Radiant and Evanescent

Autumn.

The maples don
their finest colors
flaming their way
into oblivion,
the long winter's
coma until spring
quickens their
roots and veins,
nourishing them through
the green and leafy
summer
until autumn
returns again.

AUTUMN GALLERY

Saturday, September 11, 2010

This sign was on the bikepath. It is eloquent.


I remember where I was when the Twin Towers went down. It was a defining moment, and it's hard to believe it was nine years ago.

I decided to take a break from the political posturing and the religious rantings, from the insanity and hypocrisy of the news, from the chaos of the public discourse, and I took a bike ride instead.

It is a ragingly beautiful day: bright sun, partly cloudy (very partly), cool with a nice breeze, best at your back, pushing you, rather than in your face, slowing you.

The bike path follows an old railroad track, still in use, but nowhere near as frequently as in the past. The easment along the tracks is as natural as can be within the metroplex, but one of the most interesting things about the Twin Cities is how closely and quickly you can be enveloped by nature, which twists through the cities, a complex living organism of lakes and rivers and creeks and meadows, thick, dense old trees with deep, cool shade.

It was a pleasure to experience these things. The trail was quiet, and each turn presented new vistas of reeds and flowers, trees and water, reflections and striking juxtapositions of modern architecture and thick vines, trees, lily pads.

Seen this way, the world is an extraordinary place, inexpressibly beautiful. Music can come closer than words to expressing the experience of life's beauty. There were moments, last night (SPCO, Mozart, Don Giovanni), when artists, composer, and audience were fused together in a magic space where tears and laughter flowed in rich and piquant harmonies. I laughed. I wept. The tears were not sadness; au contraire, they were tears of joy.

These are the moments that make life extraordinary; our brushes with the sublime. They alone can put into context and perspective the old and unyielding human complexities, the insane recurrence of religious wars and militant religions, and the greed, pure and simple, that appears to tower over all politics and all power. Shakespeare saw it, Christ spoke of it in New Testament; greed is wrong; generosity, unqualified and unlimited, is sublime. Christ Militant, like St. Francis Militant, like Allah Militant, is an oxymoron. We have been around too long and seen too much to believe otherwise.

Hope does spring eternal, but the source is love, not hatred; generosity, not selfishness, compassion, not scorn.

[ BIKE RIDE PHOTOS]

What bliss...

In London last March I was thrilled to see the Raphael cartoons for the Sistine Chapel tapestries at the Victoria and Albert Museum; but I had never seen the tapestries.

Now four of them will be displayed with their cartoons at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

They were commissioned by Pope Leo X in 1515 and "cost about three and a half times the amount Michelangelo was paid for painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling." You can read more about them here.



Although taking pictures is prohibited, I snuck a quick one of this particular cartoon because it was so overwhelmingly gorgeous. Please pardon, hence, the blur; and note how the cartoon is the reverse of the tapestry, as in print-making... It is interesting to compare the color and texture of the (chalk) caroon with the woven tapestry. I remember that on the signage for the cartoons it said that Leo X requested the most possible gold thread be used, he wanted to outHerod Herod, as it were, and have his grand luxe woven into every inch.

The exhibition runs until October 13.

Shakespeare

For no reason except that I always wanted to I decided to read all of Shakespeare's plays.

I read many of them before, but decided I would approach Shakespeare as a tabula rasa, as much as I could -- his being so deeply engrained in our collective minds. I would read them all. I started with "As you Like It" for no particular reason, and have pretty much read randomly, depending on whim and happenstance. Whichever caught my eye at the library or at Half-Price Books became the next.

Che meraviglia!

Each play is a parallel universe triggered to envelope us in mystery and magic. The perfect metaphor, arrived at (apparently) last, is Propsero's Island. But whether in the Forest of Arden, Sicily, Bohemia, the fairy dells of Athens, the splendor of Venice or the crummy inns of Eastcheap, the characters are all wrestling with love, death, honor and responsibility. Their solutions are as varied as there are characters; some are similar, none are the same. Each is the real embodiment of a human response to life's treacherous gauntlet.

I was particularly taken with Hal and Hotspur, those twinned opposites of power and ambition, fighting for the crown. Of course Hal wins; he is the (more or less) legitimate heir. Hotspur, passionate, impatient, masculinely glorious, goes down both through his own conviction that he is invincible (or willing to die if he isn't) and because Hal -- equally passionate, masculinely glorious, of equal conviction -- holds the birthright. But what a contest! Hotspur's brilliance makes Hal's victory more brilliant still.

The scenes of Henry IV and Hal as the old king lies dying reduced me to tears. Here Shakespeare makes it unequivocally right that Hal has triumphed and will be Henry V. "Henry V" elaborates with gorgeous humanity Prince Hal's flowering as warrior king, completing his transformation from prodigal to hero.

The women run the gamut from Lady Macbeth's chilling "Unsex me here!" to Hermione's virtue breathing life into dead marble. How can you not love impetuous love-sick Juliet, or pining, conspiring Rosalind? The courtroom scene in Merchant of Venice is one of my favorite scenes, and not only for the dark crushed figure of Shylock but for Portia, inspired by love to a brilliant coup de theatre, dazzling everyone in the room. And in the theater. And in the world, century after century.

One of the things that struck me this time around was the amount of dramatic time given to the themes of greed, corruption, ambition and power. But greed above all, in both comedy and tragedy, time and again, is the root of all evil. Radex malorum est cupiditas. This is nowhere more graphically portrayed than in Timon of Athens, that scathingly grim jeremiad on greed.

And if that all sounds a bit heavy, visit the magic glades of Midsummer Night's Dream, where everything is animated by fairy dust and ends, as all proper comedy must, with weddings, the union of the real and the unreal, the magic and the mundane, into the ecstatic.

I understand now Shakespeare is not a monolithic entity. Style and language and humour change from play to play, from year to year and decade to decade, constantly evolving. This transforming process explains why so many of the plays are truly unclassifiable as Comedy or Tragedy. This is what makes them so intrinsically modern. They are neither and both; the distinctions are fluid. Who's tragedy is "Julius Caesar" -- Caesar or Brutus? How can we embrace Coriolanus as a hero? The substance of these plays is too protean for easy classification although provisional categories have been devised since people must classify them: the "dark comedies," "the romances." The "Histories" seem more clear cut, but they are not good history and they are as chimerical as the "dark comedies" hovering between comedy and tragedy. And how could Falstaff be classified? Fat Jack looms over all, so amazingly, appallingly human, not heroic and yet so tragic, so irresistibly funny and so comically bad. He, more than Cleopatra, beggars description.

I had a lot of trouble with Love's Labour's Lost. It is early; its formal design is intricate; its language is as complex as the Metaphysical poets. It is absolutely gorgeous, but must have been ever so much easier for the audiences of its time, accustomed to the vernacular of the badinage and the conventions of its verse. Here patience was the key. It was like reading Scerbanenko in Italian, book in one hand, dictionary in the other. Shakespeare requires that extra effort and attention. His field of reference is so vast, especially in history, mythology, the Bible, astrology, astronomy and alchemy, that he is hard to keep up with. His ear for the music of language is so finely tuned that we must sometimes strain to hear it. But it all pays off.

It brought to mind a similar feeling when I was reading Marx and Engels. The sheer volume of what these men knew was staggering, not only languages from Greek and Latin forward, but history, science, mathematics, mythology and religion (and Shakespeare). How does one mind retain and creatively process so much information?

The answer is it doesn't happen often. It is what makes genius genius.

Reading Shakespeare is like learning about the world all over again, not the facts of its existence -- its "history" -- but its personality and its soul.

More later.

Doublethink

"Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is to be forever averted -- if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently -- then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity."

George Orwell, 1984


Glenn Beck on Unemployment

Minnesota Monet

Pond out back, Sunday morning, August 15, 2010

I am Death, Destroyer of Worlds

Before HUAC and the lunch counter it-ins, before the Civil Rights Movement, before LSD and the Anti-War Movement, before Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes, there was The Bomb.

The mushroom cloud overshadowed everything. We had drop drills in school, as if ducking properly under your desk could prevent you from being turned to ash in an instant. There were back-yard bombshelters prepared for life in the twilight of nuclear radiation. There was the omnipresence of instant annihilation.

Look at the photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombing. Look at the photos of the mushroom cloud, the symbol of universal death. I grew up in its shadow. In junior high I read John Hersey's "Hiroshima," and watched as nuclear annihilation poisoned the far Australian skies to the tune of "Waltzing Matilda" in "On the Beach."

I vividly remember a dream I had at the age of 10 or 11. My family huddled under the dining room table. For some reason, if we touched wood, we would be safe. We gripped the legs of the table and watched the world map on the dining room wall as the red buttons of the bombed cities lit up, wondering if we would see Los Angeles light up before we were incinerated.


This was a city.

Before The Bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were cities; after The Bomb they were charred, skeletal remains. We should never forget the world-destroying power we possess and remember, always, that we are perched precariously on the brink of the abyss, and we have only ourselves to credit and to blame. Anything is possible; but that means everything.

What we do with that information is a matter of individual choice. But it is best not forgotten. We are still clutching the wood, waiting. Whatever you do, make it count. The only thing we truly have is the present moment. Make it good.

Double Ds

[from Act 2, Scene 2, Nonny in the Sky with Love]
[CLARICE is a young Nurse's Aid hanging on to her job by a bra strap.]


NONNY
You have big breasts; he likes breasts. Of course he likes you.

CLARICE
Nice, aren't they? They aren't real, but what the hell!

It doesn't matter if they're real,
all that matters is how they feel,
and that what you got affects
persons of the the opposite sex.

Your sex appeal definitely triples
with cantelopes underneath those nipples!
So what if they're as phony as all get out?
That's not what it's all about.

I'm talking about boob-appeal!
Give 'em something they can squeeze.
Boob appeal! Guaranteed to please!
Bubblicious bowls of peaches and cream.
Every old horndog's dream!
Great big beautiful bouncing double Ds.

Some guys go for legs or thighs.
OK. Some guys go for brains.
Some guys go for big blue eyes,
or Harleys or electric trains.

But you don't even have to be too pretty;
a knockout pair of gorgeous titties
is catnip for seven guys out of ten.
If the rest want sticks, or smarts, or men...
Who cares!

It's all about boob-appeal!
Give 'em something they can squeeze.
Boob appeal! Guaranteed to please!
Bubblicious bowls of peaches and cream.
Every old every horndog's dream!
Great big beautiful bouncing double Ds.

NONNY
You're barking up the right tree.

CLARICE
The Colonel...

NONNY nods.

CLARICE
S-w-e-e-e-e-t!! OK honey. Gotta run. You made my day!

Bieito's Stuttgart Parsifal: the fabulous conversation

For those of us who love opera, to whom it matters, the ongoing discussion of Calixto Bieito's production of Wagner's Parsifal in Stuttgart on Parterre Box, an opera blog molto particolare (to which I've been addicted for nearly a decade) and carried over into the blog of Andrew Richards, the tenor who sang the role of Parsifal in the production, is an absolute treat: impassioned conversation of the highest order, from outrage to transport, and covering most of the burning questions not only of the role and meaning of art in general and opera in particular, but also the vision and mission of directors and performers, and what is their proper responsibility both to the composers' "intent" and to the audience?

I have found this conversation exhilarating. You can start here. The discussion is in the Comments section; follow-up in a newer thread links to tenor Andrew Richards' blog for his take on the discussion.

If you aren't passionate about your opera, don't waste your time.

Youth in Revolt

Luke called me the other afternoon and said, "Dad, I have a movie I think you're going to enjoy. It's really smart and really funny."

We watched it last night.

Based on the novel by C.D. Payne, Youth In Revolt is a deadpan screwball comedy, as if someone had thrown American Pie and Breathless into a blender. It is almost self-consciously nouvelle vague and yet not. The plot is driven by adolescent horniness and loneliness. It is not simply insane; and not simply funny. It is insanely funny, as in, one of the headiest cocktails to be found.

The cast is stellar, chock full of new hotties and seasoned pros. Fernwood is well represented by Mary Kay Place and Fred Willard. Jean Smart is the slutty mom, Steve Buscemi the beleaguered dad, Ray Liotta, a randy cop; and the youngsters -- hero Max Cera, his Juliet, Portia Doubleday, his pals Erik Knudsen and Adhir Kalyan -- are all originals. These are not characters you've seen a thousand times. This is probably your only opportunity.

You know when the hors d'oeuvres are stuffed psilocybin mushrooms that you're in for a wild ride. You'll never think of your pinky the same again!

I laughed my ass off.