Welcome to Beyond the Zeitgeist in Mexico

Zeitgeist: The spirit of the time – and place.

Beyond the Zeitgeist started as a New York City arts-and-language blog—random acts of culture from beyond the Zeitgeist.

After a hiatus, the blog relocated to San Miguel de Allende, a Central Mexico mountain town inhabited by a considerable (about 10% of the total) population of gringos—Mexican for “Americans.” Random acts of culture here mean culture in the broadest, or anthropological sense—anything that goes on, or the way things are. (From time to time we may report on the arts, but as likely as not from an anthropological, as opposed to a critical, perspective.)

Written by a gringa in Mexico, this blog is doubly beyond the Zeitgeist. And yet—the Zeitgeist is always the present time and place. So we can and do inhabit, legitimately, the spirit of our present situation.

Outside-in, in Mexico

In Mexico, the outside doesn’t stay there. In New York, the outside is pretty much like the inside—manmade. Unless you go to Central Park. But that’s manmade, too. And very well-behaved. We do get the odd mosquito, and a fly or two may invade our apartments. Even, on occasion, a tiny spider. Roaches don’t count. They’re inside creatures. So, really, are rats and mice. Central Park has plenty of those, too.

Mexico is different. Even a gringo-ridden town like San Miguel.

Paving the Callejon

Valvino and his family are paving the callejon. His sons Oscar and Rolando are men enough for real work, swinging the pick or sledgehammer, pushing a full-sized wheelbarrow full of cobblestones or cement. Various small grandsons share a child-sized wheelbarrow and have a go with the pick whenever anyone is willing to indulge them. Valvino’s wife sometimes comes out in the afternoon to kibitz, as do his two daughters, one of whom brings her own small daughter. A couple of friends stop by to work or hang out. Ian, who grew up with Valvino’s oldest son, Antonio, and is now in law school, kibitzes, too; his parents live on the callejon. Antonio himself comes by on weekends to pitch in, bringing his two small children to watch.

Road Crew at Work

As I write this in the office of the casita I rent from my friend Sue, the excited chatter of children cuts through the deeper tones of the men, with a woman’s voice chiming in occasionally. Then all is silent but the thud of the sledgehammer.

Play It As It Lays

“Palestinians try to dig out the remains of a security force officer from Hamas as he lays in the rubble following an Israeli missile strike on a building in Gaza City.”

The Huffington Post muffed it in this Dec. 28 photo caption*: that dead security officer lies in the rubble (although we hope not still). But Joan Didion got it right in the title of her 1970 novel (which I’ve borrowed for this post).

Uptown Oasis Caught in the Madoff Debacle

The New York Psychoanalytic Institute is not where you’d expect to go to hear jazz licks or banjo riffs, but on two consecutive Saturday afternoons in December the third floor rocked. Or, at least, reverberated. The venue was The Philoctetes Center for The Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination—a long name that has sheltered a multitude of different events, from poetry readings to films to “round tables”, free-ranging discussions by experts on anything from New York dance in the 1960’s, to the art and craft of magic, to cell biology and cancer, to the history of violin-making.

And music. Before the bad news, the good: an appreciation of those two events. On the 14th, three “world-renowned jazz artists and long-time collaborators”, pianist Fred Hersch, bassist Drew Gress, and soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, got together to explore “Jazz Improvisation: The Art of the Ballad”. This was about playing slow and moody, what Bloom described as “breath[ing] together slowly, with the bass at the bottom.” Hersch, doing his best with an upright piano, spoke of the “shape of the [ballad] beat, softer and wider, with the piano as percussion”. Gess said that with ballads he “became aware of wide open spaces….the tone is important, because you don’t have the overt rhythm”.

Incredible Shrinking Verb Forms

A reminder of how far beyond the Zeitgeist I have grown: my ear remains offended by a movie title: “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.”

“Honey, I Shrank the Kids” would sound right, as would “Honey, I’ve Shrunk the Kids.”  Maybe the second was what was meant, a careless elision eliminating the contraction of “have”.

The movie was made in 1987, and reincarnated as a TV program in 1997.  I’m still offended. I hear endless similar locutions: “He sung three new songs”; “I stunk”; even, once, “He’d swam with the sharks.”

All this with a group of irregular verbs whose past tense is—or used to be—formed by changing the vowel in the present tense—usually a short “i” as in “drink”—to an “a” (drank). To form the past participle the vowel changed again, to “u”, as in “drunk”. Used with “have” and “had”, the past participle forms the present perfect and pluperfect—“I’ve swum with the sharks, he’d swum with the sharks.” (“Swim, swam, swum”.)

According to Wikipedia, these verb forms go back a long way, and are actually fairly regular. They come to us directly from Old English—sturdy, one-syllable verbs that do yeoman service in daily use. No wonder that in linguistics they’re called “strong verbs”.

NYCB Opening-Night Gala

Deep into “Nutcracker” month, I’m looking back at the New York City Ballet opening-night gala, which was held on Tuesday night, November 25 in what used to be the New York State Theater but which, as of opening night, has been renamed the David H. Koch Theater. More on that later.

First, the good news: although it was indeed a gala evening, it was still possible to get a 4th-ring seat for $15, provided you spent $20 to join the 4th Ring Society, which entitles you to $15 seats throughout the winter and spring seasons (the only exception, I think, is the retirement performance of a famous and well-loved dancer, which  guarantees a sold-out house—e.g., in the last two years, Peter Boal, Nikolai Hubbe and Damien Woetzel).

The Usage Curmudgeon – What Exactly Does the Dow Experience?

The usage-peeve pages in the top right-hand column are under a new name, “The Usage Curmudgeon” (formerly “Do Words Matter?”) These pages explore the ways in which, through usage, common words take on strange new contexts. Here’s the newest entry:

What Exactly Does the Dow Experience?

From an unlikely source comes another usage peeve: Christa Tippet, host of the NPR show “Speaking of Faith” (at 7 a.m. Saturday morning, the only talk radio available as I sort clothes for the laundry) mentioned, at the top of the hour, that the Dow Jones “experienced” a precipitous drop….This was the umpteenth time recently that I’d heard about a non-sentient entity “experiencing” something—e.g., my cable company was “experiencing” service disruptions, or Amtrak was “experiencing” delays.

Well, no. Actually, we’re the ones who experience these things. The Dow drops, and we experience dismay, fear, a sinking feeling in the pit of our stomach. Cable service is disrupted, the train is delayed, and we experience frustration, or worse. Read on…

Giorgio Morandi at the Met

You have to love a painter who loves both Masaccio and Cezanne—the first introduced perspective to help launch the Italian Renaissance, and the second began the flattening that became a hallmark of Modernism. Morandi himself (in a major retrospective at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art through December 14th) may be a forerunner of Minimalism, but I prefer to think of him in the same serene eternity of clear, even light as his artistic forebears.

Everyone knows that Morandi painted small objects—bottles, boxes, bowls, pitchers, butter molds—endlessly rearranging and repainting them, often in series.  I loved his work early on, then thought I was bored by its sameness. In this show, I fell in love with his work all over again, happy to be seduced by its amazing variety and extraordinary subtlety. No one has better evoked the essential, mysterious thingness of things, even as his work became so abstract that his late watercolors were miniature color fields, compared by the Met’s wall text to Rothko. But then, Morandi himself pointed out that “Nothing is more abstract than reality.”

Black Watch and the End of Modern Warfare

I’d read the reviews; I knew Black Watch, the hit National Theater of Scotland production now in its second run at St. Ann’s Warehouse, is about serving in Iraq, that it was developed using the actual stories of real soldiers and that it’s a bravura ensemble production. What I didn’t understand until I saw it is that it’s the story of the fabled, almost-three-centuries-old Black Watch Regiment that, in 2006, was “amalgamated” with 5 other Scottish regiments—and that this marked more than the end of a “great tradition”. At the very end of the play, when a disaffected soldier tells his officer why he’s not staying on in the army, I realized that the end of this regiment, which served as a mercenary force all over the world and fought in both world wars, coincides with the end of the whole concept of professional soldiering on which modern warfare has depended.