Beyond the Zeitgeist

Paving the Callejon

bz62 — Mon, 11 May 2009 05:24:49 +0000

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. They are breaking up the concrete at the paved end of Sierra Gorda, the calle that dead-ends in the callejon—a short, narrow, previously dirt lane, or alley, named Curtidores, that runs between several gringo houses, two of them relatively new.

Curtidores starts where Callejon Atascadero runs up from Santo Domingo and abruptly switches to stone steps. Making the blind left turn off the short steep hill onto Curtidores means gunning the engine at just the right moment. If you overshoot, you could ram into the stone wall of an ancient tanning pool. Callejon Curtidores was the alley of the hide cutters, probably in the 18th century, certainly the 19th.

Gringos began to move up here—near the top of the hill that rises at the east end of town—in the 1970’s. Sue’s house compound, at the corner of Sierra Gorda and Curtidores, was a one-story colonial relic when Peter, who’d first come to San Miguel in the 50’s, began building it up, adding a second story, darkrooms, a third-story studio, guest quarters, sheds, the casita. In the mid-80’s, my friend Judy bought a rubble-strewn lot on the other side of Sierra Gorda, which in those days was unpaved, too. She and her husband David, whose family has owned land in San Miguel for generations, incorporated the lot’s colonial stone “shack,” with its beautifully carved, heavy wooden doors, into their house compound. Eventually, when Sierra Gorda was lined with house walls on both sides, the residents got together and had it paved.

On the other side of its intersection with Sierra Gorda, Curtidores remains flat for a short stretch and then trails downhill, angles right and takes a new name, Chepitos. Just beyond Valvino’s house, Chepitos narrows into a pedestrian walkway, overhung with bougainvillea and deeply shaded by the gringo and Mexican houses that crowd along it. Chepitos gives onto Cuesta de San Jose, the other main road leading down into town.

At the road-building site, there are engineering decisions to be made. The stretch of Curtidores between Atascadero and the intersection with Sierra Gorda has had to be raised to prevent the flooding that the rains used to bring to Steve’s house. He’s paying for this stretch, and he does a fair amount of kibitzing himself. The question is, how to angle the new surface to connect with Sierra Gorda, which rises northward from Curtidores, in such a way that when the rains come the water pouring down Sierra Gorda will drain into Curtidores and keep on flowing—down to Santo Domingo on its east end and down the hill past the vacant lot on its west end.

When the rains come to San Miguel, cobblestone streets and other hard surfaces become swift-running streams. Water flowing in from side streets hits the downhill streams with waves of turbulence. I’ve seen the steps at the northwest corner of the Jardin, the Plaza Principal at the center of town, turn into a waterfall, feeding the ankle-deep flow of the street below it.

But now it’s the dry season, and Steve, a retired lawyer from Maine in a white polo shirt, khaki Bermuda shorts and running shoes with no socks, is trying to help solve the engineering problem; unlike many gringos in this town, he’s fluent in Spanish and has a lot of Mexican friends. His hose provides water for the cement that Valvino’s crew mixes on the ground in the vacant lot beyond Sue’s house. The stretch of callejon from Sierra Gorda to the lot, running between Sue’s house on one side and two other gringo houses on the other, was the first section to be paved, using stones from the vacant lot. Sue and her neighbors hired Valvino, and on the basis of his work for them, Steve followed suit.

: The First Stretch, Half-Done

The flat half of the vacant lot where the cement is mixed serves as a parking lot (the day’s mound of wet cement is an impediment, but now that the intersection with Sierra Gorda is torn up, no one can drive anywhere anyway). Beyond the parking area, the lot runs down hill next to Curtidores. It’s full of stones that are the right size for cobblestones, cemented by hand-poured mortar. Steve, though, has purchased “river stones”—fairly uniform in size and nicely rounded. I remember, during my first visit to San Miguel, in 1995, watching workmen paving a downtown block (a municipal, as opposed to private, project). They carefully set the egg-shaped cobblestones upright in the dirt, then poured liquid cement around them from little beakers like Turkish coffee pots.

On Curtidores, the little kids have been having a ball. On the first stretch, in front of Sue’s house, they could dig up a few cobblestones from the parking lot / stone quarry, load them into their miniature wheelbarrow, and trundle them to the paving site. Even with the river stones, they can help set them into the stretch of dirt graded and prepared by their elders. It’s the kind of real participation in adult life that, in the US, would violate every known child-labor law, while provoking the nostalgia of cultural historians who yearn for the days when US kids could find meaning in life through similar participation.

: Valvino Works; Kids Clown

Valvino—a cheerful, stocky man with a pronounced limp, a generous belly, broad features and a luxuriant black mustache—is the neighborhood entrepreneur. His house on Chepitos and the two next to it are sandwiched in between two gringo establishments. The one on the corner houses several rental casitas behind its high walls. On the other side, a brand-new B&B is under construction, its parking garage giving onto the very end of the drivable stretch of Chepitos. The gringo houses all have high, smooth, variously tinted facades or walls. Valvino’s house and the two next to it are brick, on several levels, with a big stack of timber in front of two of them, bird cages and, often, a cage or two of puppies on the porches, a big sheet of blue plastic shading one section, and potted flowers hanging everywhere. On weekend evenings you may find Valvino’s extended family and friends sitting outside his house, small children and puppies tumbling over each other, adults chatting and laughing, music playing. During the day, you’ll almost always find a couple of hand-pulled wagons stacked with plastic bags of garbage, waiting for the garbage truck to clang its arrival on Cuesta de San Jose. One of Valvino’s self-constructed jobs is collecting the garbage from various gringo houses in the neighborhood and taking it out to the garbage truck.

: Valvino’s House, with Garbage Wagon

The garbage trucks in San Miguel are small, open trucks with high, white, slatted wooden sides. The garbage men, the basureros, stand in the back on top of the pile of garbage bags. The truck moves slowly along and stops, announcing its presence with the clanging of an iron triangle. Householders come out with their garbage, in cans or bags, and hoist it up to the waiting hands of the basureros.

The trucks don’t come down Sierra Gorda, so Valvino performs a valuable service. Without him, householders on Curtidores and Sierra Gorda would have to lug their garbage the equivalent of a couple of blocks—and, in any case, they can’t hear the clanging of the truck.

The Zeitgeist Has Moved

bz62 — Mon, 11 May 2009 02:40:47 +0000

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 has 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.

Play It As It Lays

bz62 — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:58:43 +0000

“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).

Surely, though, if you lay a bet by laying chips on the table, the chips should lie where you’ve laid them? Here we’re deep into transitive / intransitive verb territory. In a nutshell, “lie” is an intransitive verb: something or someone lies somewhere. “Lie” describes what its subject is doing.

“Lay” is, generally speaking, a transitive verb, meaning it takes an object—its action continues across (trans) to a noun. “He laid the book on the table.” Sometimes though, it’s intransitive, describing what a hen or a gambler does.

“Play it as it lays” is a gambling (and golf) command that fits Didion’s novel about the daughter of a compulsive gambler. The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms (1997), via Dictionary.com, offers a possible source for this usage in early 20th century slang, “let it lay,” meaning “leave it alone.”

A precise gambling usage is described in Yahoo! Answers by a self-proclaimed casino manager: “In casinos … if a customer places a bet and it’s not quite right, i.e., you put a bet on a split (17:1) on a roulette table but … it touches the corner (8:1), it will be played where it lays.”

It occurs to me that the golf usage, which refers to playing a ball that’s rolled into unfavorable terrain, could derive from the “lay of the land”. On a wordreference.com language forum, “virtdave” generalizes the command to mean “to accept the existing conditions when acting on a problem.” He thinks it may have originated in golf.

Finally, “to lie” is recognized as a nonstandard usage of “lay” as an intransitive verb by The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, 2006, also via Dictionary.com. Which brings us back to the Huffington Post, and the question of whether, in this case, and perhaps in others, the difference between transitive and intransitive is gradually being blurred.

The confusion between “lie” and “lay” has a long history, dating back as far as the 14th century, according to The American Heritage Dictionary. Among other things, it points to “Now I lay me down to sleep,” a reflexive form that was once standard. Not to mention the fact that “lay” is the past tense of “lie,” and “lay down” sounds just like “laid down.”

That soldier laying in the rubble will never sound right to me, but it’s probably a losing battle.

*The Huffington Post story can still be read, but the photo and caption have been changed since I read it.

Uptown Oasis Caught in the Madoff Debacle

bz62 — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 00:49:44 +0000

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”.

They treated us to “Mood Indigo”, achingly slow, Bloom’s sax sounding like a clarinet threading around the melody. A perfect example of “the 11 o’clock song,” Hersch said, “the next-to-the-last number, when you can relax and connect emotionally”. “It’s so simple, you’re naked,” said Bloom. “All there is is … a beautiful line.”

They played a Hersch piece for Wayne Shorter, “Still Here,” in ¾ time. They played “How Deep is the Ocean” in E flat minor (not the usual key , which is C minor), making it “fresh, and darker,” for Bloom, who refers to her improvisations as a “counter-melody”. They talked about the ballad key, and Billie Holiday, and what a ballad is. Hersch: it has a range of 10 notes, peaks at the end of the tune, and words and notes are completely intertwined.

They went out on “The Nearness of You”. Somehow, although nobody sang, throughout the afternoon the words and the music were completely intertwined.

As they were again on the 21st, when Béla Fleck, “the best known banjo player in the world today” and leader of the Grammy-winning Flecktones, teamed up with jazz pianist Dr. Lewis Porter to explore jazz improvisation in “Living in the Musical Moment: Banjo Innovations.” They said they’d never really played together before, and the piano occasionally drowned out the banjo. (Later, Fleck demonstrated that the piano and banjo are in the same range, and explained that the bass is complementary.)

The afternoon really belonged to Fleck, who gave us a lively education in the history of the banjo and the intricacies of banjo technique. He showed us the 3-finger Earl Scruggs style, with metal picks, that he uses—the rippling and syncopation of bluegrass—then called a young woman named Abigail out of the audience to show us the “clawhammer” style. This is a “stroke-pluck” technique, with no picks, all 5 fingers on the stroke, plucking with the thumb. It’s not syncopated, but a slithery, minor-key drone.

The style goes back to the African roots of the banjo: Fleck saw the same hand position in West Africa, on a 3-stringed instrument, in the town of Banjul, The Gambia, where they make instruments from the Banjul tree. A 4-string banjo was used in mid-20th-century American jazz, by Louis Armstrong. The 5-string banjo, however, may go back to the 1830’s.

Fleck and Porter played Fleck’s “Valse,” a “jazz waltz”, “like things I’ve heard jazz piano players do,” Fleck said. He recalled playing it with Chick Corea, who “gets inside the beat and slices it up”.

Fleck has recorded everything from Bach to bluegrass, and he played both for us. In bluegrass, he observed, there is a “tendency to play on the front end of the beat, push it”; whereas jazz may be more on “the back end”. Corea was “a forward-leaner;” McCoy Tyner, not. Then he played a wonderful solo, improvising on a piece he learned in Tanzania. He followed this with a bluegrass piece, then deconstructed both to show us the difference. Of improvisation, he said, he “doesn’t remember it if it’s really good”.

Finally, Fleck got into detailed demonstrations of the Earl Scruggs, Don Reno and Bill Keith styles: Scruggs “never repeated strings”, while Reno “hit the same strings over and over again”. The Bill Keith style, called “open strings”, is derived from fiddle tunes and alternates high and low strings. Fleck demonstrated, and for a minute you thought you understood the differences, the driving force of Scruggs’s bluegrass, versus the infinite virtuosity of the open strings, a continuous up-and-down rippling, major to minor and back.

The room was full of knowledgeable people; Fleck answered detailed questions, and, with Porter, played several more pieces. The whole event felt generous, expansive, and enlightening.

All you had to do was show up early (seating is limited) and listen. Events at Philoctetes are free, simulcast around the world as well as to the 2nd-floor auditorium that accommodates overflow crowds, and subsequently available as audio, video or transcript on the center’s website, philoctetes.org.

Which makes the recent news even sadder. On the website is posted “A Letter to our Friends: Most of you will have read about recent events surrounding the firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. Regrettably, the foundation that funds all activities at the Philoctetes Center held large investments with Madoff, and the Center’s capital and income source has literally vanished overnight….”

The letter asks for donations, and information about foundations that might be interested in supporting the Center. It’s signed “From Center Co-Directors Francis Levy and Edward Nersessian.”

As a long-time regular, I hope they make it.

Incredible Shrinking Verb Forms

bz62 — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 15:50:41 +0000

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”.

Old English adapted them from old Germanic forms, which in turn got them from Proto-Indo-European (the theoretical mother tongue). In fact, their full name is “Germanic strong verbs”—English, German and Dutch all being Germanic languages.

There are 6 classes of strong verbs; the “drink, drank, drunk” forms belong to class 3. What defines them actually isn’t the short “i” in the present tense but an “n” or “r” at the end, usually followed by another consonant: “sink”, “stink”, “spring”. But “run” and “swim” are included, too.

Quite a few of these strong verbs, though, don’t bother with the “a” in the past tense. They go directly to the “u”, so that the past tense and past participle are identical: “cling, clung, clung”, “swing, swung, swung”, “win, won, won”.This is a lot easier to remember, and what seems to be happening is that the vowel change to “a” in the past tense is gradually disappearing in favor of “u”.

Look up “shrink”, “sing”, “sink”, “spring”, or “stink” on dictionary.com, and you’ll find that both of its main sources—Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2006; and The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, 2006—recognize alternate forms of the past tense. E.g., Random House gives “sang or, often, sung”, “sank or, often, sunk”, “shrank or, often, shrunk”. American Heritage doesn’t bother with “often,” giving simply “sprang or sprung”, “stank or stunk”.

An exception is “drink”: Random House gives “drank or (Nonstandard) drunk” for the past tense, “drunk or, often, drank” for the past participle (the outcome here is clearly in doubt). American Heritage sticks to “drank, drunk”. They both stick to “swim, swam, swum” and “run, ran, run”. (Interesting that these verbs end with a single consonant.)

“Ring” also remains in the form I’m used to, but it turns out that “ring” is a ringer, having possibly sneaked in from the Norse (which doesn’t bother me, since I’m half Norwegian).

So I’ve got to get with the program, I guess. “I stunk” sounds OK to me, but I suspect that “Honey, I shrunk the kids” will always sound wrong, as will being told that the soprano sung beautifully. Luckily, most of the critics I read stick to the old forms—but clearly their days are numbered.

NYCB Opening-Night Gala

bz62 — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 02:07:18 +0000

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).

For balletomanes on a limited budget, this is heaven. Balanchine made sure the State Theater (it’s going to take me a long time to call it by its insalubrious new name) was designed for ballet. As a result, the 4th ring is just fine, particularly if you have a small pair of binoculars (10×25 is perfect) for the solos and duets. (There are people who can’t stand to watch ballet through binoculars. Perhaps because I’m also a birder, it’s second nature to me.)

The bad news is that, out of 9 dances presented (all but the first one excerpts), 5 were by Peter Martins, the Ballet Master in Chief, 1 by Susan Stroman, 2 by Balanchine and 1 by Jerome Robbins. Peter Martins looks great in a dinner jacket, and I guess that when it’s your ballet company you get to stuff the program, but the truth is that although he was a wonderful dancer in his day, he’s a second-rate choreographer.

It was an all-American-composer evening, starting with Martins’s complete “Chichester Psalms,” a lugubrious effort to music by Leonard Bernstein, with the NYC Opera Chorus. The chorus (with boy soloist) stands across the back of the stage on risers, on which the dancers also sit waiting their turns. The women are in white. The men wear long black skirts with black swags angled across their bare chests. The effect, to me, is vaguely Mesopotamian, with all that that suggests about slow motion and the repetition of ceremony. There is a great deal of tedious ensemble dancing, with principles Sara Mearns and Jared Angle doing their best in the muddle.

Martins cast his wife, Darci Kistler, with Albert Evans in a duet from his “Barber Violin Concerto.” Evans, a veteran, is in better shape than he’s been in years. Kistler, a young marvel when she joined the company in 1980, is now, alas, past her prime.

Not that there weren’t moments. especially in “A Fool for You” (Ray Charles) and “Calcium Light Night” (Charles Ives) which is mostly charming. It’s also relatively early Martins (1978), as opposed to the 2004 “Chichester.” His choreographic skills haven’t aged well.

There were moments in Susan Stroman’s “Blossom Got Kissed” (from “Duke”), too, but that doesn’t make Stroman an interesting choreographer, either. She’s slick, and apparently popular, but one longs for the real thing.

We got it in Robbin’s “Ives, Songs,” with Rachel Rutherford and Philip Neal, Wendy Whelan and Charles Askegaard, accompanied by a baritone and a pianist. Both women gave us wonderful point work—but then, they had serious choreography to work with.

Balanchine was represented by “The Unanswered Question” from “Ivesiana,” with Janie Taylor and Daniel Ulbricht, and by the closing number, excerpts from “Who Cares,” set to Gershwin, one of Balanchine’s most beloved and wonderful dances. Jennifer Ringer looked great, and even Nilas Martins, never a particularly interesting dancer, looked good. (It was family night at the ballet.)

In addition to the dancing, we got a fawning speech and a vodka toast from the stage by Martins to Mr. Koch, who has given $100 million to NYCB, enabling the upgrading of the theatre, among other things. “I hope you like your seat,” Martins said to Koch, who was sitting in the first ring. “It was Lincoln Kirstein’s seat. If you don’t like it, you can go to the other side and sit in Balanchine’s seat. Whichever one you pick, it’s yours. Forever.”

The Usage Curmudgeon – What Exactly Does the Dow Experience?

bz62 — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:37:13 +0000

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

bz62 — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 13:09:51 +0000

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.”

Morandi groups his objects in ways that your art teacher never would have allowed: he clumps them together or lines them up in a single or double row, almost or actually touching. Yet it’s exactly this density that gives them presence. Early on, he uses lines, but these dissolve. His palette runs to warm, muted tones of eggshell, browns, pinks and the occasional blue, green or red, and to strong whites and grays.

Sometimes the thin spaces between objects are darkly mysterious, as in a Still Life of 1956: three vertical boxes in front defined by flat planes of color, pale, delicate tones of eggshell, white and peach, with a green tin next to them and behind them a white bottle and a blue-necked one, on a gray table against a pale bluish-gray background. Between the boxes are dark crevices that lead the eye to the bottles, but the tops of the boxes and tin and the body of the blue-necked bottle are the same gray as the table, making them seem to merge with it. The white box is directly in front of the white bottle, almost merging with it; the grey top of the box could also read as a horizontal band across the bottle, except that the box is a slightly whiter white. The neck of the bottle is set off from the pale background by a vertical blackish vase directly behind it. The white and peach boxes are aligned with the front edge of the table; the eggshell one is set back, almost in line with the bottles. The background, table and front edge of the table can all be read as horizontal bands. What’s surface, what’s space?

With an evenness of light, tone and hue, it’s mainly the color that evokes space and flattens it out. In a Still Life of 1943 Morandi groups 4 objects: a yellowish-brown, two-toned bottle or bottle-shaped container with a lid, two round containers with flat tops—one dark brown, one a muted red—and what looks to me like a butter mold, a crinkly walnut-shaped object with a greenish-blue bottom and yellowish top. All these objects are clearly defined with shadowing or color; each one appears to touch one or two others. The muted red container cozies up to the bottle shape to the left of it; the butter mold seems to touch the dark brown container behind it, which is slightly behind but seems to touch the bottle shape to the right of it.

The objects are on a gray table set at a slight angle against the yellowish-brown background, its tone somewhere between the browner top of the bottle shape and its yellower bottom. In the bottom right-hand corner of the painting, the table edge is defined by two darker gray lines and a tiny sliver of background color.We read the objects as standing on the table, but the dark brown container on the left, with its perky little handle sticking up, seems to be set mostly off the back edge of the table. Or perhaps it’s leaning up against the wall, as its top seems to be set at an angle. There’s a dark brown shadow or stain on the front of the butter mold.

We see the objects, our eye places them on the table, as do their shadows, but really they are serenely sitting on nothing, an angled band of gray that meets yellow-ochre. It’s slightly disorienting.

As is the Still Life of 1964, the year Morandi died, which reuses the bottle shape and butter mold, gray table and pale yellow-ochre background. A pale-blue box, a vertical rectangle, stands right up against the bottle shape on its left. The butter mold sits in front of the left-hand corner of the box, apparently not touching it, except that it’s tipped to its right and the line of shadow between its top and bottom angles right into the thin, pale shadow that defines the bottle shape against the box. All three objects have a heavy black shadow along their right edge, and the box and butter mold cast definite shadows on the table. But the left side of the top half of the bottle shape virtually disappears into the background. There is no front edge to the gray table; in fact, the gray seems to have been roughly painted over the background color, and meets it in an uneven boundary “behind” the objects. The whole surface is very brushy, the objects are rather roughly painted, and the tonal differences between the two halves of the bottle shape and the background are very subtle.

The eye reads the objects as object and as abstraction; the whole painting as abstraction, the bottle shape barely coalescing from the background, extending the background into the gray. If you stop fighting the contradiction you can look at this painting forever. In fact, it appears to achieve a perfect balance between abstraction and—not reality; there’s no question of that, the objects themselves are pure paint, pure tonality. Between surface and object, then.

And then the sublime watercolors tip completely into color-field abstraction.

There are other subjects in the show. The semi-abstract landscapes of the 30’s and 40’s, a revelation, are in part a nod from one master to another. Several evoke Cezanne’s late great paintings of Mont St. Victoire; two particularly recall “The House with Cracked Walls”, one of Cezanne’s flattest.

There is a series of architectonic flowers-in-vases painted as gifts to friends, a small series of shells, a couple of self-portraits and a selection of etchings. In the last, Morandi uses cross-hatching to get an even tone, with patches of bare paper creating volume.

But following Morandi’s vision of those bottles, boxes and vases that he painted throughout his life is the great pleasure of this show.

Black Watch and the End of Modern Warfare

bz62 — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 02:22:13 +0000

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.

In Iraq, the boys of the Black Watch—and, except for their officer, sergeant and one of the men (Cammy, Paul Rattray, who spins the narrative thread) they are very young—encounter, not battles with other professional soldiers but ambush by suicide bombers. They’ve been set up for an impossible job: “peacekeeping” in fallujah, in the “triangle of death,” where 800 of them have been sent to replace 4,000 departing Americans—at our request. They can’t go out and attack an enemy army; instead, they’re sitting ducks in the backs of their (doubtless inadequately, like ours) armored vehicles, waiting for whatever may explode on the highway in front of them. Or they watch (and we all listen to the roar of) the American bombers zooming in to drop their fantastically noisy and destructive payloads on the villages. One of the boys says, “that’s just bullying”.

Post-modern warfare has devolved into ineffectual bullying (we soon learn that the display of firepower we witnessed killed exactly 2 people) by a national army on the one hand and frighteningly effective suicide bombings by fanatical civilians on the other.

One knew, of course, that the insurgency was not military, any more than were the Al Qaeda operatives who flew the planes on 9/11. One also recalls that forms of guerilla warfare were a scourge in Vietnam (women and children were always suspect). But there the people were helping out an army attached to an actual government, albeit one not yet recognized by us. (And there’s a good argument that that was one big reasons why the North won: the people were united against us, the invaders.)

In Iraq, the situation is a lot more complicated, but it took this play to make me understand the significance of the fact that there’s no army for “coalition” soldiers to fight. War is over. Not this war, alas, but war as we’ve known it.

Is this bad? I don’t know. It seems to be one more sign of the general decline of the nation-state in favor of global corporations and guerilla movements. It seems to me that in the short run it can’t be good. And I won’t be around for the long run.

In the meantime, we have this marvelous production, Black Watch, to remind us of how powerful live theater can be. It’s fearless: it uses mime, sign language, Scottish ballads, amazing choreography, video, a bagpipe, and a cast of 11 men to suck us into a story that makes us so strongly identify with them that we weep when they are blown up, even as they make us see why, rather than going on fighting for their mates, the survivors wind up back at their local pub.

Blog Identity Crisis

bz62 — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 11:47:42 +0000

I started Beyond the Zeitgeist as a New York City blog—random acts of culture from beyond the zeitgeist. “Culture” in the broadest sense, meaning just about anything out there that took my fancy. Certainly not myself.

It seems a little early for a blog to have an identity crisis. In fact, it’s the author who’s having the identity crisis—in a way, starting this blog has been part of it. It’s a beyond-the-zeitgeist crisis: I lost my very long-term freelance gig, I’ve already had a long and checkered career, and I have to decide whether to relaunch myself in New York City or retire to Mexico, where I can afford to live in moderate comfort without working.

Retiring to Mexico is both tempting and terrifying. On the one hand, it would be in a town—San Miguel de Allende—I’ve stayed in many times, where I have friends. It’s beautiful. I have the offer of a beautiful little house, a casita, on a friend’s property, at a very good rent.

The problem is, I’m a New Yorker. Not born, but bred. I’ve lived here for 43 years—virtually all of my adult life. The layout of Manhattan is part of my brain’s wiring. New York City Ballet seasons are not about “going to the ballet;” they’re part of my identity. Virtually every dancer I came up with has retired—Wendy Whelan is the the only one left—but there are some very interesting younger ones, like Ashley Bouder.

In my experience, the youngest dancers are not interesting. No matter how precocious, they’re all technique. It takes years to grow into a personality and become an interesting dancer. Ashley Bouder and some others have been around long enough now to be interesting. And there are always surprises. Philip Neal used to seem much too sleek, too feline. And then one night a couple of years ago I watched him partnering and thought, something’s happened. He’s changed. He’s starting to be interesting. Leaving town means missing those moments, like missing the moment when your child starts talking.

Wendy Whelan used to scare me. She was so intense, and thin, with those preternaturally long arms and every bone in her upper ribcage and back standing out. Then, several yeas ago, she suddenly became transfixing. I wasn’t the only one who noticed this, but I didn’t find it out second-hand, either. I discovered it for myself, watching her dance. When I read about other people’s observations, they merely confirmed my own. It was thought that this had to do with her relationship with the man she subsequently married, and that was interesting. But the most interesting was watching her dance.

I don’t feel ready to give that up. Losing the chance to watch the dancers dance, and change, and become interesting—not to mention seeing the occasional interesting new piece of choreography—feels like a kind of death.

My project is to to go down to San Miguel for a few months first, to see how comfortable I’d be living there. That makes sense, intellectually. Perhaps even emotionally.

To be continued….