The pleasure of walking

Lichen on a live oak on the Joe Rodota trail east of Sebastopol

ON SATURDAY NEXT — in only two days now! — I'm joining more than a hundred other walkers on a twenty-odd mile walk at the northern Sonoma coast, part of the bicentennial observations of the Russian colony at Fort Ross. It will be a curious departure from my normal walking style, which has never in the past involved more than three or four companions, has virtually always been in Europe, and, with one exception, has been more genteel than strenuous, more stroll than hike, usually only a few miles from one B&B or hotel to the next.

(The exception was the great walk across the French Alps, from Evian to Nice, the subject of my book Walking the French Alps (now available also as an e-Book) and the blog Alpwalk: this was a strenuous month-long hike of several hundred miles; I hope to repeat it next summer.)

Since we've hardly walked since early March, when we did eighty miles or so in Belgium and Luxembourg, I started getting in shape last Saturday, when I walked home from the farm market in Healdsburg. Wouldn't you know: I pulled up lame, and had to call the sag wagon hardly half a mile from home — the trick knee was killing me.

Monday, though, I walked five miles to the neighboring town of Forestville; and then after a leisurely lunch with friends walked the five miles back. I wore the old reliable Ace elastic bandage on the offending knee, and had no problems. And yesterday my daughter T. joined me on a longer outing, fourteen and a half miles, from Forestville along a county trail, paved in asphalt, south through Graton to Sebastopol, then east to Santa Rosa.

I've been using MotionX-GPS to track these walks — a free application that runs on the iPhone, constantly checking its location against whatever GPS satellites it can "see," recording the results, then returning the statistics: length, elevation change, speed. I'm not obsessive about this; I haven't taken advantage of a number of bells and whistles — adding photos, for example, or naming waypoints, or looking into the Facebook integration. I do e-mail the MotionX results to myself, so that I can look up these "tracks" on the MotionX website, whence you can even download the saved GPS waypoints to Google Earth and thereby revisit the walks in their geographical context.

(You can look at these websites too, but only for six months, after which they're taken down. Yesterday's Forestville-Santa Rosa walk is here.)

Walking is one of my greatest enthusiasms. For years I bicycled, and of course for years we've taken various kinds of car trips. In March we drove across France in three or four days; in April we drove to Pasadena and back, visiting wildflower areas and a few of the California Missions; just a week or two ago we drove up to Portland and back, a thousand miles, in only a few days. Cycling and driving have their virtues. (So do trains, for that matter.)

But walking — now there's the way to experience terrain; and cultural geography too. Because of the recent, uncharacteristically late rains, and because our trail took us along Atascadero Creek and a number of bogs and then into the great Laguna de Santa Rosa for a mile or so, the air was a little humid; under trees for the first four or five miles we heard birdsong; wildflowers peeped out at us from the trail margins, and the smells and the heavy air made me think of riverside walks we've taken in Netherlands.

There's so much to see on a walk like this; so much to wonder about. What's that wildflower, for example, that sports both yellow and orange blossoms on a single plant? The leaves suggest some kind of pea, but what is it?

We often walked past fences guarding private yards and gardens; it's always surprising, the number of houses tucked away out of sight in these rural bedroom communities. In older sections — in north Sebastopol, for example, but in the run-down but charming Roseland area of Santa Rosa — old roses escape the gardens they've been planted in, sprawling among blackberries, climbing oaks.

We took a few nuts and some dried fruit; I had a slice of bread and some cheddar cheese in my lightweight daypack. We stopped in Sebastopol for a refreshing lemon sherbet —

gelato al limon; gelato al limon; gelato al limon…

and, a little further on, a macchiato; and then we turned our backs to the sun to walk easterly toward our destination in Santa Rosa, first across the bogs of the Laguna, then on a boring, straight stretch — nearly all this trail is on abandoned railroad right-of-way — in full sun, and within easy earshot of a busy road.

Even here, though, there were visual surprises. That glorious live oak photographed at the top of this post, its lichen-covered branches energized by sunlight now lower in the late afternoon. Later, as we enter the city of Santa Rosa, industrial outskirts: an abandoned gravel depot, its fascinating, forbidden machinery beckoning to the little boy still alert in a man nearing eighty. A cherry tree hung over a high board fence off to the right, the fruit still a week from perfection but for that reason unmolested by the birds: surely a handful won't give me a stomach-ache!

At the end of the walk the knees complain a bit when we sit at a sidewalk café to wait for our pickups; and at the end of the day I'm hungry and thirsty. This morning I feel great; no knee problems at all, though in truth I'm just a little stiff — and I lost two or three pounds yesterday, in spite of the quarts of water and glasses of wine I downed in the evening. We'll see how things to on the History Walk, day after tomorrow…

Three Pieces for Piano

ENDLESS, THE TYPOGRAPHICAL errors that creep into a job of musical typesetting. I wrote these three little pieces nearly fifty years ago, using a Rapidograph pen, an Ames lettering angle, and India ink — FW was the brand, as I recall — at the drafting table my father-in-law had kindly donated to my studio, which in those days was the basement of a small apartment on Berkeley's Francisco Street. (That studio soon turned into a combined bedroom-playroom for our three kids, and I moved shop into what was originally meant to be a breakfast nook.)

As you see, the piece is fairly screaming for typographical errors. The two barlines inside the top system, for example, should probably be invisible. OMG, there's another typo: "low" has lost its vowel in the italicized pedalling instruction in the first measure. But you know what? Good enough is the enemy of perfect, and this is good enough for me, at least for the present. I'll fix these in the master file, but our Internet connection is too slow and unreliable today for me to re-upload the file and then deal with Lulu.com to replace the one now in press.

Here's the thing: these Three Pieces are the earliest things of mine that I still like to hear, not that I ever do — they waited until 1993 for their premiere, by the late Rae Imamura (who played them, interestingly, in Kirnberger Three rather than in equal temperament); and they haven't been heard since. I don't go out of my way to court performances.

You can read more about the pieces on my website, and you can hear a somewhat tweaked synthesization of the first minute of the Three Pieces here. If you decide you'd like to play them, why you can order the sheet music, just by clicking on that green cover up there at the upper left. Please do: you will make me very happy.

Sam Shepard in Sebastopol; Lou Harrison in Berkeley; The Eastside View everywhere

setting up the concert in the Berkeley Museum

JUST THREE SHORT NOTES tonight — it's late; my eyes are glazing. But I have to mention:

Fool for Love, the play by Sam Shepard, opened last night in Sebastopol's Main Stage West. Elizabeth Craven directs;Brent Lindsay and Amy Pinto star as Eddie and May with very able assists from John Craven and Keith Baker as Old Man and Martin. Lindsey and I thought it a really fine performance — tense and laconic, scary and funny, ultimately resonant with all the incestuous power of Greek tragedy, packaged in a seedy desert motel. The show runs another couple of weeks in Sebastopol, then moves to Santa Rosa. See it if you possibly can.

Lou Harrison's music was featured in a marvelous concert Friday night in the Berkeley Art Museum, where Willie Winant played the beautiful Solo (to Anthony Cirone), for tenor bells tuned to just-intonation D major (but on a mode resting on A), Sarah Cahill gave us the piano solo Dance for Lisa Karon from 1938 but only rediscovered recently, the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio played the Varied Trio written for them in 1986, and a large combined chorus under Marika Kuzma's energetic direction, with the joyful William Winant Percussion Group at Lou's American Gamelan, honored the audience and Lou's memory with the cantata La Koro Sutro of 1971.

Lou's music is strong, sweet, honest, humane, and passionate; it exactly expresses the magnificent gift and pleasure that was Lou himself. We saw Eva Soltes's film about Lou a week or so ago — Lou Harrison: A World of Music and were reminded, as if we could ever forget, what a fine and fabulous man and mind and musician he was, and how incredibly lucky we were to have known him — and, never forget, his partner Bill Colvig too. I miss them both: but it is some solace to have their sound still resounding in our ears.

On a much lesser note, I've just published The Idea of Permanence, a book version of most of last year's posts to this blog, with reviews of Orphée and Satyagraha and Nixon in China and Le marteau sans maître, and comments on painters and their work, and many reports from a month in Venice, and things too fugitive to mention. It costs $15.95, and you can find out more about it here.

State of mind

IF YOU REMEMBER the 1960s, the saying goes, you weren't there: I remember them, and I was. What I don't remember is a lot of the 1970s, and I think I know why: I was busy. This blinding revelation occurred to me today on the top floor of the UC Berkeley Art Museum. We'd reached it the slow methodical way, walking up the ramps, working our way through a show called State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970, part of Pacific Standard Time, a multi-museum exhibition investigating (mostly) conceptual and documentary art made in California in the neighborhood of 1970.

I was more or less active as an art critic at the time, first for KQED television, later for the Oakland Tribune, and in the course of work I rubbed up against these conceptualists quite often. They were of course only one part of what I had to deal with; it wasn't always easy to convince the boss conceptual art was important. Or legitimate, even, for that matter; the lingering suspicion that it was rife with fraud and foolishness was pervasive in editorial offices. A clipping of a column by the old San Francisco Examiner art critic Alexander Fried, documenting the important Berkeley group Sam's Cafe, shows that even the critics had their doubts.

And truth to tell I think it wasn't only because of Conceptualism's marginality within the establishment press that I spent relatively little time on it. The tendency of Conceptualism, of all the versions of "process art" that were contending in those years — earth art, body art, documentation art, and various sorts of politically motivated exercise — their tendency to drown in the photographs and videos and paragraphs and pamphlets they themselves spawned and spun out — that tendency was offputting. I used to complain about critics who complained when artists did things that seemed to them, the critics, more like criticism than art, as if the critics' own territory was being impinged upon; but I see now that I felt exactly the same way, and the irritation I directed at my colleagues (and competitors) was in fact irritation with myself.

I still believe that the value in this movement, and it was a considerable value indeed, lay in its message that art lay in the doing, including in the idea of the doing; not in the discussion. Even such clearly visual art as Edward Ruscha's books of photographs — All the Buildings on the Sunset Strip, for example, which is triumphantly displayed in this exhibition — I can't help being more impressed, seized, with the thought of the photographer moving his equipment, taking up these positions, waiting for the right moment, than I am with the photographic results. Looking at Vermeer's Milkmaid, or for that matter witnessing a production of Einstein on the Beach, I'm aware of course of the monumental effort that went into the production: but I am seized with the magnificence of the result, with its depth and complexity and resolution, with its presence; and all this is involved in, and itself involves, a corporeality which (as I understand it) was precisely the aspect of art the Conceptualists were thought to be denying.

It was of course enjoyable to reminisce, wandering through these galleries. We'd prepared for it by starting downstairs in a small exhibition of hundreds, perhaps thousands of everyday things sent to the collector Robert Warner by the Correspondance Artist Ray Johnson; a great testimony to Johnson's compulsive submersion of any self-realized significance of his own genius in the jetsam of his urban and social environment, a sort of democratization and Americanization of the urges that had motivated Joseph Cornell and Kurt Schwitters. And a vicious illustration of Thoreau's observation:

Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind

State of Mind, the installation, is to the museum visitor as Ray Johnson's collectings were to Robert Warner, I think: overwhelming accumulations of texts and images produced and gathered by an insistent artistic methodology, at once intent on expression and suspicious of, cynical about the very existence of anything like "expression." And as the visual record of this movement gathers to make its curatorial point — leaving aside the artists' intentions, which are inevitably confused by the circles of recursiveness the curators and critics weave around them — as that record gathers, it inevitably produces a sort of meta-Conceptualism. To spend much time contemplating this in any serious way, to bring intellectual contemplation and analysis to it, leads to madness.

No wonder I spent the 1970s largely ignoring all this. I saw it, knew about it, enjoyed much of it, even fiddled with it myself, noting down ideas for impossible or dangerous sculptures, for projects linking Bay Area summits, for quartets in which the musicians imitate members of the audience, who will inevitably catch on and begin imitating the musicians, and so on.

And then Lindsey, who'd been inspecting all this somewhat more attentively than I had, called out: Charles! Did you see this?

She was looking at six black-and-white photographs documenting Terry Fox's Defoliation, a work he did in 1970 for the opening of a conceptualist group show at the University Art Gallery in its lovely old Steam Room days before the present Museum was built; a piece involving his burning a design in a planting outside the gallery.

There in the photo at the lower left was a familiar figure holding a microphone to Terry's face. I was at KQED at the time, producing a show called Culture Gulch, a roundup of the arts as they were going on in the Bay Area in those days — a half-hour weekly show involving reviews, interviews, conversations and performances in the television studio or visits to artist's studios and pubic venues. Amazing, what we could do in those days; sad, that there is no physical record…

Oops. I just fell into my own trap, didn't I? Anyhow, there's the late Terry Fox, I think perhaps as principled and pointed a Conceptualist as any of them, who intuitively understood the degrees of irony attendant on his work, his kind of art; he's gleefully concentrating on the destructive beauty and the physical enjoyment of directing his torch against that foliage; there's the Charles Shere of forty-two years ago, equally rapt at the flames and their work and meaning.

Thinking back on all this, I realize that the very marginality of my own journalistic work of those years has some resonance with Conceptualism, and with my own conflicted responses to it (and the antecedent of the word "it," here, is deliberately left ambiguous). My work for the Tribune was little read or noticed, fugitive as fishwrap. And in those days television work was similarly fugitive: no DVDs, not even videotape yet, and of what may have happened to the old film stock I have no idea at all. (Somewhere I still have a number of 35mm transparencies, and a film interview with Georgia O'Keeffe. I think.)

As Chebutykin says: What difference does it make. A question capable of being taken in more ways than one. This way madness lies. Madness, and perhaps enlightenment.

•State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970, to June 17. Tables of Content: Ray Johnson and Robert Warner Bob Box Archive, to May 20; both at UC Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way, Berkeley; 510.642.0808

Einstein on the Beach

I WROTE ABOUT the magnificent opera Einstein on the Beach here a few weeks ago, after seeing the premiere of the present production in Montpellier, on March 16. One doesn’t see Einstein on the Beach very often; it was too monumental an event to let pass without comment — however difficult it is to describe. The opera was, together with a fiftieth birthday party in Luxembourg, the compelling reason for spending that month in Europe; it was certainly the reason for the mad dash we’d taken across France in the previous four days. When the production’s tour was first announced, in the fall of 2011, we made it a point to plan to see one of the performances in Berkeley, scheduled for October 2012. But the opera is so legendary, was so significant, will be so fascinating and evocative, why not see it more than once? A preview performance of this new production — revival is perhaps the better term — was scheduled in Ann Arbor, and we could probably have gone to it; but wouldn’t it be more fun to see the recréation en première mondiale in France, not so far from Avignon, the site of its original premiere in July 1976? And so we’d bought our airplane tickets, and made our plans.

Since seeing Einstein in the mid-1980s we’ve seen a number of other Philip Glass operas: Satyagraha live and live-broadcast from the Metropolitan; Akhneton in an effective reduced production by an experimental company in Oakland (California), Orphée effectively staged by Ensemble Parallèle in San Francisco. I even remembered a hallucinatory The Photographer from a production in Amsterdam, many years ago. They hold the stage beautifully, these pieces, and they’ve grown logically out of Einstein, but they’ve moved on.

I have an odd fix on Glass’s music: in principle it’s not my cup of tea; I find its repetitive structures formulaic, a postmodern successor to the harmonic sequences of the tonal period of “classical music.” When actually hearing his music, though, I’m frequently persuaded by the melodic contours; the repetitive structures move subtly into larger periods; and I’m reminded of the smooth evolution of music from late Schubert through Bruckner and Sibelius to Glass.

Interestingly, neither Bruckner nor Sibelius composed an opera; and Schubert composed his only early in his short career, with no success. Glass has found a way to bring what had been a nontheatrical kind of music, building its momentum in long abstract periods, into the opera house. It can be argued that Wagner is his predecessor, but I think that’s a mistake: Wagner’s operas are essentially Romantic narrative music-dramas, like those of Beethoven and von Weber, swollen in size: they are not extensive, but bloated. Glass’s achievement has been to separate the narrative and emotional theatrical content of his operas from the musical processes that drive them. His predecessor is not Wagner, whose leitmotives are sonic illustrations accompanying the narrative, but perhaps Bruckner, whose long structural blocks of musical processes construct a sonic architecture within which the listener — and, in Glass’s case, the cast — are able to move, or stop, or listen, or sound, or contemplate.

All that was apparent enough from simply having sat in our box for four and a half hours and watched and listened. Then, though, after the fact, I read the program book, a fine 128-page production with photographs, an introductory essay by the dramaturg Jérémie Szpirglas, the complete text in the original English and French translation, and a characteristically frank, well-spoken, and useful commentary by the composer, as well as a few comments by Wilson:

If I act as an artist, it’s because I wonder why something is.
If one knows exactly what one does, there is no reason to do it.
If I work, it’s to ask myself: What is it?

(The second line is a paraphrase of a mot of Gertrude Stein’s: If it can be done, why do it? )
And, a page later, referring to Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1977 portrait of Lucinda Childs, who was the choreographer (and partial librettist) of Einstein on the Beach,

Lucinda est à la fois d’une froideur glaciale et très chaleureuese. On voit dans son regard qu’elle comprend la force de l’immobilité et du mouvement intérieur.

The program booklet was in French, of course; I set the original down from now on in my quotes, and supply my own translation:

Lucinda is at once glacially cold and quite warm. You see in her expression that she has the power of both immobility and interior motion.

Einstein on the Beach is, of course, “about” Albert Einstein, whose pure reason was one of the engines of the modern enlightenment, conceiving ideas so revolutionary — more than any perhaps since those of Galileo — that they are known by the masses. (Or were, in my time: it’s possible that the recent decline in public education in the United States has changed that. I’d rather not think so.)

When Glass and Wilson met, it was inevitable that they would collaborate on an opera. But on what subject? What mythic Twentieth-century subject would provide the subject for the most revolutionary opera since Monteverdi’s Orfeo, which took the mythic inventor of music itself — and let’s not forget that to the ancient Greeks there was no distinction between poetry and music — for its subject? Glass tells us:

Wilson wanted Charlie Chaplin or Adolph Hitler as our inspiration; I preferred Gandhi. Einstein was the choice.

The choice was appropriate for two reasons: narratively, Einstein was of course one of the primary revolutionaries ushering in the modern age. Not only for his insights into mathematics and physics: for his philosophical and moral positions as well. And not only for their fixed and final positions, but for the excruciating positional dilemmas they would precipitate: he was the one who mooted the atomic bomb to President Roosevelt, in order to finesse a victory in the war against the unspeakably evil (and, be it noted, historically retrograde) empires-in-the-making of Hitler and Tojo; but he was also a pacifist:

La pire des institutions grégaire se prénomme l’armée. Je la hais. Si un homme peut éprouver quelque plaisir à defiler en rang aux sons d’une musique, je méprise cet homme… Il ne mérite pas un cerveau humain puisqu’une moelle épinière le satisfait.


[The worst of the herding institutions is called the army. I hate it. If a man can show some pleasure marching to the sounds of music, I don’t trust him… He doesn’t deserve a human brain, since a spinal cord satisfies him.]

Robert Wilson was already predisposed to celebrate Einstein, since his own esthetic had been greatly informed by the mathematician’s discoveries:

Pour moi, une ligne horizontale est l’espace, une ligne verticale, le temps.
C’est cette intersection du temps et de l’espace qui est l’architecture élémentaire de tout.

[For me, a horizontal line represents space, a vertical line, time.
It’s this intersection of time and space which is the elemental architecture of everything.]

And Philip Glass — still quoting from the program booklet — says

Le temps, dans la musique, c’est la durée. C’est l’un des points communs de notre travail : Bob et moi devons travailler en temps réel. Nous partageions une conscience du temps, de la durée. Bob étend le théâtre dans lespace et le temps, je projette la musique dans l’espace et le temps.


[Time, in music, is duration. It’s one of the things in common in our work: Bob and I have to work in real time. We share an awareness of time, of duration. Bob runs theater in space and time; I plan music in space and time.]

EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH unfolds through four acts, each in two scenes, the scenes falling into three groups. Appropriately, it is an opera “about” structure, relationships, and panorama: Einstein is not treated as a character, a biographical subject; he is present throughout as a representative or a symbol of his way of thinking, and of the revolutionary result his thought brought to his century. In fact, the opera is about Einstein’s century, depicted from a very American point of view. The panorama of that century — surveyed from a perspective focussed on the interrelationships of ideas, technology, and humanity — is, I think, what is meant by the “beach.”

The structure, very important in the concept of the opera, is simple: and here I can do no better than translate from the program of the original Avignon 1976 production, as reproduced in the Montpellier booklet:

The opera is constructed not on a literary plot but upon an architectural structure which subdivides the duration of the performance into sections of equal length and organizes them into a succession of three themes each of which is met three times.

On this rigorous scheme Robert Wilson has conceive with great precision a chain of images which are perceived as oneiric visions: visions of landscapes, of a train under way, of public benches… which are grouped around three main visual themes: a Train; a Trial; a Space ship above a field.

On this structure, and simultaneously, Philip Glass has composed music which by its intensity and its repetitive method leads to a hypnotic state. Through its modulatory form, this music attains a profound interiority, finding a place outside of time. And it is precisely the work of Wilson and Glass, each supplementing and reinforcing the other, that both are profoundly concerned with the search for a new manner of perceiving time.

Andy De Groat has conceived choreography on the same principle: sequences based on a very simple vocabulary repeat and trace rigorously drawn forms within the scenic space. [Subsequent to the 1976 production this element has been provided, with equal fidelity to the Wilson-Glass concept, by Lucinda Childs.]

The unity of the opera proceeds from Wilson’s visual constructions, Glass’s music, and [Childs’s] choreography which are organized around a common structure taken as a given:

Knee Play 1
	Act I	Scene 1	A	a Train
		Scene 2	A	a Trial (a Bed)
Knee Play 2
	Act II	Scene 3	A	a Space ship above a field
		Scene 1	B	a Train
Knee Play 3
	Act III	Scene 2	B	a Trial (a Bed) / a Prison
		Scene 3	B	a Space ship above a field
Knee Play 4
	Act IV	Scene 1	C	a Building (a Train)
		Scene 2	C	a Bed
		Scene 3	c	Interior of a Space ship
Knee Play 5

In lieu of intermissions there are five “knee plays,” so named by Wilson because they function as articulations: the audience is free to move about during them. Here is how this schema went in the Montpellier production; italicized words extracted from the libretto, followed by the author’s name in square brackets:

Knee Play 1: two characters, side by side, dressed as Einstein in the famous photograph (short-sleeved white shirt, grey trousers, braces), one reciting numbers, the other singing. It could get the railroad for these workers. It could get for it is were… All these are the days my friends and these are the days my friends… You cash the bank of world traveler from 10 months ago… [Christopher Knowles]

Act I scene 1A Train: an old-fashioned locomotive (19th century) arrives slowly. It could be some one that has been somewhere like them… It could say where by numbers this one has… What is it… These circles… nd that is the answer to your problem… This always be… [Christopher Knowles]

Act I scene 2A Trial 1: a courtroom trial. So this is about the things on the table so this one could be counting up… This one has been being very American… This about the gun gun gun gun gun [Christopher Knowles] … “In this court, all men are equal.” You have heard those words many times before… But what about all women?… “My sisters, we are in bondage, and we need to be liberated. Liberation is our cry… The woman’s day is drawing near, it’s written in the stars…” [Mr. Samuel M. Johnson]
(These “Trials” were alternatively titled “Beds” in the original production)

Knee Play 2
Act II scene 3A Field Dance 1: an abstract, geometrically patterned dance.

Act II scene 1B Night Train: a couple vignetted on the platform of an observation car, crescent moon above

Knee Play 3
Act III scene 2B Trial/Prison: The song I just heard is turning… This thing This will be the time that you come… This will be counting that you always wanted has been very very tempting… [Knowles]
I was in the prematurely air-conditioned supermarket
and there were all these aisles
and there were all these bathing caps that you could buy…
I wasn’t tempted to buy one… [Lucinda Childs]
I feel the earth move… I feel the tumbling down tumbling down…This will be doing the facts of David Cassidy of were in this case of feelings… [Knowles]

Act III scene 3B Field Dance 2

Knee Play 4
Act IV, like Act II, lacks text in the program as distributed; the small chorus and occasionally vocal soloists simply count: one two three four five six seven eight…

Act IV scene 1C Building: here, an extended improvised tenor saxophone solo by Andrew Sterman

Act IV scene 2C Bed: extended vocal solo (Hai-Ting Chinn)

Act IV scene 3C Spaceship interior: a complex simultaneity of actors, dancers, and scenic elements

Knee Play 5 The day with its cares and perplexities is ended and the night is now upon us… Two lovers sat on a park bench… “My love for you …has no limits, no bounds. Everything must have an ending except my love for you…" [Johnson]

In the concluding Knee Play the locomotive so prominent in the first scene has been replaced by a bus, as Einstein’s discovery of the principle of relativity, conventionally explained by the analogy of the different perceptions of a single event by a person standing on the ground and another on a moving train, has been replaced by everyday experiences felt by ordinary people everywhere.

So the curve of the opera, if you will, is from the interior mental process of Einstein, contemplating the cosmos as it is and formulating a relational theory that explains it, to the interior emotional response to a similar contemplation as it is announced and expressed, in mundane language, by an ordinary person.
And (to continue this compromised, reductive view of the opera) the peak of that curve is the depiction of the intricacies involved in such contemplation, and the consequences the awareness and expression of such intricacies entail, in public and societal settings.
Einstein on the Beach is postmodern opera at its inception. It’s nothing if not recursive, self-referential, intertextual, rhetorical. But through the striking clarity of Wilson’s vison, the hypnotic effect of Glass’s score, the mesmerizing clarity of Childs’s choreography, and the easily apprehended and disarmingly simple texts, its performance is overwhelming and unforgettable. One looks back on attending it with awe and pleasure, finding detail after detail further enriching the artless grandeur of its concept, further clarifying its relevance to ordinary life in this twenty-first century.

In my own experience, facing works of art throughout my life, it ranks with visiting the Greek temples at Paestum, seeing Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, reading Finnegans Wake, hearing Goldberg Variations. I thank Wilson, Glass, and Childs for the privilege of sharing their insight. In this opera they have achieved — through considerable work and private sacrifice! — a timeless work of art. The least anyone can do, given the opportunity, is to see it, and celebrate it.

Eastside Works and Days

Eastside Road, May 4, 2012—

A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO, on waking up in a friend's little guest cottage in a quiet back garden in Berkeley, a heroic couplet came to me in a flash:

Already in my shorts, I rise
To verify the morning skies…

and before long I'd added another ten lines, just for the hell of it. Then I mostly forgot about it until Christmas that year — 1998 — when, feeling sentimental and perhaps a little old, I thought I'd add verses to it, to make a little garland of doggerel for the grandchildren.

There were seven of them in those days, and we had just moved from Berkeley to Eastside Road the previous year, and were settling into a quiet life of gardening and reading and writing, the life I'd always thought would set in in our seventh decade. I suppose in writing them I was rubbing my eyes in wonder at our good fortune. I still do: it's a pleasant life. Not unmarked by little disappointments and losses, of course, but nothing, so far, we aren't able to deal with. I hope I'm not tempting the fates here. Fates, I praise you; please don't think me complacent!

If you're curious to find out what happens after the verification of the morning skies, you can read the entire garland of Eastside Works and Days here. You can even print it out, double-sided, and make a little booklet.

Road trip

Eastside Road, April 25, 2012—

AS THE PREVIOUS POST indicates, we were down in Pasadena over the weekend, seeing plays at A Noise Within. Much as we like the company, and (for the most part) their productions, I look forward to the trip itself almost more. As Gertrude Stein notes someplace, Plays and Landscape have an elective affinity. (Actually what she says, as I recall, is that a landscape has no purpose other than providing a site for landscape or for battle: but cut me a little slack here.)

If I am religious, my religion is Landscape. Chekhov explains this better than I can:

The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and It will sound as indifferently and motonously when we are all not more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings — the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky — Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.

—Chekhov: The Lady with the Dog, quoted in Janet Malcolm: Reading Chekhov

I found Malcolm's book interesting and useful. It combines, or better perhaps merges, literary criticism, travel, and first-person essay, all genres dear to my heart; and if she occasionally slips into a snippy mood she does not dwell there: with Chekhov at one's side, it's hard to remain scornful or overweening for more than a moment.

The quoted passage stands on the very first page of Reading Chekhov. Malcolm has gone to Yalta to visit Chekhov's home, and the seaside cottage that was his getaway; and what better way to set the scene than through the master's own words? She soon flashes back to earlier stages of her literary pilgrimage, visits to Petersburg and Moscow; and in those pages we're reminded that Janet Malcolm is a city-dweller; she doesn't take to the countryside as easily, I think, as Chekhov does. She writes about the stories more than the plays; she writes well about the letters (and quotes liberally from them, making me hunger to read them soon). She writes about Chekhov's rather surprising journey to Sakhalin, and the report he wrote on the lunatic asylum there.

I read Reading Chekhov quickly, in a borrowed copy no longer at hand — just as well, perhaps: I don't really want to write extensively about it here. Partly because of the speed, because it was read late at night in hotel rooms, and while seeing plays and driving through landscape, the book has gone into a vague and rather mysterious corner in the theater of my memory, taking on the quality of something W.G. Sebald might have written. I didn't take any notes while reading it, either: but I remember being particularly impressed with Chekhov's letter to his brother, urging him to put himself in order, and particularly to get some culture: to live well on this earth, among civil human society, one needs culture, which includes, Chekhov makes clear, discipline, kindness, modesty, and truthfulness.

You have only one failing, and the falseness of your position, and your unhappiness and your catarrh of the bowels are all due to it. That is your utter lack of culture. Forgive me, please, but veritas magis amicitia. You see, life has its conditions. In order to feel comfortable among educated people, to be at home and happy with them, one must be cultured to a certain extent…

—Malcolm, Reading Chekhov, p. 97 (I find the passage on Google Books)

Malcolm traveled by air and rail: Chekhov crossed Siberia, she points out, for the most part, in horse-drawn conveyances, on rutted and muddy roads. For most of us, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, landscape is experienced through glass and at speed. What Stein knew is that landscape divulges its content and its meaning only at slower tempo. Among the many differences between live theater and film or television perhaps the least discussed is tempo: theater is slower, even when it is punctuated, as are battles, by moments of violence and the violence of haste. I've noted here before that Bruckner's music is best appreciated by those who are accustomed to long walks: like Schubert, like Sibelius, Bruckner was accustomed to them.

(Mozart was I think not much of a walker; his awareness of landscape was formed during his childhood from the view of it receding from a coach moving as swiftly as possible — perhaps not very swiftly — as he sat next to his valet-companion on the rear seat, making up stories of reverse-motion worlds. I think that may be why his music often seems to have been conceived from the final moment forward to the beginning, guaranteeing all threads to converge and resolve at the conclusion.)

Looking north from Mission San Juan Bautista

As we like to do, we drove to Los Angeles with a friend, stopping to see another friend in Ojai on the way down, and dawdling in search of wildflowers on the way back. We stopped at Missions, too: I have my favorite sites and don't like to miss a chance to revisit them. One is at the edge of the little rose garden at Mission San Juan Bautista, where you gaze out over a flat expanse of farmland toward the eastern scarp of the San Andreas Fault. Last Thursday that view was spoiled a little bit by the extensive sheets of plastic covering the soil, which was probably being fumigated — one doesn't like to think about such modern industrial compromises with the higher aims of our existence, but there it is; and since it is there, it's good to be reminded of it.

(Others will be similarly discouraged by the thought of the hundreds of bodies in unmarked graves, just inside the wall in the "Indian Cemetery." It's politically fashionable to insist that the Mission movement was nothing but evil, exploitive, even cynical. You'll perhaps not be surprised to hear I think that's a bit simplistic: not only autre temps, autre moeurs, but also other truths, I believe.)

Then there was Ojai. Its valley was an inspiration, I believe, for James Nordhoff's Shangri-la; the writer lived in the Ojai valley. It is one huge citrus grove — citrus and avocados — relieved from time to time by the rather palatial residences of the rich who live quietly at the foot of the east-west range protecting them from north winds.

Churchill Orchard, Ojai

Malcolm points out that Chekhov writes of a Nature quite inflected by human activity; the natural beauty he contemplates is not wilderness but horticulture; and on this road trip I come to realize once again that I agree. The reassurance of the everpresent beauty — justice, even, I would say — derives from an intersection of natural context and human occupation or use. An appropriate use, of course, at the natural tempo and scale deriving from the natural energies: wind, water, gravity, animal and manpower.

I can never drive through California's Central Valley near Williams without thinking of old photographs my grandfather had, of enormous steam tractors big as small houses, standing out in mown and threshed wheatfields: they took the place of huge teams of horses, but likely moved not much faster. They opened a door, though, with the straining pull of an insatiable demand for ever faster, cheaper energy; and the result has been a widening of the gap between rich and poor, and a terrible cost to the environment. Demand for cheap labor, always related to willingness to exploit others for one's own comfort, always seems to result in some form of slavery.

The question arises inevitably on visiting California's Missions. We stopped at Mission San Miguel on the way back, after crossing the magnificent Figueroa Mountain in search of wildflowers — the blue and gold of lupine and poppy against sandstone and serpentine, enhanced by eddies of Kurosawa mists on an early afternoon troubled by changeable weather. The San Miguel sanctuary was badly damaged by the San Simeon earthquake of a few years ago, but the community and its parish rallied and somehow raised the funds necessary for a fine restoration. The cloister — wrong word, I'm sure, for the interior courtyard, originally little more than a stockyard — is nicely and modestly gardened; the cells left pretty much in the dark, furnished with the rawhide beds and crude tables and chairs.

Clearly the local population was worked in the vineyards and orchards, at the presses and ovens; and one can only wonder what they thought as they sat on the adobe floor of the church listening to sermons in Spanish and masses in Latin. The mental effort must have matched the physical, and they must have known they lived in a time of utter change, plunged from a preliterate hunter-gatherer society into one organized through the printed word, monetary exchange, and travel across great distances. I think California's Missions provide a glimpse into the Russian feudalism still living memory but soon to change utterly in Chekhov's day. I think, too, that we are utterly misled by sentiment when we try to apply contemporary concepts of social justice, themselves often based greatly on suspect assumptions of material needs and available energies, to a world now perhaps hopelessly distant from our ken.
align="left" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5">

Mission San Antonio

We drove from Bradley, on Highway 101, westerly through Lockwood to Mission San Antonio, one of the most isolated of the Missions. Much of the way we were driving through Fort Hunter Liggett, whose target ranges and airstrips are scattered discreetly among stately oaks in a broad, tranquil valley. The Mission itself is changed since I was last there, say twelve years ago. The Franciscans left, we were told; they'd pretty much let the place go to nature; Dominicans have taken over, the place is cleaned up, it's made available to groups for retreats, and Mass is again celebrated every Sunday for a local parish of three hundred souls or so.

The calla lilies were still standing in vases at the front of the sanctuary, their perfume mingling with that of candles and incense. God knows I am no Catholic, nor Christian either: but I respect the better instincts of those who are, and appreciate their places of gathering in devotion to the forces they think determine their nature and destiny. As I learned in my first week of college, in a required course on religion (I'd been sent to a Christian college in Los Angeles):

Religion is the serious and social attitude of individuals or communities toward the power or powers which they conceive as having ultimate control over their interests and destinies.

—James Bisset Pratt, The Religious Consciousness, page 2

From there we drove on to King City, where a county park features an interesting museum of local agriculture whose relics reminded me once again of my grandparents and great-grandparents; and then northeasterly to Highway 25, which runs north through the valley of the San Andreas Fault toward Hollister. This valley can not be photographed to any advantage; its physical impact on the visitor is spatial more than visual. The road runs between parallel ridges, the Pinnacles on the west, the mercury-bearing San Idria on the right. Apart from the asphalt the only human evidence is fencing and the occasional farmstead. The fields are grazed, of course; one wonders what the grasses would have been before cattle were introduced nearly two hundred years ago.

Lichen-encrusted oak off Highway 25 (photo: March 2011)

When we entered Cold Creek Tavern on the Cuesta pass outside Santa Barbara, at 11:30, we were the only customers; when we left the place was nearly full. Twenty minutes later, when we left Highway Highway 154 to drive along Armour Canyon Road toward Figueroa Mountain Road, we were blissfully alone. We saw one or two cars on the mountain road. We saw none on the road from Bradley to Mission San Antonio, except for one slow tank truck whose driver obligingly signalled us to overtake him. We saw none on Highway 25. It continues to amaze me that on leaving the busy highways one can be alone for hours on these California back roads, even today, even after all the publicity their pleasures have produced.

Many more photographs from this road trip can be found here.

Three Plays at A Noise Within

Pasadena, April 22, 2012—

A WEEK LATER, and still thinking about Seagull. Two nights ago we saw Illusion, Tony Kushner's adaptation of Pierre Corneille's 17th-century fantasy l'Illusion comique, and I couldn't help thinking of Chekhov afterward. Seagull opens with a play within the play: Konstantine Treblyev, one of Chekhov's main characters, an intelligent and artistic but unachieved young man apparently in his mid-twenties, has written a Symbolist drama set far in the future on a lifeless world; he quickly and impusively cancels its performance when his actress mother belittles it.

It's not hard to think Chekhov is writing partly about himself, and the relationship his own pathbreaking art bears to the popular literature of his day. Like Kostya, Chekhov writes for the future; some of the time, I think, deliberately attempting to shape that future.

Equally true of the 27-year-old Corneille, who drew on commedia dell''arte as well as classical genre to write l'Illusion. A prologue, three comedies, and a tragedy, he called it, bringing new vigor to old forms by playing them off one another. It's a postmodern idea; it's recursive; it's innovative. Of course today's audiences aren't as familiar with the classical sources as Corneille's audience would presumably have been: hence the advantage of a Kushner adaptation, which I must say respects the original surprisingly consistently.

Kushner retains the original rhymed metrics only occasionally, and then at heightened introspective moments. He omits one character, folding his lines into asides. He adds an inspired epilogue. But he retains the original's sense of wonder, hilarity, and romance, alternating and often combined, throwing the audience off guard as often as the pivotal character Pridamant (Nick Ullett, stolid and diverting), whose search for the errant son Calisto (Graham Hamilton, dimensioned and memorable) precipitates all these improbable events.

I don't know the extent to which Shakespeare's plays were already known in France in 1634, when l'Illusion was premiered. It's easy to see elements of The Tempest here: Pridamant consults the magician Alcandre (Deborah Strang, reliably effective) for news of his son, ten years after losing him, and in a series of scenes she presents him, his romances, his reversals, his eventual execution — this doesn't really qualify as a spoiler. Like Shakespeare, too, Corneille uses extant dramatic conventions (not to mention old plots and routines) to contain, or suggest, really profound contemplations of illusion and reality, convention and enterprise, imponderability and meaning.

This production brought a fair amount of new talent to the repertory company A Noise Within, whose plays we've attended for ten years or so. Strang's a company veteran and always a real pleasure to see, but Ullett and Hamilton are new to the company. So too are Casey Stangl, whose direction was swift and sure, and Keith Mitchell, whose scenic design was moody but compelling. The cast was remarkably consistent: Jeff Doba as the creepy servant Amanuensis, Alan Blumenfeld as a lunatic Matamore, Devon Sorvari as Calisto's beloved Melibea, and Abby Craden as the ingenue Elicia, Freddy Douglas as Calisto's rival Pleribo. Of these, Doba and Sorvari are also making welcome company debuts, and they're welcome. As is the play, which is really wonderful; it's such a pleasure that A Noise Within brings French repertory to its stage.

THEN LAST NIGHT we were plunged to the other end of the range of theatrical delight with an utterly misconceived production of Antony and Cleopatra, played apparently for laughs and spectacle at the cost of anything like romance or majesty or insight. Geoff Elliott bobbed his head and mouthed his lines in an incomprehensibly off-hand impersonation of the flawed Mark Antony; Susan Angelo lounged about as a nightclub Cleopatra; the direction, by company co-directors Elliott and Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, settled for stylized violence and sketchy amorousness. Costumes seemed routine at best, otherwise distracting; stage design and lighting seemed merely serviceable. Robertson Dean was an effective, subtle, and sympathetic Enobarbus, which oddly made the character seem distracting in this company.

No doubt about it: It's a difficult play, for reader, audience, cast, and directors. All the more reason to give Shakespeare his due, which is thoughtful study and evocative, enterprising production. This doesn't happen in this production.

TONIGHT MADE IT TWO out of three, though: Molière's The Bungler (L'Étourdi), his first verse comedy, ably translated in rhyming couplets by Richard Wilbur, was a total delight, funny, well cast, imaginatively directed, with fine musical interludes (and the best theatrical overture I've heard in years). The extraordinarily gifted comic actor JD Cullum was a masterly Mascarille, the servant whose feckless master Lelie (Michael Newcomer, also gifted) needs help releasing his beloved Celie (Emily Kosloski) from various complications.

Here's another play with recursive elements: Mascarille devises plots, presses his master and bystanders into service carrying them out, revises things as his boss inevitably bungles them; you can be sure Mascarille is Molière himself. The rest of the cast was quite up to Julia Rodriguez-Elliott's detailed and zany direction; Angela Calin's costumes were on the mark, David O's musical score was resourceful (and featured a magnificent tuba player). I would happily see this production every third Friday evening for the rest of my life.

• A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena; 626.356.3100; plays continue in repertory through May (see website for schedule).

The Critic

I know a critic — tedious man —
Who'll tell you everything he can.
He knows of course "why Henry Moores
Are always full of apertures"*,
Why Beckett's novels are absurd
And Feldman's music seldom heard.

He speaks of Twyla, Pina, Merce,
Of music bad as Berg's, or worse.
He knows about the Isle of Man,
The Fall of Angels, and he can
Recite poems by Gertrude Stein,
Enough to make a poodle whine.

Why Rauschenberg paints with stuffed goats,
And women read Joyce Carol Oates,
Why Jasper Johns's flags and cans
Draw much applause but never bans.
He'll tell you all these things, and then
He'll tell you all these things again;

Now if you want to make him stop
Don't bother looking for a cop:
Just smile sweetly, and nod your head,
And murmur, Gee, you're sure well-read;
I once read The New Yorker too,
It almost made me talk like you.

I bored my friends, sent them away —
And now I'm going, too. Good day.

*I think I read this couplet once,
But don't know where. I'm such a dunce.

Snake and Seagull

The two short-season plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this spring are Chekhov's Seagull and Mary Zimmerman's The White Snake, both of which we saw last Saturday. (We return to Ashland in late July to see the rest of the eleven-play cycle.)

Not that much need be said here about Seagull, adapted and directed by Libby Appel in a production designed minimally but effectively by Christopher Acebo in the New Theater. We saw this "adaptation" a little over a year ago, when it ran in Mill Valley at Marin Theater in a different production. I set the word in quotes: at the time Appel's new version, based on Allison Horsley's literal translation of Chekhov's text, seemed to me more a restoration than an adaptation, redirecting the audience's response from the picturesqueness of an exotic, long-ago society to the social and philosophical questions at the heart of Chekhov's play, always relevant, now perhaps more than fifty years ago.

I wrote about that production here.The current production is less physically detailed than Marin's, narrowing the focus onto the text, the dialogue. Since so much of Chekhov's dialogue is always interior and unspoken, revealed by inference through the otherwise apparently irrelevant comments of characters who don't really attend to one another, this can be hard on the audience.

 

It has its value, though, rightly extending the effectiveness of the play beyond the evening of its performance. It's as if Kostya's avant-garde play, quickly shut down by its anguished young author at the beginning of Chekhov's play, begins to continue in one's mind after the abrupt yet laconic conclusion of Seagull. " Conclusion": what an inconclusive ending this is, for all but poor Kostya himself: the contemplation remains, will remain among Chekhov's characters, remains for those of us fortunate to have seen this fine production.

The White Snake is also an "adaptation", this time of an ancient Chinese story, and also a restoration os sorts, in that it returns its audience to the blend of entertainment and instruction, goofy comedy and poetic contemplation — there's that word again — that propels Chinese opera. (And commedia dell'arte, and Mozart-da Ponte, and…)

Story: Snake studies philosophy, yearns to learn human experience, disguises self as beautiful woman, seduces innocent tradesman, is exposed by Buddhist monk, returns to her mountain.

Zimmerman's script, developed from the plot sketch during the course of rehearsals, contains the vivacity of commedia improvisation within the voice of a thoughtful and studious playwright. There is one element I found jarring: the ensemble in the pit — flute, cello, and percussion — relied heavily on foursquare structures and conventional Western tonal harmony for the collectively generated musical chinoiserie that helps articulate the entertainment's progress. Where Zimmerman's direction and script adapt Chinese opera to the American stage, the musicians, I thought, seek to imitate it, constantly distracting my attention.

Still, there's a lot to like here. There is real poetry, pathos, and philosophy in Snake's predicament, ably and beautifully projected by Amy Kim Waschke (new to OSF), and poignancy in the role of Xu Xian, nicely taken by Christopher Livingston; and Tanya McBride and Jack Willis find just the right amount of brashness in the comic-relief roles of Green Snake and Fa Hai, the villainous monk.

Zimmerman's White Snake often made me think of Michael McClure's wonderful Gargoyle Cartoons of forty and fifty years ago. It's sad that neglect of the breakthroughs of that period has occasioned so much ignorance and the occasional re-invention, but it's reassuring, I suppose, that artistic truth will now and then, as here, bring a historically imperative notion back to contemporary life and relevance. Something else for that superbly enlightened serpent to contemplate, back on the eternal mountain she shares, I'm sure, with Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplyov.

 

Only a Messenger

Eastside Road, March 30, 2012—

BACK FROM A TRIP to find in the mail a new novel by an old friend whom we see too rarely, Sumner Carnahan. I have always liked her writing, but am surprised by her novel: in it she sets aside her post-Burroughs deconstructed style for a fascinating and subtle alteration of a more conventionally narrative approach, weaving together two dissimilar but fluid points of view, touching on the conflict of two quite different cultural mentalities, to deal with matters of environmental and economic urgency, while in fact toying imaginatively with the genre of detective fiction.

Reading it, all kinds of things come to mind while I'm simultaneously caught by the effortless onward flow of the narratives. An intelligent, diffident young American man, David Ambrose Gentry, maintains notebooks in which he records meditations on the names of things, on nature and procreation, and on relationships — particularly one that develops in the course of the novel with an observant, spiritual, utterly believable young Mexican woman, of strong Mayan heritage, whose own diaries are intercut to form the structure of the novel.

An example:

We discuss mining. C. doesn’t believe in removing things from inside the earth. Says that metals and chemicals can be retrieved gently off the surface using simpler techniques.

I explain that civilization would not exist without mining. We wouldn’t be riding in this fine green four-speed half-ton truck just now without the mining of metals and petroleum. And the airplane we will board for San Diego:

"You want it to be made of cardboard and tree sap?"
That made her laugh. She laughed and laughed, almost hysterically, her thick dark hair falling in waves across her face. Then, abruptly, knotting her hair over one shoulder, she stared straight ahead in that way she has of keeping still..

…I see the indigena in her… Mixtec, Mayan? Her heritage is confused. (Whose isn't?)…

op. cit., p. 44-5

I still think of William Burroughs from time to time: also E.T.A. Hoffmann, Carlos Castaneda, Gertrude Stein, Sebald— perhaps because I've already associated some of them with Carnahan's earlier work. She has been an attentive reader as well as an inventive and methodical writer, and if these are influences they seem fully internalized.

Her more avant-garde style frequently used vernacular and commercial styles ironically; here I think she has found a perfect balance between stylistic, even linguistic (taken in a broad sense) universes, producing an apparently artless straight ahead whodunit, with satisfyingly surprising twists, giving the reader subtle esthetic pleasures on top of the entertainment of the plot and the substance of the social and political issues it involves. I like this book; I like it a lot, and I'm glad to say so. I hope she writes more novels: I think she makes an important contribution to the form.

• Sumner Carnahan: Only a Messenger, Burning Books (The Quadrant Series), 2011; ISBN 978-0-936050-34-8

Hotel blues

Park & Suites Ëlegance la Ciotat, La Ciotat, France, March 18, 2012—

WE HAVE DRIVEN, in the last week or so, about 1500 kilometers, crossing France from northeast to southeast, back up a little toward Lyons, then back down to the Mediterranean. There was a time when I was astonished to hear from a friend, stated almost as a fault of mine, that I was a francophile. I don't think I am. I love Italy and Netherlands first, I think, and my own dear California, I think. My fondness for la douce France is more intellectual than corporeal. When I looked into the bookstore on the Place de Comédie in Montpellier, for example, I was reminded of the considerable intellectual life, at least the vie intellectuale potentielle, of the French, and I was of course envious; I even bought a book. But I am truly not a francophile, to the extent that I would be a citizen of France if I had to change my citizenship tonight.

As I may. We are currently (five p.m.) without a place to sleep tonight. I booked a room, using bookings.com, at an inexpensive hotel in La Ciotat, choosing the town because we've never stayed there, and I recalled the name from the history of Picasso; and the hotel because it was recommended by previous users of bookings.com, and was inexpensive. But when we arrived, about four o'clock, delayed by street closings due to a Sunday market — unknown to Our Lady of the Dashboard, about whom another blog, another day — there was no one at the reception.

We weren't the only ones flummoxed. There were two Italian businessmen there, looking all around for some way to get into their room. We all looked around, walked up the street, back down the street. Finally I noticed a, well, notice, posted at the door, with two or three phone numbers. The first didn't answer. The second did, at length, but the woman spoke only French. She asked my name and how and when I'd booked, and then whether I noticed a coffret anywhere nearby. At length I found it, and she gave me its code.

Inside there were a great many envelopes, each with a key inside and a person's name on the cover. One belonged to the Italians, who were pleased with me for having let them into their room. None belonged to us. I mentioned this to the lady on the phone, who said she had taken note of my telephone number, and would look into all this, and would then call me back with further instructions.

Oh well. We walked the few yards down the street to the Quai Mitterand and the Best Western Hotel, verified there was a room there if we needed it (double the cost of the one we'd booked), and gave its bar a try. Three parts gin, I told the boy who seemed the only staff in the huge empty café, one part Lillet, shaken with lots of ice. Oui mussieu, he said with what seemed to me a little hesitation. In a little while we heard frantic cocktail-shaking and soon he was back with Lindsey's glass of white wine and a huge shaker glass full of what turned out to be quite an acceptable Martini, garnished with lemon peel.

Finally I called the lady who spoke only French back. Ah I tried to reach you, she said unpersuasively, look again in the coffret. Wait, I said, I'm in a bar, waiting for you to phone me. Trudged back to the hotel, imploring her not to hang up, looked around, found the coffret, opened it with the numbercode she again provided, no envelope with my name.

Not important, she said (c'est pas grave sounds so much, well, graver), do you see one envelope on the top shelf. Yes, but the name is Carpet, my name is not Carpet. I started to add, Though I've often been called on the carpet, but realized in time this would only complicate matters.

Pas grave, she said, use that envelope. So we did, and finally got into the room, very nice, hot water, bathtub, no wi-fi — that would have to wait for the morning. There were other adventures, of course, involving bewildered machinists from Detroit, two vivacious young maids who spoke no English but were very helpful in French (ou Arabe, mussieu?), and the gouvernante who clarified a few things — again, French only. Well, after all, we're in France. Other adventures, but they'll have to wait.

Einstein at the Berlioz

Montpellier, March 17, 2012—

My old friend John Rockwell said it well, years ago:

“Einstein was like nothing I had ever encountered. For me, its very elusiveness radiated richly, like some dark star whose effects we can only feel. The synergy of words and music seemed ideal. … Einstein on the Beach, perhaps, like Einstein himself, transcended time. It's not (just) an artifact of its era, it's timeless ... Einstein must be seen and re-seen, encountered and savored ... an experience to cherish for a lifetime."

I quote that from the Nonesuch Records website (Google nonesuch einstein montpellier, I can't readily embed links with Blogger on iPhone).

To John's remarks I merely add: the opera is as mesmerizing and transporting now. We saw it last nearly thirty years ago, at BAM; we saw it last night from similarly placed seats — center, nearly as high as possible.

Montpellier's Berlioz Theater is incredibly high, a postmodern version of a traditional European jewel-box theater. Perhaps our seats underscored this opera's unique effect: it was as if we were witnessing the coherent but often enigmatic proceedings of a distant and foreign society, at the same time re-acquainting ourselves with knowledge we'd somehow internalized, perhaps years ago, of the inexplicable yet reassuring meaning of it all.

There were little technical glitches along the way — opening curtain was delayed an hour. But the performances were superb: singing, instrumental, dance, acting, lighting, stagework.

The audience mostly remained seated the entire nonstop four and a half hours, though they were encouraged to come and go at will. They gave the piece a fine ovation, and they were right to do so. I think even Berlioz would have been struck with the beauty, the artistic truth, and the significance of the event.

Where we've slept recently

Hôtel Du Puy d'Alon, Souillac, March 14, 2012—

 

IT OCCURS TO ME I've written nothing about the hotels. We've stayed in a lot of them, these last three weeks, and there wasn't a one I wouldn't go back to, though one or two would have to adjust its price first. Nearly all of them offer wi-fi, though not always dependably in the room; nearly all have websites. Except for the first, which was chosen for us — and splendidly!— I booked most of them through bookings.com, which has a good iPhone app but also works well online. For information on the nearby restaurants we chose, see Eating Every Day (http://eatingday.blogspot.com). If you don't mind, I'll just mention them in the order we found them:

•Hotel Herberg & Appartementen De Smidse, Molenweg 9, 6285NJ Epen, Netherlands; +31(0)43-4551253. A fine old-fashioned place, two storeys, no elevator, on the outskirts of a village across the road from open fields; good rambling all around; decent simple food in a pleasant dining room, efficient, pleasant staff. Great for a three-day stay with friends.

•Hotel-Restaurant Le Relais, Place du Monument 22, 4900 Spa, Belgium; +32 087 77 11 08. Very pretty spacious room up a flight or two, old-fashioned, okay breakfast, well situated, cheap.

•Hotel Val de la Cascade, Petit-Coo, 1 - 4970 Stavelot, Belgium; +32(0)80/68.40.78. Well off the beaten track and at an amusement park-like development set next to a cascade, I can't imagine staying here except in the depth of off-season, unless you have kids to entertain. Still, the room was big and comfortable, the dining room almost snug and romantic.

•Hotel Ardenne Les Myrtilles, Rue du Vieux Marché 1, Vielsalm, 6690 Belgium; +32 (0) 80 67 22 85. Recently affiliated with the Best Western chain, right in the middle of town, surprisingly good restaurant, comfortable room.

•Hotel Burg Hof, Burg Reuland 43, Burg-Reuland, 4790 Belgium; +32 80 32 98 01. We stayed in a clean comfortable bare-bones room in a new building across the road from the big old hotel-restaurant on the edge of the village, goats and chickens in the yard just outside our window. Nice bar, decent restaurant.

•Hotel Oberhausen, Oberhausen 8, Oberhausen (Burg-Reuland), 4790 Belgium; +32 80 32 94 97. One of our favorite places, partly for the delicious pannekoek, partly for the sweet, airy, comfortable room, greatly for the lusty, good-humored, helpful mevrouw running the place. In a country setting in a tiny border village, another great post for rambles.

•Hotel Daytona, Hauptstrasse 3, 54689 Dasburg, Germany; +49 65501530. The only place for a number of kilometers, this was basically a make-it-work choice. Run by a Dutch couple, it's oriented to motorcycle tourists, and the town itself doesn't have much to offer. Still, the staff were very helpful and pleasant, the room clean and comfortable, and a bus runs right past, two or three times a day, most days anyway.

•Café Hotel de Ville de Bruxelles, 15 Grand-Rue Vianden, L-9410 Luxembourg; +35 2621186547. Don't ask me why a small old-fashioned hotel owned and operated by a couple immigrated from Portugal has a name like this; its not important anyway; what counts is the ingratiating warmth of the people, the pure heart of their work, and the truly excellent bacalhau they gave us. Quiet, comfortable, on the main street of a very picturesque town.

•Hotel Bristol, 11, rue de Strasbourg, Luxembourg-Ville, L-2561 Luxembourg; +352 48 58 29. Small quiet clean room, elevator, decent breakfast, nice (but smoky) bar, easy one-block walk from the train station, cheap. Oh: and friendly.

•Hotel Central, 2, rue Victor Millot, Beaune, 21200 France; +33 0380247724. Another very old-fashioned hotel with a pretty, quiet room overlooking a quiet street just off the central place and close to good cafés and a quite good restaurant (Ma Cuisine), with a nice bar and a friendly staff.

•Hotel Restaurant Le P'tit Monde, 54 Rue Du 4 Septembre, 24290 Montignac, France; +33 0553513276. Perhaps the grimmest of the hotels we've slept in lately, but clean enough. The price seemed unnecessarily high and the staff a little cool, but there's a fine restaurant (La Chaumière) right down the street.

•Hôtel Du Puy d'Alon, 1 Rue De Pressignac, Souillac, 46200 France; +33 0565378979. A kilometer from the center of town, thus the nearest café, bar, or restaurant; a pleasant room with stenciled wallpaper; quiet; comfortable.

 

Localinguists

Hotel Bristol, Luxembourg, March 11, 2012—

Historical Luxembourg. Red: present-day Luxembourg; two blue areas at bottom: lost to France; blue upper right: lost to Germany (and now in German-speaking Belgium); mauve: lost to French-speaking Belgium.

Walking through rural Belgium and Luxembourg I've been thinking about Small Local in the context of International Community, as evidenced by language, gesture, adaptation to terrain, and such things. And I've been thinking about these things in the context of History, because it is so present here; and in the context of some provocative comments made by a funds manager to a journalist writing about global economy:

Daniel Arbess, quoted in "Magic Mountain," a fascinating article describing the scene at the Davos gathering of the World Economic Forum, written by Nick Paumgarten and published in the March 5, 2012 of The New Yorker:

"Kids who are twenty or thirty years younger than we are have a totally different experience in and manner of absorbing and processing information," he said. "How will this generation make decisions? How will they understand the big, looming debate about the legacy of entitlements and debt left by their elders? How do they understand the economy?" It was his suspicion, from his conversations here and elsewhere, that they may not understand it very well, or at least that polarizing rhetoric fostered by social media, amplified by a cynical political class may be corrupting their ability to discuss it in terms their elders can understand or abide.

"There's a lot of intellectual confusion about the causes and culprits institutionally of the mess that we are in," he said. "The language and the thinking that have evolved after the financial crisis have had an impact on the way young people think. All this talk that companies need to change, and so on — it's a misconception of the role that companies play. Shareholders risk capital. Banks intermediate capital. This is what keeps an economy going." He went on, "The root cause of everything we're experiencing is a failure of holistic thinking in a world of increasingly complex, fragmented, and ubiquitous information."

Then today I was told that one of the fundamental assumptions about the Luxembourg state, as it was determined by William II, was that it would be officially bilingual, in French and German. And yet the country people spoke Luxembourgish among themselves, as they still do. Luxembourgish was not recognized until the 1980s, as I understand it, when suddenly linguist took an interest in it, declared it endangered, and began promoting its retention and even expansion.

It was declared a third official language, and began finally to be taught in the schools, which had until then not only not taught it but had actively discouraged it. A problem immediately arose: it had never been a written language, and orthographical rules had to be invented for it.

As I've mentioned, we've run into people in both Luxembourg and Belgium who spoke only the local language, Belgian German or Luxembourgish. They've been older people and country people, for the most part, who perhaps never did learn French or German as well as they might have, and who have lost it through years of neglect. They seem to me to be speaking Luxembourgish.

I've always thought of language-speaking as a fairly simple affair: one's monolingual, like me and most other Americans, or one's functionally bi- or multilingual, like most of the Dutch. I see now it's not that simple. Languages are intrinsically complex mediations of divergent individual and social urges and demands, always in flux, always compromising between intent and the possible. How often I've wound up saying not what I wanted to say but what I could (or thought I could).

There are monolinguists, and polylinguists, and localinguists, those who speak only a small local language, enough to converse with the neighbors about matters of local import, but at considerable disadvantage when it comes to communicating with other nations, or cultures, or times.

Charting the use of language in three dimensions, the X and Y coordinates are simple enough; language follows human social geography. In this land between Meuse and Rhine, Germanic (and Gothic) sounds prevail in the east, French (and Romance) in the west. As we've traveled south from Zuid-Limbourg, the Dutch corner east of Maastricht, our lips and tongues have moved from Dutch to French and back more than once, though, because of the third dimension of time, as many of these territories have been moved politically from one sovereignty to another. (For a long time, in fact, Luxembourg was ruled by Spain.)

And as lands move back and forth politically and, more reluctantly, linguistically, so does each of us. I once asked my father-in-law, who was born in a small mountain town in northwest Italy, near Torino, whether his parents, who settled in the United States in 1914 or so, spoke English or Italian at home when he was a child, and he seemed surprised: Italian! Why, I didn't learn Italian until I went to school! We spoke what we spoke. (Most speakers of this particular form of Italian Piemontese think of it as a dialect; I've recently come to realize that in fact it is a language, Langedocian, fairly widely spoken across southern France from the Pyrenees east to his valley in Piemonte.)

Speaking and thinking seem so closely connected that argument continues whether they are mutually necessary. (I think not, but then I think instrumental music is a form of speech, recording nonverbal thoughts of its composers.) The deliberate national decision to recognize and encourage the teaching of Luxembourgish is the recognition — belatedly! — that the Luxembourgish desire, stated in the nation's motto, "We wish to remain as we are," is a national social value worth respect.

Until a generation ago Luxembourg was one of the poorest nations in Europe; now it is one of the richest in the world, its per capita income surpassing that of the United States, surpassed only by a few oil-rich emirates on the Persian Gulf. To remain as one was, in the face of so sudden a change, seems impossible and misguided, if perhaps understandable: but then one remembers the Council of Vienna, and the Treaty of Versailles, and that of Maastricht, and one realizes these cataclysmic nation-changing events are in fact fairly regular, hardly a normal human lifetime doesn't see two of them.

And in fact as Daniel Arbess points out the fact that we see iPhones in use everywhere we go is the sure indication of another social (therefor linguistic and economic) cataclysm, in which the three dimensions of social interaction house what seems a complete jumbling of local and national, class- and subcultural-based strands, often thought fairly separate and identifiable — erroneously, it's evident.

Even in the age of archery such moments have made changes faster than their natures could have become evident: how much more urgent is such comprehension now. Lacking such comprehension one can only shake one's head, as the old lady I was "conversing with" in Rodeshausen the other day, and agree de welt ist kaput. I can't help thinking that she lacks the language to investigate and consider that world; it has largely eroded away. On the other hand, she seemed cheerful, happy with her lot, content to remain as she is.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Le Château

Vianden, Luxembourg, March 8, 2012

UP PAST THE WALL and to the Château today. The Romans built a fort up there late during their Empire, and throughout the Dark Ages its ruins stood as a reminder I suppose of the good old days. by the time the early Middle Ages rolled around civic pride and perhaps an enhanced local economy led to improvements, and by the 15th century the place had become quite palatial, near what you see above.

 

Then hard times set in again. Vianden had been the capital of its fiefdom, but times changed. By the middle of the 19th century — odd:how recently I would have written that "the last century" — the two main gates in the town walls had been pulled down and the château itself had lost its roofs and interior carpentry. How, I don't yet know: fire, I should think. In any case, it was again a ruin, this time not Roman but Romantic.

 

In the 1980s, though, miraculously, the enthusiasm, technique, and above all money was found to restore the place. The result seems quite persuasive to me. There were of course plenty of descriptions and sketches and engravings to go on, and, I suppose, analogous buildings elsewhere (though not many of this caliber, I would bet). We spent an hour or so wandering the galleries, the huge rooms, the kitchen, the residence — I took thirty photos or so: masonry, carpentry, fascinating photodocumentation, scale models of the building at three different epochs. And we were entirely alone.

 

Lindsey read in a travel website that Vianden is to be avoided on summer weekends, when the town is overrun with Dutch, Belgian, and German tourists. I can believe it. But in these early days after Ash Wednesday most of the hotels are closed and the town is given back to its 3,000 or so residents. Curiously, many of these seem to be Portuguese. Our hotelkeep is, for example; my other blog will soon report on a bacalhau.

Four men were roofing one last part of the Château when we were up there, in beautifully fish-scaled overlapping curves, cutting each rectangular tile with a mason's hammer against an anvil spiked anew into the wood substrate as each course advanced. I thought the material must surely be synthetic ti be so even, but when I asked the crew flunky what it was, C'est ardoise, monsieur. I knew that was slate, but then asked sythethique? Ah non, monsieur, c'est naturelle.

Is it from here, then, I pressed. Ah non, monsieur, il vient d'espagne. I looked at him a little more closely: Como Usted, creo. Ah si, Señor, he responded, smiling.

 

Spanish slate, Spanish skill. Portuguese inn (Auber would be pleased). European community at work. Not so different, I'm sure, from what obtained during Roman times.

 

We had walked up to the château following an itinerary outside the town walls, laid up four feet thick and quite high of local flags of shale, I think — I'm no geologist. Towers are placed every thirty feet or so, an easy arrow-shot apart, close enough that no sentry-walk was needed for further protection. The towers are curious: often four or five stories high, they're open toward the town side: no infiltrators would have hidden in them! It's a shame the main gates were pulled down a century and more ago, but a greater wonder the walls themselves are nearly intact. They anchor the medieval taste the entire town seems to maintain, with its lack of permanent signage, sidewalks, asphalt, visible wires…

 

And yet I write this in a café-bar-club devoted to cinema; Sinatra and Billie Holiday and Jo Stafford provide the background music; my Martini is to my specifications, and very good…

 

Photos from today at http://benelux2012.shutterfly.com/pictures#n_5

 

Back to the bus

 Hotel de Ville de Bruxelles, Vianden, Luxembourg, March 8, 2012

YESTERDAY , AFTER HAVING WALKED eighty-five kilometers on the GR-5 from Spa to Oberhausen — not bad, about what I'd hoped to cover, given that I'm carrying a heavier pack than usual, and developed a nasty cold along the way — yesterday we walked a mere three kilometers, down the steep hill from our German hotel to the bridge across the river Our, then along the river, on a national road, to Rodershausen.

There we waited a little over an hour for the thrice-daily bus — morning, noon, and night -— that would take us to Vianden. It was quite cold, a little above freezing, but there was a bus shelter with a bench. I read the latest New Yorker — I'm so glad I broight the iPad on this trip; it's useful for much more than writing these reports! — and stomped about a bit. National road or no, there was no traffic. Next to the bus shelter stood a small church, locked up tight, curiously low, sunken into its plot of land behind a retaining wall, as if the entire country had risen around it by eight feet in the centuries since it had been built.

Across the road, a single row of connected houses, then a vacant spot or two, then, a little further down, another building incorporating two or three attached houses. In the larger of these two rows there was a café-restaurant, closed in spite of its posted hours. We saw a woman's face in her window directly opposite us; she seemed intent on ignoring us. After a while an old lady emerged from one of the houses down the road, looked at us curiously — the curiosity of old-timers seeing strangers in their villages — dumped a jar or pitcher, I wasn't sure which, and went back inside. Birds sang in the bare branches of a tree behind our shelter, in the green field stretching down to the river.

The café-restaurant continued to be closed; its proprietor must be away. The old lady stood out in front of her house again and I went down to say hello. She was small and pert, missing a few teeth but beautifully smiling, wearing black stockings, a patterned apron, a dark knit sweater, her thin grey hair close to the skull. She seemed to speak only German, and that in a dialect, but with gestures and my poor Dutch we managed the courtesies, the banalities about the weather, and reassurances that yes, the bus would come, half before one o'clock.

Later, say twenty minutes before the bus was to come, the younger woman whose face we has seen earlier was out in front of her house, barefoot, putting trash in her rubbish-can, and the old lady hailed her in a surprisinly healthy voice. Clearly they were used to familiar conversations called acoss the eighty meters or so separating their doorsteps. I couldn't make out a word; their language was completely unfamiliar to me. After a time, though, Younger Woman stepped out her door and addressed us, in Dutch: would we like a cup of coffee, or tea?

Yes indeed, thank you very much, it's rather cold today, isn't it; how can you be standing there without shoes?

She smiled and indicated that she was used to it, and indeed her pretty feet seemed completely free from the disfigurements so often caused by years of wearing shoes. We stepped into her kitchen, a small square room whose door opened directly onto the street. A small table, two stools, and an ironing board completely filled the room. We were offered three choices of tea: rooiboos, camomile, rose-hip. The woman seemed to be in her late forties, rather pretty, blonde. The room was warm; she was lightly dressed and barefoot. 

She apologized that she spoke only Flemish — she'd come here from Belgium a number of years ago — and a little "what they speak here." The ironing board was big and sturdy, and seemed to have a built-in steamer: at one point she murmured an apology, leaned past, and turned something off, and the padded cover of the board gave a little sigh and visibly relaxed, as if it had been stetched above continually blowing air. Ah: that's why the kitchen's so warm, and she can work barefoot all day. Her iron was a huge affair with a steam-hose apparently connected to the table, and a big laundry-basket nearby was filled with what looked like sheets and pillowslips. I complimented her on her professional setup, and she smiled and said her husband had bought it for her a couple of years ago.

The bus came, empty, driven by a smiling little man who maintained an occasional telephone conversation while guiding the bus around tight curves. Gradually the landscape changed until suddenly we were next to serious operations that seemed at first to have something to do with mining: wide galleries had been drilled horizontally into the rock to our right, the Our still running fast on our left. The driver explained that this was not mining: it was a huge hydroelectric operation, profiting from reservoirs on the plateau high above us, and it was being considerably enlarged.

He dropped us in the center of Vianden, where the Grand-Rue rises west from the river Our, ultimately to the huge fortified palace above the town. Our hotel is just up the street to the right. We set our packs down in its café, explain that we've reserved a room, and settle into a cappuccino. Before we know it someone's carried our heavy bags up to our room, a cheerful one on the second floor, its windows looking out across to grassy terraces below spruce forest across rooftops on the Rue du Ruisseau.

It's such a pleasant little town, with so many curious corners, that after visiting the Victor Hugo Museum we decide to stay an extrra night, giving us a full day to explore. We go out for a stroll, a Martini, ultimately for dinner, and return to our little hotel happy with the choice. The WC and shower are down the hall, but there are nice new terrycloth bathrobes — from Ikea!— in our closet, and we're the only guests in the hotel. It seems like we've lost thirty years.