Getting in shape...

Cows outside Windsor

THE FIRST DAY hurts, always. Two days ago I proved this yet again, striking out across the neighbor's vineyards, along a shale road, then another neighbor's asphalt driveway to his locked gate.

Couldn't begin to think of trying to open it. Couldn't begin to get across the fence. Still, where there's a will there's a way, and before long I was out on Starr Road.

From there an easy walk into town — in my case, Windsor. Here there's a pretty nice coffeehouse, where I waited with a decent cappuccino for Lindsey to drive in and pick me up.

That evening, the familiar ache in the thighs, and a little footsore too, and next morning a stiff back and knee. Just as had happened six years ago when we began walking the Pieterpad in The Netherlands.

Only thing to do, of course, is walk through it. Today I set out a little before noon, walking along the road this time, and got into Windsor — nearly eight kilometers — in a little over an hour.

That's very good time, and sitting here over a mocha I feel fine. It's perfect weather: cloudy with a threat of showers; a light dusting of snow on Mt. St. Helena and the hills south of the Geysers.

The plums are in bloom, the "wild plums" as the women in our family call them, though I think they're more feral than wild; rootstock volunteers recalling the days when this country was all planted in prune orchards. As you walk past them you smell them, sweet yet pungent. It's a breezy day; the air is fresh and clean. It's good to be walking again.

Of course walking here is not like walking in The Netherlands. Here I'm forced to walk on pavement. There are places where there's a bit of a shoulder, gravel for the most part; but it's so steeply raked that you feel like you're walking on a roof, about a twenty-degree angle — not good for your ankles, knees, or hips. So I keep on the asphalt, and even that's rounded.

Approaching Windsor, once past the site of the World War II prisoner-of-war camp, once past the cows in the photo above, you're on sidewalk. Here the footing's flat, but the pavement's concrete: hard on the feet.

It's almost exactly eight kilometers from our front door to the middle of Windsor, where the Café Noto rewards me today with a mocha, and I whip out my folding keyboard and write this on my Palm — connected to the Internet via the free wi-fi that permeates the businesses bordering the "Town Green." Windsor's an odd place, its commercial architecture phony as a Hollywood sound set, all developed within just a few years (and still ongoing), but better than the shopping plazas set off by their enormous parking lots.

Eight kilometers in eighty minutes: a good clip, faster than we'll be doing in Europe in a few weeks, where the sights will be less familiar and the footpaths, I hope, less unforgiving. I can hardly wait.

Bog-man cereal

I THINK I'VE MENTIONED it before, but in case you weren't paying attention, this is how it's done:

Buy equal parts of red (hard) wheat, white (soft) wheat, oats, and rye — all in the kernel, not rolled or chopped into groats. Mix them all together.




I use the same pan every day, and don't measure anything. Water up to the rivets. Then pour in the grain: I use a little scoop, and pour it into a heap, just enough so the top of the heap breaks through the surface of the water. Add a handful of raisins.






Bring the water to a rolling boil, put a lid on the pot, and let it sit overnight. Do this just before going to bed. It takes about five minutes.

Next morning, uncover the pot and bring the cereal back to a boil. Then turn off the heat and toss in a couple or three tablespoons of oat bran, stirring it well in afterward to be sure it doesn't clump up unpleasantly. Put the cover back on and let it stand.





Some of us like to sprinkle a bit of sugar on the cereal, perhaps brown sugar; others like it just as is, with of course a little milk. Either way it's very cheap — the wheat costs about fifty cents a pound, even organic; the oats maybe three times that — and a bowl of this cereal will keep you going all day, or certainly to lunchtime.

Oh: the name. When I made this for Pavel it was just the time that a thousand-year-old body was found in a Danish bog, with some wheat kernels still in his mummified stomach. Bog-man cereal, Pavel called it.

Young Flamenco; Young Caesar

SEVENTY-TWO HOURS, more or less, over the weekend, sort of a typical jam-up for us — the jam-ups alternate, thankfully, with more tranquil times here on Eastside Road.

Friday night to the Flying Goat in Healdsburg, there to attend una noche flamenco: "La Eva" dancing, "La Vainilla" singing; David Carroll playing guitar — a chamber group, you might say, in an appropriately informal coffeehouse setting.

Saturday morning down to Berkeley, there to have lunch at Eccolo with an old friend, John R., recently retired from a distinguished career in journalism, thinking of a solid book on Die Zauberflöte, wondering how to arrange a more leisured life. Not a difficult matter, say I.

Saturday evening a quick supper at Zax in Berkeley, and then to San Francisco to see Lou Harrison's opera Young Caesar in the premiere production of its apparently final form — more masque, I think, than opera, but affecting and often quite beautiful.

Sunday morning to a screening of a friend's video Eat at Bill's, a winning, laid-back, fond documentary on Bill Fujimoto and his (Berkeley) Monterey Market, surely a unique institution dedicated to the small farmer, the demanding restaurant, and the canny shopper.

Then back upcountry to Sebastopol to see a second performance of that flamenco program, and finally to eat at the French Garden.

Home at midnight. Whew.

FLAMENCO FIRST. I don't pretend to know anything at all about flamenco; I only know that I am agitated and impressed by its performance, especially when done as well as this, especially when done by my own granddaughters. Eve, 23, has been dancing more than half her life. I have seen her balance on the heel of one foot for five minutes, tapping the toe of that foot with unbelievable force and rapidity, and then switch to the other foot for another five minutes, and continue for several such alternations — this at her school in Seville, in an exercise class that would land its instructor in prison in any country concerned about the health of its youngsters, it seems to me.

Flamenco requires that kind of discipline and focus, of course, and the skillful technique that may come of such training. But it requires more, and this is where Eve has evolved from a dedicated student to an expressive artist. She danced her own choreography on this program, alternating power and grace. To call attention to any one of her graces risks minimizing others: but the power of her percussive feet; the precise grace of her hands and arms; and her supple but muscular spine seem to me to be particularly remarkable.

Her sister Emma, 16, has been singing for years — I remember her parroting the Queen of the Night's aria "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen" when she was only five or six years old, her voice carrying across the field as she walked back home from our house. She's been studying the flamenco style for six or eight years, and her voice has moved from the Queen of the Night's stratosphere toward Tamino's tenor. What particularly impresses me at the moment are two things: her long long breath, which can support amazingly long phrases; and her ear for microtonal inflections.

They're both off to Jerez and Seville in a couple of days, Eve for a number of months, Emma for only two weeks. I'm sure there'll be more Flamenco Nights this fall: if so I'll keep you posted.


ECCOLO: well, a perfectly delicious Eggs Benedict, rich and pointed with delicious egg, a bit of tang from lemon in the Bearnaise, first-rate bacon. If I were younger I wouldn't mind eating this every morning.

ZAX: a strange meal, I suppose, but those eggs Benedict had given me all the protein I needed,Since we were about to see an opera about the adolescent Caesar, the Zax version of his salad seemed appropriate: everything's there but the raw egg. With it, a side order of Swiss chard. Gotta have your leafy greens!


LOU HARRISON WROTE Young Caesar first in 1971, in a version for puppets, singers, and gamelan, which we saw that year at the Cabrillo Festival. In 1988 we saw a greatly revised version performed by the Portland Gay Men's Chorus, for whom Lou composed a number of strongly affecting choruses; the orchestration was also considerably changed, transfered to conventional Western instruments; and singing actors had replaced the puppets.

This so impressed John Rockwell, at the time the director of the New York Festival, that he asked Lou for yet another revision for a performance to mark his 85th birthday in 2002. In the event the production was not achieved, so last weekend's performances were the premiere of this latest version — the final one, since Lou died in 2003.

I wish he'd had the chance to workshop the piece a bit more, though I can imagine he was heartily tired of dealing with it, special as it was to him. The subject is close to everything Lou loved: the young, unsophisticated Caesar, a product of a rigid but hypocritical Roman (read European) upbringing, meets King Nicomedes of Bithynia, an experienced, sensuous, subtle Asian. Well, Asia Minor: but still Asia.

I spent a year or two, fifteen or twenty years ago, writing a biography of Lou — yet to be published; perhaps never to be published. I was and am fascinated by The Making Of Lou, which is analogous I suppose to Act I of Young Caesar: Lou grows up on the West Coast, develops his chops, studies with Schoenberg, performs with dance companies, meets music of all sorts. Lou Harrison: The Second Act did not interest me, so I never wrote that part of the biography, the part coming after his fiftieth birthday, his marriage to Bill Colvig, his turn toward composing almost exclusively for gamelan. I love and enjoy the mind of Lou; I don't understand and am not interested in his sensuality. My shortcoming: I freely confess it.

But the intellectual component of Lou's music, nearly all of it, and certainly including Young Caesar, is as rewarding as almost anyone's. In a curious way he's an American Anton Webern: his gestures are bigger and his "playground," to use his own term, vaster: but there's the same precise marriage of intricately intelligent and effortlessly lovely composition in both of them.

The premiere was produced by the Ensemble Parallèle, with tenor Eleazar Rodriguez perfectly capturing the title role, baritone Eugene Brancoveanu strong and winning as Nicomedes, and John Duykers at the peak of his powers in the important role of the Narrator — a sort of Harrisonian version of Mozart-Da Ponte's Don Alfonso.

Wendy Hillhouse was a fine Aunt Julia; Sheila Willey did well in the small role of Caesar's wife Cornelia; and the fairly large number of much lesser roles was consistently and even memorably performed.

Nicole Paiement conducted with energy and lyricism, and the small big band — two woodwind, to brass, five percussionists, harp, keyboards, and bottom-heavy strings — did a fine job of conveying Harrison's uniquely Handelian-flavored, gamelan-inspired opera orchestra.

Dance was central to the production, and Lawrence Pech and Peter Brandenhoff were amazingly successful at conveying love, lust, and lyricism without looking merely silly — as could easily have happened. Pech choreographed the action, working with Brian Staufenbiel's stage direction.

I'd like to see the production again. Lou's music is so effectively written for the voice: no one else seems to be writing opera in this country with his understanding for the voice. He knows how to set English, too; and how to write melodically without simply writing major key-minor key. There are no unpleasant leaps; but neither is there a predictable "tuniness." I'd like less recitative, more aria; but I'm happy with what Lou's left us.

EAT AT BILL'S— but that's enough for today. I'll get around to that in a couple of days.

Ibsen Valentine

photo: Michele Perella

YES, ST. VALENTINE'S DAY is over for the year. This is next-day journalism. I live in the country; we read yesterday's paper at breakfast. So I got to thinking about Couples, and What We Did On Valentine's Day.

We went to see the opening of ACT's production of Hedda Gabler, is what we did.

Ibsen't play about a neurotic woman unhappily married to a bland academic is probably not the right vehicle for the occasion. It reminds me of the French government's campaign, a few decades back, to instil reverence for the glories of the Gallic culture in every French new household; among the national gifts to each newlywed couple was a copy of Madame Bovary. Not A Good Idea.

I'll tell you about the show in a few moments, but first let me think about couples a bit. Yesterday I bought a half gallon of milk (Straus, of course), at a little market in Santa Rosa, and the nice young man at the cash register (do they still call them that?) looked at me a little dubiously, I thought, and then said in a friendly manner Have a nice Valentine's Day. Thanks, I said; you too; I hope it works out well. He looked at me a little more closely and said Oh it will; you don't need a girl to have a nice Valentine's Day.

Well I wouldn't know, I said; I have a girl; I've had this girl fifty years.

There we are above, on a fine summer day at least a decade ago, at Grindstone Joe's, where we used to go every summer for a party at Bumps and Bea's boat, an exercise in alliteration that's always pleased me. Dear Bumps was a fine man, handsome and capable; a kitchen architect is how I think of him professionally -- he supervised the installation of the kitchen when we rebuilt the Café at Chez Panisse after the fire.

But like so many fine and fascinating men and women Bumps was much more than his professional self; he was active and generous, thoughtful and intelligent, kind and sympathetic. He loved to have a bunch of us from the restaurant up to his boat every August, where he always grilled a dozen chickens (or two) and made a fine big loaf of campstove bread.

Alas poor Bumps passed away last year — or was it two years ago? — and we haven't seen his handsome Bea since, though we hear from her from time to time. Our own fiftieth anniversary approaches, and I think of the couples who no longer are couples, whether for death or divorce; how lucky we are to have one another; how sad yet apparently certain it is that others no longer do; and what's to be done?

Hedda Gabler would have none of this: sentimentality was not for her. Drama, yes; sentimentality, no. The metaphorical Vine Leaves In The Hair — the sense of heroism and nobility that came with a Great Gesture — meant more to her than domestic comfort. Some of see domestic comfort as nourishing, supportive, pleasant; the daily context that enables individual productivity. (I'm sure that's what Tesman had in mind, in Hedda Gabler.

Others, though, seem to think of it as a trap, stifling the individual, draining his resources (or hers, to stay to the point), a distraction from the truly glorious possibilities of an individual human life.

So it was useful, finally, to see Hedda Gabler on St. Valentine's Day; and particularly in the company of another couple, friends who like us find nourishment in their domestic couplehood for the flourishing of their individual gifts and enthusiasms. (Writing, in this case; but also extraprofessional pursuits: travel, birding, gardening...)



Well. To the "review." We saw the production from the very top balcony, so our perspective on the production is not ideal; but physically it seemed quite effective -- a tight, obsessive drawing room to suggest the stuffy opulence of the provincial bourgeois life Hedda could not face. Fine set, slightly removing the play from our own time, as if placing it on a Petri dish. Effective costumes.

The cast: René Augesen was a brilliant Hedda, flinging herself about the stage, mercurial in her verbal outbursts, simultaneously fragile and abrupt, complex and mysterious, and handsome as the Devil — indeed, her portrayal of the role suggested that Hedda perhaps is the Devil. If Finnerty Steeves was not quite up to her brilliance as an actress, in the role of Thea Elvsted, well, perhaps that's appropriate: the role can run away with the show, and Lockwood kept it focussed and clear without pushing it too far forward.

Anthony Fusco was a fine, witless, sympathetic, enthusiastic, ultimately dull Jorgen Tesman — the role's not terribly rewarding, I'd think, but absolutely central; the play might almost have been called Jorgen Tesman; that would have made the play Ibsen's only comedy. (Oscar Wilde would perhaps have done this.)

I wondered about Jack Willis's version of Commissioner Brack, at first; drawling and stodgily slimy, not the male Malevolence that counterbalance's Hedda's Evil in many productions. (Oregon Shakespeare's fine production a few years ago comes to mind.) I think he does throw away the crushing final line of the play, robbing this sudden moment of some of its horror (but leaving quite enough of that horror to nail down Ibsen's masterpiece). But the Commissioner's minor-league nastiness does seem appropriate; it's one of the key components of the drab mundane society that sets Hedda off.

Sharon Lockwood was affecting and credible as Aunt Juliane, and Barbara Oliver was wonderful as the maid Berte; both did much to anchor the production in its time-and-place and, more important, its mood.

That leaves the difficult, perhaps impossible role: Ejlert Lovborg, the brilliant, poetic, weak genius whose failures and impossibilties inspire Hedda to her own insanity. Stephen Barker Turner took on this demanding assignment, and seemd — on opening night, remember — a little bit tentative. Attractive; capable; sympathetic; but a little bit tentative.

I think Ibsen puts a bit of himself in this role; a bit of the impossibility of being an Ibsen in the Norway of his day. The weakest moment in the play is always his precipitous relapse — Lovborg's, I mean, not Ibsen's — into Old Demon Rum, or whatever it is Hedda tempts him with in that crucial moment. I've never seen an actor really bring this off: but maybe that's meant to show the impossibility of ever really finding Vine Leaves In One's Hair.

All in all, a wonderful production and performance.

Henrik Ibsen: Hedda Gabler, directed by Richard E.T. White for the American Conservatory Theater; runs through March 11.

* * *

En route to the city we stopped, the four of us, for a Valentine's Day dinner at 868 Kitchen in Novato, where between five and six o'clock you can have a three-course fifteen-dollar dinner quite nicely planned and served — but not, it turned out, on February 14. My fault: I should have known.

We sat down to a special fixed-price four-course menu, $65, with three choices of first course, five of second, four of plat principal. I had

Lettuce salad with grapefruit, cucumber, pickled onion, watermelon radish, avocado, bacon, and Meyer dressing
Ahi tuna tartare with shallots, chives, truffled ponzu, seaweed salad, and nori crips
Filet mignon wrapped in pancetta with potatoes, broccolini, braised cioppolini, sauce Bearnaise

Others had lobster bisque or endive-beet salad, canapés of libster, trout, caviar, and smoked salmon, and lobster ravioli with black ear and hedgehog mushrooms; and they were as delighted as I.

My tuna tartare was particularly memorable. Everything on this menu looked, on the menu, too complicated and distracted, but proved on palate to be perfectly balanced yet pointed and stimulating. A perfect Valentine from a kitchen. We'll be back; but we look forward to the $15 specials!

Books

SOME OF YOU have said you prefer reading books to blogs. Here's your chance to prove it.

I've vanity-published two sets of travel dispatches, and I'm pleased with the results. The first one I did, about six weeks ago, is called The Company of Strangers and contains the dispatches blogged here last October and November, when we were traveling in the Netherlands, Piemonte, and sojourning in Budapest and Vienna.

128 pages, 6x9 perfect-bound paperback, four or five black-and-white photos, available for purchase here.






I'm more pleased with the more recent title, Roman Letters, which gathers the two sets of travel dispatches sent from Rome in January and November, 2004. It's a bigger book, at 250 pages, and it has a much more beautiful cover. More to the point, it seems to me the writing is better, probably because Rome can't help but make one think. There are more black-and-whites, too, 21 of them, but they seem to go a little fuzzy. If you want photos, you can't beat seeing them online, I guess the moral is.

But for reading words, some of us still prefer books. 258 pages, 6x9 perfect-bound, order it here.

Both these titles were self-published online using Lulu.com. It's a simple process: you lay out the book the way you like it, turn the result into a .PDF file, and upload it to Lulu. You do the cover the same way. There's no charge for this service; Lulu apparently makes their money by printing the results. When a reader orders a book it's printed and bound to order and shipped right out — in a week or ten days it arrives in the mail.

I recommend this process. I think it will revolutionize small-audience publishing — and finally, for better or worse, writers can publish without dealing with editors and designers. They have only themselves to blame for the results.

Of course there's no money in it...

Cabbage

RAINY. Reading about Ives; thinking about food.

A small Savoy cabbage
a couple of carrots
a little onion
olive oil
salt

Halve the cabbage, remove its core, chop the core fine along with some onion, not too much.

Brown this in a little olive oil with a little salt.

Chop the carrots and add them to the pan and sweat them a little, with a little salt, without really browning them.

Slice the halved cabbage thin and add it to the pan; sprinkle with a little salt; moisten with water; cover and steam until done.

Let's eat!

Pomegranate Roads

Those who were born during calm years do not remember their way. We are the children of fearsome years in Russia, we are unable to forget anything.
— Alexander Blok, quoted by G.M. Levin in Pomegranate Roads

HERE'S A SLEEPER of a book, part botany, part memoir, completely fascinating, written in a style so direct and effortless you want to keep turning the pages.

The author, Gregory Levin, was only five when the Germans besieged Leningrad; his father and three uncles were killed in the battle; he saw people die of starvation all around him. A born scientist, he cured his mother's scurvy, during that siege, with pine needles. Turned away from the university he should have attended because he was Jewish, he perservered, studying botany, doing graduate work in Turkmenistan, eventually concentrating on pomegranates.

That fruit resonates particularly with me for its medicinal properties, but you don't need health problems to appreciate them. They have fascinated mankind for thousands of years. Levin makes a good case for their having been Eve's fruit, Aphrodite's reward. Their teeming interior suggests fertility; their permanent stain suggests fidelity; their flavor and color suggest sensuality.

Levin wound up with a collection of over a thousand types of pomegranate, having searched them out in gorges, deserts, and mountain ridges throughout central Asia, traveling on broken-down trucks and jeeps, on horseback, by foot. He writes simply and almost laconically about these travels, with the dry pen of a scientist and a Chekhov, for he's Russian to the core, well-read, resigned to his time and place but determined to make the best of them.

The ambiguities and ironies of the Twentieth Century are only one constant subliminal thread through this book. Levin's life work was centered on a remote agricultural station centered on the Soviet-Iran border. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1989, and Turkmenistan became independent, priorities changed, and he emigrated to avoid seeing his work plowed under.

Turgenev and Jack London — and, perhaps, a certain detachment that comes with cultural isolation — seem to have taught him how to write. In a slim book that can be read in one or two sittings, he quotes literature, describes his childhood, portrays the vast central Asia, teaches botany, reveals Stalinist horrors — all effortlessly. You'll put the book down glad to have read it, to have met him, grateful to Barbara Baer for having found and published the book, eager to travel to central Asia, and thirsty for a glass of pomegranate juice. And, perhaps, a return to Mikhail Lermontov's great novel A Hero of Our Time.

Levin, Gregory M.: Pomegranate Roads. Forestville: Floreant Press: 2006

Old Wine

TWENTY YEARS OR SO ago I needed to have a sixty-gallon oak winebarrel fixed up a bit. In those days there was still a cooperage on one of those narrow streets parallel to Mission, just north of the freeway ramp from the Bay Bridge. The place looked like it had been there since the 19th century.

In a couple of weeks I returned to pick up the repaired barrel. The guy who'd repaired it asked me if I ever cooked with wine. Sure, I told him. White wine? Yes; we often cook with white wine, especially when we're making a risotto.

Because I have some white wine someone gave me and I think it's too old to drink and I can't use it. Would you like to have it?

So he gave me a case of Chablis, a 1970 vintage. It was indeed maderized a bit, not very nice in the glass. But I made a risotto with it, and the result was delicious. From that day until last week there's almost always been a bottle of this wine in the icebox. Fridge, I mean; sorry.

Last week, alas, Lindsey used the last of it. It's gone, all of it. I will miss it forever, and remember the fellow who gave it to us forever.

Rome on my mind

The Tiber at dusk


A FRIEND ASKS HOW to spend a day in Rome. One day in Rome; the only day they’ll have there during a cruise they’re taking.

The immediate thought, of course, is Why go to Rome for only one day? Oh, how terrible, only one day for all of Rome!

But then, a day in Rome is better than a day in many other places, or even several days in many other places. So without really thinking too much about it, or looking anything up, here’s what I suggest:

Start at the Campo dei Fiori early in the morning. Walk down to the Ponte Sisto, cross it, then walk down along the Tiber to the Isola Tiberna, and spend twenty minutes or so walking around it. Then back to the Trastevere side and down to the Ponte Palatino.

Visit the Tempio Vesta and the Tempio della Fortuna Virile, stop in at S. Maria in Cosmedin to admire the floor (but ignore the Bocca di Verità), stop in at S. Giorgio in Velabro (my very favorite), walk the Circo Massimo, then the via di S. Gregorio to the Colosseo.

Have lunch at the Ristorante Nerone de Santis, via Terme di Tito 96. (Ah: I did some research after all.) Then take a cab to the Pantheon and stop in for coffee at La Tazza d’Oro nearby. Before or after the coffee go to the Gelateria San Crispino, via Panetteria,42, near the Trevi Fountain.

Take a cab from there to the Piazza del Risorgimento and then rest by taking a tram ride from there, through the Villa Borghese, getting off at the Piazza Buenos Aires to walk around the fantastic architecture of the Coppedé district; then resume the streetcar back to the Colosseo. Stroll through the Forum at dusk.

Have dinner at Perilli, in the Testaccio district, incredible spaghetti carbonara; or at Da Lucia in Trastevere, wonderful pasta cacio e pepe; or at La Campana, via Campana 18, marvelous borlatti beans with onion and celery slivers. If there’s music on, go to Ombre Rosse on the Piazza Sant’Egidio in Trastevere to hear a little jazz.

Don’t forget to have several coffees and a couple of grappas, and buy a hat, if possible. If it rains, get a haircut.

* * *

I think of Rome because I’m editing the Rome Dispatches from January and November 2004 for publication. Little by little some of those travel writings will come out in book form. One title is already out: The Company of Strangers, letters from The Netherlands, Torino, Monferrato, Budapest, and Vienna, from last fall.

128 pages, softbound, four photos in black and white. You can order it from Lulu.com or, of course, you can read it, blog by blog, right here in the Blogspot archive.

Pour faire fuir le froid

HAVING FINALLY FINISHED Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, having celebrated by racing through Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Francaise, I’ve been s l o w l y , s l o w l y enjoying a little book given me by a friend last year: Solar Margins, by the poet Michael Kincaid.

It’s a perfect Janus book — a book for the close of an old year, the start of a new one. The margin of the solar cycle. It seems to be — I haven’t finished it yet; it’s a book to savor and meditate over, though it’s only sixty-nine pages long — it seems to be a collection of observations on life, Nature, science, Art; carefully polished until they are almost aphoristic.

Solar Margins is profound, precise, oracular. I can’t find anything in it to argue with. It seems to consider and examine and depict — one can’t say “analyze” or even “discuss” — matters of such urgency and profundity as to be inescapable, and to express the resulting thought with such clarity and poetics as to be irrefutable. He writes things I’ve long thought and felt, without realizing it until reading him; and writes them with a skill so superior one can’t feel envy.

I’ve read the first 172 of these statements. They’re divided into sections: History of History; History of Religion; Art and the Artist; Art, Utility, and Power; Sciece and Metaphysics; Listening to the Logos; History of Nihilism.

Nihilism? Yes: Solar Margins< takes as its subtitle Nietzschean Meditations, and is dedicated

Pour Némésis,
à l’honneur d’Albert Camus,
disciple du déesse

Samples:

1. A Prejudice of Time. —Clarity, simplicity, and unity are effects of retrospect; before the event, nothing is so designed. Such clarity as science and history attain is the passive submission to rule of that which has already happened.
19. Original Religion. — The hunter keeps faith with the invisible. All subsequent worship builds upon this theme.
40. The Pride of Self-Defeat. —Satan and Samson are Milton’s self-personae: the defeated hero, the hero in chains. Milton indeed "wrote in fetters," as Blake put it. His greatness is heard in their clanking.

And so on. Of course Kincaid attracts me; he sees through Milton; lauds Blake, appreciates Char and Rimbaud, decries Descartes, scorns Socrates. I can’t follow him into Nietzsche and Heidegger; haven’t dealt enough with them. Kincaid is a philosopher: or, rather, knows that philosophy is a branch of Poetry, and is a Poet.

(He appreciates another hero of mine, Wallace Stevens, who he describes as “a beast in a cage of patience.” May I allow H. James visiting hours?)

Number 19 above reminds me that, to me at least, by far the finest writing in Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma are the pages on hunting, and especially the disquisition on the heightened awareness that accompanies the hunt; I think I’ll have to follow Pollan to Ortega y Gasset next.

And applying Kincaid to Suite Francaise, Némirovsky is a poet, a tragic one:

84. Mortality’s Trophy. —The poem is your death, skinned alive.

Michael Pollan The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin Press, 2006. The facts, theory, and sensations behind fast food, supermarket food, organic-sustainable food, hunted and foraged food.

Irène Némirovsky: Suite Francaise: a novel. Translated by Sandra Smith. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. The horrors of the flight from Paris, 1940, and life in a Pétain French village under the Nazi occupation.

Michael Kincaid: Solar Margins. Minneapolis: Nemesis, 2003. The facts of life, mapped from within.

My advice is, read them; read them while there’s time.

Devotion

IT’S NOT QUITE THE WORD I want, of course. Devotion, etymologically, has to do with vows: it’s the attitude accompanying the carrying-out of one of those vows. I’m thinking about it because it’s Christmas, and I always feel somehow more spiritually aware at Christmas, though I’m not what you could call a Christian, because I don’t accept him as a saviour, because I don’t feel I need salvation, because I don’t agree with the concept of inherent sin.

I went to a religious college during my freshman year, and the first course — a required course — was in the psychology of religion. We had two textbooks: William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience and James Bissett Pratt’s The Psychology of Religion (first published in 1907). Looking back, I’m surprised; these are enlightened texts; I hope they’re still used today.

I’ll never forget Pratt’s definition of religion; it’s etched into my brain. Religion is the serious and social attitude toward that which is conceived as having control over one’s destiny.

Even at Christmastime I’m a confirmed anti-monotheist; I think much of what’s wrong with the world, speaking of social and political matters, is the fault of the near total dedication of the West (and the Western East — all of Asia Minor) to monotheistic concepts. If you want a good read next month, during the rainy days of January, get a copy of Gore Vidal’s novel Julian, a historical novel first published in 1964. It’s about the Roman emperor now unfortunately best known as “Julian the Apostate.”

His uncle, the emperor Constantine, famously established Christianity as the sole religion of the Roman empire; Julian, who had a fascinating upbringing that left him well schooled in Hellenic science and philosophy, tried during his brief reign to return religious freedom to the empire — allowing the various “pagan” cults, as well as the more enlightened Neoplatonist philosophy that Julian himself seems to have favored.

Vidal’s novel argues persuasively for Julian’s point of view, and I wish it were better known these days: there are too many parallels between the fall of the Roman empire and the events of our own time. (Julian himself died of treachery during an ill-advised military campaign in Mesopotamia: at least he led his troops personally, unlike our own Commander in Chief.)

Last year, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times on the occasion of the death of Arthur Miller, Bob Herbert quoted the playwright as saying he felt, among other things, that most men and women knew “little or nothing” about the forces manipulating their lives. Like Vidal, Miller was one of the great mid-century (that is, post-World War II) American writer-thinkers, a man and an artist who knew that one good way to make an intelligent citizenry think about the big socio-political issues of their day was to wrap ideas in engaging narrative.

But what an interesting pair of citations: Religion the serious, social attitude toward the the forces of destiny; People in our time and place unaware of the forces manipulating their lives. If you can’t accept the realities controlling your life and death, well, best to make up some acceptable mythos. That’s what happened in the turmoil of the rise of the Roman empire, a few years before Jesus was born; it attended the turmoil at the fall of that empire, only four hundred years later. (Our own system of government has already run half that term.)

Well, as I say, I can’t be a monotheist. Yet part of the complexity and contradictions of Christmas, even for me, is that matter of Devotion. When I drive past a crèche, no matter how crudely executed, something responds. I suppose even I am, in some way, devotional; perhaps even devout. I just have to figure out what it is I’m devoted to.

Chocolate gelato

AMBLED, YESTERDAY, with a friend, in search of chocolate gelato in our little town, and found it in four shops on the sides of our central plaza. I won’t identify the sources of the shops, because friend and I disagreed slightly, proving that chocolate gelato is after all a matter of taste (itself born of the uneasy mating of intuition and experience).

So here are the results, comparing six samples:

First attempt: sold as “gelato,” but badly mixed — grainy and almost waxy and very inconsistent from top to bottom of the scoop. Cheap chocolate flavor. (What does this mean? Well, thin, tired, lacking in complexity). So wrong that I actually took it back to warn the proprietor of the poor quality, precipitating an uncomfortable confrontation with a very defensive man who wanted to discuss it aloud at some distance. Was given as consolation

chocolate-port “gelato,” masking the poor quality of the chocolate with the harsh alcohol of equally cheap “port.” Not a pleasant experience.

Chocolate ice cream: not gelato but ice cream, dense and fairly rich with a decent texture.

“Mexican chocolate” ice cream, overwhelmingly cinnamon-flavored as those hard discs of Ibarra chocolate tend to be, but refreshing and energizing; again, a good texture.

Chocolate “gelato” made, I hear, in San Francisco, and trucked up here seventy miles away. A good chocolate flavor, rich and substantial, marred by an overly dense, rubbery texture, almost like taffy.

Chocolate “gelato” made here in Healdsburg by a local restaurant kitchen. Surprisingly lightweight chocolate flavor; inconsistent mix; very tired, stale-refrigerator taste.

None of this is important; it was only ice cream, after all. But it raises the intersection of a number of complex subjects, Chocolate and Gelato and Ice Cream and, of course, Taste. (A businessman would be quick to add others: Marketing and Economy and Consistency among them.)

We’ve tasted a lot of ice cream and gelato, Lindsey and me (she was not the friend joining me on yesterday’s search, though she went along with it good-humoredly). The best ice cream I’ve ever eaten has been that that Lindsey has made, in a hand-crank freezer; for years she made it that way (though with a machine-cranked freezer, otherwise identical) at Chez Panisse. I still think she wrote the standard recipe for ice cream, in her Chez Panisse Desserts (still in print, thank you).

The best gelato has been found three times: once in a memorable little stand in Capalbio at the southwestern corner of Tuscany; once at Gelato di San Crispino in Rome; always — always — at the remarkably consistent and always pleasant and attractive Pampanin in Verona. Well, of course those are all in Italy; gelato is an Italian experience.

I must add to this list, of course, Mary Canales’s remarkable work at Ici in Berkeley — but Berkeley is also seventy miles distant.

We’ve tasted a lot of chocolate, too. Some day perhaps I’ll write seriously about Chocolate, which is almost enough to make me believe in Divine Providence — surely chocolate is, with wine, one of the great gifts of life. (I don’t mean they should be taken together, of course, though some quite specific pairings can be very pleasant.)

We tend to the dark and bitter chocolates. I like white chocolate, but it’s another thing altogether. Chocolate should, in my opinion, be dark and bitter, should tend more to the oily-unctuous than the waxy-brittle, should be deep and complex. I don’t care about all those specific flavor-adjectives: jammy, fruity, blackberry, and so on. I know they’re there, but adjectives are even more a matter of taste than are flavors. But dark and bitter, unctuous, deep and complex, that’s what I want, something that hits me immediately when I smell or taste it, that builds in my mouth, that keeps on saying something afterward, something pleasant.

Benevolence

Jin: (Japanese kana) “benevolence.”

The two strokes on the left are the combining form of the character that means “man”; the two strokes on the right, taken alone, form the character for the numeral “two.”

Something is emanating from the midsection of the man, flowing out between the two parallel lines toward the right, or forward. Benevolence: from Latin, “good willing.”

Thanks to Judy Hoyem for bringing this to my attention. I’m working on “devotion” next; it’s something that comes to mind as I drive past all these crèches that have sprung up around town. I like the idea of devotion, but I’m not sure what it is.

Community: the intersection of private interests and public values

Our town, Healdsburg, is discussing the adoption of a new General Plan, to be adopted next year.

AN IMPORTANT PURPOSE of a General Plan is to balance the needs of the community and the rights of the individual. Individual rights, especially concerning the ownership of property and the pursuit of commerce, are well entrenched in the American climate. Community rights are less well understood.

But they are important, partly because they enable the social context within which those individual rights develop their meaning. One chooses one’s house and property partly because of the value of their site, which depends these days nearly as much on community as on climate or terrain. And commerce depends greatly on clientele, which in turn depends on community.

So the rights of the community, the public sector, should be maintained and defended. And this in turn requires constant balance between historical, even traditional rights, and the requirements of individuals (and individual businesses) as they continually change in response to changing social conditions and technologies.

One clear example of this is the problem of traffic patterns. These have changed, in a short century, from primarily pedestrian or animal-drawn conveyances to cars, trucks, and buses; and there’s no really good reason to assume that that change won’t itself change yet again as energy use, petroleum dependency, and climate change over the next forty years.

Healdsburg’s traffic accommodation is virtually unchanged since the days of the horse and buggy, though more attention is probably paid now to parking availability and to safety considerations, particularly at intersections. But where buggy use was relatively infrequent, automobile use is virtually universal. At the same time, for various reasons (not all of them good, in my opinion), walking has fallen out of favor; people would rather drive and search a parking place than walk another two blocks from one spot to the next.

Communities need to take these changes into account and plan either to accommodate their demands or encourage their adjustment. They should do this in the present, and their plans should envision continued consideration from time to time in the future, responding in real time to changed demands.

But traffic is only one example, a fairly visible one. There are other examples of the need for a community to assess and safeguard its public rights.

I am particularly concerned with three areas of concern: Pollution; Class balance; and Preservation.

POLLUTION of the air and water is generally understood and provided against in the proposed General Plan, but two other forms are less well considered: light pollution, and visual pollution. Both are analogous to the problem of noise, which is well established as a matter of municipal attention. Light pollution carries with the problem of energy waste, as well. Visual pollution is rarely considered, but it contributes greatly to stress, distraction, and a general sense of civic unease, as well as reflecting badly on the community’s unspoken concerns for order, cleanliness, and propriety.

I’ve heard such concerns dismissed as “chi-chi,” as a “Santa Barbara” sort of yearning for gentility. That would be true of an extremist consideration, but does not refute a simple civil attitude toward proper maintenance of privately owned property whose appearance impacts the public.

CLASS BALANCE is almost completely neglected except for provisions for “low-income housing.” Americans are uncomfortable with the concept of class, which fits uneasily within an essentially democratic society. But class is a real component of any American community, involving income level, skin color, ethnic descent, and cultural preferences among other things.

It seems obvious that, class differences being real and in place in our communities, it is better to celebrate and accommodate them than to ignore and restrict them. Communities should allow these differences to develop naturally, finding their own places within the public structure; but they should also be encouraged to mix in the public arena. This is done in many ways: encouraging ethnically-oriented small businesses, for example, in areas where they can be found serendipitously by new clienteles.

One way of achieving this kind of accommodation is the further encouragement of small business, even of marginal business, within the downtown. (By “marginal” I mean simply businesses whose nature is to appeal to a less profitable clientele.) To take one example: Spanish-speaking clientele should not be subordinate to English-speaking simply because of fewer spendable dollars. The answer may lie in low-income business assistance, along the lines of low-income housing.

PRESERVATION is a value clearly honored in existing civic plans chiefly with respect to architecture, though even there it is a value too readily sold out to commercial demands. Any community should maintain an up-to-date inventory of its architecture, partly with a view to maintaining historically valuable buildings, sites, and monuments.

Preservation extends however beyond physical considerations to social, commercial, and possibly other public concerns. One obvious example is the downtown Plaza, whose traditional value is well honored — though even there “improvements” over the last twenty years or so have tended to narrow its appeal to one class of user at the expense of more general use. (I refer especially to the recent intent to remove its traditional function as a meeting-place of employers and day labor.)

Another example, quite pressing at the moment, is the Farmers Market. A Public Market has a traditional and historical position, an important one, in virtually every community in the world — but has been edged out of American communities over the last century, probably in response to pressures, visible or hidden, from private commercial interests. Yet the tradition is so strong that the Farm Market movement has taken real hold across the nation.

Communities should work hard to restore the Public Market to their proper places at their centers. Markets are places for all kinds of social and commercial activity, encourage mixing of the classes and subcultures, and energize communitarian values and undertakings.

And markets should not be treated complacently, or thought of as mere entertainment or tourist appeal, or shifted from one place to another in response to emerging land-use desires by private interests. Any such attitude weakens the market by lessening confidence in the community’s support for its own necessary and valuable component.

A COMMUNITY’S REGARD for its own identity, past, and future can not be in question, if the value and sustainability of the community itself are not to be doubted.

Hunger

Recent travels having reminded me once again of the obscene good luck I have, compared with the tragic bad luck of billions of other people on this planet, here is an

OPEN LETTER TO JOHN WHITING:

I'm mulling over, but not very consciously, the problem of cuisine, agriculture, and poverty. It's a complex subject. You're right that most advances in cuisine -- I mean substantial and significant advances, not foolishness and frippery -- have been inspired by poverty. Contemporary "advances," in my opinion, aren't worth a moment's thought, let alone the energy of commentary or polemic.

Let's see if I can lay out some areas of concern:

1) too many people who have too little to eat. It's apparently a documented fact, though I don't know how you go about documenting this sort of fact, that the problem is not inability to produce. In most areas of the world the population is able to sustain itself locally. Still, this looks to me ultimately like a question of population outstripping production. The reasons:

1A) overpopulation. Don't need to discuss this further.
1B) concentration of population in areas that can't produce food (i.e. cities, poor climates, etc.) Local micro-agriculture is worth pursuing here, and a whole area of investigation is the lack of desire, or inability, of urban people to produce any of their own provender. (I do believe many huge problems, even global problems, should be addressed first at a local and even individual level).
1C) desire for food not natively available. Here we branch into two subconcerns, at least: Distribution, and Enticement. Both need addressing.

2) concentration of food production. It has been taken from individual farmers (and even individual consumers) and given to large corporations, which have their fingers also in Distribution and Enticement, and even Manufacturing and Banking. One result has been the regulation of demand and supply, which "should be" natural and organic processes growing out of intuitive transactions between individuals (or families, or tribes) and Nature, but are instead manipulated on a scale divorced from individual human attention. WTO-scaled economic forces and processes trump smaller ones.

3) imbalance of Desire and The Possible. There can be only so many truffles, so many tuna, so much Burgundy. Here there are two directions of solution:
3A) increse the Possible. Plant or discover, when possible, new truffle-fields; farm tuna; develop vineyards in hitherto marginal areas.
3B) decrease Desire. Encourage the use of truffles only on special occasions, the eating of tuna only as a main course (not in fast-food sandwiches), and so on.

4) perception of scales of importance. Charity, for example -- the extension of one's own excess toward those who are poor -- is both ultimately and immediately more honorable than Wealth. Allowance can and should be made for the ability of the ambitious and even the proud to stand "above" their neighbors, but limits should be set on just how *far* above; and the excess should go first to charity, then to the common good. Allied to this point is

5) perception of value. Self-sustainability is of greater value, both personally and societally, than is robbery, which is what accumulations of wealth at the expense of others amounts to.

Alas, John, the only way society has ever found of inculcating and even enforcing these perceptions has been through organized religion. We need a new religion of human decency and practical enabling. Care to contribute?

--

Experience and enchantment: another weekend in L.A.

Bandstand, Old plaza, Olvera Street



ON THE ROAD again last weekend, this time a quick trip south to see two plays at A Noise Within in Glendale, staying at a cheap motel on Colorado Avenue. Eat dear, sleep cheap, is our way.

Friday we ate dear in Ojai, taking a couple of friends to Auberge at Ojai, formerly L’Auberge — an interesting, local and seasonal menu and an enterprising winelist in a relaxed homey setting with rather elegant appointments, as I just told Zagat. I’m glad I went. A simple green salad, then beef cheeks, full of flavor, with a bottle of good Rhone red.

Next morning we had an errand: make a delivery to a guitar shop in Playa del Rey, a funny village on the coast (of course) under the flght lanes from LAX. This is one of those towns where you think you’ve driven back forty years — calm, modest, funky. The shop was interesting: a triangular building whose top (second) floor is one large open room with first-rate acoustics. Any guitar aficionado in Los Angeles should surely be familiar with Trilogy Guitars: a recital in that room would be a real pleasure.

While in town we had an okay lunch at Bistro de Soleil, 6805 Vista Del Mar Lane, on a corner of the main drag. Funky indeed, with outdoor seating on a scrappy patio, a full bar, a decent croque-monsieur and reasonable prices.

Friday night Lisa had told us about a must-see museum in Culver City, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and it was just a few miles down Culver Blvd. in the direction of Glendale, so off we went. Emma sighted it, just as I was giving up on it — right across the street from the theater where The Actors’ Gang plays, so it’ll be on our regular beat from now on.

There’s not a lot to say about the Museum. Lisa had described it to me accurately: dark, inscrutable, completely devoid of irony, attentive to museumship — a museum ofmuseology, you might say. The floor plan is disorienting, and the darkness encourages a total immersion of the visitor in the exhibits — you’re either totally involved, or totally repulsed: Emma and I found ourselves creeped out after a half-hour or so.

Others have described the Museum well, especially Megan Edwards; I won’t even begin to describe the contents here. Instead I’ll tell you what I thought while hearing Lisa tell me about it, because exactly the same thought accompanied me all the way through the Museum:

Benjamin’s idea of a social utopia hinged on his theory of “experience.” Like many thinkers of the time, he believed that experience was among the casualties of advanced industrial society, which had rendered everyday human interaction entirely functional, utilitarian and impersonal. He shared Max Weber’s belief that the modern world had undergone a process of “disenchantment.” The march of progress had cruelly denuded life of all mystery, solidarity and human warmth. Unlike Weber, however, Benjamin urgently advocated the re-enchantment of the world.

That’s from a review, by Richard Wolin, of a number of Walter Benjamin books. It ran in the Oct. 16 issue of The Nation (it takes a while to catch up on things). Turned out Benjamin was a favorite of Lisa’s, too. I haven’t really read Benjamin, myself, though I’ve dipped into The Arcades Project from time to time; it’s the kind of book that doesn’t suffer from that kind of reading.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology would clearly agree with Benjamin about re-enchantment; that’s what its exhibits documenting weird, marginal, haunted, obsessed investigation are all about. Many of these investigations are also about the tiny, what Duchamp called infra-mince, things — I can think of no better word at the moment — so small they almost leave thingness, substance, and become instead conceptual. But I give up: a blog is no place to pursue a subject like this further.

Saturday night we saw As You Like It, one of the two Shakespeare comedies (the other being, of course, Twelfth Night that seem perfectly inevitable and, therefor, perfectly indispensable. I won’t bother to “review” the production, since it’s closed now: but I will say that it seemed to me the most successful Shakespeare play we’ve seen this company do, and we’ve seen a number of good ones, since they give two each season. And it was Michael Michetti’s debut as a director here, so that augurs well for future productions. I hope.

Sunday night was even better, a tight, driving production of Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet, with an amazing, memorable, fierce portrayal of the lead character by Geoff Elliott, and fine, sympathetic realizations of the difficult female roles by Brigetta Kelly (Sara) and Derborah Strang (Nora). O’Neill always seems a little creaky to me, a little dated; on the other hand, it’s important to consider this assessment of the underbelly of the United States as it was emerging in the early 19th century, as seen by a moodily brilliant victim of the early 20th.

A Noise Within does six plays a year: two Shakespeares, one or two other classics, one or two newer vehicles. Earlier this fall we saw them do Racine’s Phaedre, beautifully; next spring we’ll finish the season with Romeo and Juliet and Joe Orton’s Loot. (We’re skipping Man of La Mancha.)


SUNDAY MORNING WE BREAKFASTED with friends at a place they knew about: Auntie Em’s Kitchen, out in Eagle Rock (4616 Eagle Rock Blvd., Los Angeles; (323) 255-0800). This turned out to be another retro exercise: the 1950s seem never to have left these pockets scattered across the second-biggest city in the country. Eagle Rock, like Playa del Rey, is gentrifying somewhat; property values are up; but the look and feel of these places is somehow still frozen in the 1950s — maybe because of the wide streets and low buildings, the consequent nostalgic imminence of the overhead electrical lines, the palms. (Or maybe it’s just me, nostalgic for my own first stay in L.A. back in the 1950s.)

Auntie Em makes a nice bacon-and-scrambled-egg on buttered toast, the bread from the La Brea bakery, and the house scones are nice; they only lack an espresso machine for the perfect breakfast spot. We’ll be back, nonetheless.

Then it was on to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) to see a truly absorbing show, Skin and Bones, filling the galleries with fashion and architecture, occasionally forcing the analogies a bit but still giving the visitor a lot to think about — in addition to room after room of truly fascinating and often truly beautiful fashion design.

One result was to make me think that it doesn’t really matter how extreme fashion is; a dress or a suit of clothes is no bigger than the person wearing it (well, not much bigger anyway); but extreme architecture poses a serious problem in its visible interaction with its environment — the more so when the environment is natural or, if urban and therefor synthetic, architecturally orderly.

Maybe that’s one reason I like those “retro neighborhoods”: they’re orderly, even in their disorder, because there’s very little dominating going on; the ensemble remains more significant than any one detail, though the grain of the detail is itself absorbing.

Los Angeles offers continual examples of this alternation between architectural imposition, like Frank Gehry’s Disney Center (which I loathe, and Lindsey does not), and areas of unobjectionable architectural character. But I close this long long blog with one particularly interesting neighborhood: Olivera Street and Union Station, which face one another across a busy street a little off-center from the downtown center embracing Disney Center, the new Cathedral, and MOCA.

The Spanish language was paramount, of course. Wealthy people rarely ride trains these days, at least here on the West Coast; AMTRAK is only a small cut above the Greyhound Bus. There’s a nice bar, Traxx, in Union Station, and its table seating was full, but the coffee outlet was busier, and there we went for a quick cappuccino, which we drank in one of the patio waiting rooms, nicely gardened, really looking quite a bit like the cloister gardens in the Missions running up and down the old Camino Real.

Union Station has been spiffed up considerably, and the waiting rooms look great. Built in 1939 and considered the last of the great public rail stations in this country it too is nostalgic, and I thought a little bit about my feelings two weeks ago about the great railroad stations in Europe (see the Nov. 20 blog below, “The Companionship of Strangers”). Union Station, of course, no longer serves that public purpose; it does not comfortably mix the poor and the wealthy, it does not teem with life and fascination; its geometrical beauty (greatly enhanced by its fabulous natural lighting) is more mausoleum than meeting-point.

This is certainly not the case across the street. The old Plaza, with its lacy bandstand (photo above) presently filled with a life-size Christmas crèche, is an outdoor living-room for families, tourists, and locals; and the market street, though crammed with kitsch often of dubious origin, is colorful and busy. Old men stand around playing guitars and singing; kids buy souvenirs; the same restaurants and candle shops line the street that I recall from fifty years ago.

People seemed relaxed and happy: when I hesitated over buying a wallet, then decided not to, the proprietor of the stall smiled broadly and wished us well. The life-style of Olvera Street is Latin, pleasant, oriented more to the pleasantness of the moment than to climbing to the top of anything. That’s retro too, I suppose, and it’s analogous to the neighborhoods I prefer, those where ordinary daily transactions are more important than some kind of architectural or commercial Importance.

There’s more to say about this, but you’ve read enough.

22: Mozart, Picasso, and Toni Morrison

Ruprechtskirche, Vienna

TRUMPETS AND DRUMS in the bright, certain, open key of C major; violins and organ scrubbing away at their passagework; cello, bass and bassoon anchoring it all with their darker bass — that was Mozart’s business Sunday morning, in the Gothic-striving-for-Baroque Stephansdom.

I’d found seats up front, behind the conductor, but Lindsey and Hans and Anneke hadn’t followed quickly enough and were elsewhere in the crowd. A pillar stood between me and the priest, so I saw nothing of the service — there was probably Meaning there: I’m a terribly lapsed Christian, to the point of not being one at all, not even a monotheist.

I am a Mozartian, though. It was his K. 258, the “Piccolomini Mass,” intercut with a C Major “Church Sonata” and, of course, the sections of the liturgy supplied by the priest in a pleasant, focussed chanted German, with responses from the parishioners. For God, perhaps four hundred of them, standing and sitting, kneeling, crossing themselves, singing in response. For me, six violins, a viola, a cello and a bass, the bassoon and trumpets, the organ, and twenty-five fine singers, young for the most part, four of them singing solo at Mozart’s suggestion.

Next to me was a couple from the mountains, out somewhere near the Swiss border, a retired electrician and his wife, in their late seventies I’d say, in town to visit grandchildren and hear some music — and attend Mass, for they were clearly devout. And then we shook hands all round, I with the young woman next me on the other side, and those seated in front of me, and the older couples sitting behind; and we settled back for another homily by the unseen speaker — this one repeated, once I’d finally got a hint of what his German was trying to tell me, in much more understandable Italian; and then finally confirmed, as if for me alone, in English. And then it was over.

We’d been to church once before in the last few days, to a Friday night service in the Romanesque St. Rupert’s Church, the oldest in Vienna; it stands on a bluff overlooking the Danube (canal) in its own Platz, like all churches here; with a leap of imagination you can mentally erase all the buildings around it, fill in the missing slope below, and imagine the little settlement Vienna was twelve hundred years ago.

We’d been attracted by a meeting of the local St. Egidio cell. Egidio has interested us since we lived for a month in an apartment near his church in Rome, in Trastevere, and learned of the society that developed there in the break-through days of 1968, when John Paul was thawing Catholicism as others were to thaw Communism twenty years later, and when local youth and students determined to do something for the poor and the homeless who were beginning to be all too apparent, in Rome and Europe as in our own country.

The Vienna group was small Friday night, and their service was simple. A very pretty young woman welcomed us, in fluent English, and we sat forward in the small stone church on a wooden bench; perhaps a dozen others were in attendance; we sang our way through a few hymns and listened to a short lesson in German (and so incomprehensible to me; the young woman (who’d been playing “organ” on a small synthesizer with decent sound) said the Lord’s Prayer in German, then English; and we shook hands all round and went out into the night.

The St. Egidio meeting had the feeling, to me — and of course I am very much an outsider — of a small private group associated with groups in other places; and for that reason made me think of what Christianity must have felt like two thousand years ago. Or, for that matter, Mithradism, or any of a number of other religious movements. “Religion is the serious and social attitude toward that which is considered as determining one’s fate,” ran the definition in the textbook required in my first college class, a history of religion — I was sent to a Christian college for my first year — and that’s always seemed to work for me; it’s just that what I consider to determine my “fate,” to use a word that already loads the discussion, is a matter of genes and DNA, of the laws of physics, and of the grace of Life.


I THINK THAT MAY BE something of Mozart’s attitude, too, by the time he reached his late years. Sunday night we heard The Marriage of Figaro, sung in German at the Volksoper — a fine production with excellent singers, orchestra and conductor, none of whose names are at hand. This opera sounds odd to me in German, and there were no supertitles to remind us of the intricacies of this wonderfully humanist opera; but of course we’ve seen it so many times, the jokes are so familiar, and above all Mozart’s music is so clear in its depictions of not only emotiion but also repartée, that the chief disadvantage lay in what the sound of German does to the melodic line — especially the fast, busy, contrapuntal lines. Quick patter-songs in German have a humorous effect not intended, I think, by Mozart and da Ponte in the original Italian.

It’s Mozart Year here in Vienna. Scattered around town are red pylons with messages in German and English stating the relevance of their particular position to Mozart’s life in Vienna: his first public concert here, his residence there, and so on. There must be forty of these signposts, and they each have a telephone number on them. I called one of these numbers, and got a three-minute mini-lecture, in English, with eine kleine backgroundmusik; a pleasant way of getting a guided tour of Mozart’s Vienna.

But it is not only Mozart going on. At the Albertina yesterday we saw an amazing exhibition of late Picasso paintings and prints, room after room of them, beautifully installed in these intelligent, open, serene galleries. I remember the fashion for disparaging these paintings when they were new, in the 1960s; and I agree with the introductory panels in this installation (helpfully in both English and German) that Picasso was, once again, prescient, foreseeing the mood of the New Expressionism that would come in twenty years.

He was also really old, approaching ninety; and he was in contradictory moods — resentful of his aging body, aware of limited time, intent on producing work, still delighting in invention and discovery, and — but now I’m speculating — increasingly detached from earthly activity.

What does this mean? Basically, I think, the increasing awareness that it’s not one’s personal life that’s important, but the ongoing Life one’s own has been a part of. Picasso and Mozart have much in common, most of all their awareness and enjoyment and passionate, entertaining, pointed depiction of The Human Condition. The Marriage of Figaro has much in common with Picasso’s late depictions of models and artists, models and matadors, models and musketeers. Sex is life and life is sex, according to the laws of Nature: to the old and aging — even at thirty-five, Mozart’s age at death, Mozart attained these qualities! — both have become more comedy than serious business.

This is behind the absurdity of Count Almaviva’s lust for Susanna — and, because of its absurdity, its injustice: so much of the revolutionary quality of this opera, and of Beaumarchais’s pre-French-revolutionary plays, depends on a reading of the changed meaning of sexual activity in a society that has evolved past the primitive.

But the detached view of the busywork of life, of what James called somewhere the species’s great will to continue (he wouldn’t have used so blunt a word as “sex”), also facilitates the fond approval of Cherubino’s and Barbarina’s amorous play, which reminded me of the pretty young couple biting one another’s lips in the queue the other day at the supermaket. And, of course, the anticipatory flirting-and-bickering of Susanna and Figaro. And, for that matter, of the fondness, the affection, still clearly present between Marcellina and Basilio.

Picasso and Mozart are both clearly conflicted about being on the threshhold of retiring altogether from this busywork. Each was clearly aware of his mastery of his art, and of the essentially endless amount of work that remains always to be done, of further mastery to achieve. I think Shakespeare, Mozart, and Picasso pretty well sum up their metiers; in their respective forms of expression each is the outstanding modern reporter on the human condition.


AND WHAT ABOUT Toni Morrison? She’s here in Vienna participating in Peter Sellars’s New Crowned Hope festival, an exploration of this new century’s possibility of continuing to explore the themes preoccupying Mozart in his final days: the forgiveness and reconciliation of La Clemenza di Tito, the transformative magic of Die Zäuberflöte, and the valediction of the unfinished Requiem.

In conversation with Sellars last night Morrison addressed these themes, pointing out first that she deliberately courts inconclusiveness in her work, as the stories that fascinated her when she was a child avoided neat, told-you-so conclusions. More profound, to me, was her description of a four-stage process she hoped to work through in her writing — and which she apparently sees (and I would say with accurate insight) as describing the process of art: to move from Data, the raw stuff assaulting our perceptions every day; to Information, which is some kind of organization of such data; to Knowledge, which is the understanding (and, presumably, usefulness) of such information; to — “hopefully,” I’m afraid she said — Wisdom.

This is clearly the process of the three works Sellars chose as his jumping-off point; and of the three great Mozart-da Ponte opera (and, I’d argue, of all of Mozart’s work). It’s also, I think, the process Picasso was engaged with at the end of his long life.

And it may be the process the Western World is engaged with. Sellars’s festival seeks to bring the data of art from neglected worlds to Vienna, convinced that there is by now sufficient organization, in this postmodern world, to make a resulting contribution to the “developed” world’s knowledge. It remains for our artists, I think, to transform the result, through their magic, into Wisdom — and clearly those he has assembled here are capable of this, if we only pay attention.

21: The companionship of strangers

BELLS ANNOUNCE THE TIME throughout the day here; I’m not sure about the night. I sleep pretty soundly, after a day packed with sensory input and several kilometers’ walking. This morning I heard them strike seven, but not seven-fifteen; I got up when they struck the half-hour. I don’t know where these particular bells are: perhaps on the Hoch Markt.

There a dozen historical figures parade across an elaborate mechanical clock, a new figure at the beginning of each hour. Every minute the figure takes a very slight lurch forward; in an hour he’s nearly off-stage again, and his successor is beginning another hour’s passage. Marcus Aurelius, I think — or possibly some other Roman emperor — is the first of these; the last is Joseph Haydn. Most of the others are important rulers, among them Maria Theresia; but I’m happy to see that Walther von der Vogelweide is there too, Haydn’s not the only musician in town.

Until fairly recently the average Viennese did not carry a watch, let alone a cell phone. The watch was born of the Industrial Revolution but wasn’t cheap enough for the average guy until fairly late in the Nineteenth Century. Until then these bells had a very real utility, marking each quarter-hour. Keeping track of time was a public utility, whether managed by the city or the Church.

This remains true, in a sense; both my laptop and my telephone set themselves by consulting with a public agency every now and then, figuring out where they are and adjusting their time-displays accordingly. I haven’t actually set a watch for a long time, except when flying across time zones, when I want to anticipate the arrival zone before leaving the present one.

But it’s easy to overlook our contemporary dependence on Public Time, so intimately connected are we with the time we carry in our pocket or strapped around our wrist. Our individual, private business, our comings and goings, seem entirely personal, reminding us of appointments we’ve made for our own personal reasons, whether business or pleasure. The passage of time is personal, almost never shared.

Yesterday, though, I participated in a rare example of public sharing of the passage of time. A group of us were gathered in the Hoher Markt watching that clock, wondering what would happen at the top of the hour. We waited several minutes, for either the clock is two minutes late or the rest of us were two minutes early. We stood there, some of us open-mouthed, gaping like village idiots, which I increasingly think tourists are — hicks from elsewhere marveling at unfamiliarity.

At the top of the hour, of course, not all that much happened. Maria Theresia took another little jump forward, almost offstage left; Joseph Haydn took exactly the same jump forward, just onstage right. The bell rang the requisite number of times. We separated and went our separate ways, the public moment dissolving back into a scattered collection of personal ones.

These figures ticking across the clock are fascinating but a little sad. They’re in constant motion but never get anywhere; they’re condemned by their machinery to repeat the process endlessly. Their only hope for rest is in the ultimate breakdown of the entire machine, a calamity we all hope does not occur in our lifetime.

The other day at the new museum of contemporary art, the building in yesterday’s photo, the one with the upside-down cottage crashing into its roof, we looked at a fine show of “New Realists,” those European sculptors and painters who manipulated reality in arresting modernist work in the 1960s and ’70s.There were two wonderful Jean Tinguely pieces, one of them quite enormous, with belts and flywheels and pulleys and bell cranks and eccentrics and springs attached to accordions and pianos and glockenspiels and drums and pots and pans, all making a subdued racket whose chaotic futility was charming to see and hear.

It reminded me, as did the Hoher Markt clock for some reason, of Epicurus’s explanation of the nature of matter: tiny tiny particles acting on impulses known only to them, swerving toward or away from one another through attractions (or revulsions, perhaps) of some kind of charm. Clinamen, was the Greek word for it. Inclination.


CLOCKWORK IS A MECHANICAL means of regulating these inclinations; public time provides a co-ordination of private business. We visited the City Historical Museum yesterday and took in, along with much else, an extensive exhibit on Railway. Here’s something barely two hundred years old; my grandfather’s grandfather must have ridden on the first railway to appear in his neck of the woods. But we have yet to come to public terms with it, and its relevance to contemporary society, not to mention life only a decade or two into the future, is questionable.

Some of the reasons for this of course have to do with energy sources, land values, competing transport methods, commercial demands and the like. But there’s another problem, and that is the changing address of the Public toward Regulation. Railways are intrinsically complex, far-flung, and costly. They demand huge outlays of capital, in terms of money, labor, land, and forethought; but they repay these outlays only over long periods of time.

They seem to me to be uniquely Public, like all other things pertaining to Transportation — which is, after all, the motion of personally or privately held material (or persons!) through public space. Society, which is chiefly urban, has evolved streets, ditches, high roads, canals, and byways to facilitate transportation; and public space, as noted here yesterday, to punctuate this constant shuffling about with points of rest or assembly. More recently, to accommodate technological advances, society has provided trams and tramlines, buses and bus shelters, railways and railway stations, air control and airports.

Much of this is taken for granted, especially here in Europe, where public transportation is thought of almost as one of the Rights of Man. The great railway stations are our version of the medieval cathedral, huge public buildings, reasonably central to the cities, but temples to Commerce rather than God, with cafès, newsstands, bars, tobacco shops, and banks; and the great European stations were designed to be imposing, to impress their users with massive scale and, often, extravagant decoration. (To an extent the great shopping streets of European cities have also assumed this function.) One subtext was the desire of the State to remind its citizenry of both its power and its service.

Rail travel is still quite popular in Europe, but it’s in trouble. Longer hauls are facing stiff competition from airlines. Twenty years or so ago the railways fought back by increasing their speed; high-speed lines were built across France, then into Spain and Italy. Even so, you can’t get from one European capital to the next by rail as fast as you can by air. And the rise of cut-rate airlines has changed things: we flew from Amsterdam to Bergamo for €29; from Venice to Budapest for less. There’s no way rail can compete with that, even forgetting about the time advantage.

But one factor is left out of this competition: the intrinsic difference between rail travel, which one thinks of as publicly facilitated, and air travel, which has become purely a business concern — and increasingly a losing business, like rail. I somehow find it easier to forget about the governmental aspect of air travel: traffic control, subsidized airports, subsidized airlines, subsidized airplane factories — it’s all behind the scenes, behind the corporate logos and the frequent-flyer cards and the flight attendants. The role of government in rail travel seems more apparent, partly because with very few exceptions it’s a national monopoly — in the United States as well as in European countries.

And along with that difference there’s another: travel by air seems like a few hours of forced exposure to the company of strangers, an interruption of a journey which is otherwise essentially personal. Rail travel seems like an embrace of the company of strangers, a willing entry into a traveling public space. At least to me. I think this difference has two or three chief reasons: the relative speed, more human in the case of rail (at least until the TGV started streaking across France); the greater ease of moving about the carriages (and the close but comfortable companionship with strangers in the six-person second-class compartments); and the view of human activity out the windows.

THIS COMPANIONSHIP WITH STRANGERS, enhanced by the presence of public spaces and public transportation, reinforces the idea that we share our lives with many other people; that there may even be some degree of shared responsibility for life and prosperity. I’m thinking along these lines partly because I’m reading — in an extraordinarily desultory way — Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract, chiefly because a copy happens to be at hand here in the apartment we’ve rented. But these considerations are forced on you when you spend hours looking at human history, shared human history, from the poignant bones found in a Neolithic grave to the technologically dreamy projects for a new Central Railway Station to be begun, some hope, within the next ten years.

It seems to me that the drift of human occupation of this planet — I can hardly call it “evolution” — will necessitate, in the long run, a greater sense of community, rather than greater trends to individual privacy, tribal independence, or national separateness. Much of the horror of the century recently finished resulted from a pride, even arrogance, of Nation. Rousseau suggests that social structure evolved from the most instinctual form of human organization, the paternally ruled family. If true, it’s time to abandon that model: our numbers and our technologies require administration, not rule.

20: Public Space

The new MOMUK in the Museum Quarter

YOU TAKE THE BUS 48A here at the Dr. Karl Renner Ring, said the helpful lady at the Information office, and you ride it to the end of the line, and then you walk. It’s rather far.

We use information offices a lot. My favorites are the VVV offices in The Netherlands; there’s one in just about every town in the country, and they’re well supplied with information — though only for their own town.

In France it’s the Syndicat d’Initiative, or was; we haven’t toured in France for years. The name means simply Chamber of Commerce, but I like its assumption that a little initiative will be on display; and frequently it is.

In Italy there are Turismo offices in most of the cities we’ve been to. There was a fine office in Budapest, where a young man spoke fine English but no Hungarian at all, because he was from Spain. Thus does Brussels, one of the capitals of the European Community, normalize staffing in this recently integrated subcontinent.

In spite of its size and its dependence on tourism, Vienna seems to have only the one office, on the Albertinaplatz across the street from the Staatsoper. Nor does there, at least on grey days in November, seem to be much demand for it: we always step right up to a window for assistance from one of the bright and pretty young women, who always speak perfectly fluent English.

(The men are off doing more important things, I suppose; or behind the scenes, administering. Vienna, which has been a capital city for a thousand years, relies heavily on administration for the employment of her citizens.)

Getting about in Vienna has been simple, particularly since it hasn’t been raining. We walk most places, since our apartment is within the inner city, and many of the streets are pedestrianized. But we’re only five minutes or so from the Ring, with its trolleys tirelessly circling the inner city every five minutes or so, one clockwise and one counter-clockwise. We’re even closer to a Metro station, and they also run frequently.

Then there are a couple of mini-bus lines within the inner city; one stops a block from our front door. Their routes seem rather circuitous, and well they might be, for they must snake their way through a network of pedestrian streets, one-way streets, narrow alleys, and Platzen — for like all European cities Vienna has a liberal sprinkling of open spaces devoted to conversation, temporary markets, photo-taking, and a little bit of parking. Platzen, places, pleins, piazzas, plazas; the effect in all these cities is to open things up a bit, often in an unanticipated place, letting in sun (or rain), lending a bit of distance and perspective to one’s view of facades and towers, and reminding one that there are people in cities, that cities are, as someone memorably said, for people.

Of course these openings date from pedestrian days; these cities evolved without motor vehicles. They also represent cultures whose take on real-estate value, and the very purpose of social space, is not like the take prevailing, it seems to me, in the United States. Of course we have our public spaces too; Healdsburg with its formerly central Plaza and Manhattan with its downtown Squares testify to that at two different extremes; but our public spaces are both fewer and more closely regulated. And as our cities decay, too often these spaces are simply parking lots, for large expanses of the American city are not for People at all, but for Cars.

WELL: WE TOOK THE BUS out to the end of the line, yesterday evening, leaving home about six-thirty, lazing our way to Dr. Karl Renner Ring via foot and tram, and then riding all the way out to Baumgarten. As the bus drove out, the city grew more drab. There was more motor traffice, even though the Neustiftgasse is not a very wide street. (Gasse means, roughly, small street, or even lane or alley; the more usual German word Strasse would indicate what we think of as a normal two-way steet.)

Cars and bicycles sped past our bus when it was stopped, for whatever reason, often only inches from our window. More often it was we who sped past them, for buses and taxis have lane privileges. The storefronts and eateries offered progressively less upscale material, less for tourists, more for locals. The paving was smooth asphalt, not cobblestone. We were almost imperceptible climbing, west, away from the Danube, across what was for centuries fertile river-plain at the base of the hills bordering the citie with their famous Vienna Woods.

From time to time the vista opened further as we crossed wide railroad yards, I suppose, or other trafficways, on viaducts. At one point we were surpised by a soccer field, tucked away and a little lower and secure behind a high wall, but given away by its clusters of lights, and finally revealed, when we came to the end of it and took a slight curve: a couple of teams, amateurs playing without an audience, were in what seemed to me to be rather listless activity.

Suddenly there was an enormous building promising tennis, handball, saunas, exercise; and next to it the Merkur complex of shopping mall and discount stores: we were well into the suburbs. And then it grew darker, the street was bordered on one side by trees, on the other by a low dull-grey cement wall that seemed endless, pierced only at considerable intervals by driveways.

The bus had started out full, but there were now only a few people left. Some of us were clearly going to a concert, I thought; others were oddly talking quite loud, or making nuisances of themselves in some other way. They were behind me and I didn’t turn to see what was going on: drunks, I imagined.

The bus stopped at one of those driveways, next to a sign identifying the place as a psychiatric hospital, and the obstreperous riders crowded good-naturedly out onto the sidewalk. Patients out on leave, I thought, or perhaps visiting even less fortunate friends who are inside somewhere.

Further on most of the rest of the passengers got out at another hospital, but we did not: this was not the end of the line; there was one stop more. There of course we did get out, with one other person who quickly disappeared. There wasn’t much to see in the dark — one lone building with lights on a few meters away, a roadhouse of sorts. I asked the bus driver where the Jugendstil Theater was, but could not understand his reply, which came in an impatient Austrian dialect.

At the roadhouse no one spoke English. The cook-bartender, harried and suspicious, seemed to say that it was back in the direction we’d come from, but I couldn’t be sure. Still, there was nowhere else to go, so we started walking up the street.

BEFORE LONG WE CAME to a gate with a guard-porter in his little office. He signed and turned down his television set when I asked if he spoke English. Nein, he said, and began to turn the thing back up again. Kennen Sie wo is der Jugendstil Theater, I asked in my limping German, and he responded almost comprehensibly: up there (gesturing), five hundred meters, on the left, go in at the big doors.

I counted the paces, for my pace is just about a meter, and sure enough at five hundred there we were back at the next-to-last bus stop where a number of people had got off the bus. People were milling around uncertainly, then for no apparent reason heading up the driveway into the dark. I was reminded of the big flocks of chimney-swifts we watched a month or so ago, milling and wheeling in the dusk, then for no apparent reason all flying, first a few at a time and then en masse, into the chimney of a building at the Seventh-Day Aventist Acadmy outside Healdsburg.

We were not flying; we were walking purposefully, curving left to walk around the large building this gateway served — sure enough, a hospital — and then we came upon a bed of white plastic tubes with small yellowish lights in them at the bottom, set a foot apart or so in a grid of what must have been hundreds of torches — a permanent installation or a temporary one? No idea.

And then we were at the Jugenstil Theater in what I learn this morning is the Otto Wagner Spital: presumably it was Wagner who designed it, in his famous end-of-19th-century pre-Cubist style. It was the setting for a concert by the Kronos Quartet, who played Terry Riley’s The Cusp of Magic, an intricate 45-minute suite of six movements involving prominent parts for the Chinese pipa (effectively played by Wu Man, who also sang enchantingly) and, in one movement, a collection of children’s toys, whose sounds merge with pre-recorded toy sounds, and voices.

At one particularly magic moment, in the third movement (“The Nursery”), Riley’s music slowly disappears altogether; music and the art of music merge imperceptibly into the music of unseen human voices and activity. The fifth movement, “Emily and Alice,” returns to this quality in a particularly moving and absorbing texture, this time returned to the familiar textures of the string quartet — sonic textures I always think of as quintessentially Viennese, since it was here that Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert defined the norms.

After intermission we heard Henryk Górecki’s third quartet, written ten years ago but only released by the composer last year — one doesn’t know why, for certain; but it’s clearly a valedictory message, nearly an hour of extremely slow music (though the central of the five movements moves a little more quickly), beginning with the insistent rhythm of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” slow movement and growing steadily more somber from there.

I don’t know when I’ve heard Kronos play so beautifully, with such refined tone, with such impeccable intonation, with such precise but purely felt ensemble. The music was enhanced by very subtle plays of colored light, so subtle one might easily have ignored it altogether. The audience, quite full, was riveted; hardly a cough or a rustle to be heard in fifty-five minutes of concentration.

To my taste the effect was damaged by an encore based on an Icelandic rock group — I surmise from the strident distortion and reverb applied electronically to the quartet — but no one else seemed to mind, and the first violinist, David Harrington, even explained that Ligeti himself was inspired on hearing it after his own music.

And then the trip back. I’ve been struck by the rudeness of the young Viennese: they crowd in front of you in queues; they do not yield seats to old ladies; they slump in streetcar seats, monopolizing foot-room and even sitting in two places when people are standing. The concept of public space seems not to have handed down to the generation under, say, thirty.

This was particularly striking given that many of these people had just heard the same inspired, transcendent concert, a program clearly addressing the poignancy of human interrelationships — “intercourse,” it used to be called, until that word became pre-empted by too specific a meaning — in a world of too many people grown increasingly too self-absorbed. It’s one of the sub-themes of this Festival of “New Crowned Hope,” and Vienna, with its eternal juggling of traditions and rebellions, invention and politesse, City and Empire is a uniquely appropriate place to consider it.