Events of the day

 Solnit on Snowden:

Privacy is a kind of power as well as a right, one that public librarians fought to protect against the Bush administration and the PATRIOT Act and that online companies violate in every way that’s profitable and expedient. Our lack of privacy, their monstrous privacy—even their invasion of our privacy must, by law, remain classified—is what you made visible. The agony of a monster with nowhere to stand—you are accused of spying on the spies, of invading the privacy of their invasion of privacy—is a truly curious thing.

Read more: A Letter to Edward Snowden | The Nation http://www.thenation.com/article/175339/letter-edward-snowden#ixzz2ZkRdnUFe 

And then Fahd Iraqi, writing about Egypt, at http://www.telquel-online.com/content/retour-vers-le-futur :

A notre petite échelle, nous vivons aussi ce choc des temps. Il y a un décalage entre le temps des citoyens, le temps de l’entreprise, le temps des politiques et le temps de la monarchie. Ils ne sont pas synchro et le risque de collision est omniprésent.

[On our local scale we too live in this shock of time-scales. There's a lag between the time-scales of citizenz, of business, of politics, and of monarchy. They aren't in sync, and the risk of collision is everywhere. ]

Al Gore, in his book The Future, points out that in the 1970s only 3% of retiring congressmen became lobbyists. Now, over 50% of retiring senators, and 40% of retiring congressmen, become lobbyists. Our representative democracy is evolving into an oligarchy of old and defensive insiders, themselves pawns of a Monarchy (money, status, entitlement) which has escaped its own royal house (CEOs, revolving corporate directors) and become enshrined in inertia. It will continue thus until like all objects spinning out of control it flies apart. That will be an interesting day. 

Marginalia and loose ends

Villard St. Pancrace, France, July 4—

SEVEN AT NIGHT: a church bell is ringing, for vespers, I suppose. I am at loose ends, having just spent two easy days walking, first from Montgénèvre to Briançon, then to this hameau. The mountains have pretty well cleared my mind, apparently. It's a principal reason I do this, of course. 

My companion is reading about Oppenheimer on his Kindle, and reports he was able — Opp I mean — to quote verbatim the passage about Mlle. Vinteuil challenging her lover to spit on her father's portrait. Of course I have Proust here with me, along with Shakespeare and Moliere and Athena knows who else, but my e-reader search function is unsatisfactory, and I cannot find the passage.

I catch up on Curtis Faville's musings over at The Compass Rose: a fascinating pair of meditations on John Ashbury's marginal notes on Pasternak. It reminds me thAt a couple of years ago I thought I'd start a running commonplace book here: just one of many false starts. Really I feel more like Pessoa every day. 

I particularly liked a formula of Faville's: "the impenetrable idiomatic membrane which insulates separate languages from each other." That has been present these last few days, in spades. Translating and marginal annotation have much in common, I think. They both remind us that meaning, never monogamous as Sontag pointed out, is always elusive, provisional, fugitive, mythic.

Summer vacation

The Eastside View will probably be silent for a few weeks. I'm in the French Alps with a friend, walking to Nice, and have just posted the first three days of the adventure to my blog Alpwalk:

http://sherewalking.blogspot.com

I'll try to maintain a running account there. Things will come to mind from time to time, of course: language, terrain, history, cultural differences and all that. But for a while no reading but schedules and maps, no music but marmots and songbirds, no art but what Nature provides, and why won't they suffice?

Brown, Bischoff, Fabritius, Vermeer

Eastside Road, May 30, 2013—

I MADE A COMMENT over on Facebook the other day that I've been thinking about on and off since:

I think culture is primarily local — think Vienna in Mozart's day, or London in Johnson's (not to say Shakespeare's!), and Paris at various times. Some of the local cultures develop intense moments; others no doubt simply simmer along comfortably and sustainably. But entertainment as we know it today is global corporatism, like agriculture, and war, and any number of other disasters. Oddly, the Internet supports this global tendency to a degree, but it also facilitates the thing I'm calling local; there are "localities" uniting me [with my readers and] commentators though we live thousands of miles apart.

Yesterday we drove down to San Francisco to see two favorite paintings, here from the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Two of the finest paintings I know, painted within twenty years and ten or twelve years of one another, by painters who must have known one another. To Vienna and London and Paris, add Delft, where Carel Fabritius (1622-1654) and Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) both lived toward the middle of the seventeenth century.

The Goldfinch (1654) seems to be one of the last of Fabritius's paintings, of which few have come down to us. Fabritius was killed, only 32 years old, in the great gunpowder explosion of October 12, 1654, which destroyed a quarter of the city of Delft, including his studio and paintings. Thirty-two years old! He was, you might say, the Schubert of painting. He had studied at Rembrandt's studio in Amsterdam before his unlucky decision to move to Delft. He was certainly taking painting into a new direction. I don't know why he painted this pet goldfinch; even whether it is in fact a finished painting as we see it, or a fragment of a larger work (it's about the size of a sheet of typing paper). I only know it is enigmatic, neutral in mood (to me), beautifully composed, and — seen in the flesh, not through reproduction — amazing for its application of paint to capture light, solidity, texture. The white highlights on the brass rails; the striking yellow-god on the wing, the delicate tracery of the chain… and the marvelous texture of the plaster wall, a triumph of abstraction…

Hardly anything need be said about The Girl with the Pearl Earring (ca. 1665). Hardly anything can be said with any certainty. It is most likely not a portrait, but what was called in its day, by the Dutch, a tronie, an unidentified model, usually costumed, painted half-length or, more often, as here, closer to, concentrating on the face and its expression.

It is possible that its painter, Johannes Vermeer, studied under Fabritius. He was known and respected by the members of the Delft guild of painters, serving as head of the guild on four occasions. He worked slow, experimenting with light in a number of interiors whose walls are often hung with paintings or maps, in which milkmaids or astronomers or ladies are engaged in enigmatic occupation or preoccupied with unknowable thoughts.

It's stupid to single out one Vermeer, so I'll single out two: The Milkmaid and The Girl with the Pearl Earring. The latter has become even more universally known, I suppose, since the publication of Tracy Chevalier's novel of the same title, and the 2003 film made from it. As I stood gazing at the painting yesterday two women behind me were discussing it, one of them helpfully explaining many details of its production, meaning, and setting; she apparently took novel and film for absolute fact. They are pure fiction: but the film has marvelous views of Delft, and some haunting imagery of the studio and, especially, the grinding of pigments. The blue of the turban is lapis lazuli ground to powder: these paintings are rare and beautiful partly because they are literally made of rare and beautiful things.

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Upstairs from the paintings from the Mauritshuis (which remain on view only through June 2) there's a striking installation of three paintings by Joan Brown (1938-1990), a seated Swimmer by Manuel Neri (b. 1930), and a pensive Bather by Elmer Bischoff (1916-1991), all San Francisco Bay Area artists. (Neri is a sculptor; Brown and Bischoff were painters.) I have always felt the Bay Area of, say, the years since World War II has constituted a cultural energy-spot that can be ranked with the communities mentioned above, particularly in the visual arts but with literature and music not that far behind.

Joan Brown's painting of a girl, from about 1960, is an early canvas among her considerable output, but she was an early master. It was marvelous to contemplate this strong but muted painting with the enormous poster based on Vermeer's painting available simply by turning my head — and with the recent memory of the Vermeer to have for ready comparison. The similarity of mood, though not of execution, is unmistakeable, I think.

The degree of community here! Brown and Neri were married; Brown was the sitter to Neri's sculptor of the seated swimmer; their son Noel is depicted in her painting Noel and Bob, hanging nearby. Noel's eyes repeat Joan's, as Neri paints them on his plaster sculpture. Walking about Delft, by the canals, after dark, on a quiet night, you can be forgiven for thinking you know a little bit what the town may have been like in the 17th century. I know better, I think, what existed among Brown and Neri and Bischoff, and no doubt their work speaks more quickly to me because I knew them and their voices, let alone the streets they walked. They were — and Neri still is — deep, contemplative, yet sociable artists, living the experiences we all do, responding to them, and to their predecessors, with the greater insight gained through knowledge, discipline, patience, and commitment. We are all so incredibly lucky such men and women live and work among us.

• de Young Museum, through Sunday 9:30 to 5:15, Friday to 8:45 pm; Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis closing June 2; John Kennedy Drive, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

RIP Kenji Nanao

TWO YEARS AGO or so I wrote briefly here about the painter and printmaker Kenjilo Nanao, whose studio I had visited that day, to get to know him and his paintings better, since he had asked me to write an essay for the catalog that would accompany the retrospective exhibition at the University of Santa Clara that September.

We hit it off immediately, Lindsey and I, Kenji and Gail. We didn't get together often, but we had dinner in their home — Kenji cooked at table, memorably — and again at Chez Panisse. Gail is an intelligent, deeply sympathetic woman; Kenji was a force of Nature. A samurai, as Gail says, big, bearlike, lusty, tender. Like all good painters, he sees things privately, attaching importance and poetic meaning to things you and I simply look at.

I cobbled together the essay quickly enough — there wasn't a lot of time — drawing on my memories of paintings I'd seen over the years. I had always cherished one particular painting of his, which I'd made a little sketch of in my journal when I first saw it in a San Francisco gallery. It seemed to me to be an ideal mediation of landscape and abstraction. It was almost entirely in white, and projected a kind of tranquility I associate otherwise, in works of art, only with the music of John Cage and Morton Feldman.

I reprinted the essay in my book The Idea of Permanence; it is not available, I think, on the Internet. I quote here only the final paragraph:

Comely and appropriate, searching and explorative, rooted in childhood, in youth, in maturity; traveling through time and space, tracking life energy to its most universal source, these paintings stand I think astride the Pacific, one foot in Japan, one in California, aware of the beauties and triumphs of the long history of the arts from Ancient Greece to the present, celebrating yet regretting our transient energies, always presenting, containing, suggesting the essential optimism of contemplation. There is nothing more beautiful, in all its generous modesty, than this mastery.

Kenji died on Monday. He'd been in hospital ten or twelve days, after a series of strokes culminating in cerebral hemorrhage. Gail e-mailed me quickly, asking me to write an obituary, which I set here:

Kenjilo Nanao, whose serene, lyrical paintings assimilated the sensibilities of his native Japan and his adopted California through a long and distinguished career, died in Berkeley on May 13, at the age of 84, of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Born July 26, 1929, in Aomori, in the far north of Honshu, over four hundred miles north of Tokyo — “the Oklahoma of Japan,” Nanao used to say — he arrived in San Francisco in 1960. He had wanted to study painting in France, but had trouble learning French. He became instead a Bay Area painter, influenced by the lyrical abstraction of Richard Diebenkorn and his own friend and teacher Nathan Oliveira.

He became known first as a printmaker, his erotic and realistic imagery similar to that of his friend Mel Ramos, but the Japanese sensibility, and an intrinsic love of seascape and marine light, led him to the uniquely spiritual, meditative quality of his mature paintings.

He was an influential and greatly loved teacher who contributed greatly to the growing reputation of California State University in Hayward, where he was considered a "consummate professional," Ramos says, adding "It was difficult to be an innovative Abstract Expressionist after the 1960s, but Kenji managed to dispel that myth by making wonderfully fresh paintings."

An inveterate traveler, Nanao was particularly drawn to Venice, Turkey, and his native Honshu. His work drew on these travels, on the light and space they revealed to him, and on the paintings he was able to study at first hand by such favorites as Cezanne and Titian; but it also speaks of transience and objectiviity, resolving the vulnerability of human life in the contemplation of the immaterial.

Nanao loved sweet things, colors, jokes, cooking, poker, and his family. His grandchildren adored him. He leaves, beside the fond memories of hundreds of students and friends and the beauty of his many prints and paintings, his devoted wife Gail, his son Max and daughter-in-law Chloe, and their children Zoe and Alexander.

I will miss him, but as I get older I seem to get more accustomed to these disasters. In a curious way Death draws us closer together. Some of us: those who have departed after affecting us deeply, deeply enough to have left a part of them behind in our hearts. Like Cage, Kenji affected me with his silence and his vision, his tender passion for life and his awareness of its limits and his dedication to the reconciliation that awareness demands of us. The essential optimism of contemplation.

There's a touching farewell to Kenji by Deborah Barlow on her blog Slow Muse, with a wonderful photo of him taken in his studio only a couple of weeks ago. And here's another, which I took on that studio visit nearly two years ago…

Iberia, 5: Fado

Patricia Costa singing Fado in Porto, April 5 2013 photo: Lindsey Shere

Hotel Sao José, Rua da Alegria, Porto—

FADO IS THE TANGO, I suppose, of Portugal; the national vernacular music, commercial, not authentically in a folk idiom, that has come to represent a certain sad, nostalgic, existential quality that seems to me to permeate this enchanting city.

I like, though not unreservedly, what Wikipedia has to say about fado:

In popular belief, fado is a form of music characterized by mournful tunes and lyrics, often about the sea or the life of the poor, and infused with a characteristic sentiment of resignation, fatefulness and melancholia (loosely captured by the word saudade, or "longing"). However, although the origins are difficult to trace, today fado is regarded, by many, as simply a form of song which can be about anything, but must follow a certain structure. The music is usually linked to the Portuguese word saudade which symbolizes the feeling of loss (a permanent, irreparable loss and its consequent lifelong damage).

Fado — the word means "fate" in Portuguese, though apparently is rarely used in that sense — has fallen out of favor in some quarters, where it is criticized for having succumbed to commercial imperatives. No doubt it has; and it's as ubiquitous a tourism property in Portugal as is tango in Argentina or flamenco in Spain. That's no reason to avoid it.

On our first afternoon here in Porto we were wandering the narrow, cobbled, hilly streets of the old quarter. Such a curious city: the façades, grey and dirty, often embellished with Baroque lintels over the windows; lots of ancient ironwork — railings, balconies, window-bars.

The façades on the plaza express everything Fado sings, I think; everything except the individual human content of the song. They represent the context: history; motionlessness; decay; outlived aspiration. Dignity. Within it all, reserved, somewhere, hope: what once was known may yet return.

Rounding a corner we saw two men straining to lift a heavy stone into a battered wheelbarrow. They joked with me about the weight of the stone, and its perverse presence in the way of whatever work it was they were about. It's everywhere, they said, this stone; you can never avoid it. The younger man then wheeled it, downhill fortunately, into a plaza, up a steep plank, into the back of a pickup truck parked casually in the midst of the plaza.


We turned back to our walk, immediately confronting a restaurant I'd been curious about: RESTAURANTE TIPICO O FADO, the individual blue-glazed tiles spelled out; and the same message was engraved on a bronze plaque right next to the tiles, framed by a lamp, an alarm-bell box, and the wiring supplying them; with a menu and a few snapshots in windows below. The haphazard care and symmetry of it all appealed to me, and we took note of the place.

We continued through the confusing narrow streets, down to the center, across and up to Sao Bento, the marvelous railroad station, its vast lobby walls covered with cazuelos, blue and white glazed tiles, depicting great moments of Portuguese history. Outside the front entrance, in the place where the restaurant had featured its menu-box, I was touched to see a bronze plaque in homage to Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral, two great Portuguese aviators, the first to cross the Atlantic, in 1922. On it, addressed TO POSTERITY, there was a poem in two stanzas, only the second of which I am able to decipher from my notes:

A nossa alma, na sua trajetória

Para o supremo Bem, para a Beleza,
Tem desferido um canto de vitória
Nas amplidões de toda a natureza!
Em frente ao apogeu da nossa glória
Veja o mundo que a raça portugueza
Leventa sempre o génio criador
Para a luz, para a vida e para o amor.
which I translate, with the help of the indispensable Google:

To our soul, in its trajectory
to the supreme Good, to Beauty,
they unrolled a song of victory
greater than all nature!
Before the height of glory
see the world that the creative genius
of the Portuguese race will always lift
toward light, to life and love.

---

THAT EVENING OUR DESK clerk recommended two fado restaurants in town; each was represented by fliers in the local-hotspot display you see in most hotel lobbies these days. I asked about a third, which we'd noticed on our walk in the Rua São João Novo, in the heart of the old town. Oh, that's the best of them all, the clerk said, though in fact they're all good, they all give you professional singers, there really isn't any difference.

In the end, though, we went to the Rua São João Novo, precisely because they did not supply the hotel with a pamphlet — maybe that suggests they're less touristy. We reserved a table for the four of us at eight o'clock: a little early, I thought; but the Portuguese seem to dine earlier than do the Spaniards.

The dining room is a long rectangle. It was empty of diners save one table at the very end — on reflection, this may have been relatives of the restaurant staff. Our table was reserved, in the center of the room, directly opposite a small stage for the performers. As we ate dinner other diners showed up, and before too long the place was fairly full.

After an hour or so the host — clearly the restaurant owner — took the stage to welcome his guests and introduce the performers. He did this first in Portuguese, then in quite fluent English, getting a good deal of applause from the audience. Then he went through it again in French. The many Americans laughed and talked among themselves, as if the French announcement were nothing anyone needed to heed; next to us, a table of French tourists looked quite pleased and attentive.

Then the first singer appeared. Again, I was unable to catch the name: subsequent rooting around the Internet leads me to think she may be Patricia Costa, whose photo I find somewhere on the Internet. She had a clear soprano, bright, silvery, and she sang like a young woman, on the threshold of mature life, expecting her first child, aware of the difficulties of life but not at all overcome by them, harboring no sorrows, no angers. She sang about singing, about Lisbon, about life and love. She sang simply, affectingly but unaffectedly, directly, stepping aside at moments to allow the guitarist to supply his wordless comment on her song, stepping back naturally, without pretense or ego, to resume the song.

When she was finished, after perhaps fifteen minutes or so, she walked unaffectedly off her platform into another room, followed by the guitarists. We turned back to our table; a new course had arrived, and we enjoyed it and our conversation, and the energy of the dining room which had filled up and was clearly as pleased as we had been. We didn’t expect further entertainment, at least I didn’t: but our master of ceremonies returned to the stage to introduce another singer, a man this time, Antonio Laranjeira. Behind him the guitarists were taking their places again and tuning up, and soon Laranjeira appeared: a young man, late thirties perhaps, a little stocky, with a broad open honest face, very pleasant-looking, rather artless.

His singing was most direct and disarming. He had a clear tenor, supple, insinuating I suppose, light, inflected with perhaps more personal experience than the soprano had had. There was a wistful quality to his voice and his delivery; he reminded me at times of Luciano Pavarotti when he was young and was singing simply. He began, straight-forwardly, with

Este fado é de nós dois
Quero cantá-lo e depois
Vou levar-te pela cidade
De bairro em bairro à toa
Por esta velha Lisboa
Onde se canta a saudade

[This fado is for us two
I want to sing it and then
I'll take you through the city
Neighborhood by neighborhood aimlessly
For this old Lisbon
Where saudade sings…

[Saudade is famously untranslatable. Nostalgia, longing, melancholy are all involved. I first met the word in Darius Milhaud's marvelous piano suite Saudades do Brasil, composed in France after spending two years in Rio de Janeiro. Then, years later, but many years ago, we had a Brazilian exchange student with us for six months, and I observed a lot of saudade first-hand.

There's a long discussion of the word, the concept, the condition, on Wikipedia: "The state of mind has subsequently become a "Portuguese way of life": a constant feeling of absence, the sadness of something that's missing, wishful longing for completeness or wholeness and the yearning for the return of that now gone, a desire for presence as opposed to absence…"]

Again, the gravely smiling grey-haired man with the Portuguese guitar accompanied the voice, then played the interludes, accenting certain beats with a curious quick upward motion of his entire upper body, arms, and instrument, as if he were incapable of resisting the urgent insinuation of the music; his quieter, more retiring colleague supplied bass and afterbeat harmony with his conventional guitar.

Laranjeira gave us quite a number of songs — this was generous entertainment. And then, after another interlude devoted to conversation and the table, a third singer was introduced: an older woman, Leonor Santos, whose face and voice and styling were quite a contrast with the previous two singers. Where the first woman had the clear light soprano and the disarming innocence of, say, Doris Day, this woman made me think of Peggy Lee, if she'd only sung fado.

After her set the evening was pretty well over. We talked to the two female singers — a nice conversation, about fado and its history, about the irrelevance of such categories as popular or commercial or folk or vernacular. The singers were clearly artists, they'd given their art a lot of thought. I was struck, as I so often am, by their generosity, singing so artfully and sincerely in a restaurant to an audience of tourists. We took photos and bought a CD.

As we left the restaurant, just before getting to the door to the street, we passed through a sort of vestibule — it looked like the reception desk of a small hotel, though this was no hotel, as far as I could see. The restaurant host, who'd served as MC, was standing toward the back of the room. Antonio Laranjeira was leaning over the high counter; behind it the man with the Portuguese guitar — how I wish I could find his name! — was seated, with his instrument. Laranieira was singing to him, and he was playing guitar back to Laranieira — as if they were working up an arrangement, or refining a duet whose music each had long known but had perhaps not performed with the other.

I suddenly realized my iPhone could record this, and made a short video — the singing was extraordinarily beautiful, persuasive, engaging, direct; and the guitar supported it intuitively. It was late and time to go, but I couldn't tear myself away. Finally I had no choice: if you watch the little video I made you'll see what finally happened…

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My latest book, Improvised Itineraries, is just out. In a little over two hundred pages it describes walking in Limburg and on the GR5 in Belgium and Luxembourg; driving across France; exploring cave art and cassoulet in the Perigord; seeing Einstein on the Beach in Montpellier; lunching with Lulu at Domaine Tempier; and a number of small hotels, country restaurants, and good times. A number of black and white photos. You can order it online, and I wish you would. $12.95 plus shipping.

Two more plays in Pasadena

Pasadena, California, May 12, 2013—

QUICKLY NOW, BECAUSE it's late and we have a longish drive tomorrow, let me sum up the rest of the spring season here at A Noise Within, whose productions continue to impress us after all these years. Yesterday we saw Frank Galati's adaptation for the stage of John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath, a work that perhaps means more to me than it will to you, since my father was born in Oklahoma, and lived through the Dust Bowl, the great Oklahoma migration, and all that.

I shouldn't have to write much here about the novel, which traces the eviction of the Joads from their Oklahoma farm, their travels across the Southwest to the migrant worker camps of the California Central Valley, the unspeakable poverty and hardship of the period, the injustice and inevitability of their exploitation at the hands of ranch managers, their brutal treatment by the establishment, and all that. You think the last few years have been tough in the USA: you have no idea how things were in the years before World War II.

It's a long time since I've read the book — I really should re-read it, I know — so I can't be sure: but this adaptation, while necessarily episodic, seemed faithful to me, fleshing out the main characters mostly through Steinbeck's words, organizing the high points of the lamentable narrative effectively, leavening what might otherwise have been overwhelmingly depressing deaths, disease, and failure with the finally irrepressable energy of the daily untutored will to live, and to live with dignity and decency.

Michael Michetti's direction was straightforward and effective. Matt Gottlieb, Steve Coombs, and Deborah Strang stood out in the large and effective cast as Casy, Tom Joad, and Ma, with Mark Jacobson a remarkable Noah and Lili Fuller growing through the course of the play as Rose of Sharon.

Many in the cast sang, danced, and played instruments — fiddle, guitars, bass, jug — with skill and vigor, contributing to a sense of authenticity. One would never want the country to return to such hard times, but it sure would be nice if people could once again be that good, that adaptable, that determined. This was a first-rate production. If it could travel the length and breadth of the land, Americans might learn something positive about their heritage, about the honesty and justice of workers and the out of work.

---

THEN THIS AFTERNOON we saw a rare production of The Beaux' Strategem, the 1707 comedy by George Farquhar, in an adaptation by Thornton Wilder that was abandoned, then finished recently by Ken Ludwig.

It's a Restoration Comedy, I suppose, about scoundrels: impoverished gentlemen, louche inkeepers, a highwayman doubling as a parson, a dotty old woman dabbling in surgery, and the like. Beatrice and Benedick meet commedia dell'arte, action gives way to direct address to the audience, jokes are made at Mr. Shakespeare's expense.

In Julia Rodriguez-Elliott's brisk direction, it was all great fun. Blake Ellis was superb as the blandly loveable Jack Archer; Freddy Douglas a good match as his sidekick Tom Aimwell. Abby Craden and Malia Wright were just under overwrought, good-looking and very funny as the young ladies Kate Sullen and Dorinda. Apollo Dukakis did his characteristic wide-eyed goof for the Boniface, and Deborah Strang defined demented zaniness as Lady Bountiful.

Best of all, perhaps, Robertson Dean portrayed Sullen. I don't think I've ever seen a more complex, longer, more utterly believable, and funnier drunk impersonation than his. He was absolutely hilarious. The whole show was. There are serious things here, comments on Science, on The State of Woman, on class warfare. (At one point, a gentleman masking as a servant declares they are all on the cusp of a great upheaval in such relations: and this is the early 18th century.)

One of the most remarkable things about this company, A Noise Within, is its record, its ability, with repertory, balancing serious drama with entertainment, looking in dusty corners of repertory, finding vehicles that stretch the company and its audience and that speak to one another, developing an intelligent conversation about the constant human condition through the theatrical entertainment that has been devised throughout the centuries, across boundaries of nation and language. This spring season has, in one sense, simply been one more example. In another sense, it has been exceptionally effective.

Eurydice

Jules Wilcox as Eurydice, with her recumbent Father (Geoff Elliott) and the menacing Lord of the Underworld (Ryan Vincent Anderson); three Stones in background

Pasadena, May 10, 2013—

SAW A PLAY down here last night that needed reseeing in my mind's eye this morning: Sara Ruhl's 2003 romantic comedy Eurydice. We're here for the spring season of a company we've followed for a number of years, A Noise Within: one of the things we like about them is their propensity for thoughtful repertory. (Tomorrow we see The Grapes of Wrath; next day, The Beaux' Stratagem.)

Sarah Ruhl is perhaps better known just now for a more recent play, Dead Man's Cell Phone, which we saw a few years ago up in Ashland. Like it, Eurydice is an entertaining and very contemporary play on verbal language, mindless American leisure, and Life and Death. I suppose her antecedents include the American novelist Robert Nathan, whose bittersweet fantasies were once bestsellers and produced hit movies — think Portrait of Jennie — but is now so neglected none of his thirty-eight novels now rate an individual Wikipedia entry. (I particularly loved One More Spring, which I try to re-read every ten or twelve years.)

I wouldn't be surprised if Eurydice is similarly forgotten in twelve or fifteen years: and that is not to its discredit. Theater must be of the moment. There are of course, and thank both Melpomene and Thalia for them, plays that manage to hold the stage for centuries, even millennia. A Noise Within offers them, usually two or three a year. It seems reasonable, though, given the limits of human activity, that for every one of those plays there must be hundreds and thousands that have shorter runs.

And there's no reason that among them there shouldn't be some whose short shelf life is due to their specific address to their specific audience, in its specific social context. One of my objections to Eurydice, during the ninety minutes I was actually watching its single long act, was that it trivialized the Orpheus myth. Myths owe their power to their ability to speak to the most basic concerns of their audiences, what you might call root level desire, fear, and comprehension. The higher you go (to use suspect spatial analogy) in the intellectual reception of the audience, conscious or subconscious, the more particular the appeal, the more delimited to a specific construct of social or psychological issues.

Eurydice opens with the two characters on a beach, apparently in the United States, apparently in the late 20th century. Orpheus is a glib, rather bland young man whose head is full of tunes. Eurydice, equally adolescent, prefers the books she reads. They prance and preen and prattle good-naturedly about their differences, and they seem not really all that passionate about one another.

They engage to marry, though — one's not sure why — but during the ceremony, or just short of it, she runs off to the apartment of a sinister fellow who has picked up a letter written to Eurydice by her dead father, who has some advice for her. After stealing the letter she rushes out of the apartment, falls down a flight of six hundred stairs (not "steps": Ruhl's language is occasionally oddly imprecise), and dies.

From there the play returns more or less to the standard myth, saving the presence in Hades of Eurydice's never named Father, who coaches her in verbal communication following Lethe's erasure of her intellect.

The cast is rounded out by a Greek chorus of three Stones, who comment on the action from time to time, more to remind us that Ruhl's play grows out of antiquity than to enlarge the effectiveness of her theater.

Looking back on the play this morning, a few hours after seeing it, I see its resonance — in terms of physical production, at least, but through that also in terms of suggestion — with such plays as Il Re cervo (King Stag), which Noise Within did ten years ago. If Ruhl's play looks back, consciously or not, to Robert Nathan, it also recalls, at least to me, the plays of Wallace Stevens: Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise, for example.

Geoff Elliott's direction of the play was consistent, a little subdued, sympathetic, and intelligent. (The same can be said of his portrayal of the role of Her Father.) He didn't flinch from the playwright's idea of anchoring, miring perhaps, the play in the specifics of bland American adolescence, and that speaks for the esthetically ethical respect he has for the script. In the other main roles, Jules Willcox found some wonder and depth in the title role; Ryan Vincent Anderson was often imposing as A Nasty Interesting Man and Hades. Graham Sibley was, I thought, weaker as Orpheus, but then in Ruhl's play this isn't a very rewarding role.

As the chorus, Abigail Marks, Jessie Losch, and Kelly Ehlert were perhaps a bit too indulged as Big, Little, and (especially) Loud Stone, sitting stolidly on the ledges of the back wall of the set, blue, comically ominous and eternal, enigmatic. These stones can't help but bring the dead in the closing pages of Our Town to mind. I like them, the more I think of them.

The physical production was effective and memorable, especially Meghan Gray's lighting design and Jeanine Ringer's scenic design. Indeed it was those components, abetted by Endre Balogh's offstage violin improvisations (if indeed they were improvised), that force me to rethink my immediate reaction to the evening, and to find considerable merit in the play. I'd see it again, especially in this production, if I lived down here: the production closes May 19.

Two Stoppard plays

FOR THE RECORD, whatever the record might be, we saw two plays by Tom Stoppard on Saturday, down in Berkeley. We caught them just in time; I'm sorry to tell you they've closed. Comments are justifiable, though, because one or another or, I hope, both might well be remounted next season: they constitute the first two-thirds of a trilogy, whose closing piece has been promised for next year.

The trilogy is The Coast of Utopia, which, as stated by Wikipedia, focusses on "the philosophical debates in pre-revolution Russa between 1833 and 1866." The trilogy runs nine hours, Wikipedia further states, and I can believe it: the two plays we saw, Voyage and Shipwreck, ran close to three hours each.

My experience with Stoppard is insufficient — not entirely my fault: his plays aren't given sufficient attention by the companies whose productions we visit. We've seen, let's see, Travesties, On the Razzle, Arcadia, maybe The Invention of Love. His translation of The Seagull, too, and of course the movie Shakespeare in Love, whose screenplay he co-wrote (with Marc Norman).

Nor have I read any of his plays. This will distress my reclusive friend in Corvallis, in the unlikely event he reads this: he lent me a copy of The Invention of Love months ago, and I haven't yet got to it.

It was Travesties that put me off Stoppard. I was a dedicated Joycehead for decades, and the idea of fooling around with historical fact, throwing Joyce and Tzara and Lenin together on stage simply because they happened to live for a short time in the same city where they might have met, seemed not only dubious in terms of ethics, but downright shameful. It seemed to my priggish standards an assault on the dignity of Joyce's accomplishments; certainly the dignity of the situations he suffered in those Zurich years.

Of course I've come to realize the absurdity, the ignorance, the uselessness, the short-sightedness of my outrage at Stoppard's "liberties." An outrage facilitated, by the way, by my not having actually read or seen Travesties at the time: it was only a few seasons ago that I first saw it, produced — brilliantly, I thought — by the Shotgun Players.

It was the same theater that brought us Voyage and Shipwreck the other day. They are truly a marvelous company, engaging, resourceful, enterprising. Their little Ashby Stage, a storefront theater with a steeply raked audience seating perhaps a hundred, is obviously limited in terms of facilities, but where other companies wallow in theatrical resources, Shotgun dances cleverly and gracefully in theatrical imaginativeness and enterprise.

I've complained here about certain productions in other theaters, where the urge to make Shakespeare, for example, "relevant" to today's audiences has sometimes resulted in compromises with what seems to me the intent and meaning of the script. The idea seems to be that the audience can't understand the complexity and seriousness of the play unless it's pushed at them in theatrical dress more current. The result is Troilus and Cressida, say, performed like an Iraq War movie. You alter the play to make your audience "understand" it, even though the result is not the play Shakespeare wrote.

What Shotgun did with Stoppard's complex and serious plays was alter the audience, not the scripts. The alteration was simple enough: a member of the company came out onstage a few minutes before curtain and explained a few details, in the course of which aspects of Russian art, philosophy, and society of 180 years ago — not to mention the French Revolution, the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna, Marx, George Sand, and a few other items — was easily and gracefully presented.

What a pleasure, to attend a theater whose audience is treated like a collection of intelligent men and women, interested in such things, and capable of following simple declarative sentences! And the printed program, too, was a masterpiece of clarity and precision, dispensing with the usual format and setting instead a timeline of the dramatic content of the two plays, another of the French Revolution, biographies of the characters Stoppard involves in his plays, and synopses of the action.

The plays are meaty, no question. Of the two, Voyage, the first of the trilogy, seemed to me the more fascinating, largely because of its structure. Act I, set on a Chekhov-like country estate near Moscow, presents nine scenes centered on the wealthy Bakunin family, four daughters and a son (Michael) and their parents, guests, and serfs.

Act II moves the action to Moscow and Petersburg, following the same characters (and a few new ones) through the same time period, 1833-1844, backfilling details and motivation and consequences.

The play is "about" the lassitude and hopelessness and uncertainty of the Russia of the period, mired in the serfdom economy, torn between fascination and envy for Europe (especially the freedom of France and the dedication of Germany) and an obstinate loyalty to the antiEuropean qualities of the eternal Mother Russia.

All this is slowly, carefully spooled out through conversation, with a few set pieces at critical junctures. The economy, agriculture, law, religion, literature or the lack of it — those are the subjects, ostensibly: but the real substance of Stoppard's play is the complexity, the inheritance, the philosophical difficulty and the eventual failure of a historical moment, reaching back to the Age of Reason and the French Revolution that followed it, and forward to the long night that would follow the events of this play, seventy more years before the Russian Revolution, then ninety more to our own time, when the Russian failure seems just as surely sealed.

Shipwreck follows Bakunin and his foil the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky to Paris, 1846-47. Where the first play introduced literati and liberals as guests of the Bakunin country estate, Bakunin himself is now seen as a guest in the cosmopolitan home of the wealthy Alexander Herzen, half German and half Russian, at home in neither society. In a similar structure, though much more linear in its chronology, Stoppard narrows his focus, drawing the net tighter around his characters, propelling us to the inevitable futility of the 1848 Paris revolution in the first act, then in the second dissolving the tension in the anticlimax of the Herzen household in Nice.

I can hardly wait to see the final play, Salvage. In fact I'll probably have to buy the scripts of all three and read them soon; the production can't come soon enough for me. If Shipwreck was less gripping than Voyage, it was probably because it is after all the centerpiece of the trilogy. The first play stands on its own; the second needs the first and, I'm sure, the third.

I can't say enough about the principles among the cast. Joseph Salazar was deep and changeable as Michael Bakunin; Nick Medina was smoldering and intense and brilliant as Belinsky; Jonah Rotenberg was sometimes meditative, sometimes quick and brittle as Herzen. It's a huge cast, and there were a couple of weaker actors in lesser roles, but for the most part I was persuaded throughout the afternoon and evening.

The director was Patrick Dooley, artistic director of Shotgun. I'm glad he's where he is; intelligent theater needs an intelligent and effective master in a community like Berkeley. But when I think what he might be able to do a few hundred miles north…

Three Plays in Ashland

FOR A NUMBER of years, since September 2001 in fact, we've been attending the Oregon Shakespeare Festival productions in this southern Oregon town. Until last year, in fact, we'd be in residence for a solid week, sharing a rented house with three other couples, friends we've come to know pretty well in the course of attending plays, discussing them, agreeing, disagreeing, persuading, failing to persuade.

Alas, tempus fugit; that social habit has run its course, though we remain good friends back home in California. For some of us the Ashland experience has lost some luster. I've complained my own share, God knows, about a number of the productions. And for the first time in years, we're not seeing everything this year, not even close to everything.

We are making two trips on our own this year, returning in October for Cymbeline, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and two new plays. And this weekend we've seen three others, with varying degrees of success — ending, I'm happy to say, on an almost unqualifiedly high level.

Friday night we saw August Wilson's play Two Trains Running. We've now seen more than half his ten-play "Centennial" cycle of plays centering on the black experience in Pittsburgh, PA, one play set in each decade of the 20th Century. This is of course a significant cycle of plays, and some of them — notably Fences and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom — strike me as unequivocally successful, plays that deserve to stay in the active repertory.

To judge from the current OSF production, Two Trains Running is secondary. The sixth play in terms of order of completion, it's set rather statically, in a down-at-the-heels restaurant threatened with condemnation for an urban redevelopment project. It's 1969, and the bleak coalition of real-estate development and misguided cultural do-goodism has begun the final assault on the flourishing if marginalized black culture that flowered in the Harlem Renaissance and in other American cities from Baltimore to Portland.

In spite of one of OSF's major actors, Kevin Kenerly, who brought detail and energy to the role of Sterling, and Bakesta King's unforgettable portrayal of the waitress Risa, something seemed flat about the performance we saw Friday night. I think the fault lies in the script, which is oddly formulaic and abstract, lacking the memorable characterization of other Wilson plays. Tyrone Wilson was quite moving as the holy fool Hambone, and the rest of the cast did what they could with their lines and direction.

Lou Bellamy makes his OSF debut with this production: he's specialized in Wilson, directing more productions than any other director. He notes that Two Trains Running is true ensemble theater: "it refuses to allow the isolation of any one character." I see this as Wilson's most Chekhovian play; the ensemble depends on the "isolation" or, better, the detailing of each of these characters as they weave through the fabric of the dramatic situation. I suppose I should see another performance.

A FEW YEARS AGO OSF began a new annual feature: a musical is to be done on each year's program. The first out was Enter the Guardsman, and it was triumphant. So was She Loves Me, another neglected standard (based on the Molnar comedy The Shop Around the Corner). Other attempts have been less successful, including The Music Man and a disastrous vulgarization of The Pirates of Penzance.

This year's musical is an adaptation of the Lerner and Loewe masterpiece My Fair Lady. I didn't want to see it, as it's being given with two pianos rather than the marvelous original orchestration, but I was roped into it. In the event, the piano transcription was reasonably successful (though the violin added every now and then was problematic, being flat far too much of the time). The real problem was the direction.

Amanda Dehnert apparently specializes in mistreating scripts. Last year she cast a woman in the title role of Julius Caesar, throwing in a Kabuki actress for good measure. This year — well, let her make her own case:

While there is something tidy in the relationship of the alive-ness of the theater (risk and reward) and the experience of Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins (what they risk, lose, and gain), this tidiness bothers me. Life isn't neat and theatre isn't clean. Life is messy, so should theatre be…

But of course George Bernard Shaw's plays are the epitome of well made plays, and Lerner and Loewe's adaptation of Pygmalion into My Fair Lady is notoriously impeccable. The play is about artifice, and makes its point brilliantly by being artifice itself. It is never vulgar, or slapstick, or in our face, not even — perhaps not especially — in the sections depicting the, ahem, lower classes. Alfred P. Doolittle is, as Higgins says, a philosopher, not a clown.

The Alfred in this production wrestles with direction that belongs in a Vegas club, not an intelligent theater; and to his credit Anthony Heald salvages his role at the end of the night. David Kelly finds a sympathetic Pickering, too; and when he's not made to do incredibly stupid things, Ken Robinson gets more sympathy than the role of Freddy Eynsford-Hill usually deserves.

Otherwise, the women provide the best moments in this production. I thought Rachael Warren was an unusually deep and thoughtful Eliza. The marvelously named Chavez Ravine was delightful as Higgins's mother; so was Kjerstine Rose Anderson as Freddy's.

Jonathan Haugen seemed miscast to me as Henry Higgins. Of course anyone in that role has to deal with the specter of Rex Harrison, whose inimitable way with the script and whose authority as an irascible charmer are virtually unique. Haugen enjoyed the role, and often found real character in it, but seemed smaller than this production, noisy and violent throughout, demanded.

O UR VISIT ENDED with a first-rate production and performance of another masterpiece, Tennessee Williams's 1949 A Streetcar Named Desire. Here, Christopher Liam Moore completely trusted the script, directing a performance relying on its insight and poetry and on the fine individual and ensemble acting of the four principals.

Danforth Comins, as dependable a trouper as OSF has, was a magnificent Stanley, balancing the pure animal with mental intensity. Nell Geisslinger was sympathetic throughout as Stella. Kate Mulligan grew throughout the performance as Blanche DuBois, propelling the fragility and fatigue of the opening scene toward the madness and overwhelming tragedy of the close. Jeffrey King found plenty of detail in the role of Mitch, elevating it to a level of dramatic importance almost as high as the other three.

There were problems: the music was too loud and demanding; the set a little unfocussed and fussy; the supporting roles of neighbors and poker-players a bit too strenuous. But the rest of the production, and the portrayals of the central quartet, were so well done those problems receded almost out of memory.

Moore's direction of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in 2010, was haunting, powerful, and beautiful. This Streetcar was nearly as triumphant. I hope his work points the OSF future, and Miller's proves to be a momentary detour.


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Iberia, 4: three encounters in Zamora

WE WERE LOOKING OUT over the river Douro, subsiding from last week's high water but still boiling along carrying a fair quantity of soil with it, brown and busy, though under fair blue skies and scudding clouds, when we heard a lot of shouting and carrying on behind us up the street.

Three boys, ten or twelve years old, came charging around a corner and down our way, too much involved in their own importance to recognize ours, or even, at first, register our presence at all. Our world was charged with distance and contemplation, memories and detail; theirs was apparently filled only with their own noise, and the immediacy of their moment, their presence.

It was funny, I thought; not that long ago, back at our hotel, watching with some relief as a busload of touring American teen-agers pulled away, we'd reflected that it was only the American youngster who was noisy and unheeding. In our comfortable hotel bar the Americans sat in twos and threes at tables meant for four, leaving us four to sit at the bar. Worse, imstead of comversing quietly at their tables, they called to one another at several tables' distance, making it impossible for us to talk among ourselves.

Spanish young people seemed brought up to be considerate, judging by those we saw in museums and restaurants. Removed from the presence of their elders, though, apparently, they are as rambunctious as any of ours. These three on a quiet street in Zamora, for example suddenly, though, they realized we were watching them, and they fell into a momentary confused and perhaps even embarrassed silence. Quickly, though, they had to save face.

The boldest of them addressed me, in Spanish, using the familiar tu: Turista! Are you German? No? Well, English then?

I told him politely that I came from California, but that my brother was Australian. They seemed to find that strange and amusing. They backed off and eyed us speculatively, heads at a bit of an angle. It felt like a moment out of Penrod and Sam, or Tom Sawyer.

Then the leader addresses me again: Do you want to see a strange thing, one of the local customs of Zamora? He broke into a fast shuffling dance-in-place for a couple of beats, then amazingly turned his back, dropped his pants, and looked at me from between his legs for an instant, before running full speed, pants hitched back up again, to the end of the street up the hill.

Bravo, I called to him, you looked just like one of the devils carved on a capital in the cloister! He seemed not to like that, for he picked up a stone about the size of a walnut and launched it at me quite accurately, hitting me on the leg.

I picked it up and made to throw it back at him, but all three had disappeared.

We turned back to our prospect, then walked on. After a few minutes, though, when we rounded a corner at another street, there they were again, coming our way. There were other men and women on this street, locals it seemed, and when they saw us they immediately turned tail and ran away, without making a sound. We never saw them again.

§ § §

NEXT MORNING we decided to visit the Museo de Semana Santa, to learn more about the Holy Week processions of penitents we'd been seeing, and to marvel at the huge, intricate, sumptuous, and amazingly lifelike sculptural groupings on the carros — "floats" being far too trivializing a word for them — that are carried through the crowded streets by up to forty men, all hidden from view beneath the platforms, also intricately carved, on which they stand.

Seeing a well-dressed rather purposeful man on the street as we walked in the general direction of the museum I asked for directions. I do this even on the rare occasion when I already know the route; I like the opportunity to hear the language, and to practice brutalizing it a bit myself.

It's just up the street a bit, he said, I'll show you; come with me, I"m going there myself. And so he was, and so we did; and then we spent an bour or so with perhaps fifty enormous carros, taking in the entire story of Holy Week, from the triumphant Palm Sunday entrance into Jerusalem, through the Garden, the Betrayal, the Crucifixion and ultimately the Ascension.

It's a long time since I studied these stories, sixty-five years at least, but they seem to have stuck with me. It was amazing how many details came back, and how much significance they could suggest, if I forgot about some of the other things I've learned since. The function of these tableaus and rituals was immediately clear: not only was I reminded individually of the religious teaching I'd received; I was also cemented, so to speak, into the society of all the Christians, lapsed or faithful, gathered around me.

And it wasn't only the carros and the penitents that had this effect. Paintings and sculptures in the churches perform the same office. I was never a very good student of the Bible, but a surprising amount of even the Old Testament comes back to me as I look at these paintings of Noah or Abraham or Lot and his daughters or Judith and her servant, just as the tapestries we saw elsewhere, rich depictions of Hector and Achilles, say, trigger recollections of long-forgotten details in the Iliad.

Several hours later, on our way back to the car, we met our helpful guide again. He called out something I didn't catch, and as we drew closer I apologized that I don't understand Spanish. Yes, you speak Spanish, he said. No, I said, I speak a very little Spanish, but I don't understand it. no comprendo Español.

Sí, comprende, he insisted, and went on, always in Spanish, asking us if we'd see, the Castillo, if we'd enjoyed it, if we didn't agree that his city was a very beautiful one.

Yes, I tried to say, we enjoyed everything about Zamora. Well except that there were some boys — jovenes — who seemed a little…

But Spanish failed me utterly at that point. incivil? he asked helpfully. Sí incivil, un poco, I answered, aand was glad I couldnt emember the words for "throw" and "rock."

Oh, well, los jovenes, theyre the same everywhere, the mn said; I'm glad you enjoyed our city; do come again…

§ § §

NEXT MORNING, on our way out of town, we stepped into a yardage-goods shop, attracted by the unusual fabrics displayed in the shop window. There was a faint and agreeable fragrance of good cigar in the air; I thought how nice a jacket cut from one of his woolens would be.

He seemed amused. That four tourists, obviously traveling without a sewing machine, would be so interested in his wares, and, smiling, asked us if we'd liked Zamora. I told him I was struck by the elegance of so many of the women we'd seen in the city; he seemed happy I'd noticed.

Somehow the subject of flamenco came up, and he quickly disavowed any local Interest in the art. The local dance was more a quick shuffle, first one foot, then the other, in place, without actually moving the upper body, exactly as the naughty boy had demonstrated, though with considerably more dignity. The man was a little hefty, in a sober, well-dressed way, and shuffled rather seriously; then smiled indulgently at himself, and self-deprecatingly at us.

The dance originated in imitation of the footwork of the torero, he explained. Ah, I said, is the bullfight still important here in Zamora?

He was a little incredulous. Yes, señor, of course, it is what makes us Spaniards. He expounded further, answering further questions. Yes, it is important to nearly all Spaniards, young, old, poor, well-to-to. Of course, there are some who object, there is the occasional demonstration, but it is a very small minority. He shrugged. There will always be some who refuse to belong, who reject their culture.

The corrida is central to our culture, he continued, it is what makes us Spaniards, has always been at our center and our roots. In every city there is the Plaza de Toros, and everyone can go there.

We got in the car and drove to the border, through beautiful heath in bloom, and thin pine forest that made me think of Arizona. I thought about Christianity, and the saints, the stories, tauromachia, cultural history, national pride and identity. The Spaniards sometimes speak of going to Europe on holiday. The Roman Empire, some of the time, seems more Spanish, or at least Iberian, than European. I think it best if all these cultures, and the cultural and historical moments that define them, are allowed their distinctions, allowed to coexist in mutual enrichment, like the differences in climate and terrain, from which they spring.



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Location:Rua da Alegria,Porto,Portugal

Iberia, 3: Ávila

Avila, March 31, 2013—

A FAVORITE CITY of mine, Ávila, accent the first syllable, please, is a small old city, still entirely encircled by its great and beautiful medieval wall, only an hour or two from Madrid, but much higher — one of the highest cities in Europe, in fact — and therefore cool, even cold, and rather sober. A perfect place to be at Easter.

It is the home town of Teresa of Avila, of course. Her convent is an impressive site, but we will not visit it again this trip; we content ourselves with a single Sunday and the two contiguous nights, in a very pleasant hotel on the cathedral square. Today we walked the ramparts, which takes two or three hours if you rest and dawdle along the way, as well you might at our age, as the steps are high and shallow and often uncertain.

And, more to the point, the views are enticing. At every step there's something so interesting, or beautiful, or arresting, that you're compelled to take yet a other photo. There's the wall itself, of course, massive, forty or fifty feet high, ten or twelve thick, with its crenelated parapet and its frequent lookouts. The stone is limestone, I suppose, a soft warm beige color, cut into massive blocks, and the details — the triangular caps of the crenellations, for example, which are infilled with brick tile; and the huge corbels, beautifully sculpted with softly rounded edges — are repeated with a precision suggestive of great discipline and thoughtful planning.

Clearly a master architect was at work here, whether an individual or a committee or, very likely, a succession of individuals; the work must have extended over centuries, and involved, as my brother remarked, evolving additions and improvements.

One of the things that pleases me most is the playfulness of the geometry. Watchtowers are often set at surprising angles; staircases climb to them steeply nearly always with fifteen risers, but at angles that are both practical and, to my eye at least, refreshing. No doubt it had to be possible to use these details with alacrity, even in the dark, the rain, in freezing weather: but I can't help thinking even rushing defenders — and for that matter the laborers carrying stones and baskets of mortar or pails of water — must have appreciated the physical beauty of the public work they were defending.
Geometrical beauty like this has a civic function. Its clarity of purpose, its solidity and perdurance, express moral clarity and rectitude. And containing the city it defines its relationship to the resources beyond the walls, the fields and groves, the river and the distant mountains whose grains and fruits, snows and quarries contribute so much to a society organized to common benefit.

The low mountains define a horizon not really that far away. Everything here feels high: the air is cool, clean, crisp; the plains undulate easily, rising to that skyline. The light is utterly clear and transparent but, oddly, soft and luminous. Gazing out from these ramparts over the fields one can't help feeling the kind of certainty, order, and tranquility that must have informed Teresa, whose fine mind resolved sensual and moral sensibilities with so little trouble.

Last night we stood among the rather small, respectful group of onlookers along the street just outside the wall, watching the Holy Saturday procession. It felt very similar to the one in Madrid I described in my previous post, but also very different. For one thing, it was not dark, not at the beginning. And we were much closer to the marchers, more aware of their individual faces and manner.

Again, I was impressed, moved, by the determination they express; by their sobriety and dedication amd purposefulness. Avila was a city before the Romans came; she has seen cults and cultures come and go, and doubtless will see more. The procession reminded me of the slow and generalized relationship of communities and their undertakings to the contexts they inherit from the mountains and the fields and from the great works left to them by their predecessors — whether physical, like the cathedral, the walls, the chapels; or intellectual, like the songs and the literature and the enigmatic sculpture from archaic times.

We live, learn, flourish, and fail, we individuals and the societies and cultures we make; and around us the light and the open skies and the mountains do the same, at their vastly different paces; and I find something hugely comforting in all that.

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Iberia, 2: Processions, buskers, tooth

Hotel Zurbano, Madrid, March 29, 2013—

BACK DOWN TO THE CENTER of town last night, about eight o'clock, to find the streets devoid of automobiles and given over instead to throngs of Madrileños. One didn't know which way to go: from the Plaza de San Luis, some groups strode purposefully down toward the Puerta del Sol, others charged up the dubious Calle de Hortelleza; yet others moved off down the Gran Via toward the Plaza de España.

I think I've never seen so many people massed in streets, all clearly about some very public matter, but none in groups of more than would constitute an immediate family. Parents and children; young couples; grandparents with extended families; sometimes two couples, clearly friends: all went about their ways, purposeful and often intent, but free of any collective partisan or political issue. They weren't demonstrators, or pickets, or even football fans.

If it reminded me of anything, it was the passeggiata you see in Italian cities in the hour or two before dinner on a fine Sunday evening. But this was Madrid, and Thursday, and not particularly fine: in fact, rain had been threatening, and the air was damp as well as cool.

We joined those continuing down the Gran Via but soon veered south toward the Plaza Mayor. The crowds grew thicker. It was Holy Thursday, and four processions were scheduled through the city streets; one would proceed right through the Plaza Mayor, and we didn't want to miss it.

We took up a station at a likely-looking corner of the plaza where the crowd had left a wide pathway open for the procession, whenever it should appear. There were no monitors, few police, no barricades. No one had folding chairs. We all stood fairly silently, some conversing, one woman in front of us quietly talking to someone at another position on the route, keeping track of where the procession might be.

Finally we heard drums; we saw distant lights; the procession entered the Plaza Mayor. It moved incredibly slowly, often stopping. There were hooded men, brass bands, drummers, sober women in traditional black mantillas and modest, elegant dresses. Some were barefoot.

Walking, all seemed to sway slightly from side to side. Standing, they were still, looking straight ahead, expressionless — or, rather, expressive of profound sobriety and dignity. We couldn't help but feel moved.

At length a great golden altar arrived, borne along by forty-eight men, eight on each of the three poles fore and aft. The figure of a black-garbed Virgin stood atop the float, which halted just in front of us. Men lit the many candles along the sides, further heightening the gleaming apparition against the prevailingly dark night — for there was little light in the Plaza, only a few lamps at the distant side.

The gold altar was finally lifted again and carried through the arch. After a time another huge float was carried in, paused, and then was carried out; you see it photographed, as well as I could do it, above.

Finally the procession was completely past us. Eleven o'clock: we had been standing in one spot for three hours. People nodded to one another, murmured goodnight, and drifted out of the plaza; voices gre more normal as we entered the surrounding shopping streets; the passeggiata resumed.

---

There is more secular street entertainment to be found, but all of it reminds me of vignettes familiar from Goya and, later, Picasso. There is of course the occasional beggar, but much rarer than in Venice, for example, or, for that matter, San Francisco.

There's the occasional street musician: a lone accordionist or violinist — occasionally, these days, unfortunately accompanying himself (he is inevitably male) with a boom-box. I prefer them when they play unaccompanied. Now and then there'll be one with very little talent, surprisingly little, but you have to give them grudging credit for at least trying. More often they're pretty good; now and then there's one who's really good, and you feel he may be playing for himself, because he's a musician and can't help it, though the case will be open on the pavement, for whatever thanks may fall into it.

Then at some of the handsome plazas on the Paseo Castillana, when automobile traffic is stopped for a minute or two by the traffic lights, jugglers will run out into the middle of the street, often wearing amusingly colorful clothes; they'll bow or curtsy (for some of these are women), tip their hats, and begin juggling their Indian clubs, throwing them high in the air, picking up the occasional fallen one daintily with an instep and kicking it back into action.

Somehow they know just when to stop, and walk between the lanes of traffic, clubs in one hand, cap in the other; and I'm glad to report a number of windows are opened, and coins dropped into the caps.

We don't contribute. There seems to be a convention at work here: it's car and taxi passengers whose money is sought, perhaps to atone for their vehicular presence. Returned to the sidewalk while thee traffic lights are green, thee jugglers talk among themselves, and smile at us pedestrians and say Good Afternoon, friendly and polite. We feel conspiratorial; there's a bond among us.

---

My own entertainment on Good Friday was, wouldn't you know, a broken tooth. Nothing to be done but ask the desk clerk where the nearest emergency dentist might be found.

As luck would have it, only a few blocks away, a Clinica Dentista in a white building on Calle Breton de Herramentos. I telephoned and made an appointment for eleven-thirty. I was a little early; his bell didn't answer. Right on the second, though, there he came a shaggy-haired man in his early thirties. He looked at me questioningly; I nodded; he beckoned me to follow.

He put a white coat on over his street clothes and, I noticed, changed his black shoes for a pair of white ones. I took my seat in his dentist's chair and watched him meticulously wash his hands before drawing on gloves. He spoke no English, and my Spanish is barely rudimentary, but both problem and solution were pretty obvious, and soon he'd put things right.

I told him not to run, as he dashed between the operating room and the counter serving as his office, but he pointed at the clock, and said there'd be three more patients arriving at noon. I liked him, his work, and his manner. The operation was not cheap: the handsome jacket I'd been thinking of splurging on was now moot. But it's nice to have my tooth back, and the experience was, well, interesting.

Location:Madrid

Iberia, 1: Chez Nick revisited

Hotel Zurbano, Madrid, March 28, 2013—

A GOOD MANY YEARS ago we found a marvelous restaurant on the Rue Taylor in Paris, Chez Nick. They served only bouillabaisse and a Grand Aïoli, nothing more, and each was superb. The restaurant was very modest and inexpensive, with a bar down the left as you enter, a few tables, the kitchen at the back. Nick, a Marseillais, presided over the kitchen; his wife, whose name I never knew, over the bar and dining room.
We ate there two or three times, then skipped Paris for a number of years. When we finally returned I insisted on stopping at Chez Nick. It's probably gone, Lindsey said, as she always does, throwing cold water on my fondest plans. Nonsense, I said, Chez NIck has always been utterly reliable.
We walked up and down the Rue Taylor but could not recall exactly where it had been — nor did it jump out at us.
Finally, way down the street, I spied an ancient woman with a cane, a young woman helping her at her elbow, slowly hobbling toward us. I fixed my eye on her: obviously a local resident. She must know.
As she drew nearer she eyed me suspiciously, as well she might: bearded, long-haired, not particularly well dressed, and huge compared to her, I might have been trouble, even though I was accompanied by a clearly decent and well-behaved lady.
Pardon, madame, connaissez-vous un restaurant qui s'appelle Chez NIck, I asked in my flawless non-Parisian French. Her look of anguished misgiving dissolved into an expression of sweet nostalgia.
Ah, mussieu, Chez Nick, c'etait un restaurant, c'etait si bon… non, mussieu, je regrette, c'est fini Chez Nick.
So Lindsey was for once right, one couldn't go home again, the snows of yesteryear were melted well and truly. And today we were at Chez Nick again.
In years past we've liked La Fuencisla, in Madrid, on the Calle San Mateo, no. 4. Naturally I looked it up yesterday, our first day here, only to find it was in some question, with only a few references on the Internet. The first included a glowing description, falling in with what I remembered of the place, but was followed by three troubling and enigmatic comments:

Gerardo, 12:34 pm: There was a time I wanted to reserve, but no one answered the telephone. Is it still open?
Anonymous, 1:21 am: It's closed Señora Teresa died and it closed
Anonymous, 12:53 pm: She isn't dead and functions perfectly

Now that last entry is ambiguous, No esta muerta could conceivably refer to either Señora Teresa or the establishment itself, if you stretch a grammatical point. So today we simply stopped by to see for ourselves.
Well, not so simply; I had described the location imperfectly in my book Mostly Spain, which I was ill-advisedly using as a source. Down one street and across to another we went, asking in at shops and apartment-house doorways, finally closing in on the location, where we found a hot-dog-and-hamburger joint-cum-cocktail-lounge, where a young man was perched on a ladder at the front door, washing the transom.
Is this La Fuencisla, I asked, doubtfully. Yes and no, he answered, La Fuencisla was here, but it changed four years ago. It changed, I said, did it change a lot?
Go in and have a look, he said, it's not the same. I peered inside. No, it was not the same at all. No old men playing cards at dusty tables, a bottle of wine at the elbow; no promising dining room beyond. No Señora Teresa of the delicious eponymous soup.
Another traditional Madrileño location has given way to Americanization. Chez Nick at least had the decency simply to disappear; La Fuecisla has not dried up, but been quite polluted. Oh well: there was a perfectly acceptable Asturiana place not far away…
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Madrid

A Time in Rome

NOT LONG AGO we spent two weeks in Rome, first a few days with one couple of old friends, then ten days with another, finally a weekend with a third. I meant to write more about the visit, but in the end only came up with three posts, two on street performers, another on Shostakovich's opera Nose.

I may revisit that visit. Looking at the dozens of photos, many impressions come back to mind. Of course many are old friends of impressions, by now; this was our third extended visit to the city, and previous impressions were written up at the time — January and November, 2004 — and subsequently found their way into my book Roman Letters.*

My way of visiting Rome is essentially irresponsible and self-indulgent. We've avoided most of the museums and failed to explore the Vatican. Of course we've been to the major sites, and return to some regularly: I wouldn't visit Rome for a day without stopping in at San Giorgio in Velabro, for example, or crossing the Ponte Sisto into Trastevere. But on the whole we prefer trams to tourguides, back streets to boutiques, cafés to cathedrals.

The perfect illustration of this attitude, and these preferences, jumps out at me in this week's reading. I'm still bogged down in Robert Hughes's history Rome; I may never finish it, and will write about it later, if ever. But I just finished Elizabeth Bowen's marvelous A Time in Rome (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), and can't wait to share it with you.

It is neither guidebook nor history. It's a meditation on Rome, by a gifted observer and writer spending three months there, mid-January to mid-April, mid-20th century. There are extended passages descriptive of streets, quarters: the Forum of course; the via Giulia; the cemeteries. At other times a paragraph or two will be enough to suggest Testaccio, say, or Ostia Antica, or what she still refers to as "1942," Mussolini's architectural fantasy projected for an international exposition, now known as EUR.

There are lengthy explorations of historical periods and the personalities behind them: the Julio-Claudian emperors and then the Flavians; Benvenuto Cellini; Pope Sistus V; a contemplation of Augustus's wife Livia; a detailed account of the end of St. Paul's career.

There are wonderful little insights, often witty in their expression: On political correctness, evidently as irritating mid-century as now:

I am sick of the governessy attitude of our age, which is coming to be more genuinely presumptuous, nosier, and more busybody than the Victorian. Deplore the past if you wish; you cannot do anything about it, other than try to see it does not recur.

or poetic: the description of a

great ripe Sicilian blood orange … in a class by itself: the peel, mottled satin outside, white velvet in, curls away under digs from the thumbs, gladly; the delicate-membraned sections fall asunder like petals, firm flesh not spilling one drop of crimson juice till one bites into them. Such oranges deserve to be eaten as I ate them, in infiltrated sunshine, with wine to finish.

Often of course she contemplates Art. On ancient wall-paintings, for example, like those at Pompeii and Herculaneum (though she does not write about those sites):

Nothing about these paintings, minute and sensuous, releases one into the air of art: if anything, their effect might be claustrophobic. The aim was not to enlarge existence but to flatter it.

Later she touches again on the ineffable enlargement of existence art can engender:

While I stand and regard it, the indifference to myself shown by a work of art in itself is art. In Rome, I was more drawn to statues than to paintings. But, whether it was a statue or a painting, I came to recognize first a disturbance and then a lessening of the confusion within me as I beheld. Partly there was a liberation from the thicket of the self…

She doesn't flinch from facing the difficulty of writing about Rome:

Attempts to write about Rome made writers rhetorical, platitudinous, abstract, ornate, theoretical, polysyllabic, pompous, furious… Language seldom fails quietly, it fails noisily.

or about the fugitive essence of much of its population — especially its ancient population:

'Average' existences, at whatever level, are probably the hardest to conceive of, when they are other than one's own.

Yet some of her most fascinating insight is trained on the underclasses of ancient Rome: slaves, mechanics, women.



She writes about her approach to a description of the Forum:

My route, I have so far found, does not correspond with any recommended by an authority… Mine corresponds with my sense of order: the taking of things as one comes to them, one by one, placing them by their relation to one another. My approach to the Forum was visual rather than historic — even though 'seeing,' the greater part of the time, had to be an act of the mind's eye (or better, that of directed imagination.

and reveals thereby her greater intention: to direct that mind's eye (a particularly penetrating one, I think) to the entire scope of Rome, spatial and temporal, enlarging the reader's existence through her art, not with mere factual information but with gentle encouragement to the reader's own mediations.

Writing about Rome, she necessarily mediates on time and memory:

I wanted to establish the Forum monuments' nearness to or distance from one another in time as well as in space. Clearly some are the seniors, other he juniors. Many of them were one another's contemporaries — for how long, and when, did they share the same term of time?

We are drawn to Rome and its past because, unlike the past we studied as children in history class, fixed with precise dates and determined by sequence and succession, the Roman past attested by its living ruins is a continuum. Wars, assassinations, births, and treaties are momentary affairs, however long the moment may be: but the past that is Ancient Rome encompasses a thousand years; where the Coliseum was built in Hadrian's day (CHECK THAT), and stands still today, swans floated on Nero's lake a century or so earlier.

In the face of such contemplation a certain elegiac note is hard to evade.

The Forum, I said, leaves one with little to say — I could have as easily said, with nothing. Silence seems the only possible comment on finality. I do not think you or I feel less, but we feel, because more resignedly, more calmly.

(One thinks of Wittgenstein: "Of that we cannot speak, we must be silent.")
Though certainly not intending to write a History of Rome, she is mindful of her responsibility to History:

One must be on guard against misconceptions, when trying to grasp the movement of the history of Rome — untruths are thieves, robbing us of a birthright.

Yet she is willing to abstract, to generalize, to interpret; often through the novelist's method of construction from observation. She recalls an April in 1939, when she was enjoying an afternoon on the Palatine:

The idle yet intense air smelled of honey; Rome shimmered below with hardly a stir, and bluer than the sky were the Alban hills. There was a harmony between the distances. I was sitting on a broken ridge, reading and sometimes not reading a book. Low but clear voices, coming across the irises, told me that a couple who had been wandering ad set down behind me — students, by their serious young tones; friendly lovers or loving friends, familiar with one another as with the Palatine. If not born Romans, they had acclimatized. They talked metaphysics, for whose discussion the lucid Italian language is so perfectly framed. 'This beautiful house of sensation in which we live…' he said.

('Questa bella casa di sensazione in qualie viviamo…') The words made me their neighbour: I looked round, to see, stamped on the air, his profile intently turned, her full face abstract and calm with thought. Since, what has become of him? I must not forget him. Killed in the war against us? (Soon after that April, the war came.) If he still lives, I hope he still finds the house fair. It is still here. Is there so great a gap between the pure in sense and the pure in heart?It is a haunting book, A Time in Rome, and I'm grateful to Giovanna for directing me to it.

__________
* Roman Letters: available at Lulu Press as a paperback or an e-book; it is also available at the iTunes bookstore.

Death and the oboe

February 28, 2013—

MY BEST FRIEND in high school, from 1949 to graduation in 1952, was Merton Tyrell. We were bandmates together: in this photo we sit in the front row center, me with my bassoon across my knees, Merton with his oboe sitting on my right.

Merton — I don't think anyone called him "Mert" — was intellectual, rather formal, quite elegant, his dark hair slicked back from a high forehead, a lively eye but a rather cautious expression on his face. He played oboe, as I've said, and excelled at math and science. He drew the single “A” in our physics class, when the rest of us all got “C”s, except for one poor fellow who failed in order to establish a perfect bell-shaped curve when the final grades were posted.

I only visited Merton’s home once, when I think I was dropped off to be taken to some event together with him. It was a small but very neatly maintained cottage on a gravel driveway, neatly clipped shrubbery in place, a smiling mother in an apron. And Merton, as I recall, never visited my home; I was probably too embarrassed to suggest such a visit.

In fact I held him in considerable awe. I spent far more time with my other friend, Richard, who played French horn. All three of us lived in the country, miles from town and our high school, but Richard lived on the same bus route as I, and Merton did not. And Merton was socially well above me, better dressed, better educated, much better spoken; and a year older, too; whereas Richard lived in rather a squalid shack with poorly educated parents, and was a year behind me. And then there's the difference between the oboe and the French horn, especially in a band. (Now that I think of it, the bassoon can often be heard mediating between the other two.)

I saw Merton only once after high school. At graduation he announced that he was going to become a rich man, and would study geological exploration to that end; I on the other hand was sent to Los Angeles to a religious college, where I went seriously awry for a few years. I thought of him often over the years, but never looked for him. By the time I did, after the Internet made such searches fairly simple, I found he had died, just 65 years old, in Ukiah, only an hour's drive north of me. I know nothing else about him: whether he'd made his million, whether he left a widow and children, whether he'd kept his oboe.

Although my instrument was the bassoon, it was the oboe to which I always aspired. The oboe has always struck me as the supreme woodwind, perhaps because of my awe of the elusive, intelligent, handsome, super-cool Merton Tyrell. Played well, it is focussed, clean, present. It lacks the wide range of the clarinet, which can play much more quietly in the low register, more shrilly in the high. The oboe can't reliably play more than two and a half octaves, the most restricted range of any of the major woodwinds. But there is something in its sound that suggests intelligence, wit, authority. Wallace Stevens would not have written Asides on a Flute, or a Clarinet: only Asides on an Oboe makes sense.

My first attempt at a composition of any ambition was a concerto for oboe, French horn, and strings, imagined and partly written in my first year of college, when I was seventeen. I didn't get far, of course. I'm sure it was Merton and Richard I had in mind, them and the lovely pastoral Vaughan Williams oboe concerto.

---

William Bennett

THIS MORNING ANOTHER OBOIST died, William Bennett, principle oboist of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. He joined that orchestra in 1979, when he was only 23, and became principle eight years later, succeeding Marc Lifschey. His death was particularly tragic: he was stricken by a cerebral hemorrhage in the Symphony concert Saturday evening, toward the end of the opening solo of the Richard Strauss oboe concerto.

The concerto opens with a couple of beats of quiet rustling in the strings, then a long unbroken phrase for the soloist, over two minutes long with few opportunities to breathe. The oboe is a peculiarly difficult woodwind in that the player generally has too much air in his lungs, not too little; lungs and sinuses can suffer from the resulting pressure. Of course Bennett was a master of the instrument and well used to these problems. Furthermore, he had played the concerto the previous night, and the afternoon before that. It would be presumptuous to blame his attack on the oboe, the concerto, or the concert.

But, much as I have always loved this concerto, it will be hard to hear it in the future — especially that long, graceful, pensive opening phrase — without a kind of regret. Strauss composed four masterpieces in his last four years: Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings, from August 1944 to March 1945; the Oboe Concerto, 1945; the Duett-Concertino for clarinet and bassoon with string orchestra, 1947; and the transcendent Four Last Songs of 1948. He was in his eighties when he composed these pieces; his country was in ashes and its culture nearly as extinct; his music, which had been extravagant, then discordant forty years before, had finally come to terms with, had nearly mastered, its surrender to the rueful lyricism of Mozart.

It's notable, I think, that he followed the funereal Metamorphosen, composed for solo strings — with its transtion, at the end, into a quote of the "funeral march" of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony — with two major scores for solo woodwinds. The story of the Oboe Concerto's composition is well known: an oboist, John De Lancie, was one of the American soldiers directed to occupy Strauss's villa at the end of the war; he asked Strauss why he had never written a concerto for his instrument, and the aging composer responded favorably.

The Duett-Concertino is less well known, perhaps because it is somehow less autumnal in character. Its solo clarinet and bassoon seem to me to represent a Zerbinetta kind of mentality in response to the Ariadne of the solo oboe in its concerto. Together, though, the two works sum up Strauss's fully mature, rather remote expression of the range of human emotions: playfulness, wit, amour, awareness, maturity, age, regret.

By all accounts William Bennett was the emblematic oboist. Those who knew him mention his intelligence, his intellectual curiosity, his good humor. Joshua Kosman's obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle and his predecessor Robert Commanday's remarks in a story in the online San Francisco Classical Voice hint at the admirable man Bennett apparently was.

I lost Merton, and I never knew Bennett. I heard him many times, of course, but rarely as principle oboist; he took on that appointment the year I retired from music criticism. Perhaps that makes my mourning particularly poignant.

Radio station KDFC broadcasts San Francisco Symphony performances on Tuesday nights, and the concert including William Bennett's performance of the Strauss concerto is scheduled for this next Tuesday, March 5, at 8 pm. Yan Pascal Tortelier is the conductor; the Strauss is flanked by Debussy's Petite Suite and Mendelssohn's early Symphony no. 1. I don't know whether the entire concert will be broadcast, but no finer farewell could be imagined than hearing this gifted, complete musician repeat his last public gesture for an even wider and certainly more fully engaged audience.