1.30.05: "Pelleas and Melisande"

Went to the opera. Pelleas and Melisande, by Debussy. I had read a glowing review of a different production in the newspaper, and since I like Debussy's orchestral works and a bigger production was opening I thought "why not?"

Lots of ladies in furs. A few bizarre hairdos on the diamond necklace set. I don't get to the Met (Lincoln Center) all that often. And I don't know opera or classical music that well. It turns out Debussy had some peculiar ideas. He didn't want this piece to be popular — maybe he didn't want any of his works to be popular. Popularity would have meant failure. "Music really ought to have been a hermetical science, enshrined in texts so difficult and laborious as to discourage the herd of people who treat it like a handkerchief! I would go further, and instead of spreading music among the populace, I propose the foundation of a Society of Musical Esotericism."

Sounds like a very "downtown" sensibility to me, mixed with an elitist academic point of view. There is indeed a downtown P.O.V. here in NY and elsewhere that likes to guard its favors. Downtown tastemakers will quietly rave about something or someone until that music or art achieves a relative popularity — then it is denigrated as having "been better when I first saw them." A lot of alt music publications and websites share this weird snobbism, it's a way of establishing a little in-crowd.

There were lots of orchestral passages and interludes, all of which were, in my opinion, beautiful and haunting. But when the singers started (Anne Sophie Von Otter among them), well, there was not a memorable tune to be found. Claude D. had achieved his goal, I guess — there was nothing here to grab a hold of, and maybe that explains why this piece remains somewhat obscure. Congratulations, Claude.

According to the program he had some oddball theory to justify the monotonous limited vocal melodies, saying he wanted to achieve a kind of mythic stylized speech in a new way — and maybe he did, the whole thing seems like recitativo, the boring talk-sung parts in between the arias in many other operas. I realize I may be speaking out of ignorance here...

And the story! It's linked to the work of the Symbolist poets (Verlaine, Rimbaud, etc), so it's highly symbolic, nothing being very direct. Reading a description it appears to me a parody of absurdist theater, a Monty Python piss take on arty drama or something akin to L'age D'Or, the Bunuel surrealist film that I can never make any sense of (not surprisingly, I guess.)

Here’s an excerpt:

"Yniold has lost his ball among some rocks. He tries to move one of the boulders. A flock of sheep comes bleating by. He calls out to the shepherd, whose reply makes it clear that the sheep are lost."

And another:

"They emerge into the air. Pelleas relishes the breeze and the scent of 'sprinkled roses'. It is mid-day, the clocks are chiming, children are going down to the beach to swim. He notices his mother and Melisande sitting by a window in the tower. 'They are sheltering on the shady side' says Golaud."

The story features lots of beaches, caves, towers, sick monarchs and mysterious women. It would be a trip to actually see all things described, but Jonathan Miller, the esteemed director, went for a massive rotating set that looked more like a scene from a Cocteau film — a decaying chateau, marble busts, furniture with sheets over. This all made it seem like a social satire. I might have maybe been able to wallow and submerge myself better in an even weirder mysterioso setting. Caves and towers and dark forests as the story implies.

I left before the scene in which the Pelleas gets his face tangled up in Melisande's hair.

1.14.05: Art exhibits & openings

Went to some art openings last night. At Pace/MacGill was a photographer Jim Goldberg who I had first seen in a book he did called "Raised By Wolves" in which he documented street kids in San Francisco for 10 years.

In the words of one of the kids:

"You show us how we are and let us tell our own story. Young people will only listen if society lets them speak too. Make sure that your work tells true stories, show people that they are not the only ones who matter, and that they do not have the right to categorize kids, for that won't make them disappear."

Now he's showing some other older work — similar to the picture above but this other series contrasts images of rich and poor people accompanied by captions written by them. One of the poor young men pictured in this series was present at the opening, now older and bearded, dressed in a cowboy hat, boots... and spurs! He was talking loud to all who would hear — obviously proud to be a past subject and he was representing Goldberg's work to all who would listen.

There was another long wall piece, an autobiographical timeline montage that in less sensitive hands would have been a spilled drawer of pix from a stranger's attic glued to foam board. Somehow he managed to make the events photographed in his life resonant, touching and tragic — there were trips and travel — judging by the pictures these were inspiring and enlightening — lovers, relatives and children — sad partings and old age, birth and sex. There were years spent among the down and out, druggies and society's castaways.

There were collectors, some museum curators and a lot of art students at the opening, in contrast to the next one I went to.

Down to Chelsea to an opening of new work by Bob Rauschenberg, whom I've known for years, ever since he did a Talking Heads LP cover. The big Chelsea gallery was packed and Bob arrived in a wheelchair — he had a stroke a few years ago and part of his right side is paralyzed — but he's come back and, according to his partner Darryl, he's been working nonstop, and has at least 4 large international shows this year.

The new stuff is made of color photos that Bob took (I assume), transferred to canvas by first printing them on paper using water-soluble inks — then the paper can be placed on wet canvas and the image inks, or most of them, stick to the canvas. It makes the images look rough, imperfect, like color Xeroxes, but larger.

I liked these much better than some other recent shows of Bob's I've seen — I like when the use of photography is less painterly, and to be honest I always felt the drips and smears in much of his earlier work were guilty remnants of abstract expressionism, an attempt to give photo-based work the credibility of painting.

Anyway, these have none or little of that. There were lots of colorful images of orange traffic cones and roadwork, a subject I focus on sometimes, so I was a little jealous, too.

I ran into acquaintances from Bob's studio, folks from various print edition studios he's worked at — some folks I hadn't seen in a long time. Most of the other attendees were of a "certain" generation of the art world. Wild and crazy once, but hardly now — the men were in suits or jackets at least, most of them with gray hair like me, and some of the older women had oversized glasses that they might have worn glamorously in the 70s.

Then I biked to a dinner that the gallery owner was having for Bob at his Upper East Side aptartment. It's a part of town I don't venture into often, but this would give me a chance to say hi to some old friends and acquaintances outside of the crowded gallery scene.

The house was of course filled with art. There were real Picassos, hanging Calders and a giant Donald Judd on one wall. The windows looked north and south on the FDR drive, so one could see the Queensborough Bridge nearby out one side and from another window the east coast of Manhattan and the in the distance the Williamsburg Bridge downtown. Wow.

Meryl Streep said hello(!) Saying "we used to be neighbors" which is true, as we both lived on the same block of 12th Street a year or so ago. We'd never met. I asked if she'd ever seen the web posting that compared and contrasted her townhouse with ours when they were both up for sale last year — "Real Estate Celebrity Smackdown" I think it was called. Using images and descriptions posted by the various real estate agents they compared the exteriors, some of the rooms and the appraised value of the two houses. It was snide and pretty hilarious.

Sat with Sidney B Felsen, of Gemini editions in L.A., who does a lot of stuff with Bob. Jim Rosenquist and he are big jazz fans and when Jim was in New York he would hang at the jazz clubs. He began to tell stories of encounters he had. He met Thelonius Monk, who, when approached repeated over and over “Nitsky Noo, Nitsky Noo”, which according to Jim was the name of the child of a 50s comic strip character. Once Jim, a huge Monk fan, traveled all day with some friends to catch a concert that Monk was participating in. Monk came out, played exactly one note, and departed.

Jim was at a bar where jazzers hung out and in walked Miles Davis and in his raspy voice said "What mutherfucker is going to buy me a drink?" Jim took him up on the offer.

A lady with big glasses is taken by the statement Bob wrote for his catalogue. She's going to read it aloud. Bob's sort of embarrassed and sort of proud.

Then the woman reappears and announces that Sigourney Weaver will be doing the reading instead. I didn't even know she was in the room. She borrows the giant glasses and begins — people poke their heads in from the other room full of chairs and tables. It's a charming inspiring paragraph, and she doesn't over dramatize it, as it's naturally funny.

Joannie, Sidney's wife and partner, spots Marc Jacobs and says to Sidney "Get to work!" as she pulls him out of his chair to make an introduction. Sidney isn't a pushy person, but he introduces himself and tells Jacobs about Gemini and Jacobs says he's opening his first L.A. store almost across the street from them.

Being a fashion designer he's naturally the most slovenly dressed person in the room, aside from Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim Museum director, who may be the most powerful person in the room, in some ways. Maybe it's a sign of status NOT to feel the need to dress up, in fact, maybe more status is implied if one intentionally dresses down. Jacobs is wearing baggy clothes and white running shoes and Krens entered wearing a nylon running outfit — though I'm sure neither of them were running recently. I'm in dress shoes, collared shirt and a pin striped jacket, dressed up for me, though I rode over here on a bike. (I find that if I pace myself I don't necessarily get sweaty while pedaling, so the skin-tight bike riding pants some folks wear seem an affectation to me — unless the person is seriously in training.

Talking with Christof De Menil whom I met through Bob Wilson years ago and with Keith Sonnier, the artist. Christof and Keith wonder who painted what appears to be an all blue painting on a wall nearby. The assumption is, of course, that it MUST be some important modern artist, it couldn't possibly be a nobody. I throw out Yves Klein, as it's blue, as does Streep's husband, a sculptor — but that idea is given the thumbs down.

Someone identifies it as an Ad Reinhart — an appropriately influential name in the modernist cannon — and points out that it's actually stripes of two different blues, so close in color and hue that the difference is almost imperceptible.

I look closer. I love this effect. I stare at it and it plays tricks with the eyes. Kind of like some of Bob Irwin's work... and that of his acolyte Jim Turrell. I stare and the dividing regions appear and vanish or become indistinct — it's a surprisingly retinal work for an artist who became known for intellectual games.

Bob and Darryl have temporarily relocated from Captiva Island, where his home and studio was, to Fort Meyers, FLA, the larger town on the mainland. Captiva was hit pretty hard during the recent hurricane bouts. Many of Bob's buildings were heavily damaged and the trees were uprooted and the place is a mess. Miraculously, no artwork was damaged, but the fish house, a little wooden structure on the end of short pier — where I once wrote some of the songs for my CD Uh-Oh while visiting there in the early 90s — was pretty much destroyed.

Dick Tracy’s associates:

Enemies: 3-D Magee (used killer ants), 88 Keys, Angletop, B-B Eyes, Big Boy Caprice (Tracy's arch enemy, and leader of the Apparatus gang), Big Frost (killer of Brilliant), Black Pearl, The Blank (face destroyed by gunshot), Blowtop, Bony, Breathless Mahoney, Broadway Bates, The Brow (Nazi spy), Chameleon (disguise expert), The Claw, Coffyhead, Cueball, Cutie Diamond, Deafy Sweetfellow, Doc Hump, Faceless Redrum, Flattop Jones (professional assassin with mis-shapen skull), Flattop Jr., Gargles, Gruesome, Haf-and-Haf, Headache, Heels Beals, Honeymoon, Itchy Oliver, Johnny Scorn, Larceny Lu, Lips Manlis, Littleface Finney, Matty Square, Maxine Viller, Measles, Miss Egghead, Mrs. Pruneface, Mrs. Volts, Mr. Bribery, Mr. Crime, The Mole, Mousey, Mumbles, Olga, Peanutbutter, Pear-shape, Perfume, Pruneface (Nazi spy), Puckerpuss, Putty Puss (able to change his features), Rughead, Scorpio, Shakey, Shoulders, Sphinx, Splitface, Splitscreen, Spud Spaldoni, Squareface, Tiger Lilly, El Tigress, Tonsils, Torcher, Yogee Yamma

Known Relatives: Tess Trueheart (wife), Bonny Braids (daughter), Junior Tracy (adopted son), Moon Maid (daughter-in-law, wife of Junior, extra-terrestrial, deceased)

Here is a comic book cover from 1955!:

1.12.05: National Identity

Marina's mom, who is Japanese-American, has a Japanese face but doesn't speak Japanese. She was born in the USA, but people who meet her expect her to know about Japan (which she does a bit) and to be fluent. I sensed in talking to her that she almost feels she should learn Japanese, as a way of knowing herself better. Then she'll be a little bit more what people expect her to be. Maybe she'll also be more herself, maybe a self that never existed before, that lay buried. Maybe our identities don't always match our faces, and we either put up with the mis-match or try and be somewhat accommodating. Identity is what we make it, we as individuals and as people. It's malleable, invented, true but not true.

Until fairly recently, the Finns spoke Swedish (except for the peasant class) as Sweden dominated not just Finland, but a lot of the region. But in 1828 Elias, a country doctor and folklorist, began collecting tales from the peasant class — they had a meter but no rhyme. He strung a bunch of them together — wrote some connecting bits himself — and it was received as the national epic saga, The Kalevala. This helped give the Finns an identity, it helped unite them as a people, and as they were feeling a bit nationalistic anyway, the moment was right and it eventually led to their independence. Finnish began to be taught in schools and songs and symphonies were written that were, or had claims to be, uniquely Finnish. Maybe some of the adoption of Finnish was a way of distancing themselves from the Lapps as well. National identity implies superiority to someone. And to think that a big part of this particular identity was partly made up, invented, by one man!

Language divides and unites. Not just nations, but classes within those nations. The upper and aristocratic classes hold and guard their use of language as being official, correct and proper. In the past royalty often spoke a completely different language than the peasants, a way of making the separation obvious and evident. Russian and many others spoke French. Lingua Franca. Controlling language is a way of maintaining status.

The newly wealthy, the nouveau riche, uncertain as to their status and standing, tend to be more demanding in their adherence to the rules or language. They want to be sure, in language and in appearance, that the lower orders can see and know that they who have arrived are no longer a part of the messy crowd.

The language and accents of U.S. TV announcers tells a story. In the past the accents were of the American Brahmin castes — the sound of the upper class voice said, "here you find quality and reliability. You can trust this man."

More recently, according to a book "Do You Speak American?", the Midwestern twang had replaced the upper class honk as the voice of U.S. TV. The perceived neutrality of the Midwestern accent which dominates now was, they claim, a reaction to the incoming waves of Jewish and Catholic immigrants — and stemmed from a need to assert a primacy, a dominance and superiority over those uncouth foreign masses.

Could this get out of hand? Could a nation adopt a wholly fictional identity? Lots of people would love to live in Middle Earth. Histories get rewritten all the time. School kids in Texas are shocked to learn that the brave defenders of the Alamo were actually land-grabbers, stealing land from Mexico. And who knows if the stories that we call history could get rewritten once again, and again. Could the next story be less self-serving but more fantastic than the first one?

Here is a picture of a Hasidic reggae artist named Matisyahu. If he wasn't real I'd think it was a Saturday Night Live skit. But he's real.

1.6.05: Unreported Conflicts

Back in NYC.

Talked to a woman at a friend's house who has been spending a lot of time in the Peruvian Amazon who says the Shining Path still exists. She said the global media just lost interest after Guzman was captured, but the organization mutated and lives on. She said it now is more involved with the drug traffic that passes through the jungles where Peru, Brazil and Columbia come close, and that the Shining Path use indigenous people — both Meztizo and indigenous — as necessary guides and forced help — they would get lost without local guides and wouldn't be able to find food either.

Conflicts arise (these people are basically kidnapped) and individuals and villages are massacred. It's a low grade war, as it always was for the Shining Path, but the ideology has almost vanished. Where originally it may have been a Maoist peasants revolt, it became, like the Red Guard or Khmer Rouge, an excuse for both the neighborhood bullies and the aggrieved to avenge themselves and wield power. Kids with guns. Imagine a thousand Columbines.

Apparently, the U.S. armed the Colombian militia groups by routing arms through Peru. (It was illegal for the US to actually supply arms.) Vast amounts of guns passed through this region — the woman said that if all those arms reached their source, Columbia would be the best armed country on Earth. Naturally a fair amount got skimmed off.

If conflicts and wars go unreported do they exist? Well, yeah they are happening, but they don't exist in the global sense — they aren't affecting policy and finances in ways that we are aware of — at present. I suspect, optimistically, that what should be news eventually becomes history. At some future point there will be an interest in this area and someone will dig and ask and discovers what was going on. The massacres, drug and weapon running with become the back story to some future present situation. Maybe.

I wonder if there are lots of other conflicts dragging on in other regions below the media radar. How much do we not know? How much is hidden from us or have we forgotten? We marvel that the Arabs were the repository of so much science and literature for hundreds of years — that the genius or Rome and Athens was "forgotten" by medieval Europe but the Arab world kept it safe — we wonder how could that be? Surely now, with the world wide web and global communications we wouldn't never "lose" a whole area of knowledge.

But maybe we could. We wouldn't know, would we?

1.3.05: Costa Rica

We stayed at a B&B near Montezuma that was pretty isolated — surrounded by farms and jungle. It was being run by a Belgian couple and the man, Henry, liked to sit with a whiskey and chat with the guests after dinner.

I mentioned that this was the first trip I'd taken with no cultural agenda, such as previous trips to Brazil, and he mentioned that he’d lived there for a few years.

It was decades ago, and he and partner were in a town somewhere in the middle of the country. The town may have bordered on the jungle, because he told a story about penetrating the jungle, a kilometer a day, by machete.

I mentioned that I'd recently read Claude Levi-Strauss, the famous French anthropologist, whom I thought, being Belgian, he may have been familiar with. No luck. I said I thought Levi Strauss was a wonderful writer but that his behavior was questionable — traipsing into the jungle with relatively huge retinues and trading guns — unavailable to the Indians at that time — for artifacts.

Henry seemed to concur. He and his friend eventually encountered a tribe in the jungle, and were made welcome. But, Henry said, as he realized what a totally different worldview and universe they had come upon, he began to ask himself "what are we DOING here?". He felt ashamed, embarrassed. He said "We didn't belong there, we had no business there."

He recently talked to this former partner who recently flew over part of the Amazon in a Cessna and, according to Henry... he cried. So much has been chopped down and the land, once the trees and everything else is removed, is not good for farming or even ranching. It becomes a wasteland.

Henry claims it is the Japanese who are bribing the appropriate politicians and are paying the requisite prices for the hardwoods.

It is Xmas everywhere.

In Austin...

...and in Costa Rica.

I'd brought some snorkeling gear, which we tried out at beach on the Northern Pacific Coast, but the water was cloudy and we couldn't see much. There were pelicans near us, which Tracy said meant there were fish in the water, but we couldn't see them.

As we left the coastal areas and were heading back inland we had one more chance to go snorkeling — we'd pass by Isla Tortuga on the way to the car ferry and I figured there'd be enterprising small boat owners who would take us to the island, which is supposed to be surrounded by reefs and good for snorkeling.

A sign on a tree offered snorkeling or scuba boat trips for $15, which seemed reasonable, and we were at a point where the island was closest to the mainland, so the trip wouldn't take long and we could presumably get back in time for the ferry.

At the beach where the boat left from, part of another reserve, we were told to wait for Juan, who was due to leave for the island at 10:30. As it was already 10:45 we wondered how accurate was this information. By almost 11:30 Juan and another man appeared from around the corner in a little outboard.

The snorkeling was OK, not fantastic, but I love drifting amongst fish and coral so it doesn't have to be extraordinary. I'm glad Tracy suggested we give it one more try. Scuba diving is even more delirious, as one experiences a pleasant dislocation — up and down are less meaningful and one can spin, rollover and slither uninhibited by gravity. Even I become graceful in my own eyes.

1.1.05: Costa Rica

Took a lovely hike up around Rincon de la Vieja, a volcano in the north with an area on its lower slopes with bubbling mud pots and hot sulfur pools. Lots of iguanas around, too.

We decided to take a trail that let to a hot spring in the jungle — a few kilometers away according to the markers. A dip in a secluded hot spring sounded wonderful, and the day was early. But this "enchanted" forest, as they referred to it, was on a mountainside, mainly uphill, repetitive, and after a couple of hours and no sign of a hot spring we decided to turn back. The forest was indeed lovely — lots of twisted trees, some covered in palomatos vines (tree killer vines that eventually take over their host trees, which is left as a hollow center.)

Back near the boiling mud we came upon a coati crossing the trail — there was a noise in the bush and soon there were more of them, all rushing away from the source of a hooting in the forest over on the right. Soon there were at least 30 of them, surrounding but almost ignoring us, leaping out of the bush and crossing the trial. In a minute they were gone and we could see that the hooting was coming from a group of howler monkeys with white faces high up in a distant tree.