Shakespeare at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Meaning is never monogamous.
                              — Susan Sontag

Eastside Road, July 28, 2011—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kenjilo Nanao

Eastside Road, July 29, 2011—

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

                      8 NOV

Rug.
    Formative look.

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

 G A: “hybrid.”

            Merwah — shafen — palm; script

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



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

          7 Nov

•Finishing the production

•Booking production : Franklin. V Jan ; photos.

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


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

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

The Function of Poetry

The Function of Poetry
For Kathryn

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

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

—July 27 2012

New American Theater at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Ashland, Oregon, July 24, 2011—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Molière at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Ashland, Oregon, July 20, 2011—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ghost Light at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

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

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

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

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

“A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.” (Imgram Bywater: 35).

“Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action of high importance, complete and of some amplitude; in language enhanced by distinct and varying beauties; acted not narrated; by means of pity and fear effectuating its purgation of these emotions.” (L. J. Potts: 24).*

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Day with Picasso

Eastside Road, July 7, 2011—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

152

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Book of Disquiet, p. 253

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

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

The Book of Disquiet, p. 138

Venice Journal, 16: Biennale

Venice, June 18, 2011—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

photos from Venice (and a number of other places)

Venice Journal, 15: Further conversation

Venice, June 14, 2011—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to the iPhone Biennale app,

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

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

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

———

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

photos from Venice (and a number of other places)

Venice Journal, 14: Conversations

Venice, June 9, 2011—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Venice Journal, 13: Typical Day

Venice, June 9, 2011—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

photos from Venice online here

Venice Journal, 12bis: More Loss

Venice, June 8, 2011—

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Venice Journal, 12: Lost, Found, Stolen

Venice, June 8, 2011—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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