, or ten years from now, or forty years ago. The idea of permanence lends such photos their attraction, I think; it is what extends simple viewing into contemplation.

This morning — Saturday, now, the 28th — we were back on the same bridge, on a nice sunny day, with a little breeze. The eye clearly saw what the photo does not reveal: at the distant end of the canal, the tiny white speck is not another cloud but an enormous cruise ship.

We rarely see anything like this: we saw one when we arrived, but have been back to that part of town only once since, apparently between stops. Just as well.

I mentioned the other day chancing upon the hotel we stayed in for a couple of days thirty years ago, Dalla Mora. Yesterday we visited the quarter we stayed in for a month, ten years ago, when we rented an apartment with another couple, and were joined by two granddaughters. That trip was before digital photography, or at least before I'd embraced it, and though we took a number of photographs, mostly as transparencies, I haven't taken the time to look for them — so we took a few today, finding the area looked virtually unchanged.

That apartment, like the one we're in now, is off the tourist track. Closer, though: only a few turned corners, only a couple of bridges, and you're on the Strada Nova. (Venetian tends to drop the “u” from words like nuova.) As I've mentioned, the only notes left from that sojourn are those concerned with eating; you can see a comparison of eating notes over at Eating Every Day if you like. We're less enthusiastic about the restaurants this time, so far, and more careful to collect facts about them — partly because I never dreamed how enthusiastic readers would be about these eating-notes, so never really realized how responsible I should take this exercise in journalism.

Cameras and foot-traffic may slow things down, but things do change; and among them restaurants. People retire, or get lazy, or find more profitable ways to do things, or give in to trends or expectations. At the same time, of course, our own experience has grown by ten years; our tastes change — they've evolved toward a simpler cuisine, and at the same time my own sense of taste seems to have heightened; I'm more aware of chemicals, and of changes brought by aging (in the food, not in me).

At the same time, of course, restaurants have got a lot more expensive. I don't fault them: I haven't once felt exploited. Fish is expensive, because there's less of it, and more people who want to eat it. But we seem to be eating in house more often this time, usually simply sandwiches and salads — mortadella and prosciutto are so good here, and relatively inexpensive; and the arugula and lettuces are very fresh and tasty. And the Prosecco spento — still, not sparkling — is a little less than €2 for a liter and a half, cheaper than water. So we make do.

Let me leave you with one last photo today: the garden behind a wall, seen from the same bridge from which we looked down that canal at the beginning of this post. I think of our quarter as workingclass, and have so described it earlier: but this garden suggests a certain degree of comfort, don't you think? You just never know what might lie behind all these brick walls…

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Venice Journal, 4: the pace

2011-05-26T14:42:00.000-07:00

Campiella della Pazienza, Venice, May 26, 2011—

THERE'S A LOT of stuff in this town: bricks, stones, tiles, glass, more trees than you'd think, jewelry, clothes, fish, wine, fancy papers, feathers, watches, hats, books, musical instruments, sandwiches, cameras, churches, and pasta, among other things; and none of it arrives in trucks. Freight trains, perhaps; maybe a few small vans too, though I haven't noticed them. And even then those things will be off-loaded, as today's ugly English has it, at the depot at the west end of the city, and distributed throughout Venice, like every other portable commodity, by boat or hand-truck.

I first thought about this in 1980, when we first visited Venice. Today in our walkabout we ran across the hotel we stayed in then, the Hotel Dalla Mora, and we looked in at the lobby to see if it had changed. No, signor, sempre lo stesso, it's always the same, the man at the desk said. Ancora le bottiglie, le mattine? I asked, smiling. He glanced at some guests who had just checked in, then smiled at me, Yes, you hear the bottles in the morning.

It's a very nice little hotel: but across the canal there's a loading dock where bottles of soft drinks are loaded into boats early every morning, to be shipped off to little shops, I suppose, and restaurants; and the workers don't take pains to do this silently.

There are many reasons to appreciate the lack of motor vehicles here, and one of the subtlest is the result that you're frequently reminded of work that's otherwise too often invisible, therefore taken for granted. There's no separation of pedestrians and freight: Tourists in their finery (or more often their astounding negligée) rub elbows with workers hand-trucking commodities along narrow pedestrian streets and over bridges.

And everything is nearby, or at least immediate. On the morning walkabout we passed three men repairing pavement: a three-foot hole had been dug, probably to repair or check on some plumbing or conduit, and had been refilled with sand, and a few paving-stones were lying about, two men turning them over, this way and that, a third looking on (the foreman, not doubt, it's the same everywhere). When we went by again, an hour or two later, they were just finishing resetting the stones and sweeping in the sand; you'd hardly know the job was recent.

Yesterday in a very narrow street — you can easily touch the walls on either side without stretching your arms — we noticed a good many such stones stacked alongside the temporary boards on which we were walking: perfectly flat and squared on one side, the side you always see; rounded and rough on the other, which would be set into the sand when the job was done. Each of these stones was numbered, but the numbers only ran from 1 to 5: I don't know what the numbers represented. They all looked the same to me, and I worked on paving crews, fifty years ago.

~~Mattingly~~ Curtis asked ~~the other day~~ yesterday if in some post-petroleum era all urban life may have dispensed with motor vehicles. It would be nice. You could easily phase this in, I suppose, by first restricting deliveries to certain hours in certain areas — say, noon to three in residential sections; or various such periods distributed among various areas within a town, as is done on pedestrian streets in towns and cities in Europe. Then, later, phasing in hand-operated delivery in certain areas, never more than a practical distance from some kind of freight dock. I've noticed that there are refrigerators (though smaller than American ones), and possibly even grand pianos, even here in Venice; somehow they're delivered, and perhaps taken away again when required.

Of course this would require more workers, and why not? Why shouldn't healthy strong young men and women do such work after college, say, or even during college, and then move into some sinecure like journalism or brain surgery later, when they want more money and less muscle? And why shouldn't we pay just a little more for unnecessary commodities when we buy them in places like Venice where the stress of exhaust fumes, noisy trucks, and vehicular traffic has given way to a gentler pace?

We came here directly from London, where you're constantly threatened by trucks and buses, often coming at you from the wrong direction, incredibly close to the vulnerable pedestrian: traffic lanes right by the sidewalks, with no parking lane to protect the passerby. The lessened stress here is quite noticeable: you can walk for hours — and do — without feeling the strain of constant alertness to impending death. (Unless it be by drowning, of course: we've gone down a number of streets that ended abruptly at a drop into a quiet back canal.)

We did ride our first vehicle today, our fifth day here in Venice: a traghetto, a gondola rowed by one boatsman, carrying no more than ten or twelve pedestrians at a time (five of us, in this case) from one bank of the Grand Canal to the other. This saves a lot of time and walking, as there are only four bridges across the Grand Canal, and they are far between. It only takes a minute or so to cross, though you may have to wait three or four for a traghetto to arrive; you stand all the way, feet slightly spread and facing front to brace against the wake of passing vaporetti and water-taxis. It's a real pleasure, of course: you're close to the water; you feel the breeze; you're away from crowds and hard surfaces. The price has doubled these last ten years, but it's worth a euro to save twenty minutes' walking, if you want to get somewhere soon.

Of course we rarely feel the need to get somewhere soon. Lunchtime runs from noon to four, these days; dinner from eight to eleven, unless we simply feel like snacking. It's hot; it's always hot in Venice this time of year. We have plenty of time, and there'll be no final exam. And to me, almost anything here is as interesting, as absorbing, as anything else.

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Venice Journal, 3: the edge of Cannaregio

2011-05-25T01:58:00.001-07:00

Campiella della Pazienza, Venice, May 25, 2011—

YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED, though probably not since it's such a trivial matter, a change in the dateline above. It involves a curiosity of our apartment's location, which, since it probably stands for a general peculiarity of this curious city, may be worth describing.

The fact is, it's hard to tell exactly where we are. According to Google Earth, I'm sitting at 45°26'39" North, 12°19'14" East, and the image looks dead on the money to me. Describing the location in any other terms, though, is a tricky matter. I thought at first we were on the Rio della Crea, a blind canal that runs northerly from the Rio di Bursello, which flanks the railroad terminal on the north, toward the Canale di Cannaregio. That would make the street we walk to our front door — actually a pedestrian street, of course — the Fondamenta della Crea.

Our apartment is one of a dozen or so in a relatively new building (2007, I think) in a gated complex, a condiviso, I think they're called. L____ found it on the Internet, I'm not sure how, and rented it from a man called Fabiano, who appears to own it and at least one other, next door. Our front door is on a narrow footpath between two identical buildings, each containing a number of apartments identical, I suppose, to ours: short front hall, bathroom with tub and washing machine to the left, big room dead ahead with its kitchen, sofabed, television cabinet-armoire, and dining table and chairs; also a staircase leading to the bedroom upstairs with its king-sized bed and ample bathroom (shower, no tub).

But it's the cancello, the main gate, that gives access to the apartment. On the map you'd think it was at the end of the Calle della Misericordia, but that street takes a bend back to the Calle Priuli di Cavallletti which you might as well have taken in the first place, the first street after the train station as you walk into the city. At the end of the Priuli di C. you come to a wooden bridge over the Rio della Crea, take it, turn right, and walk to the end of the Fondamenta; then, to the left, you find the cancello.

As the crow flies we're quite close to the much more attractive Canale di Cannaregio, the broad canal that twas Venice's driveway until the railroad came to town: but the cancello in that direction is locked. Frustrating.

Until yesterday, when Fabiano came for his money, and explained a few things. I asked about the back cancello, and he looked at me carefully. He saw a responsible man, apparently, or perhaps merely an old one unlikely to raise hell, and gave me another key. You must be very quiet when you go in, the cancello can be noise when he closes, neighbor sleeps. Yesterday noon, then, after Fabiano left, we could put this to the test and explore our neighborhood as if the train station didn't exist — and, more to the point, the Lista di Spagna, the broad pedestrian street-cum-plaza crowded with tourists, hand-trucks, gimcrack stands, dubious restaurants and bars, and those fellows who try to sell you a flourescent green ball made of something that goes splat when you throw it forcefully onto the pavement, then regroups itself into a ball again, expressing the futility of action.

I turned out we were on the Campiello della Pazienza, as I'd originally thought when exploring the area a month ago, vicariously, on Google Earth. If only the Rio della Crea had not been filled in for its last forty yards or so, forming the Rio Terrà della Crea, we would be on our own little island, the fine three=arched Ponte Tre Archi anchoring its northwest corner, the Fondamenta di San Giobbo its front door.

"Fondamenta" is Italian, or at least Venetian, for "quay." Elsewhere in Italy you live on a "lungo" if next a river: the Lungadige, say, or Lungarno, or Lungotevere: here it's the "fondamenta" or, if in a classier district, the "riva." Our little island is not classy. There are no fancy houses, no Gothic arched windows, no marble wellheads. The buildings are blocky apartment buildings from, I'd say, mid-20th century, or these new low ones, row-type buildings with tiled roofs. All are stucco'd, of course. From the stone- or concrete-paved street the impression's rather hard and desolate. There's little street activity: few passersby, fewer cats, rarely a dog. One's not on the street unless one's going somewhere: home, or leaving home.

Our apartment's lit by skylights, fancy new Velux ones with remote controls working their panes, shutters, roller blinds, and ventilating slots (very difficult to remember the configurations). Through them comes the local sounds: the cooking of pigeons, quacking of unseen and unidentified waterfowl, something sounding suspiciously like chickens, mewing of cats (never a dog barking), songbirds. Now and then a neighbor working his skylight. Occasionally the sound of a large object being hoisted, or moved, or perhaps dropped: these are working canals, with depots and docks.

The quarter's not fancy, but it's attractive and even serene. Yesterday's little walk to lunch, on the Fondamenta di S. Giobbo, took us into the Calle della Cereria, where we found geraniums and petunias in boxes decorating the stucco façades of these workingclass condivisi, and in once case a garden behind an eye-high stucco wall, beautiful double white oleanders and single red ones mounding up at the corner. Across the way, in a little nook next another wall, discarded, an iron decoration, about as big as me, representing a shooting star, leaning up against the wall.

We spent a month in Venice ten years ago, with two granddaughters and two friends, in a two-bedroom-plus apartment at the other, eastern end of the Cannaregio, much nearer the Rialto. That was a profoundly impressive month. I took a lot of notes and wrote an extensive journal, and we accumulated a few maps and guidebooks. Alas, all that disappeared the day after we left Venice, when our car was broken into and a number of items taken. (I'd forgotten this detail a couple of weeks ago, when I looked for that journal and those notes, all over the house, unsuccessfully: it was only when I re-read the e-mail "dispatches" I'd sent from that visit ten years ago, fortunately preserved on my computer and printed out to bring along as reading matter, that I encountered a description of the robbery.)

Among those impressive experiences, of course, were the restaurants, the eating in general. That was before I'd begun my other blog, Eating Every Day, where I record such things now. Again, I'd fortunately recorded a few of these restaurants in the dispatches, but I'd made some mistakes. Yesterday we went to dalla Marisa for lunch, partly to confirm my suspicion that I was wrong to attribute a meal to it ten years ago, partly to try it out, as it's been highly recommended.

It's one of at least three restaurants with tables on the Fondamenta running along the south side of the Canale di Cannaregio. Marisa may or may not be the woman who hosted; or she may be the cook; or she may no longer be involved, or even for all I know on this happy earth. In any case lunch was not impressive, as you'll read over at Eating Every Day. Dinner may be much better, but we're unlikely to find out.

What was impressive, I thought, was the area. It's at the end of the world, or at least the end of the Cannaregio. At the end of the Fondamenta di S. Giobbe you stand on the edge of the island looking north toward the distant airport on the mainland; to the right somewhere, hidden by buildings on the other bank, the islands of S. Michele and Burano. The air is maritime, salty, breezy, delicious. There's a fair amount of boat traffic, even at noon when most things have stopped for the midday meal.

Boats tie up next to the quay your table's on, a few yards away — you could get up and step onto their decks in just a few paces. Boatsmen steer their boats with their rumps, standing backward straddling the tiller, nonchalantly cruising down-canal toward town. One calls out to a man walking past our restaurant: Mario! Stasera, a Giorgio! Alle otto! and you make a mental note to join them at Mario's this evening at eight, then reflect that you don't know Mario, or where he'll be.

There's something about walking toward the end of something, I tell F____, and she nods gravely in her way, slightly setting her lips in a memorably beautiful, meaningful, serious expression of awareness and understanding beyond her eighteen years. There's something pleasing about it, but also a little sad. I'm sorry if this sounds like a pendant to yesterday's meditation on the sweet sadness of Awareness of Large Scale; something puts me into this mood, perhaps Venice, perhaps merely Aging.

We stand silently on the edge of the island, the three of us, and watch an airplane, nearly invisible in the distance, touch down at Marco Polo airport, a few miles away. It's an improbably delicate blue, this airplane, with a white tail, descending with an uncanny grace and stateliness, one of the few moving objects in view, confirming the beauty and truth of this intersection of human activity with the timelessness of the lagoon and its islands, islands now almost entirely covered with structures and activity of human manufacture yet calm and measured in that activity.

Across the way there's a new building, or at least a new façade on an old building; it's linked by a curious arch containing a curious ring to a slightly older new façade on another, higher, equally symmetrical building. The smaller building sports two of those characteristically Venetian chimney-pots, these in metal and not chimney-pots at all but sizable smokestacks. Symmetry, design, color, placement — all convey an awareness of history, history as recorded in architecture and human activity; and an awareness of ecology, by which I mean the balance of human concerns and "values" and those of the natural setting, the lagoon, its marshes, its waters; and an awareness of economy, the traffic of freight, tourism, shipping, fishing; the transportation of agricultural and industrial products; the endless business of work (as slow and relaxed as possible), eating, conversation, meeting and parting, activity and contemplation. These are among the rewards of my Venice today, ordinary Venice, quite away from basilicas and Bellinis.

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Venice Journal, 2

2011-05-24T01:43:00.001-07:00

Rio della Crea, Venice, May 24, 2011—

NOT THAT MANY changes here in Venice, apart from that Calatrava bridge mentioned yesterday. There is the occasional new building — or new façade, perhaps — and I've noticed a new shop here and there where it seems to me there used to be something else. There's a section down on the Strada Nuova, I think, where there's a number of chain shops: a Disney store, a United Colors of Benneton, a couple of others. I don't recall them being there before.

It's our first visit in ten years, near as we can figure it out. We haven't yet quite got our bearings. It's famously easy to get lost here, and my iPhone often loses its place because the narrow streets are urban canyons, the poor thing can't see enough satellites to get its own bearings until we come to a campo.

Yesterday, for example, we decided after lunch to walk over to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. The map app made this out to be a fairly straightforward trip: across the Canale Grande in front of the railroad station, straight through San Polo on Rio Marin to the Campo dei Frari, out along the Calle Largo Foscari and behind San Barnaba, through the warren of streets at Toletta, around the Accademia and along the Fondamenta Ospedaleto, and there you are, Bob's your uncle.

(I write all this out in detail here to fix it in mind: it's a route we'll surely be taking again. Today, for example, we'll continue our exploration of gelaterie; one of the first I'll want to confirm is Il Doge over on the Campo S. Margherita, behind Frari; and no one wants to get lost on his way to a gelato.)

Not much has changed, but the Guggenheim has changed, a little. There's a fancy new ticket-booth lobby. Duchamp's Sad Young Man on a Train was not to be seen, which made this young man sad as well: it's a favorite painting, and one the mind's eye — or at least mine — doesn't hold as well as, say, Max Ernst's unforgettable La Toilette de la mariée, which needs little more than a glance to bring it back into terrifying life.

I feel a little guilty about the way I enjoy visiting familiar museums. It's not only a matter of revisiting the objects, or even the buildings and the installations: it is perhaps more a matter of confirmation of past visits, of reassuring myself that, yes indeed, I have been here before, I am that sophisticated. Let's set that to one side for the moment, though: there is in fact something about the revisited painting. Here's one of my very favorite paintings, I tell F___, down at the end of the corridor. (It's Picabia's Très rare tableau sur la terre.)

We approach it, and as I contemplate it I realize we're seeing two different paintings, the one I've seen several times and studied many more, the one she's seeing for the first time. Same thing with many other favorites, not all of which the pedant in me insists on mentioning. Pollack, Picasso, Picabia; Klee, Kandinsky; Duchamp-Villon. Marino Marini, of course, the "handle" of whose equestrian seems ever more schematic — how many times has it been replaced?

Contemplating a familiar painting — in the flesh, so to speak, not in a reproduction — is a little like hearing a familiar symphony in a fine performance. The experience reinforces pathways already present, already imprinted, in the synapses of the brain. Simply recalling it, however accurately, leaves out the gateway apparatus, the involvement of eye or ear. Even renewed experience via reproduction — whether photograph or recording — renews the gateway's involvement, but omits the prime external stimulus, which I think anchors the experience in reality. So perhaps one need only glance at the remembered painting in situ, or overhear a live performance of a piece of music, or confront once again a favorite landscape, to confirm and reaffirm one's original exposure. This must be what Melville, I think it was, called "the shock of recognition"; what Proust described when writing about his famous madeleine.

To the extent that things have changed, to the extent that Calatrava's come between the Piazzale Roma and S. Lucia, these confirmations are disarranged, deranged even; the assurance of continuity is damaged; one feels a bit threatened. Of course to an extent such a derangement is pleasant, is itself a new experience; and I tell myself it's a folly and a flaw to expect to live in a steady state; life is change; fixity is a form of death. But as I grow older I enjoy the more the vast and very slow. A Bruckner symphony, an extensive landscape offer both detail and scope, reminder of the possibility of life in long measure.

I suppose this is a reason we — I, I mean; I shouldn't involve L____ in all this — like to revisit Venice. The city is rich with detail; it is fine-grained. The tourists and the shops catering to them, with their improbable clothing and accoutrements, anchor the city to the mutable present moment; but the city itself continues to offer the illusion of — not permanence, God knows, but the very long scale, the dozen centuries of perdurance. (I look forward to an early return to Torcello, founded in 639.) Crazed Hitler dreamed of a thousand-year reich; Venice has actually achieved it; and if its decay is a caution against aspiration to eternity, it also offers its key to serenity.

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Location:Campiello della Pazienza,Venice,Italy

Venice Journal, 1

2011-05-23T05:27:00.001-07:00

Rio della Crea, Venice, May 23, 2011—

AN EASY FLIGHT on EasyJet from London across the dramatic Alps, a gentle descent to Marco Polo airport. It's always a little exciting to land at a new small airport. This one was simple enough: the baggage fairly quick to arrive, a simple passport control, no customs interview. Fabiano's father was there holding a sheet of paper with my name on it.

Fabiano's the agent for our apartment, which is in a new building near San Giobbo, in the Cannaregio. Ours is pehaps not the most convenient location; it's a five-minute walk to the Canale Grande with its vaporetti and, more important for us, the main (pedestrian) street to other parts of town. But it's quiet here, the apartment's well equipped, one can relax, read, and perhaps write a little.

Fabiano's father speaks French, German, and of course Italian. He's a drummer, it turns out; he's spent years playing in a small jazz combo in Germany and England — but he doesn't speak English: at least, not to us. He drives efficiently through the glorious sunset, rays of sunlight mounting behind towering clouds.

At Piazzale Roma he parks, illegally and a little nervously, and we make a few phone calls on his telefonino to find out where Francesca is. Surely she's at the bridge, I think, and on one occasion even say; no, says Fabiano's father, she'll meet us here. Finally Fabiano's wife arrives, speaking English: she's over there, she says, at the bridge.

The bridge surprises me, even shocks me a little. It's a new one, at least to me; a Calatrava bridge, a broad rather low arch with glass treads, spanning the Grand Canal to lead people to Benneton. Fabiano's father explains: there may be four thousand, five thousand people on that cruise ship; they all get on the People Mover, arrive at the Ponte Calatrava, and go to Benneton, where they buy things; then they cross the Calatrava, get on the People Mover, and go back in the ship.

Yesterday, our first full day, we spent walking and getting lost in the Dorsoduro, a sestiere (an arrondissement, a borough) I hardly know. We were going for Sunday dinner to Montin, a place I've always loved. Venice is famous for confusing its pedestrians, of course. Maps are increasingly useless as one's eyesight continues to decline: the streets go every which way, and so do the printed street names when they are present, and in any case the names may be printed on the map but they're rarely to be found on the streets themselves.

What are streets anyway, in this wonderful city of no vehicular traffic? Some, like the Strada Nuova, could well sustain two lanes of cars and trucks, with sidewalks on each side — but how would cars and trucks get to it? Every few hundred meters you'd need another drawbridge. And then: would the street bear the weight of such traffic? Many of these “streets” are rii terà, former canals roofed over or filled in.

The streets are narrow for the most part. Tourists are cautioned not to walk two abreast and certainly not arm-in-arm: but of course they do. And they stop without signalling, or lollygag along. They stop at the tops of bridges to take photos each way down the canals. They even sit on steps when they want to, the steps of the many bridges I mean: someone should tell them only beggars are allowed to sit on bridge-steps, beggars in black, perhaps exposing wounded legs or arthritically crippled hands to excite sympathy.

It's hard to be sympathetic for the tourists. It helps to recall one's a tourist oneself. Most of the locals — waiters, sales clerks, even residents — are pleasant and patient. I always begin a request in Italian, and try to remember to begin with Buon giorno, and not to smile: it's the Americans who are always grinning like apes. We dress modestly, too, of course: not everyone does. Yesterday near Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari we saw a young woman standing near a low stone wall, one foot in her companion's lap: he was examining a toe, I suppose for a blister. Her skirt was improbably short and sheer; not much was left to the imagination. I wondered if they'd try to enter the basilica when the pedal inspection was finished, but we did't wait around to see.

Montin was just as remembered: I wrote about it over at Eating Every Day. This used to be thought one of Venice's best restaurants, but it has declined in the sweepstakes, partly because its cuisine has been shouldered aside by trendier stuff, partly because the public's taste has evolved even for its own old-fashioned cuisine, which is neither fashionable nor casalinga (home-style); it's simply the familiar Veneto restaurant fare of fifty years ago. But that's a comfortable, nourishing approach, I think, and one comes to appreciate its dependability. You sense it's a family-run establishment, with the older generation managing things, the next waiting tables, and a third allowed — in the indulgent Italian way — to watch and participate a little, eventually to take its own place in the parade. A six-year-old girl brought us a basket of bread, set it down with a smile, then clasped her hands behind her back exactly like Degas' petite danseuse de quatorze ans, posed just a few seconds, and gravely walked away. Later we saw her deliver a plate of sliced tomatoes to the next table; and later we noticed a woman of thirty or so moving among the tables, her hands clasped behind her back.

Each night so far — there have been two — we've taken a walk about our quarter, at eleven o'clock or so, to enjoy the balmy air, the dark sky, the lapping of the dark water in our Canale di Cannaregio. Last night at eleven o'clock we wanted ice cream, and realized we were near one of the most highly recommended gelaterie here, da Nini. Alas, it closes at nine. Next door was a restaurant: a handsome young waiter invited us to have ice cream in his giardino— in fact, a table on the street. We discussed it for a moment, then decided What The Hell, our frequent philosophy when in Italy.

I'm confused, he said to me; you speak italian, she (indicating Lindsey) speaks English, she (Francesca) is Italian. Fran explained, but the waiter looked more into her eyes than attended to her explanation. Che bei occhi, he said, you can't be from Napoli, you must leave Venice. We sat down for gelati: lemon for me, vanilla for L., both for F. At a nearby table three loutish young men were shouting at one another in low, bad, and broken English; impossible to tell their nationality, though one had a strong Spanish accent. So loud and profane, not to say vulgar, were they, that other parties left early, or did not stay at all to be waited on.

Today F. and I were out doing errands and spoke to our waiter again. Yes, they are terrible, he said; they send customers away; the other day one of them even put his hand up a woman's leg, a woman he did not know. Che bei occhi, he continued, looking into Fran's eyes.

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Dinner in Transylvania

2011-05-15T22:36:00.001-07:00

Sibiu, June 1983:

A nice band, too: alto sax, guitar, organ (!), bass, drums; and decent food, the best I had in Romania, I think. Curious place, lost in the woods as I recall. Waiters and musicians in folk-costume. Those were the days.

… (we've been busy)…

2011-05-11T10:12:00.001-07:00

An excellent test:
Bring everything to silence
In the midst of noise.

On the road again: Elfring trip

2011-04-01T18:49:00.001-07:00

WE'VE BEEN TO SO MANY places with this couple, old friends, dear friends: Hans and Anneke, who live in Apeldoorn, Netherlands, but travel with us to Vancouver, Tahoe, Death Valley, Budapest, Vienna, Rome, Madrid, Friesland, and points between.

This time it's a wildflower tour. Well, the second week is: the first was spent relaxing for three days in San Francisco, doing the tourist things; then another two or three in Sonoma county. I won't bother you with details of that week, except to mention that we found a fine two-bedroom apartment in the Mission for the first four nights; that we visited the Mission and Basilica, Chinatown and North Beach, and ate at Foreign Cinema, Chez Panisse, Boulette's Larder, and the Empress of China. (Details on those over at Eating Every Day).

We took a trip up to Laytonville, too: a pleasure to attend High Mass with an Archibishop presiding one day, then the Long Valley Feed Store the next. And we spent a fine afternoon at Quarryhill Botanical Garden in Glen Ellen, and the mission and Vallejo's home Lachryma Montis in Sonoma.

Wednesday, though — two days ago — we hit the road, driving to San Juan Bautista for the first night. Here I revisited one of my favorite landscapes in the world, looking out from the mission over the San Benito Valley across the San Andreas Fault: an agricultural landscape that never fails to captivate me with its perfect balance of man and nature, agriculture and landscape, beauty and utility. It's an incredibly serene view, I think, particularly late in the afternoon.

We spent the night at the Posada, enjoying the songs of the feral roosters, and took dinner at the Jardines de San Juan, an unexceptional kitchen but a beautiful garden setting.

Next morning, yesterday, we drove out to Tres Piños, then down the hauntingly beautiful Highway 25, encountering one or two other vehicles in an hour or more of driving. We ate our sandwiches at the Priest Valley Tavern, where we had a fine conversation with the proprietor; then turned south on the Parkfield-Coalinga road to tackle the Parkfield Grade.

Why did I take no photos of that drive? After three shallow fords, easily taken even by a Prius, we climbed steadily, with dramatic vistas across the steep peaks and gulches of this part of the Coast Range, always following the San Andreas Fault. At the summit the asphalt paving gives out and the road is graded packed dirt and gravel down into Parkfield. It takes nearly an hour to cover these comparatively few miles, but the scenery is unique, and the evidence of human use — apart from the road itself — virtually nonexistant.

There's not much to Parkfield itself. Population 18, says the city limits sign. The post office and library have been closed, though the school remains. The steak at the café had flavor — it was raised on the local ranch — but the cuisine was basically cowboy cooking. (I like cowboy cooking, in its place, and this is certainly its place.) The lodge is comfortable enough, and the night is very quiet.

Today we drove out through Cholame, then down Bitterwater Road to California Valley and the Carrizo Plain. I've written about this place here before, here and here; I won't add much more today. The flowers, alas, are not spectacular this year; the big winter rains were followed by a false spring, then a cold spell, then more rains, apparently confusing the wildflowers.

Still, the show's something not to be missed. The place is so serene, so calm and calming, and so incredibly big: our Netherlanders were more than satisfied, and so were we.

Tonight we stay in a place we've been happy with before, the Ramada Inn at the foot of the Grapevine. No place to eat but the next-door Mexican franchise, but it's fairly good. We'll manage. And tomorrow, on toward the high desert…

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Pierre Boulez at Hertz Hall, Berkeley

2011-03-15T18:11:00.001-07:00

PIERRE BOULEZ IS only one of many enthusiasms I lost track of over the years. In the late 1950s and throughout most of the 1960s I kept up with these enthusiasms as well as one could in Berkeley, with little budget for concerts and recordings and none at all for travel. The local radio station KPFA was a considerable help, with occasional recordings of live performances from European festivals. I recall a performance of Structures, Book II at UC Berkeley, given by the visiting duo Karl and Margaret Kohn, sometime in the early 1960s; and I've already written here about the Le Marteau sans maître given there in 1962 by a group conducted by Gerhard Samuel, with an unforgettable performance by soprano Anna Carol Dudley.

Among the recordings on my shelves in those days there was only the first piano sonata and, even more resistant, a European festival performance of Pli selon pli, on badly recorded tapes made from radio broadcasts on a second-hand Viking reel-to-reel machine. Then there was an LP of the Sonatine for flute: but it never interested me as much.

And then, when I moved from programming music at KPFA to the visual arts (among other things) at KQED — television naturally preferring to look at things, not merely listen — the musical modernists moved toward the periphery of my activities. At the same time, the unpredictability and freshness that had characterized open-form or aleatoric music through the early 1960s — and even Boulez, rigorous as he was, managed to create music that sounded free and impetuous, whatever the actual process was he used to make it — that freshness seemed to harden into procedure-ridden complexities. Then too, Boulez had become a conductor as well as a composer (and an ardent revolutionary); this suggested he had come to some kind of compromise with the industry. I buried myself in Duchamp.

Last month we noticed a Boulez concert coming up, though, and yesterday we drove down to Berkeley to hear two pieces new to me: Anthèmes 2 (1997) and Dérive 2 (1988, 2006). The performances were lively and subtle and, according to a fellow I spoke to after the concert, quite accurate, and we were glad we'd made the trip.

The music was given in Hertz Hall, a wood-panelled room seating just under seven hundred in a shoebox configuration. I always like to sit centered in the last row in this hall, and bought our tickets forgetting that surround-sound electronics were likely to be involved. Sure enough, Anthèmes 2 requires it: two small speakers were in the corners behind the stage; three were spaced along each side wall, and another was say five feet over my head on the wall directly behind me.

Anthèmes 2 is written for solo violin with an electronic accompaniment involving live processing of the instrument: frequency shifting, harmonizing, ring modulation, reverberation, and apparently some sampled sounds, triggered by the sounds of the live violin. In the event, even to my seat, all this seemed to work very well: though the hall is sizable enough to make the sounds from the loudspeakers seem to be more a framing element, or a commentary on the solo violin, than an intimately responsive co-musician.

This, of course, may well be Boulez's intention. He has always been fond of layers, commentaries, paraphrases, doubles. In fact I always think of his composition (and his composer's statements, quite provocative in the old days) as bivalent, as German as French, as “poetic” as mathematical. Graeme Jennings gave a marvelous performance: his technical mastery was evident (he was with the Arditti Quartet for ten years), but so was the lyrical element; he shaped the music, making supple lines, articulating the intellectual component of the score with an almost narrative kind of phrasing. Anthèmes 2 emerged almost silky and feminine, as one used to say; there's little irony in the piece, but considerable delicacy, urgent though it sometimes is.

Dérive 2 was another matter: no electronics at all; long; kaleidoscopic in its treatment of the ensemble resources. Violin, viola, cello, French horn, bassoon, clarinet, and English horn ranged in a shallow arc in front of the conductor. To his right, behind the woodwinds, a marimba and a vibraphone. To his left, beyond the strings, a harp and a piano. In a single movement, spanning perhaps forty minutes, Boulez combines the sonorities of these instruments fascinatingly, grouping and regrouping them into sub-units, allowing solo instruments to come forward out of the texture, then drop back into it.

Strings play as a unit, for example, perhaps contrasting with the winds; then the cello, horn, and bassoon become a unit, playing against comments in the upper strings and woodwinds. The percussion instruments often function as an aural frame around the inner group; just as often, they serve as an aural binder, when the entire 11-person ensemble functions as a small Mahler orchestra.

My attention was constantly engaged. You never know how Boulez chooses his next note, dynamic, sonority; but it always sounds correctly chosen. There's nothing, to me, as entrancing as the completely “meaningless” logic of a beautifully constructed musical composition, especially when argued, or stated, with both well-grounded personal expression, engaging the audience, and faithful attention to the composer's directions. The result is an event of great artistic impact, human in its expression, orderly in its presentation, aware of its historical precedents, committed to the unique curve of its own logic.

Where Anthèmes 2 seemed Gallic, I thought I heard almost deliberate references to German repertory in Dérive 2: the Schoenberg Wind Quintet; Berg's Chamber Concerto. In the end, though, I think Boulez inherits, finally, a historical position last left off by Debussy. After all these years, music like this no longer sounds Modernist: it's classical: balanced, intelligent, thoughtful. It's sumptuous, of course: but it's above all resolved. David Milnes conducted; the Eco Ensemble responded, every member impressive: Hrabba Arladottir, violin; Kyle Bruckmann, oboe; Leighton Fong, cello; Christopher Froh, percussion; David Granger, bassoon; Peter Josheff, clarinet; Dan Levitan, harp; Loren Mach, percussion; Ellen Ruth Rose, viola; Alicia Telford, horn; Ann Yi, piano. I would drive down tonight to hear it a second time.

Composer Portrait: Pierre Boulez. Graeme Jennings; David Milnes, Eco Ensemble; Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley, March 14, 2011.

Skews

2011-03-08T22:04:00.001-08:00

I AM NOT WRITING the blog I want to write: a report on the three nights of performances by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company we saw last week in Berkeley. That blog is well begun, but needs more time.

In the meantime, I am listening to the first act of Philip Glass's opera Orphée. The CDs arrived the other day, but I haven't had a chance to put them on. And sliding the CD into the Mac — for I have no other functioning CD player these days — I look at my desktop photo once again, a photo I took last May in Siracusa, during a holiday in Sicily.

The photo always looks just a little odd to me, because I know it has been altered. The original ~~was~~ has been skewed, using the open-source software Gimp, to correct for the faulty perspective caused by low camera angle. In the original the walls left and right leaned away from the center as they went up. You can best see the inadequacy of the technique by looking at the fifth column from the left, the one whose rectangular base is clearly evident: it bows a bit, halfway up, to the right.

I look on the hard drive in vain for the original photo: I must not have saved it. It's permanently altered — a phrase whose absurdity is difficult to deal with. But then I remember a discussion I had with a fellow in a photography shop years ago in Berkeley, when I asked him something about Lindsey's photos, made with the then-new ”panorama“ option on her very early-generation digital Elph camera. ”They're just cropped that way,“ he said, ”they're not really panoramas, it's an optical illusion.“

”But isn't that what all photographs are, when you think about it,“ I replied, ”just optical illusions?“ He didn't seem to understand, or want to understand, or want to think about it.

That photo up there — perhaps because of the artificial skewing, it looks like a stage-set: forced perspective. I think too of certain Vermeer paintings, but that may be not so much because of perspective as because of the stillness: the few people, arrested in the action of motion; the hard edges of the stucco walls against the softer sky; the empty expanse of pavement.

The photo strikes my eyes, and through them my mind, much the way the CD strikes my ears, and through them my mind. There's something so vulnerably and pathetically two-dimensional about all this, when we all know Orpheus and Sicily are four-dimensional at the least. Width, height, depth, time: and then the extensions of those four dimensions: Embrace, Aspiration, Resonance, and Change. The photo recalls the experience to me, of course; I feel again the sun, the moving air, the hunger and thirst, the gratitude at simply being there: impressions no one else can have save perhaps Lindsey, who was at my side at the time.

Perhaps the cast of this Portland Opera recording of Orphée can have a similar rush of recollection when listening to these CDs. I hope so. They worked very hard, and did a fine job. But a recording is not an opera, as a photograph is not a city. Something has been skewed. Perhaps it is only the skews that remain, that ”mean“ anything; perhaps these skews are what Epicurus had in mind when proposing his clinamen.

Two operas: Orphée; Nixon in China

2011-03-02T23:05:00.001-08:00

MY POSITION ON THE MUSIC of Philip Glass is odd: when I'm not actively hearing it I tend to reject interest in it on grounds of principle; when I am actively hearing it I find it almost always beautiful, often compelling, sometimes memorable. (Those last two words aren't meant to diminish the music: memorability is, to me, these days, a very rare commodity.)

Simply thinking about the Violin Concerto, for example, which I haven't heard in years, I fault it for repetitiousness, blandness, and a curious fault I'll simply call, for the moment, of-interest-only-for-itself, nonextensibility. It's not as bad as what I think of as the music of Arvo Pärt or the recent Witold Górecki, but it's in that direction. But then quickly I recall the physical effect of actually hearing the Philip Glass Violin Concerto, whether live or via recording, and I remember the overwhelming feeling of happiness I had in the event, the curious attentiveness to its sounds and procedures.

"Curious" attentiveness, because one's at the same moment in a sort of mesmerized state, floating along in complete acceptance of only the sensory impressions provided by the hearing, yet one's aware of each detail, the attack, swell, release of each note, the interplay between solo and background, the grain of the piece.

I've met Glass on a few occasions, once or twice to interview him, and always found him immensely likable. Attractive, informed, intelligent, and receptive; very much aware of his own importance (given the context of the meeting, which after all was a conversation directed to himself and his work), yet interested also in others. He has never impressed me as a man or a composer abnormally fixated on ego.

I've seen, let's see, three or four of his operas: Einstein on the Beach twice — I remember John Cage sitting behind me at one performance — Satyagraha; a reduced but very effective version of Akhnaten; The Photographer; perhaps another somewhere along the way. They were all quite different from one another, putting the lie to the canard that all Glass is interchangeable. (People do fixate on what he refers to, in his book Music by Philip Glass, as the "highly logical arithmetic system I later began to call 'additive process,' a cornerstone technique that has served me well…" (op. cit., p. 8)).

Yesterday I extended the run by one: the Ensemble Parallèle was presenting Glass's opera Orphée (1993) in San Francisco, and at nearly the last minute we decided to go. This isn't that easy a decision: lower-priced (I will not say "cheap") sections were sold out, so we spent nearly $130 for our dress circle seats; and then there's the drive down and back, 130 miles (funny the duplicated number) and six bucks bridge toll; and of course the six hours or so out of one's diminishing stock of time. But an opera unseen is an opportunity not to miss, with certain exceptions (anything by Wagner, for example): and my grandson has been raving about Orphée, and I'd never even heard a recording.

I'd been warned away from the opera, when it was first composed, by negative reviews, of all things. They are indeed insidious, negative reviews, affecting even a seasoned [retired] reviewer like me. As I [~~call~~] recall they focussed on the exceptional conception of the opera: Glass worked not from a conventionally written libretto but from the soundtrack of a film, Jean Cocteau's 1950 Orphée. My memory of the Jean Cocteau film is blurred by the passage of, let's see, probably half a century. Black-and-white; motorcycles; Jean Marais. Surrealist, or striving for. Stilted, a bit.

The film itself has many detractors. (Here's one, which I link to for two reasons: an excellent example of bashing-masquerading-as-criticism; also a reasonably accurate job of reporting the content.) Most of those I've encountered make the same mistake, reacting against Cocteau's film as not being what they think it ought, or in ~~come~~ some cases was intended, to be. And, of course, there's the usual Anglo-Germano-American prejudice against that part of the French sensibility that I find pensive, subtle, fond, or tender; which France-detractors dislike as wooden, vapid, silly, or weak.

Philip Glass began his career in Paris. I think of him, the day after seeing Orphée, as essentially a French composer; certainly, if an American one, French-trained. He studied, after all, with both Nadia Boulanger and Darius Milhaud. Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud were as important early impressions on him as were Brecht or Beckett, and film and live theater as important, apparently, as music.

SEEING ORPHEE YESTERDAY in San Francisco's Herbst Theater I was struck first of all by two things: the enterprise with which the production transferred the implications of Cocteau's screenplay from the movie screen to the stage, and the serene beauty of the score. The opera opens in a Paris café, staged in this production outside the proscenium, the orchestra at stage level, to music dominated by ragtime piano; soon afterward the orchestra, playing all the time, descends noiselessly to pit level while the action is transferred to the stage. Visually and aurally, it's as if the audience is being drawn into the action, through the looking-glass the scrim curtain had constituted: and the score smoothly moves from café-music to the opera house, with references — I swear I heard them — to Gluck's classical setting of the Orpheus myth.

From then on, the score underlies, supports, propels the narrative. As Cocteau does not merely adapt or re-present the familiar Greek myth — Monteverdi and Gluck have satisfied that operatic imperative for all time, I think — but instead poetically transforms it to reveal the mythic component of the Eternals of love, death, and poetry as they stand in our own time, so Glass transforms the sensibility of Gluck's classical score, through his "additive process," to connect to our more motor-needy time. The ancient Greeks did not differentiate "composer" and "poet," to be one was to be the other. (This is why the Orpheus legend is uniquely foundational to opera, which itself, at best, makes no such distinction.)

Glass even refers to Gluck in his orchestration: the empty treble of the flute contrasts with the darkly complex trombone and bassoon, and the harp, perhaps consciously representing Orpheus's lyre, plays nearly throughout Orphée. His French prosody seems to me right on the mark. I heard complaints, after the performance, that the opera lacks tunes; I thought it very lyrical, Cocteau's sometimes inconsequential-seeming lines often brought out with just the right degree of irony or pithiness to reveal his poetics of the everyday — a Surrealist thumbprint.

I've only seen one other production of Ensemble parallèle, the premiere of the "final version" of Lou Harrison's Young Caesar (2007). It was effective, but virtually unstaged, produced in concert form. This was a tremendous advance on that production, transforming Herbst Theater into what really seemed an opera house. Brian Staufenbiel's direction mediated nicely between the Cocteau film and the Herbst stage, among Dave Dunning's resourceful set, dramatically lit by Matthew Antaky.

Nicole Paiement conducted with great attention and energy, getting a lot out of the fourteen-piece ensemble and ably cuing the singers. Marnie Breckenridge was a superb (Death) Princess; Eugene Brancoveaunu rather a bland Orphée. John Duykers made an interesting chauffeur Heurtebise; Thomas Glenn an attractive Cégeste; Philip Skinner an imposing Judge; Susannah Biller a retiring, timid Eurydice.

These principals, the lesser roles, even the mute circus artists brought in to replace the menacing motorcyclists who harvest for Death in the original film, all took their parts in perfect relation to one another and to the Cocteau-Glass opera, I thought. There was something almost literary about the effect, so well did it enter the mind, develop, and broaden. Glass's music is certainly the sustenance of the entire thing: but musical interpretation and theatrical production were detailed, evocative, and beautifully balanced, leaving memories that continue to deepen in meaning.

IF PHILIP GLASS'S SENSIBILITY nearly always strikes me as French-oriented, John Adams's looks sideways toward Germany. One of his early orchestral successes was called Harmonielehre: neither Schoenberg nor Wagner is ever really far from his orientation as composer. The Death of Klinghoffer makes me think, don't ask me why, of Parsifal; A Flowering Tree, Die Entführing aus dem Serail; Doctor Atomic, a mature Lohengrin.

A couple of weeks ago we watched the delayed in-theater "simulcast" of the Metropolitan Opera's long-delayed production of Adams's first opera, Nixon in China. The opera impressed me tremendously when I saw its premiere in Houston, nearly 24 years ago, especially for the humane, sympathetic, poignant view it develops of the Nixons, Mao, and Chou En-lai.

You could argue that the creative team of Nixon in China — Adams, librettist Alice Goodman, and producer Peter Sellars — do, in their opera, for the factual event of Nixon's visit to China in 1972, what Cocteau did for the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. They revisit the original events, studying closely the factual record, the personalities and mannerisms of the principals, and simultaneously recount the story while revealing deeper insights, freely allowing specific depiction to engender broader allusive meaning.

This has caused a certain amount of complaint, of course. Last month Max Frankel, formerly executive editor of the New York Times, wrote an op-ed piece in that newspaper, warning

that when living reality is so blatantly harnessed to bait the audience with familiarity and to create a heightened sense of excitement, it risks being constrained by that same reality from reaching true depths of drama and character.

That may be true in general, but I think Nixon in China achieves those depths: perhaps precisely because, unlike Frankel, I am not distracted from the poetic and philosophical achievement of the opera by the literal and realpolitical specificities of the events that inspired it. Frankel seems to complain (and others have too) that only the first act is really about real events, that "Act II catapults from the real to the surreal," then "takes a final turn, in Act III, to the psychological." But this is precisely the genius of the opera: it lifts the audience from an engaging, often bantering, anecdotal presentation of the Nixon visit, ending with the round of toasts at the welcoming banquet, to the retrospective, greatly broadened contemplation of large issues in the third-act nocturne, anchored though it is occasionally by Nixon's recollections of mundane hamburger-turning on a Pacific island during WWII, or the Maos' aging fox-trot that hauntingly underscores the final minutes.

(There is of course the matter of the big second-act ballet, the lynchpin of the opera, where Mark Morris's choreography draws Kissinger and Pat Nixon into a portrayal of the Chinese ballet The Red Detachment of Women — another example in this opera of one event, or work, engendering another. Watching the Met's performance made me think of Holden Caulfield's complaint, in The Catcher in the Rye, about the acting style of Lunt and Fontanne: very good, but too good, virtuosity distracting one's attention from the event.)

Where Glass seems drawn to individual expressive poetics, narrowing the focus from Greek myth to an individual poet's anguish, the Nixon team responds to a transcendental meditation on the generalized human condition, as revealed through individual stories. Surely no two couples could have been more different than the Nixons and the Maos: but the third act of Nixon in China exists precisely to contradict this.

Neither composer reaches for the kind of operatic tunefulness of Verdi and Puccini, of course. But where Glass seems to ground his score on a French tradition, the French baroque opera never far from his declamation even though he begins with café-style ragtime, Adams looks back to the American big-band sound for his score, though the third act fox-trot reminds me of Hindemith's and Stravinsky's view of "jazz" more than that of, say, Jimmy Lunceford. (Glass scores for a fifteen-piece ensemble, though he allows for multiple strings. Adams requires a bigger orchestra: 2-2-3-0, 4 saxophones 0-3-3-0, percussion, two keyboards, 6-6-4-4-4.) And where the vocal lines in Orphée are chiefly quiet, a kind of lyric sung recitative, those of Nixon in China are frequently urgent and declamatory.

The passage of time enhances memories of past performances, and I thought the Metropolitan cast a level below the Houston one — except for the Nixons. James Maddalena sang the title role in both productions; if anything, he's deepened in the interval; his portrayal was completely satisfying. And Janis Kelly was as sympathetic, occasionally funny, finally rather moving as Carolann Page had been in Houston: it's a difficult role dramatically, a rewarding one musically.

Otherwise I thought there were problems with the casting. Russell Braun was not as deep or convincing a Chou as Sanford Sylvan had been; Robert Brubaker by no means as persuasive a Mao as John Duykers; Richard Paul Fink less subtly malevolent a Kissinger as was Thomas Hammons. Kathleen Kim did a fine job of the shrewish Chiang Ch'ing, "Madame Mao," though; and the three "Maoettes," Ginger Costa-Jackson, Teresa S. Herold, and Tamara Mumford, did well as sinister backups to their boss.

The orchestra sounded fine, and Adams conducted a more expansive performance than I recall having heard in Houston, where John DeMain presided. I thought the staged production suffered quite a bit from the film-projected-into-theater format. There are so many problems with the concept it's hard to know where to start, but let's begin with the sound source: it's all over the place. I'm used to the orchestral sound being in the pit, the vocal sound on the stage; here, everything was everywhere, and the aural scale was off.

Then there's the close-ups. You can imagine how many problems they occasion. The cinematic direction was pretty good, I'm sure, but I'm used to steering my own eyes around the stage, not having them guided by someone else.

Worst of all, I thought, were the intermission features. Thomas Hampson, I think it was, interviewed a number of the singers, Adams, and Peter Sellars. Questions veered from inane to inconsequential and were largely a waste of time. Particularly Adams's time: he was interviewed just before going to the pit to begin the third act; when we last saw him he was looking around for a place to set his hand-held microphone down on his way to work.

Still, Nixon in China has moved to the Metropolitan Opera. One of the intermission questions had to do with its place in the repertory: Janis Kelly was sure it belonged. Adams is one of the great opera composers of the Twentieth Century, she said, up there with Berg and Strauss. I'm sure I don't know: only history will be able to make that judgement. I do think it a fine, strong, ultimately moving work of art. We'll know more about its historical position when it's moved away from Peter Sellars, I think, not that I have anything but profound respect for his intelligence and humanity in this production.

Philip Glass: Orphée, chamber opera in two acts for ensemble and soloists, 1993.
  recording: Ann Manson, Portland Opera (Orange Mountain; UPC 801837006827)
Philip Glass: Music by Philip Glass (New York: Harper & Row, 1987)
Jean Cocteau: Orphée (Andre Paulve Film and Films du Palais Royal, 1950; The Criterion Collection, 2000 [DVD]

John Adams: Nixon in China, opera in three acts
  recordings: Original cast; Edo de Waart, Orchestra of St. Luke's (Elektra);
    Orth, Kanyova, Hammons, Heller, Opera Colorado Chorus, Colorado Symphony, Alsop (Naxos)
John Adams: Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008)

…reading…

2011-02-16T13:29:00.001-08:00

Spoon Fed (Riverhead Books, 2010), by Kim Severson: enjoyable. A breezy memoir in nine chapters, each centered on one or another well-known cook, all women, who helped the author with one or another insight in overcoming various personal hangups and getting on to maturity, it falls into the tell-all inspirational category. I've known four of these illustrious women well enough (Marion Cunningham, Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl, Edna Lewis) to recognize descriptions and dialogue as perfectly accurate: Severson's a good reporter. (She was a food writer at the San Francisco Chronicle before joining the New York Times, at first and for years writing about food, more recently serving as Bureau Chief in Atlanta.)

Writing away from interviews originally written for the Times, Severson writes about her own life as an adolescent misfit, an alcoholic, a Lesbian; a daughter, wife, and mother; a journalist who worked her way from Anchorage to San Francisco to New York. She cites these eight cooks — the other four being Leah Chase, Marcella Hazan, Rachael Ray, and her mother, Anne Zappa Severson — as having helped her cope with her problems, offering (sometimes without even realizing it) life lessons. Bottom line: things are as they are; play the hand you're dealt as well as you can; stay the course; look out for others.

Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization (Brookings Institution Press, 2007), by Akbar Ahmed, is an introduction, primarily no doubt for Americans, into the three major strains of Islam (mystical, fundamentalist, and open, to generalize; approximating, I think, Sufi, Shia, and Sunni) as they currently respond to an increasingly globalized world. The "journey" of the title refers to travels this anthropologist made with a team of students — young men and women, some Muslim, some not — to the centers of these three branches and to mosques and mudrassas from Damascus to Jakarta.

I wish I'd found this book more readable. It's repetitive, sometimes unclear. The idea is fascinating: an extremely knowledgable man (Ahmed has been, among other things, the Pakistani Ambassador to the United Nations) leads his young students on a long journey in Muslim lands, visiting schools and homes, discussing contemporary issues frankly with students, imams, people in the street, government officials. Much of the description is lively and fascinating, and the difficulties faced by these various Islamic responses to globalism are sympathetically drawn.

But the author is often too self-congratulatingly present, and his students, though frequently mentioned, never really revealed in their own responses. Geert Mak's fine In Europe (see my entry of three years ago here) came too often to mind as an invidious comparison: I kept wishing Ahmed were as invisibly yet intelligently present in his similar survey.

Tintin and the Secret of Literature (Counterpoint, 2008), by Tom McCarthy: An absolutely fascinating discussion of the internationally popular series, applying contemporary literary criticism techniques, finding implications in the artistic and intellectual content of writers extending from Poe and Baudelaire to Sciascia, with Raymond Roussel always lurking just offstage. To be read and re-read.

Such were my quick comments on finishing the book, a month or so ago, as I added them to the Librarything page on the book, where three or four other reviews had variously irritated me. (Two examples: "I'm torn with this book… his references are somewhat out there…" and "…a fairly perceptive enumeration of some of the things that make Tintin special mixed with an embarrassingly bad attempt at showing off the author's knowledge of French literary criticism.") A better, more extensive, more professional review by Matt Bowman can be found here at The Quarterly Conversation, a website I'll likely return to.

Frankenstein (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, n.d.), by Mary Shelley: A great book, for the story, for the writing, for the extensive meaning. Subtle allegory. Beautiful and faithful descriptions of the settings — the description of the Mont Blanc glacier over Chamonix is riveting, haunting. The ironic first-person narrative is wrapped in an intriguing flashback, beautifully establishing the early 19th-century cosmology. In this edition, irritating footnotes and endnotes distract from the reading; but the central idea of the book, of course — whether man should attempt to create life, and whether, if he succeeds, his ambition is likely to overwhelm him — is as relevant now as it was two centuries ago. Perhaps more so.

Jane Eyre (Random House, 1943), by Charlotte Brontë. A fine, literate novel, straightahead, marred perhaps by a few coincidences, but ironic in its first-person narrative, nicely phrased, peopled with interesting and memorably delineated characters. Quote: ”Well, propensities and principles must be reconciled by some means.“

Wuthering Heights (e-book), by Emily Brontë. Yes, early last month I went on from Frankenstein and Jane Eyre to this. I'd read Jane Eyre in the edition that had long been on my mother's bookshelf; a Random House publication from 1943, it came with Wuthering Heights as a companion volume, both illustrated with scary Expressionist wood-engravings by Fritz Eichenberg. Alas, I couldn't easily get that edition of Wuthering Heights, so read it as an e-book on my iPad. I found it heavier going than its sister, less straightforward and clear, but deeper and more resonant. I'd love to sit down with Edgar Allan Poe and discuss this book. Come to think of it, what did Henry James think of it? (Ah: he dismissed it as "a crude and morbid story." But what did he really think of it?)

The Genuine Article: Chekhov's Seagull in Mill Valley

2011-02-09T01:54:00.001-08:00

SLAVIC LANGUAGES LACK the definite article, as anyone with a Czech in the family can attest. So Libby Appel's version of Anton Chekhov's least-performed major play, now running at Marin Theatre, is called simply Seagull, promoting that bird from what's too easily little more than shtick to pervasive metaphor. It's clear in any case, of course, that Seagull stands for Konstantin Gavrilovich, the male lead; Kostya (as he's nicknamed) shoots the damned thing in the first act, then shoots himself in the last. (Oh. Spoiler. Sorry. I assumed you already knew.)

Seagull also stands for a force of Nature, like the lake brooding in the backdrop of the stage; the lake visible through the makeshift stage set up outside Sorin's country estate for the production of Kostya's play, an experiment in "new forms" and abstraction. Unlike Chekhov's other three major plays, in many ways more finished perhaps because less ambitious, The Seagull — sorry; I'm so used to using the article — is among other things a play about theater: about acting and actors, certainly; about writers, yes; but also about itself. I always think of Chekhov as the first truly modern playwright: this first play of his Big Four features recursion among its fingerprints; it's what Francis Ponge calls a momon, a work about itself. Chekhov himself is all over the cast list, from the young visionary writer Kostya to the successful hack writer Trigorin to the country doctor Yevgeny Sergeyevich, whose objectivity and practical acceptance of the conditions of life, while bordering on cynicism, brings a gentle note of reality to the proceedings.

There's so much to think about here. The histrionic women in this cast — three of them, of course, stage ladies seem generally to come in threes — drink and flail and wheedle and dictate. In this version, some lines have been restored giving even Polina Andreyevna her measure of desperation, so there are four failing ladies. Four of the men, too, portray various kinds of ineptitude. It's a human comedy; another aspect of Chekhov's modernity is the source he provides such diverse followers as Pirandello, Beckett, and Federico Fellini. Throwaway jokes collide with terror, cruelty, and anguish.

Marin Theatre's production is worth seeing. (It runs through Feb. 27.) Apart from the servant class, who in any event have little material to work with, the casting, and the individual roles, are quite well played; and the more difficult the role, the better the performance seems to be. John Tufts was remarkably strong as Kostya; Tess Malis Kincaid every bit as resourceful and commanding as his mother, the actress Irina; Christine Albright and Lis Sklar memorable (and very different) as the young women Nina and Marya; Craig Marker made a sympathetic character out of the weak, amoral Trigorin; Howard Swain was the well-detailed doctor Yevgeny. Smaller roles were just as well portrayed: Peter Ruocco, Richard Farrell, Julia Brothers, Michael Ray Wisely.

Jason Minadakis directed carefully and effectively, though curtains seemed mistimed and curtain lines sometimes tossed off too lightly. The large cast was well distributed onstage; even in large ensembles there never seemed to be a dead area. Robert Mark Morgan's scenic design caught the accelerating ennui and oppression of the play nicely, and Chris Houston's music — an onstage piano is used to very good effect — was atmospheric without being distracting.

The translation is by Libby Appel, who relied on a literal translation by Allison Horsely. Oddly anachronistic vernacular sometimes distracts — phrases like "desk job" and "will do" don't seem to me to belong in Chekhov's world. But this adaptation is strong, passionate, energetic, and detailed.

Anton Chekhov: Seagull continues through Feb. 27 at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Avenue, Mill Valley; tel. 415.388.5208

Keener sounds: Robert Erickson at Mills College

2011-02-07T17:50:00.001-08:00

"WHAT IS IT FOR?", Ann asked, as we sat in her small comfortable small living room after the concert. We'd been reflecting on the concert we'd just heard, and its small audience — no more than forty or fifty people, I'd guess, scattered through the nicely restored concert hall out at Mills College.

It was a one-man concert: five pieces by Robert Erickson (1917-1997), who was my composition teacher, and who I suspect guided my career in other ways, and whom I thanked, partly, by writing his biography, Thinking Sound Music. (In fact it was Ann whose Fallen Leaf Press published the book, back in 1995.)

"I mean," she went on, "why do composers go on writing music; it's so hard." Left unsaid: "And so few seem to understand, or be interested, or even be aware."

Another few beats of silence, while I thought about my grandson Simon, another composer. Well, I thought, what is life for; it's for making more life. Same for music: we go on composing, so the next generation can compose.

A high percentage of the audience had in fact been other composers; many of us Eridkson's students, at one time or another. We're a loyal crew, partly for human reasons, partly for musical. Human: Bob was enterprising, patient, affable (though he could be crusty too), generally optimistic, practical, generous. (He refused any payment from me for my lessons, knowing I had hardly any money to spare.)

Musical: well, those reasons were evident at the concert. If there are musical "mavericks," Erickson is certainly among them. He was born in Marquette, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and grew up in a Swedish-American family in a backwoods setting; but his intellectual curiosity and his remarkably sensitive ear — encouraged by early teachers — took him ultimately to Chicago where he met Modernism. Industry, Modernism, and an innate gregariousness informed the rest of his career: teaching, broadcasting (he was an early music director at Berkeley's KPFAA), writing, above all composing.

We're so conditioned these days to think in terms of quantity. There are billions and billions of us humans on this planet, millions and millions in this state: if a concert has a small turnout, something seems wrong. But as Gertrude Stein said,

I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers.
The Making of Americans, p.289

Composers compose similarly, I think, though with luck we all work for colleagues as well as ourselves and strangers.

Unfortunately the fundamentally paranoid streak in the American temperament, which promotes healthy skepticism to outright mistrust, leads audiences — and, worse, what critical establishment remains — to reject convivia not themselves embraced as exclusive and "elitist." (Think, for example, of the contempt lavished on Stein's own salon.) So we who "like," want, and listen to new music have in the last fifty years become increasingly marginalized, not by our own activity (or lack of activity) but by what you might call a culture-historical process.

(The late Milton Babbitt wrote about this a generation and more ago, in an essay commissioned by the magazine High Fidelity. He called his article "The Composer as Specialist," but the editors re-titled it, without consulting him, "Who Cares If You Listen?" The title, much more widely read than the article itself (which in this online version is dry and "difficult", like much of Babbitt's music), contributed to the marginalization of new music in the United States.)

Erickson tended to shrug off failure and rejection. He preferred to focus on the positive values of whatever resulted from his work, the performances of his music, the work of his students; he met indifference or, worse, distraction — faculty meetings, for example — with a cheerful kind of inattention. He knew, I'm sure, that it's Pythagorus, Euripides, and Epicurus who are remembered, who are "important," not the hundreds of nameless citizens who ignored them at best, hounded them at worst.

Still, it's hard not to be discouraged at the inattention of even the musical community to work of such interest and beauty as Robert Erickson's. He taught at UC Berkeley, San Francisco State, and the San Francisco Conservatory: interestingly, only Mills College, among the important Bay Area music departments, seems to be curious about his work and influence. (He never taught at Mills, but one of his most celebrated students, Pauline Oliveros, oversaw the relocation of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, one of his "step-children," to Mills College in 1967.)

AND WHAT OF HIS MUSIC did we hear Saturday night at Mills College? The evening began with a clip from a San Diego television story about Erickson's activity as a soundcatcher, prowling towers, airports, and electric substations with a shotgun mike and a portable tape recorder: he was always keen to find new sounds in everyday modern life, sounds that could contribute to his composition, either directly as sonic ingredients or indirectly as suggesting areas of sonic awareness.

Then came an electronic example of that: Roddy (1966), for tape; a work of musique concrète whose original sounds were improvised (following the composer's scenarios) on a percussion instrument made by clamping various lengths of steel rod to the sounding board of a piano, then altered and edited in the Tape Music Center studio.

To my ear the "performance" of the tape — I mean its playback in the spacious Mills College Concert Hall — was more artifact than expression. Roddy, like much tape music, seems to me to be chamber music, to need intimacy between listener and sound source; the separation of the loudspeakers, their distance from the listening ear, and the awareness of a lack of listening community within the audience all made the piece more intellectually interesting than artistically expressive. But the rest of the program more than made up for this.

I had never heard the Trio (1953), for violin, viola, and piano, in a live performance before, and was charmed and fascinated by its eccentricity. The piece is tonally melodic, brusque and edgy in its architecture. The piano writing is non-pianistic, often single-lined though also often chordal, given (like the string material) to insistantly repeated notes. Erickson never showed much interest, as far as I know, in jazz for itself; but his music often reminds me of bebop. (A lyrical episode reminds me, oddly, of Dvorak.)

But this Trio also made me think of his Swedish-American heritage. Violinist and violist saw away at their instruments, alternating between careful collaboration and go-it-alone soloistics, with a determination (and a beauty and skill, in this performance) that seems utterly unselfconscious, utterly uninterested in musical conventions other than those dictated by the instruments themselves. Two quick movements, three minutes, then four; and it's over.

Next came Pacific Sirens (1969), for tape (altered environmental sounds, this time from the ocean near San Diego) and a group of sustaining instruments (in this case cello, trombone, flute, bass clarinet, trumpet, clarinet, two contrabasses, and three percussionists). Conducted (which in this case really means rehearsed and shaped) by Steed Cowart, the performance seemed utterly authentic, with all the contemplative beauty I remember from performances years ago. The instruments handed off sustained pitches effortlessly, overlapping and merging, occasionally emerging more or less soloistically (trombone; flute-and-trumpet; rolls on suspended cymbals and drums), as one's attention, at the beach, drifts from one suddenly isolated observation of sonic or visual or even tactile detail to another, always aware simultaneously of the more generally undistinguished fabric of all these cumulative events.

After an intermission, Gloria Justen returned to play Summer Music (1974), another environmentally responsive piece; its ongoing, meditative violin melody counterposed to a tape recording of processed and filtered natural sounds — a babbling brook, in fact, considerably altered but retaining its sounds-of-nature atmosphere. And the concert ended with a truly magnificent performance of The Idea of Order at Key West (1979), a setting of Wallace Stevens's poem for soprano, flute, clarinet, trumpet, viola, and cello.

Where Pacific Sirens is concrete, using natural sounds as if to anchor the music's process, the procedure Erickson uses to build a sonic artistic statement reflective of his impressions on reading about the sirens who sang to Odysseus and the moaning, singing sounds sailors still hear when rounding certain rocks on the Italian coast; The Idea of Order at Key West is more abstract. Like the unnamed "she" of the poem, the composer makes his music

…beyond the genius of the sea,
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood…

The music proceeds by repeated held tones, spinning into more quickening elements, always contrasting those two ideas but within no immediately apparent structural process: it is incantatory, improvisatory, yet clearly carefully (if intuitively) measured out. Many composers have turned to Stevens for material; few, perhaps none, have so persuasively achieved a sonic equivalent of his poised, intelligent, crystalline yet often decorative poetry.

What Stevens writes about — the nature of song as a generative, mediating influence between singer and setting — is a central issue of music itself, and certainly of the composition of music. "She" is of course Wallace Stevens, and Robert Erickson, as she measures

to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang.…

as the poet and the composer are the single artificers of theirs, in their "Blessed rage for order…

The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Looking over these notes I realize how cunningly the program had been chosen and arranged, clearly and overwhelmingly setting Erickson in place as a composer whose music mediates musicianship and the environment. Perhaps this explains his neglect by the musical establishment, which is nothing if not urban, metropolitan even. The immediate effect of the material in the early Trio is very different indeed from that of Pacific Sirens or The Idea of Order at Key West; but on reconsideration they represent different moments in a body of work that's personal, intuitive though tremendously knowledgable, patient, aware of tonality but careless of conventions.

The perfomances were marvelous; all the musicians deserve mention. They were, first of all, Christine Abraham, the magnificent soprano in The Idea of Order at Key West. She has a very fine instrument; her elocution was spot-on; and her musicianship admirable. I can't imagine anyone singing this demanding cantata better. Then there was Gloria Justen, violin; Nils Bultmann, viola; Belle Bulwinkle, piano; Gianna Abondolo, cello; Jen Baker, trombone, Tod Brody, flute, Rachel Condry, bass clarinet; Tom Dambly, trumpet; Peter Josheff, clarinet; Adam Lowdermilk and Richard Worn, contrabasses; and Daniel Steffey, William Winant, and Anna Wray, percussion. Steed Cowart presides over this Mills Performing Group.

Fortunately, while neglected by the concert hall, Robert Erickson is fairly well represented by recordings, including all titles mentioned here except Roddy and, regrettably, the Trio. (Maybe the Mills Performing Group will rectify that omission.) Four works can be downloaded free at Community Audio, among them The Idea of Order at Key West.

"What is government if words have no meaning?"

2011-01-15T12:44:00.001-08:00

THE QUOTE IS FROM Jared Loughner, the apparently paranoid young man who seems to have been responsible for the shootings in Tucson a week ago (January 8, 2011). I find them prominently displayed in a "quoteout" on page 28 of the special issue of Time (January 24, 2011), where they are characterized as his "…nonsensical question to Representative Giffords at a 2007 constituents' meeting".

But the question is not nonsensical. In fact, the same issue of Time devotes considerable space to it, for the root of the discussions going on in the wake of the event is linguistic. Language is the means by which individuals communicate in complex and especially in societal contexts. And the clear, effective, and just discussion, which is central to the maintenance of a civil democratic society, depends on a shared approach to the use of words.

The civility of public and political discourse is, as I see it, one of three major discussions going on just now. Another, more specific, centers on the question of "gun control," shorthand for legislation expressing the public's right to tranquility in a society granting the right to bear arms. Here the language problem centers on the Second Amendment, probably the most evasive passage in the Constitution as it is currently worded. Any discussion of the passage, and its language, must consider context as much as content: the evasiveness (or at least vagueness) of the passage undoubtedly evolved for a reason, probably to satisfy unresolved negotiations between "framers" who could not agree. (Too bad they didn't simply write that we are each entitled to bear three-fifths of a gun.)

A third discussion centers on the correct — I mean effective and just — attitude society should take to mentally disturbed individuals. Mental disorders of the sort Loughner apparently suffers are subtle and complex, but I think they are essentially linguistic, confusions of meanings and contexts. Awareness of the distinctions between individual and citizen — between myself as my self, on which everything centers, and myself as a member of family, society, nation — comes late in development. Comes late in an individual's development from child to adult, and comes late, I think, in human development from pre-conscious to conscious thought; in societal development from tribal to rational organizing principles.

To paint with a broad brush: if ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, then social development recapitulates individual human development. This "development" is far from a one-way linear process. Complex as it is, it is vulnerable to error, to breakdown, to reversal. I believe it is the essence of adolescence, whether in an individual or in a society. Those of us who have survived adolescence, perhaps even matured beyond it, have problems dealing with it as we observe it in others; problems arising from our forgetting or ignoring its nature and complexity. Even observing it, in individuals or social contexts which involve us directly, is difficult enough; trying to understand it is worse. Yet it is something we must confront.

ONE FUNDAMENTAL ISSUE needs to be considered: context is as significant as causation. As Susan Sontag put it, meaning is never monogamous. It's easy to point out that no direct causal link can be found between, for example, Sarah Palin's "crosshairs"* marking congressional districts "targeted" for particular attention in last November's election, on the one hand, and the literal targeting of Congresswoman Giffords (whose district was one of those so marked), on the other. That needs to be kept in mind as we investigate the background of the shooter and his assault.

But as we work to improve society, whether to improve civil discourse or to identify and interrupt potentially lethal behavior, we should attend to Climate as well, perhaps more, as to Cause. Our present moment is both speedy and violent (if the two are not two faces of a single attribute), and we cannot escape this. Over and over in public discussion we see metaphors and symbols — there's language again! — dealing with excess: inflation, out-of-control, cancer, obesity, unsustainability, Ponzi schemes. Matt Matsuda, in his important book The Memory of the Modern, writes about the acceleration of history, suggesting that every civilization accelerates itself to death, spinning out of control. As "taxes are the dues that we pay for he privileges of membership in an organized society", as FDR said, so Regulation is the price we pay for living in a secure one; it is apparently the only brake available against what is apparently this natural tendency of human organisms to constant growth and acceleration.

*But are they not exactly the symbols used as registration marks; and is that not why they are easily found in symbol fonts on the computer?

“The Creative Problem”

2010-12-29T11:18:00.001-08:00

A FRIEND WRITES:

Working on a small piece about creativity and was just wondering if you could give me a word, phrase or sentence on what you think about when you hear the term "the creative problem."

Last night I began reading, for the first time, Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. In the preface to the second edition she touches on this very issue:

“Everything must have a beginning… and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.… Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested by it.”

In her case, a dream, or perhaps better a nightmare. In my case, sometimes a dream; sometimes a deliberate plan.

The creative problem, if there is one, must be individual; different folks have different problems. Virgil Thomson used to say, sit down at your writing-desk every morning at the appointed hour. If your Muse doesn't show up, it's her fault; you've discharged your end of the agreement.

I find it's better to say Three hours every day, or whatever, rather than Nine to noon every day, or whatever. If the latter, then when nine o'clock has gone by and I haven't gone to work, I tend to say Oh well, I'll sit down at nine o'clock tomorrow. Whereas if the former, even if by now it's one o'clock in the afternoon, there are still three hours left somewhere in the day, better get to work.

But there are also general creative problems, and one of them is historical: the problem of creating Something New. This isn't really a problem, because it has no solution: it's impossible to create something new (see Shelley, above). That was a Modernist injunction conceived out of rebellion against history; it was continued as a marketing device.

Another general creative problem: the amount of distraction today, far worse I think than formerly. You really do almost need A Room of One's Own, as Virginia Woolf said. Without telephone, though I find Wikipedia a useful desk tool when I'm writing.

My own creative tools, or methods — things I do to get started, or re-started:

Tell a story.
Make a map.
Arrange a few objects.
Re-read my journal.
Look at a random sentence in a random book.
Listen to a random phrase in a random recording.

In my case, it doesn't often help to look at photos, pictures, out the window; that generally distracts me rather than inspires me. But of course if I'm writing about travels that's another matter.

Of course there come times when for weeks on end you're simply too busy with other things, or mundane things, to be “creative,” which is why even The Eastside View falls silent for weeks at a time. Doesn't mean I'm not thinking, or listening, or looking, or lurking.

The Dutch-American historical connection

2010-11-09T01:20:00.000-08:00

YESTERDAY I READ A BOOK confirming and explaining the connection I've long felt exists between Netherlands and the United States — a common mentality, you might say, a societal posture differentiating them from other nations. Not all other nations, perhaps; and not entirely: but a special orientation enabling a societal organization — "political," in fact — that underlies the social responsibilities enabling a social contract, written or not.

The book is in fact a pair of short essays by Geert Mak and Russell Shorto, 1609, The Forgotten history of Hudson, Amsterdam, and New York, published in 2009 in a handsome bilingual edition by the Henry Hudson 400 Foundation. Hudson arrived in New York harbor on his ship the Half Moon in 1609; the book was published as part of the events celebrating the 400th anniversary of that event.

Hudson was English, not Dutch, but he sailed on a commission from the Dutch East India Company, who hoped he would find a short route to Japan and China by sailing along the north Russian coast where the long summer days, it was thought, might melt the polar ice. He was four centuries too soon for that, as we know now, and before rounding the north cape of Norway turned back, crossed the Atlantic, and sailed to what is now Virginia to visit his friend John Smith in the colony there; then looked into first the Delaware river, then what's now the Hudson, hoping for a passage through the North American continent to the Sea of Japan.

(Not as ridiculous as it seems today, Shorto points out. At the time most navigators and cartographers thought that Ptolemy's ancient estimate of the size of the earth was correct; this would have placed Japan about where Ohio is.)

Hudson sailed up his river as far as present-day Albany before the river proved entirely fresh water, not salt, dashing that hope. But he explored the banks, and reported back to the Company that the fields were fertile and well-supplied with game. Before long the Dutch were sending colonists to stake out their own territory north of England's doomed Roanoke colony, and New York was Nieuw Amsterdam until 1664, when the English finally claimed the city at gunpoint.

By then the city had begun to develop qualities that characterize it still, qualities that early set it apart, Shorto writes, from "Boston, Hartford, or any other city in English North America." And what were those qualities? "Free trade and an immigrant culture," the features that enabled Amsterdam's rise in the late 16th and the 17th century as the most important, richest trading city in the world. The shipping companies were owned by a Dutch innovation, stock companies, not a monarchy; risk was shared as were returns; and the co-operation this necessitated was underwritten by a relatively liberal, tolerant view of differing social values.

Amsterdam, with its busy seaport, had already been attracting refugees from the religious wars in Germany and France, and the suppression of the Jews in Spain. "In an age of religious strife, it was almost universally held that a nation should be of one people and one faith," Shorto writes.

Intolerance was thus official policy in England, Spain, France… but not in the Dutch nation. There, tolerance became a topic of political and religious debate. Tolerance was adopted as a policy — not as a grand ideal, but as a way to deal with the mixed character of the population.

The Union of Utrecht, for example, declared as early as 1579 that "each person shall remain free, especially in his religion, and that no one shall be persecuted or investigated because of their religion."

As a result, Shorto argues, the Dutch colony in New York was a mixture of ethnic and religious strains from the beginning, approaching common problems and decisions in the spirit of common consent. "Even as early as the 17th century," Mak writes,

the Dutch had an uncontrollable inclination to assemble and to "polder" or debate until consensus is reached. This inclination based on the collective decision-making they were accustomed to as they worked together to reclaim their wetlands… Everything revolved around the art of persuasion, convincing others through debate.

The technique has its drawbacks, of course: it requires an educated, articulate, and probably fairly small body of discussants; and it takes time to arrive at its consensus. But it's a commendable procedure, and no doubt served as a model to the "Founding Fathers" as they themselves debated the form of the new government to follow the American Revolution.

Rural; urban

2010-11-07T05:34:00.000-08:00

OR: COUNTRY MOUSE, city mouse. For a long time it's seemed to me possible, maybe even simple — too simple, you'll object — to divide elements of human culture into those two categories.

This first occurred to me through coming to know the music of Anton Bruckner: big, easy-paced symphonies. It's true they're often characterized as monumental, even architectural, and somehow that does seem appropriate, whatever it means. I can understand those who liken his symphonies to cathedrals. It helps the fancy to recall that he was a devout man and a church organist.

But it occurred to me an even more helpful entry to these cathedrals of music was by walking. It had occurred to me even before I read somewhere of Bruckner's own walks, long ones, from home to school, from home to church, across the flat Austrian plains in the countryside south of Linz. I'd already sensed a logical connection between Bruckner and Schubert, whose late music often has a similar walking tempo. Schubert did a lot of walking too, but not in the countryside; his walks took him across Vienna, as a century later Erik Satie's walks took him across Paris.

Beethoven walked too, preferring the countryside outside Vienna; but I don't think of him as the inveterate walker that Bruckner was. Nor do I think Mozart can have been much of a walker: serene as much of his music is, it has the serenity of contemplation, not of walking; besides, he must have been in far too much a hurry most of the time. (I recently re-read his letters; you can't imagine how much activity he packed into that short life.)

Some music just seems to exhale country air through its phrases and cadences. Bruckner; Berlioz; Webern. I know the knowledge forms the impression; the music itself can't be responsible. Copland's harmonic dispositions are as wide as Berlioz's, for example, and few composers write more urban music than Aaron Copland — as far as I'm concerned, even Rodeo and Appalachian Spring reveal their Paris-New York breeding. But perhaps this country quality is expressed in purely musical terms through tempo and, especially, articulation. The even duple stresses and repetitive phrase-structure of the slow movement of Schubert's Ninth Symphony is a perfect example of this.

Of course there are Country and City painters, too, and poets, and cooks. We saw a wonderful show of landscapes by Giorgio Morandi the other day. He's known for his still lifes, of course; the idea of Morandi landscapes was particularly intriguing. He spent nearly his entire life in the city, in Bologna, but his landscapes are almost entirely rural. The Italian and French words — paisaggio; paysage — convey the open-country feel better than does "landscape," I think (though there again I'm probably completely misled by language; one's own language is so familiar that it tends to convey qualities more prosaic than do the languages one's much less adept with).

I think there was only one painting in the exhibition, though, that did not contain among its pictorial matter a building, or a road, or some mark of man's hand on the landscape. Most of the paintings contained mute Italian country houses. These tend to be cubical, probably because that's the most efficient use of material to contain space while relying on straight lines, not curved ones. (Masonry hates curves.) The windows tend to be few and small, protecting interiors from wind, cold, and blazing sun.

There are no people or animals attending these buildings, not in Morandi's world, and the feeling aroused by these landscapes is very like that associated with his still lifes. In both cases, the real subject seems to be the permanence of the evanescence of human products — houses, barns, bottles, pitchers — as they stand stolid, mute, dissociated from the humanity that made them through their obvious lack of use at the moment.

Why should Morandi's seem a country mentality to me, rather than an urban one? Perhaps because through both his palette and his geometry he so often recalls Cézanne? Perhaps because the nature of Morandi's moods resonates with my own mood, when I am lost in nature, away from noise and crowds, steeping myself in self-in-nature apart from intellectual, urbane, societal distractions?

We began our current journey with three days in noise and crowds at the Salone di Gusto in Torino, virtually every waking moment subject to insistent, urgent demands of all five senses. (The last day, in fact, we took a light-hearted test of the skills our five senses had at dealing with both subtle distinctions and imperious attacks.) Then came three days in snowy, rural Savoie; then three in the countryside and the villages of the Valsusa.

A week ago, on Sunday, we were back in a crowd of people, gazing at those wonderful Morandi paintings in an exceptionally well-installed show at the Fundazione Ferrero in Asti; but we spent the night in an isolated country hotel. The next morning we drove through the mute, Morandi-like mists of the Po Plain to Milan, as stylishly busy a city as I care to deal with, and tested our mental-emotional balance negotiating between its crowds, traffic, and trattorias and the discursive conversation we enjoy with our friends Richard and Marta the next two days.

Wednesday we flew across the unseen Alps, through the night sky and above clouds, to Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, where we made the mental shift from Italian to Dutch, bought a Dutch phone-chip, took a Dutch train to this very familiar provincial city in Gelderland, my favorite province. We're staying with another couple of friends, really old and close friends. We've been relaxing, more or less, conversing, walking, shopping, reading a little.

Last night, to get back to the subject, we took the bus, the four of us, to the nearby provincial capital Arnhem, where we saw the National Ballet in three major works: Krzysztof Pastor's Moving Rooms, to music by Alfred Schnittke and Henryk Gorecki; Hans van Manen's Without Words, to Hugo Wolf's Mignon songs; and Benjamin Millepied's One Thing Leads to Another, to music by Nico Muhly. (Yes, all three titles were in English; yes, that choreographer's name is really Millepied.)

The opening work didn't interest me at all, either choreographically or musically, and I dozed. The other two, though, I found both beautiful and interesting. Without Words was basically a series of pas de deux, one woman (Igone de Jongh) responding to one or another of three men (Jozef Varga, Juanjo Arques, Alexander Zhembrovskyy) flirtatiously, or seriously, or disinterestedly, to the interesting musical accompaniment of Hugo Wolf songs presented through their piano accompaniment only, the voice (and therefor the texts) missing altogether. (Reinbert de Leeuw was the pianist, onstage though well back and ill-lit, and he was marvelous.)

One Thing Leads to Another was an altogether fascinating interpretation in dance, by no fewer than twelve male and twelve female dancers, of Muhly's always interesting, always clear, sometimes surprising score for large orchestra. The music is now choppy and insistent, now long-lined and insidious; its orchestration is skilful; its architecture logical but rarely obvious. (It was played splendidly, by the Olland Symfonia, conducted by Benjamin Pope.)

Millepied's choreography was attentive to small details while building large units. I thought it clear that he's found ideas in Mark Morris, in Cunningham, in Pina Bauch, just as Muhly clearly knows his Stravinsky, his John Adams, his Louis Andriessen. But everyone associated with this piece seemed quite comfortable knowing such sources, yet turning their contributions to new, idiomatic, individualistic expressions.

I call this quality sophisticated and urbane. It can be achieved by country artists: God knows Berlioz proved that. But last night it was the product of distinctly urban mentalities, and I was in exactly the right mood to deal with their "Strong Voices," as the entire program was called.

Valsusa, 2: Chapels

2010-11-06T05:54:00.001-07:00

AFTER AN INTERLUDE of a couple of days in Milan, too busy to write, I resume, I hope. If you look at a map of Italy you see at what's normally though of as the northwest — though in fact the peninsula does not run north and south, but lies at a rakish angle against the compass — a big sort of shoulder: that's the two regions of Val d'Aosta and Piemonte. Val d'Aosta's an interesting place, rather isolated though easily accessible, a valley open at the south corner but otherwise ringed by Alps, home to Italy's magnificent national park the Gran Paradiso. We've driven through Aosta a few times, twice spending the night in one or another corner high up a side road, and have fond memories of the people, the terrain, and the cuisine. But we know Piemonte much better.

Piemonte's terrain is quite varied, flat and easily farmed in its southern half, rumpled for vineyard and truffle forests in the east central region, marshy along the great Po river where the best rice is grown. But it's the western side of the region I like best, the series of five or six valleys cut and drained by fast streams running from the high snowy ridgeline down to the foot of the mountains (pie monti in dialect).

Lindsey's father was born in Chiomonte in one of the northernmost of these valleys, the Valsusa. The country hereabouts is rugged. Chiomonte's above the Dora Riparia river on the south , right bank; across the river the mountain rises nearly vertically in some places, terraced with vineyards that seem impossible to maintain, and laced with perpendicular flumes, pipes perhaps a meter in diameter, bringing snowmelt down precipitously to run a hydroelectric plant.

(I like to think Lindsey's father was inspired by the awe of this landscape, and by this daring domestication of its powers, to an early fascination with electricity; he became an electrical engineer after his emigration to the United States.)

Like the Savoie on the other, French side of the ridge, the mountains and foothills on the Piemonte side are dotted with romanesque chapels, many containing frescos in the powerful, sometimes lyrical naive itinerant style of the area. We visited two of these: San Benedetto on the south side of the valley, above Villar Focchiardo in a regional park; and the Abbazia di Novalesa on the north side, just off the road leading over the Moncensio pass to Lanslebourg on the French side.

Chapel at the Abbazia di Novalesa

The Abbey was interesting for its architecture, its fine site overlooking a beautifully farmed valley, and its frescos celebrating Saints Eldrado and Nicholas, important local saints whose pilgrimages led them to these mountains. We drove there, impolitely driving right up to the abbey which is still a working religious retreat open to tourists only a few hours a week, and we joined a group of Italian tourists guided by an enthusiastic and very sympathetic guide who did her best to be sure I had some idea of what she was explaining though she knew very little English.

We walked to San Benedetto, driving to the end of a long narrow paved road, through many switchbacks, to a parking spot at the end, then walking nearly an hour along a narrow footpath through mixed hardwood forest, crossing a fast stream (half cascade) midway on the walk on a crude bridge a foot or so wide, then climbing fairly steeply before suddenly coming out into an alpage centered on a stone farmstead and the chapel, church really, of S. Benedetto.

S. Benedetto (center) in its alpage

This was founded by Cartusian monks walking here on their pilgrimage from Mont St. Michel on the French coast, by way of the Grand Chartreuse in the French Alps outside Grenoble, finally to Rome. I suppose these waypoints were settled partly to shelter, partly to supply later pilgrims taking the same strenuous but in many ways refreshing journey. In their day, of course, the terrain was wilder; the woods full of wolves, life considerably more uncertain. On our little pilgrimage up to the chapel the only danger was the slippery wet chestnut leaves underfoot; those, and the souvenirs left by milk-cows and cow-dogs, inevitably fouling our shoes.

On one side of the church a low side-room has been turned into a fromagerie where wheels of mountain cheese, tomme or tomo depending on your language, are left on crude wooden shelves to take on some age. I asked the farmer, who was about to round up his herd, what breed the cows were: "French," he said — the same red-brown breed we'd seen playing their bells on the main street in Lanslevillard. (Looking back on the little video I made of them that day, I see now that some of them are the Abondance breed, easily distinguished by the black "spectacles" they wear.)

The church has been stabilized, not really rebuilt, and a wooden suspended floor has been provided to protect the original. Apparently concerts are given here in the summertime; there must be a paved road up here that we didn't know about — I'm glad, as we might otherwise have missed a truly fine afternoon's hike.

Valsusa, 1: Agriturismo

2010-11-01T11:35:00.000-07:00

Milan, November 1—

WE SEEM USUALLY to have incredibly good luck finding places to stay and to eat. In Lanslebourg, wondering what to do for three days and nights near Chiomonte, I looked for "agriturismo" near Susa, and found four. I chose the first, nearest Susa: Cré Seren. After finally getting my jacket liberated from the museum in Modane we drove back to Lanslebourg, then over the Moncenisio pass…

But first a few words on this road, which we'd already taken a few days earlier, on Monday, in a light snowstorm, northbound. We first drove this road perhaps thirty years ago, and I had distinct memories of that summer's drive, past a pretty lake where two girls, maybe twelve years old, were sitting on the grass weaving daisy-chains as they kept watch over their small herd of milk-cows.

We'd driven down through France and were eager to get to Italy and were pleased to see the conifers on the French side of the pass give way to mixed hardwood forest, then palms and citrus trees. Kennst du das Land, wo die Citrönen bluhen? Heidi and The Sound of Music giving way to Goethe!

Last Thursday, though, I noted the lake was a reservoir held back by an immense earthen dam; there were neither girls nor cows to be seen; the weather was chilly. The end of October is a long way from July at this altitude. We did stop just beyond the dam to investigate what seemed an abandoned village, its few buildings in varying degrees of collapse. It wasn't inviting, and we went on.

Our dashboard navigator with its incredibly irritating Englishwoman's voice — turn right at the vee-ah ee-vray-AH — led us to our agriturismo by a dubious route. I should have expected this; the same thing had happened to us in Sicily, when we were also led into an increasingly narrowing street. We turned an improbably steep angle, down a cobbled road between plastered stone walls confining fields, between frugally placed houses leaving almost no room for traffic, finally pulling in both side mirrors and driving with inches to spare, but finally noticing signs to Cré Seren, and finally drawing up at a pretty little chapel beyond which stood a winery shed across the street from what proved to be Cré Seren's restaurant.

This wasn't our digs, though. The restaurant was closed; no one seemed about. Back at the parked car, wondering what to do, we waited until a pleasant-looking man, fortyish, walked out of the winery. He asked us what we needed, then crossed the road to call into a kitchen window, and our hostess stepped out, apologizing for her lack of English, smiling at my Italian.

Another fellow drove up in a small pickup with a box of tomatoes and peppers, and the hostess transferred them to the wheelbarrow and trundled them back across the road. In the meantime her mother had materialized, a small, goodlooking woman with a marvelously good-natured face all smiles: she would lead us to our bedroom.

She set off back down the road, on foot, motioning to us with that curious Italian gesture, pawing the air palm down, and we drove slowly after, down the street and into a courtyard where she showed us to leave the car in front of a woodpile, the hood and windshield under an overhang.

The room itself was another forty feet away, up the street, into another yard flagged with basalt and granite, next to a vegetable garden, up a flight of stairs. Inside, two twin beds and a bunkbed; next to that bedroom, an enormous bathroom (lacking, however, a tub).

We later learned that this cheery lady was Sylvana Sereno. Her daughter, the cook, is Serena Sereno. (Her brother, who we never met, is named Hilario Sereno: Sylvana is a master of light poetry, I suspect.) The winemaker was Serena's husband, GianCarlo Martina: Italians often keep their own surnames when they marry.

I won't write here about the food and wine at this agriturismo; you may already have read about it over at Eating Every Day; if not, click over there if you like. I will explain that an agriturismo is a place licenced by the government to bring tourists in contact with the agricultural tradition of Italy; the food and wine served is often, perhaps always for all I know, produced by the location (obvious exceptions like cocoa, sugar, and coffee being tolerated); and in our experience the people who run these places seem to be particularly oriented toward small-farm, sustainable, chemical-free practice, though by no means refusing continuing education into modern versions of traditionally-valued agricultural practise.

After unpacking and cleaning up a bit I wanted a walk, and set out toward a chapel I'd noticed perhaps half a mile away, down the street through the village — if village it was: for there seemed no commercial center or indeed any commercial buildings at all apart from the winery, itself a modest sort of barn with no facilities for retail sales or tasting. On either side of the street were houses and their vegetable gardens or, occasionally, small orchards or vineyards. These were fenced and in many cases guarded by frisky, noisy dogs, mostly terriers it seemed.

I passed a fellow who was cleaning up a press-basket, having just finished pressing out his private stock of Barbera. We had a pleasant conversation, in the course of which he agreed that things in the Valsusa were changing: The only thing that's improved around here is the wine, he said, though he didn't seem outraged at the decline; rather he seemed optimistic and grateful for the improvement. I went on, past an open pasture in which the most enormous chestnut tree I've ever seen stood, certainly toward eight feet in diameter. A man was raking its leaves and chestnut-burrs away from the trunk, working methodically, raking out to a circular periphery exactly at the dripline, say twenty feet from the trunk. A wagon stood nearby; he'd soon be piling the leaves in it. For feeding his livestock, I wondered, later in the winter, when everything would be snowed in?

As I walked back the man with the press-basket eyed me curiously. You must be Mario's cousin, he said. No, I said, I don't have a cousin named Mario, I have no family at all in these parts, it's my wife's family comes from here, from Chiomonte. Ah, Chiomonte, he nodded thoughtfully; Chiomonte.

In the next three days we had three dinners at Cré Seren, each very good indeed. When on Friday morning we drove into Susa for information on walking-paths in the area I mentioned that we were staying there, and the lady at the tourist-office desk nodded and said Very good table there; that's a woman knows how to cook.

Serena feigned no English, though I suspect she speaks a little and understands more. (I'll never know how it is these people can understand more than they can speak; with me it's the contrary. Perhaps it's just that I speak, I talk talk talk, whether I know what I'm saying or not. As Laverdure the parrot says, in Zazie dans le Metro, tu parle, tu parle, c'est tout ce que tu pourras.) That didn't keep us from conversations, in the course of which she mentioned that the government restricts agriturismo tightly; they must have no fewer than x beds, no more than y; their dining rooms must have no fewer than x covers, no more than y; they must serve traditional food of the country: in this case, vitello tonnato, bagna cauda, brasato al polenta, bonet…

None of that offends me at all. In fact I think it a good idea: old traditions are kept alive that might otherwise vanish, and the links among terrain, climate, nutrition, daily life, and daily pleasure as well as work are maintained.

For the most part the natives of this valley seem remarkably healthy. We hear of people of considerable age: there's a woman in Gialgione who's 105, and in full command of her senses though a little deaf, they say. People are lean and bright-eyed and ready to do things, perhaps at a measured rate, but one that accomplishes the task. Tools and vehicles are appropriately scaled. All parts of the land, the buildings, the day seem to be put to use: when not, they're allowed to collapse gracefully, sinking back into the soil.

Yet Serena told us even here there's been the constant flight to the city, especially by the young people. (I reflected on the migrations of the past: of Lindsey's father's family, for example; only her father, of his family of five siblings, ever returned to the land; and then to a distant land indeed, fortunately for me.) As people leave, their smallholdings begin to disappear. Where once had been orchards and vineyards the wild forest begins to encroach. They never used to worry about wild animals; now they have to fence against mountain goats and sheep, capretti, wild pigs.

Wolves? Yes, she said, even wolves; they don't bother us of course, they don't bother the gardens, but if you have sheep you have to think about them, shepherds now have big white dogs big enough to hold the wolves at bay, and the dogs are frightening too.

We've seen a fair amount of this forest, both on drives and on a wonderful walk we took the other day. Mixed hardwood forest with a fair number of chestnuts and horse-chestnuts, the colors and textures of the forested hillside incredibly beautiful to look at. The balance of nature and human occupation seems poised at a tentative stand-off, and I'm glad the traditional values (not to menbtion the skills) haven't completely vanished: before long they may well be needed, when areas like this have been left by technology's failure to fend for themselves.

Modane, Oct. 28: Museobar

2010-11-01T09:12:00.000-07:00

Milan, November 1—

WE WERE ESSENTIALLY without Internet connection for the three days after leaving Lanslebourg: hence I have catching up to do, and will inevitably get confused about the time. Traveling like this always does strange things to my sense of time; or, rather, it confuses the days as their events mingle not only among themselves but also recall similar events on other travels, or similar sights or sounds in other places. Still, I make an attempt.

In the first place we spent the morning, last Thursday, in Modane, chiefly because I wanted Lindsey to see the Museobar there. Opened by the city of Modane in 2008, it celebrates and presents a specific part of the history of that frontier town, a part very dear to us: Modane's role as a center of emigration from Italy to other places, in the years 1860-1935. Modane lies on the northern (French) slope of the Moncenisio massif.

For a few hundred years its economy was primarily mining (especially lead) and, of course, agriculture, but the Industrial Revolution changed things. Waterpower produced abundant electricity, and small manufacture developed. The railroad arrived about 1860 (hence that starting date in this museum), opening distant markets. Then, in the late 1860s, the push developed for a tunnel piercing the Moncenisio massif, uniting France and Italy.

Until 1860 this entire region had not been French at all. It was Savoy, a nation whose ruling house was the longest-ruling family in Europe. There were two capitals, as the family's interests wandered from one side of the ridge to the other: Chambery and Torino. The official language was French, I suppose, but of course the people spoke the dialects of their own districts. In mountainous regions like this the concept of an overriding nationality was unfamiliar: since Hannibal and his elephants (not to mention Julius Caesar and his legionnaires) the country had been traversed and to one degree or another exploited by "leaders" from distant places, but the inhabitants had continued in their own traditions: herding, small-farming, hunting, trading.

After Napoleon, and especially in the time of the Second Empire, the French urge to spread to the ridges became irresistable. An election was held in 1860 to "reunite" (as the French had it) Savoy with France, and a majority was counted in favor of the idea -- though the result has been contested ever since.

Soon after, the railroad was built, mostly with Italian labor. Then as now Italy was poor, relative to the more Northern countries on "our" side of the Alps, and the contadini grew in numbers beyond their resources, starting with those in the nearest regions. Lindsey's own grandmother, for instance, though she was born and grew up in Chiomonte in the Valsusa, worked in France, mostly in Paris according to family history, as a wet-nurse. She'd have a baby, park him with a sister or a cousin, take the train to Paris, and nurse a well-to-do French baby for a couple of years; then return to Chiomonte and her husband until another baby was born and weaned, when the cycle would repeat.

Generations of Italians emigrated through the tunnel from Bardonecchia to Modane. Lindsey's grandparents did in the first decade of the 20th century; her father followed, alone, ten years old, in 1914. So the panels of photographs, and the extended quotations from oral-history interviews with oldtimers, fascinated us as we visited this museum. There are four "rooms," each depicting a café of a different generation, with photos of the period, murals depicting typical citizens of the town in four different periods: the bourgeois early period, the time of the first big wave of Italian passants, the roaring 'twenties, and the Modane of military occupation by huge regiments stationed here for defense, as the Maginot Line was being built during the nervous years before 1939.

In each room you can sit at a café table, put on a pair of headphones, and watch a well-designed video presentation of the history of the period. Or, if your French isn't up to that -- and mine isn't -- you can examine the dozens of photos, beautifully restored and enlarged, with explanatory texts (again only in French).

Lindsey and I were alone in the Museum, and I was lucky to have a long conversation with Claudine Théolier, who presides at its desk and writes a fair amount of its copy. She filled me in on the economic history of the period, the rise of its fascinating first families who brought in rice from Piedmont to be milled in factories in Modane, who were instrumental in organizing the drive for the tunnel, who went into banking -- and who built one of the most fascinating factories in Modane, specializing in the manufacture of mechanical pianos.

The Italians brought us music, one of the panels in the museum quotes; They loved to dance. Indeed the first piano I saw in the museum, in the first of the cafés represented, looked very much like one we'd seen in operation in a puppet theater in Palermo last May. Claudine wasn't surprised: the Italian crank-operated piano, often drawn on a cart by a street musician in the 19th century, was apparently a source for the inspiration that led Desiré Jorio to develop his factory.

Throughout this period Modane emerged as a city, with its bourgeois banking and manufacturing society, its armies of laborers and soldiers, its skilled labor and its tunnelers, thriving at the mouth of a tunnel that united two distinct halves of a single mountain. Since its ridge runs east and west it clearly has a cold side and a warm, France and Italy; this alone must account for an enormous amount of temperamental difference among residents. But because the ridge was always a frontier, even when it ran through the middle of a single politically unified "country" (Savoy), there was always smuggling, traveling, innkeeping. Jean-Jacques Rousseau walked over the pass on his way to Italy, 250 years ago or so; Henry James was only one of many travelers who wrote about the pass.

We left the museum at noon, having spent nearly two hours in it -- I've only sketched its attractions -- and has a croque-monsieur at a nearby bar, when I realized I'd left my jacket behind. I'd taken it off to sit at one of those café tables to watch a video, and had hung it on the back of my chair. I'd thought of hanging it on a coat-hook on the wall, next to a woolen jacket from the 19th century apparently belonging to one of the Modannais of that period, but realized the danger of that; it would take its place among the museum objects, I'd overlook it, it would never be a part of me again (though a part of me would always be a part of the museum).

It was probably because I did not hang it on the hook, but on the chair instead, that I dismissed the danger from mind, and wound up forgetting it anyway. Nothing to do but wait until three o'clock, or maybe four, when the museum would re-open after Claudine's midday break. But as we sat with a glass of wine talking about this, a fellow walked by she'd introduced me to in the museum, an archaeologist who'd been able to answer a number of my questions (and who indeed I'd met two summers ago at the little museum he himself had built in the nearby town of Solliers). He asked why we were lingering, I explained, he called Claudine, she came by and smilingly let me in to the closed museum to retrieve the jacket. Thank you M. l'Archaeologue, and especially thank you dear Claudine; I am very sorry to have put you to this trouble.

Lanslebourg, 3: the walk from Bonneval to Bessans

2010-10-27T08:28:00.001-07:00

Lanslebourg, Savoie, October 27, 2010—

I BROUGHT LINDSEY HERE to show her the valley I'd walked a couple of years ago, when Henry and Mac and I walked the GR5 from near Geneva to Nice. (You can read my running blog from that trip at Alpwalk, or, more conveniently, in my book Walking the French Alps.)

My idea was to introduce her to the valley via one or two stages of the walk, not at all strenuous here, basically flat, in the hopes she'll acquiesce later to further stages. It's such a beautiful walk, so varied, through calm, splendid landscape, and dotted with interesting villages, good restaurants, and comfortable hotels.

Alas, Mother Nature chose this week for the first snowfall of the year. It wasn't all that heavy, though it made crossing the Moncenisio a little hairy the other day. But it did cover the walkingpath with a good three or four inches of snow, and we waited until this morning to try the first step of the walk, from Bonneval sur Arc to Bessans, a short walk of six or seven kilometers — less than five miles, on country road, then footpaths, along the northern bank of the Arc, at the foot of massive rock cliffs, where I figured the sun would soonest melt off the snow. (Other stages of the walk hereabouts are on the south side of the river, in the shadow of high mountains and through forest.)

We drove up to the little town of Bonneval and left the car there. Bonneval's more or less a vacation community of ancient stone houses, most of them with new or recent roofs and fitted out inside, no doubt, with all the comforts. The town was quiet; hardly a person to be seen; the houses not yet occupied for the season; few other cars in the car park.

(Bonneval prefers that you not bring a car into the village, and provides a good-sized parking lot on the outskirts. The two or three hotels are also on the outskirts, leaving the village free to imitate the middle ages whenever it likes — or, if I'm not being too cynical, whenever it's to its advantage, say for a photo shoot.)

Following my trail guide, La Vanoise (FFRandonnée, 2008), we walked through town, past the ancient stone church, and out a country road. Bonneval is at 1800 meters, just under 6,000 feet. I'd put on my long underwear and layered up for the morning, but though there was thankfully no wind and the few clouds were high cirrus it was still a little chilly. Nor had the snow melted: only in the tracks left by a few farm-trucks was there bare ground to be seen, and it was often treacherous with black ice.

Another point, one I hadn't though of though I'd run into it before: often the balissage marking the route, a white strip over a red one, is painted directly onto a low rock by the side of the path. Snow covers these marks, of course. Still, we had the trail map in the guide, and I'd walked here only two years ago; besides, the direction is obvious, you keep walking downstream holding to the right side of the river. There's no way you can get lost.

It was a beautiful walk. First you walk through open farmland, all of it snow-covered today, with only a couple of nearly invisible white horses and, later on, a small herd of cows to animate the countryside. I heard an occasional rook up in the cliffs, and once a more melodic birdsong. There was the occasional crunch on frozen snow, or the more amusing squeaky crunch on partially thawed snow; otherwise our footsteps were pretty well muffled, and the morning was blissfully silent.

At one point I mistook the way, not remembering that it climbed after passing a few scattered stone barns, and floundered down through soft snow toward the river, turning then through a small forest. Soon enough this proved a mistake; it was hard to work our way through the branches; we turned back up to resume the trail. Almost immediately we met a French couple coming up trail from Bessans, confirming the route. (They were the only other people we saw on the walk.)

Then we crossed a little brook, the Vallon, on a footbridge, at a spot I remembered feeling quite special in the summertime — one of those pools where you just know a naiad hangs out to help or hinder passersby, depending on the respect they show the site. And then, just ahead, there was what I'd wanted Lindsey to see, the Rocher Château, immensely high, black and gleaming with ice and icy water, streaked with grey-blue lichen and red iron oxide.

This rock was something of a village six or eight thousand years ago, offering shelter to Neolithic community and raw material to their economy, which centered on (besides hunting and gathering, of course) the manufacture of spear and arrow-points. The stone here is perfect for the purpose, apparently, and items manufactured here have turned up hundreds of miles away, apparently eagerly traded in those days.

The area was quarried as recently as fifty years ago, and one or two huge cubes of stone lie at the foot of the cliff from that time. But this is too important an archaeological site to succumb to commerce, and the State has set it aside. There are petroglyphs here, too; eight running stags, painted in the style of the cave painters of soutwestern France, but almost invisible now after so many years facing south into the sun. Four or five explanatory panels give the history, and a helpful empty frame on a standard is placed to help the visitor see what's left of the paintings.

By now I'd begun to get hungry, and half the baguette in my backpack disappeared as we resumed the trail. A farm road took us on into the hamlet of Villaron, where a tiny stone chapel stood at a crossroads, utterly dark inside but with one missing pane of opaque glass allowing a flash photo. Further on was a curiously rustic crucifix in a shrine set into the low stone wall: this is a devout area, this Arc valley, or at least a careful one.

Then in half an hour we were at the bridge crossing the Arc into the town of Bessans. By the guide we should have been here in ninety minutes without stops; two summers ago it took us two hours and a quarter. Today it took two hours and a half: we took longer at Rocher Ch âteau, and the slick ice had probably slowed us down, not to mention the little detour in the woods.

Bessans was quiet; not a thing open. No place for a hot cup of tea. The church and the impressive chapel were locked up tight as a tick, so the only frescos we could see were those on the outside wall of the St. Anthony chapel, whose interior boasts sixty of the most impressive frescos I've seen anywhere. The little churchyard sat poignant in the snow, the photographs of its more recent citizens speaking mutely of evanescence.

We found a bench outside a closed hotel-restaurant and sat down to eat our sausage, bread, apple, and chocolate. A black cat minced carefully over the snow. Someone unlocked the closed Mairie, went in, brought out four enormous pots of crysanthemums, and disappeared. A stout middle-aged woman waddled past, eyeing the ice suspiciously. An old couple, older even than us, walked past quietly: we spoke briefly: no, there was nothing open; no, there was no transportation back to Bonneval.

Bessans lay dead-silent under its snowcovered roofs. There was a very nice public restroom at the Mairie, though, so after our lunch, after listening to the church strike one-thirty, then two o'clock, we shouldered our packs and took the Departemental road back to Bonneval. Immediately a car drove past us: I put out my hand, he stopped, and we rode into Bonneval to drive back to the hotel.

Lanslebourg, 2: le plus beau pays

2010-10-26T07:14:00.001-07:00

Lanslebourg, Savoie, October 26—

THE LAST TIMEI was here I was unimpressed with the area. Not this town, with its comfortable old-fashioned hotel, but the area, stretching from Bonneval at the upper end of the valley to Modane at the lower end. I was on foot, with my friend Mac and my grandson Henry; we'd been walking two weeks, having started at Evian-les-Bains on Lake Geneva, and were headed to Nice. We were a couple of days behind schedule; worse, we were down in what seemed like low country.

Worst, we were in civilization, after days in the high mountains. People, cars, machinery, noise.

This time, though, we've come here from the city. Same people, cars, machinery, noise: but so much less than in Torino, never mind the crowded Salone di Gusto. There's snow all around, which of course mutes sound; and we're not on a tight schedule; and we have a car, which covers the boring stretches so much faster, theoretically allowing more time for the interesting ones.

But we're between seasons, and many things are closed, or apparently closed. I wanted especially to take another look at the marvelous frescos in Bessans, but they're off limits for some reason. We drove into Modane this afternoon to see about its interesting museum, but it's closed until Thursday morning. We'll go back then, or maybe Friday.

It is so incredibly beautiful here. We keep stopping to snap photos, or sometimes we don't stop, Lindsey lifts her iPhone to the windshield — on the road it's not often easy or safe to stop. The mountains hereabout rise to nearly 4000 meters, 13,000 feet; and there are a good many of them, rising in blinding white above the dark forests, the bare stretches of dark grey rock.

The light slants in from the south, sometimes filtered to extraordinary effect by the yellow-gold needles of the larches — mégèves in French, what I've always called spanieltails because of their characteristic branches.

This morning we did manage to visit the chapel to St. Sebastian in the next village upstream, Lanslevillard. Our hostess called the mairie there and arranged our visit: like the chapel in Bessans, this one is a national treasure; you can't visit it without accompaniment.

Extraordinary. Three walls are covered with frescos painted by an anonymous itinerant, probably Piemontese, in the Fifteenth Century: two bands on one long wall, three on the other, broken comic-strip-style into rectangular frames illustrating the lives of Jesus and St. Sebastian. It's known the Sebastian mystery-play was given here in May 1567, performed by the villagers; and that a company of archers was stationed here at that time; Sebastian is an important patron saint here.

The frescos are remarkably fresh and realistic; you'd recognize these faces if you ran into them on the street — though they aren't particularly Savoyard: to my eye, the faces are Italian. Of course there was no Italy in those days, nor did France really have much presence hereabouts. We are in fact in Savoy, as the white cross on the red escutcheon reminds us on road-signs. Savoi, the Kingdom of Two Sicilies before that; France only since 1870 or so (and some territory hereabouts was ceded by Italy within my own lifetime).

This morning our hotelkeeper, the birdlike woman I wrote about in the book about our Long Walk of two summers ago, looked out the window at the snow-covered mountains and said C'est le plus beau pays dans le monde, the most beautiful countryside in the world. Then she started, and put her hand to her mouth and looked at us guiltily. They're all the plus beau, I responded, my country also: but this is extraordinaire.

It's also a bit foreboding. The edge of the cisalpine world, it's been defended from invaders — or armies merely passing through, but doing damage en route — for millenia. Hannibal brought his elephants through one of these passes (many claim him); the Maginot line ran across these mountains as recently as the 1930s. Huge fortresses dominate the skyline down around Modane; another fort is a tourist destination at Exilles, the other side of the Italian boundary.

It's a hard country, hard with rock, sharp with cold and wind, sudden with avalanche and flood. The summers are seductive, with endless miles of flowers among the sweet grasses that give Beaufort its unique savor. These days even the winters are deceptively playful, with ski-lifts and vacation chalets on all sides.

But down the street a monument to a dog reminds passersby of he danger in these mountains. He worked nearly a decade finding and assisting the victims of blizzards and avalanches; when he was ten, worn out with work and loyalty, he took a last walk into the mountains to die where he had served. His monument reads

Passant je suis autre chose qu'un monument
peut-etre plus qu'un symbole
je suis un example
Passerby I'm not a monument
perhaps more than a symbol
I am an example.

Catching up in Lanslebourg

2010-10-25T13:53:00.001-07:00

WE'VE BEEN ON THE ROAD almost a week, but the first couple of days don't really count, of course; you're in the air, your mind is out of sync with everything else; then you land, rent your car, drive to an unfamiliar hotel in an unfamiliar city. That same night, last Wednesday, after 24 hours or so traveling, we went out to dinner with friends — I've written about that on Eating Every Day, of course.

Then we spent three days in the Salone del Gusto. Some reports from that leaked into the eatingblog too, but others will provide food for thought — heh heh — for comments on this site, later on, perhaps. Let's see:

Immigration
Quality of Life
Enjoyment
Disappearing apples
Sardegna, not Toscana

Today we drove from our Chivasso hotel, where we've slept the last four nights, over the Montcenisio pass and down into Lanslebourg. I wanted to bring Lindsey here to see this valley along the river Arc, from Bonneval south to Modane. I walked it two years ago, with Mac and Henry, when we took the Long Walk from Geneva to NIce. At that time I didn't really like it, but the more I thought about it afterward the more I realized I'd missed something.

I'd hoped Lindsey and I would be walking here, but the year's first snowfall coincided with our arrival. Driving the pass was a little hairy: the road was often covered in snow and sometimes icy, and toward the top we drove into cloudy air that tended toward snowblindness. It's a special road: we've taken it two or three times before, but never in this kind of weather. I remember the first time, when, at the top, we drove past the lake and saw a couple of girls, twelve years old or so, sitting in the grass, ostensbily watching their herd of cows, weaving daisies into a chain, right out of Heidi. They weren't out today.

We arrived at our hotel in Lanslebourg, the one Henry and Mac and I stayed in in the summer of '08, about three o'clock. We were cold. There was snow on the street. A fire burned in the hearth. The same birdlike woman met us, and was cheerful, and showed us to a room, and brought us tea back at the hearth in the lobby.

After a bit we drove up through Lanslevillard — yes, there were apparently two settlements named "Lans," one the bourg, one the villard — to Bessans, where I'd hoped to show Lindsey the amazing frescos. These are in a 15th-century chapel; Henry and I saw them on that walk: they depict the Life of Christ, and are amazingly concentrated paintings. But the chapel is off limits; we're not going to be able to see these frescos, not on this trip in any case.

Too bad. But we stopped in at the library, excuse me, "Media Center," here in Lanslebourg, and looked at photographs of the frescos in a couple of books. They were painted by an anonymous itinerant at the beginning of the 16th century, we read. Migration, again. Local saints are very important in these chapels, often protecting domestic animals as they were herded up and down the Alps. Another saint, St. Landry, was sent to Bonneval a thousand years ago or so, and drowned in the Arc river on his journey; his body washed downstream to Lanslevillard, where all the bells began tolling on their own initiative. A miracle: so he's preserved in the church there, and became the saint in charge of droughts.

Makes sense: a drowned man would know something about irrigation. I think the cult of saints replaced the local cults of local deities, lesser deities of course, dryads and such, spirits of springs and torrents, forests and bogs; protectors of virgins, widows, drunks, and domestic animals.

Yesterday at Terra Madre I heard a woman from an immigrants' rights organization say that "immigrants are the bearers of competence." I believe that; but I also believe that other migrants bear foreign authorities. Perhaps it only depends on from which end you view the spectrum.