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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-135939022014-10-28T01:02:15.411-07:00The Eastside Viewtravel, eating, reading, theater, music; occasional political remarksCharles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-19473368643279083012014-10-28T01:02:00.001-07:002014-10-28T01:02:15.441-07:00I MandorliCardona di Alfano Natta, October 28, 2014—

Siamo uccelli di passagio, I explained to Gabriella last night at dinner, we're migratory birds, we need to come to the same trees year after year.

Not always, of course; we do skip years; our migrations are annual, give or take, but not always the same route. But we do like our familiar temporary settling places, and among them this is a favorite.

It is half past seven; I've been awake half an hour. The fog is beginning to lift. Out the window I see the familiar rumpled landscape, the irregular fields divided among many different crops — olives, grapevines, dry cornstalks, lush green pasture. a couple of cars glide soundlessly along an invisible narrow road. To the right, the east, quite nearby, the village, stucco buildings, tile roofs, a square church-tower with two windows and a giant clock on each face; you'll be able to read the time out in your field, though anyway the bell tells the half-hours. A black and white cat comes across the tiles just outside my window, sits, regards me without interest, looks out at my view, then seems to think of something and moves on.

We came here first fourteen years ago, Gabriella tells us — I hadn't realized it was so long ago. She and her husband Franco bought this farmstead on the edge of the village a few years before that, having moved from the city for a quiet life. Over the years they've added to the property, and now their B&B offers several rooms and apartments. Franco has made wine and olive oil; Gabriella tends to the orto, the kitchen garden, and bakes, and makes delicious jams and tarts.

Here she is now with breakfast: a fine mortadella-like Piemontese sausage, two goat cheeses, a basket of toasted bread, butter, apple butter, a bowl of walnuts and hazelnuts, fresh-squeezed orange juice, a basket of apples, oranges, and bananas, and carafes of coffee and hot milk. We decline the yoghurt, as always. It is all too much, of course; it is mostly not only local but della fattoria, from the place itself; it is all delicious.

One of the problems with my other blog, Eating Every Day, is that occasionally it asks me to write about a meal prepared by one of its readers. I know this to be the case here; Gabriella mentioned it herself last night, at the table. We hadn't wanted her to go to the trouble to cook for us, and perhaps she didn't really; perhaps she and Franco always dine like this: fried cheese, radicchio salad, soup, roast lamb, beets and onions, giardiniera, tiramisu. Domestic and delicious.

The bed is comfortable; the air tranquil. Theo the basset is two years older than when last we saw him, and deaf, Gabriella tells me, deaf like me — my ears still blocked from last week's flight. We all get older, those of us fortunate enough to survive. But one of the attractions of this familiar roost: it does not change, nor does its setting.

Oh, there are little changes. The chapel down at the corner, which had lain a ruin for decades after its deconsecration — the population has not grown here! — it has been taken over by the municipality and gussied up with a new and to my eye irrelevant pseudo-Classical porch and is for sale, if you have an extra quarter of a million Euros. There are no toilets in it, Franco tells me, and when I ask if there's any plumbing at all, he shrugs. Well, it could always be installed.

I don't know what you'd do with it. To my eye, Cardona doesn't really need anything. A mile down the road, in Alfiero Natta, there's a bar and a little store. Cardona has only its church, telling the hours patiently to anyone who'll listen, and the sleepers in the cemetery down the road toward Tonco…

Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-77644907840045866442014-10-26T13:37:00.001-07:002014-10-27T01:12:14.755-07:00San Salvario, Torino

our building, Via Principe Tommaso

WE CAME HERE to Torino to atttend the Salone del Gusto, an international fair celebrating food and its producers, specifically those embracing the qualities famously statedd by Carlo Petrini, the founder of the Slow Food movement:

Buono, Pulito, Giusto

Good, Clean, Fair

Petrini is from Piemonte, as was my father-in-law; and Torino is the capital of Piemonte and one of Italy's biggest cities. We have spent four days wandering through the Salone, and we determined to take today off. I'll write about the Salone later — it's fascinating, and we attended two notable conferences there; there's much to write about. But tonight I want to write a bit about Torino.

It's not what you think an Italian city is. It's always struck me as being a bit reserved. We spent a pleasant hour with our host in a neighborhood bar discussing the possible reasons for this, and much of the following will be a paraphrase of his comments.

The city was founded by Julius Caesar, a long time ago, as a camp and a headquarters for his campaigns in both the neighboring territory and, further, the definitive settlement of Provence and the campaigns into Gaul. The original camp left its rectilinear layout to the old city, which lost its importance in the dark ages, when neighboring more prosperous towns shouldered it aside: Asti, Monferrato, Saluzzo.

In the 16th century, I think it was, certainly by the 17th, it began to regain some importance as a capital of the emerging kingdom of Savoia: but it remained small and relatively isolated, even from such nearby (by modern standards) cities as Milan. It is a mountain town, Marco went on; it's always addressed the mountains, even though it is on the Po.

After the French Revolution, and during the Napoleonic times (which in Italy extended toward the middle of the 19th century) the city began to enjoy some considerable importance, and grew considerably in size. We are staying in one of the suburbs of that time, San Salvario, say a hundred or so blocks lying to the southeast of the main railroad station.

Marco contributed to a fascinating guidebook, L'altra Torino: 24 centri fuori dal centro (The Other Torino: 24 centers outside the center), which we took with us today on our casual walking tour. It describes much of the history I've outlined, and points out the first Waldensian (Protestant) church, the hotel whose bas-reliefs portray the pretty young working girls of the quarter in the time of gaslight, the building that housed the Fiat offices, Natalia Ginzburg's birthplace — things like that.

I like its offbeat interests, effectively lightening its serious purpose. Marco is a young man, but a Piemontese, after all: he understands the beauty, the necessity, and the purpose of the past as it relates to the present.

That's an essential component of the Torinese character, I think. Lord knows things are up-to-date. The Metro is like a fast sleek horizontal elevator: the tracks are completely enclosed under glass; doors open quietly and effortlessly when the train glides into the spacious, well-lit station; you feel like you're entering a hotel lobby, not a grubby train, when you step inbto the carriage — though it may well be crowded, especially if you're on your way to the Salone.

We had a number of pleasant conversations today. At Franky's bar, near the train station, where we stopped for a cappuccino because we wanted the wi-fi, we were pleasantly asked where we were from, and given a little treat — a delicious filled cookie, in fact — when we turned out to be from as far away as California. This of course led to conversation about pastry, which is so good in Torino in general, and seemed exceptionally good here — my croissant was flaky and delicaely rich, very Parisian in the best sense. The pastry-cook spoke no English, but beamed at meeting Lindsey and enjoyed our enjoyment of his work.

Later in the day we had a substantial conversation with a woman met in a pubic market, where an afternoon contest had been organized in which ordinary people, from Torino and nearby villages, stood behind their very best bagna verde, green sauce. This is made of parsely, garlic, anchovy, and oil, with perhaps other things thrown in; it is made very carefully, with great attention to balance, and is then spread discreetly on, for example, boiled meat.

The young woman apologized that she wasn't really Torinese herself; her father was from Abruzzo and her mother was Roman; she was from Lazio; but she'd settled in Torino because she liked its intellecttual, language-conscious, literary, prudent atmosphere. She was fluent in German, French, and English, and seemed a little ashamed and maybe surprised that she didn't speak Piemontese, the local dialect as they call it — in fact, I think it is more a language of its own, closely related to Occitan.

We are staying in an Airbnb apartment, and I recommend it, in spite off its 96 steps' removal from the street. It is sober and quiet here, three blocks away from the busy Via Nizza. It is quiet enough now, in fact, half-past-nine, that I think I'll stop here, get my papers in order, and begin to pack. Tomorrow we return to the Salone for a last day; then rent a car and drive to the country, to a very different venue. I hope from now on to have a little time to write like this, and I hope you find something to enjoy in the result…
Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-55682136703998787232014-10-21T05:37:00.001-07:002014-10-21T07:02:41.063-07:00The Death of Discourse

New York City, October 21, 2014—

UPWARDS OF A THOUSAND people, I'd say, jammed themselves into a small triangular patch separating the automobile access to the Lincoln Center from Broadway, which itself was at a standstill with taxicabs, emergency vehicles, and police cruisers. It was a little before seven p.m., and the opening performance of a run of John Adams' opera The Death of Klinghoffer was set to begin in a little over an hour.

The opera is based on the 1985 hijacking of a cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, by the PLO, during which an American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, was murdered in his wheelchair. Set to a libretto by Alice Goodman, the opera, conceived by the director Peter Sellars, premiered in Brussels in 1991, and has been produced a number of times since, often to protests, largely from Jewish groups.

The history and content of both the opera and its protests are well covered on Wikipedia; I won't recapitulate that here. I saw the opera in San Francisco in 1992 and wasn't eager to see it again last night; we're here only two days, en route to Italy. But we did walk past the demonstration on our way to a restaurant we've long wanted to sample, and I talked briefly to a lone dissident from the general mood of what seemed to me a restrained but noisy crowd of protestors.

He was young, well dressed, good-looking, earnest, and very much aware of danger. He wore a yarmulke, and held a hand-lettered sign above his head, apparently prepared in some haste; I never could quite comprehend it, though STOP THE HYSTERIA was bold enough to read at some distance."What hysteria does he mean," my friend wondered; "let's go find out," I replied.

The poor fellow was being harangued by two or three men who were asking him how he could shame his own people, denying the evils of the PLO and Arabs in general, when the Nazis had murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust; how he could permit the Metropolitan Opera to produce an anti-Semitic opera.

He countered that he agreed about the PLO but that it was wrong to generalize about the Palestinians, not to mention the Arabs, and that the opera was not anti-Semitic. "Have you seen the opera?" he asked, reasonably enough I thought. His hecklers said they would never see such a thing, reflecting the general attitude of the crowd was that it was anti-Semitic propaganda masquerading as "art".

A young woman was listening to all this, reporter's pad in hand, taking notes, trying to interview the man with the sign. I talked to her briefly, then told the man I agreed with him, as far as I can tell, and asked him if he felt himself in danger. He was aware of it, he replied.

I asked if he thought the protest was organized, either by a single group or a coalition, and if so who he thought it might be.

Look, he said, I don't know anything about that, probably a lot of groups are represented here, probably some groups I even belong to myself. But it's important to counter this kind of hysteria with truth and reason.

I asked if he'd seen the opera. Not yet, he answered; I'm going later in the run. I have no opinion of the opera until I've seen it myself. I don't believe it has a political agenda.

At just that moment one of his earlier hecklers returned, approached him from behind, gave him a kick in the backside, then sidled away. I turned to see where Lindsey and my friend had got to and rejoined them, and the next thing I knew the poor fellow was being led away by a couple of uniformed cops, still holding his placard aloft, telling them he was going willingly, he was not resisting, he only wanted to express his opinions freely and peacefully.

He should be silenced, a man in front of me said. Let the police take care of it, his friend replied, with a smile.

Someone had set up a public-address system; a soprano wailed through The Star-Spangled Banner, and a recorded instrumental version of the Israeli national anthem followed. We felt our dinner reservation approaching, and walked on up Broadway.

Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-86605004204112437752014-10-13T00:31:00.001-07:002014-10-13T00:31:32.406-07:00Out and back<big>N</big>O ONE MORE AWARE than I how badly this blog's been neglected lately. Please excuse this neglect, and prepare for more. I've been away, and I'm about to set out again.

There was a time when I posted fairly detailed notes on such travels, sending them as group e-mail "dispatches" to a list of readers that ultimately grew to over a hundred — too big for the e-mail managers of that day, whereupon I began this blog, a little over nine years ago. There have been over six hundred posts since then, on topics related to travel, books, music, art, theater, politics — whatever I've felt like writing about.

I write these things mostly to find out what I think about things. I don't know why I want to know what I think about things: it's probably simply a habit, formed a long time ago, when something (or more likely some one) led me to believe it was one's duty to examine meaning.

Yesterday we drove home from a four-day tour to Ashland, Oregon, where we've been in the habit of seeing plays put on by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Comments on those plays have formed a number of posts to this blog over the years, all the way back to July 2005; and apparently there are those among you who are interested in these comments: I notice someone from Oregon City has just looked in on last March's remarks about three plays we saw earlier.

This year we decided against seeing the entire season, for two reasons: I've been growing increasingly impatient with re-interpretations of Shakespeare — Troilus and Cressida was the last straw — and we've been unenthusiastic about too many of the new plays by new playwrights. It hurts to say that; one always wants to retain curiosity and enthusiasm for the work of one's own time: but now that I'm in my eightieth year I find too often the "new" is merely the latest revelation of ignorance of yesterday's "new."

So we saw three plays last March: The Cocoanuts; The Tempest; The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window; and enjoyed all of them. We stayed away from Ashland through the summer, and returned last week toward the end of the season for a final threesome: Richard III, The Comedy of Errors, and the most promising of this year's new plays, The Great Society.

I'll give you the most negative report first: Richard III was damaged almost beyond repair by the new "sound system" the festival administration has installed in its outdoors Allen Elizabethan Theatre, which attempts to reproduce Shakespeare's Globe Theater. We sat at almost the exact center of the audience, just under the edge of the balcony, seats 11 and 13 in row L, twelve rows back from the apron. Many, perhaps all the actors wore body microphones. The sound was carefully managed, I'm sure, but much of the time spoken lines drifted to us as much (or more) from the clusters of loudspeakers high above the stage as from the actors themselves. You could put this to good use in a production designed to take advantage of it — the ghost of Hamlet's father could take on new and terrifyingly disembodied presence, for example — but until this sort of thing is familiar enough to be ignored completely it will always be, for me, at best, a technical gimmick, distracting from the performance. It's as if Richard were to muse on the winter of his discontent through a megaphone.

Another distraction: the choice of the deaf actor Howie Seago, who is also mute, to play Hastings. His lines were spoken by Omoze Idehenre and signed, in American Sign Language, by Seago. I can understand the desire to extend theatrical boundaries, to widen the community of actors; but sometimes this works better — Seago was useful, interesting, and sympathetic as the ghost of Hamlet's father, but quite a distraction inRichard III .

These problems were particularly unfortunate because otherwise there was much about the production, and its performance, and James Bundy's direction, that seemed both effective and faithful to the text. I was taken aback by the amount of humor Bundy found, but it was made faithful to Richard's persona by the powerful yet subtle acting of Dan Donohue in the title role.

The women in the cast were particularly strong - Idehenre as Mistress Shore, Kate Hurster as Lady Anne, Robin Goodrin Nordli as Queen Elizabeth, Franchelle Stewart Dorn as a magnificent Queen Margaret, and Judtih-Marie Bergan as the Duchess of York. An extremely interesting play could be devised keeping their lines, trimming other roles, and thus presenting the familiar psychological drama from a completely different perspective.
Shakespeare's comedies, to my mind, suffer less from extreme directorial departure than do his tragedies. (By their very nature, the Histories are another matter altogether: they're successful either as literal representations of the time they treat, or when brought forward to underline parallels between their events and those of the present day.)

The Comedy of Errors was set in 1930s Harlem and played by a cast of black actors (with a couple of minor exceptions), and I thought the result worked perfectly, enlarging a white audience's understanding of the black American experience of that era while maintaining Shakespeare's goofy rewrite of commedia dell'arte and Plautus. The actors were superb, clowning much of the time yet finding moments of pathos and edginess when appropriate, playing with asides to the audience, sight gags, pratfalls and the like, yet projecting real character and preserving the sentimental magic of the inevitable recognition scene at the close. The whole play went by very quickly, without an intermission; I could happily have sat through another performance as an encore.
Speaking of Shakesperian Histories, Robert Schenkan's The Great Society continued the pageant opened a couple of seasons ago with the same playwright's All The Way. The subject, of course, is the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, his access to office following the assassination of J.F. Kennedy in 1963 and his triumphal passage of the Civil Rights Act forming the first play, his inability to continue the social reforms he envisioned and his entanglement in the Vietnam War the new one. The Great Society is long and detailed, but dramatic and fascinating. It is pageant, I think, not play, because it is the historical events that seize the audience, not the personae of those who shape or succumb to them. Jack Willis was superb in the lead role, and he was supported by a fine set of actors in such roles as Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, and Hubert Humphrey. The deliberate attempt to make a contemporary American counterpart to such plays as Henry VI is audacious, no question about it: but it has been successful. This is important theater, restating the essential purpose of theater, to tell a community's stories to the community, lest the historical lessons otherwise be lost and forgotten.

Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-55385949706612026032014-09-15T17:23:00.001-07:002014-09-15T17:25:55.395-07:00String quartet: En balançant; Screen; Vie lactée

En balançant, for two pairs of bowed instruments (first half of the score)

Screen, for four to six bowed instruments

Vie lactée, for any four bowed instruments (first half of the score)

<big>I</big> HAVE WRITTEN ONLY one string quartet. ("So far," I suppose I should add; but I think it unlikely I will ever compose another, unless it is a re-notation of this one.) But even a simple statement like this is misleading, for my String Quartet is in three movements, each of which was originally written to stand alone, and was conceived for a different kind of instrumental configuration. The three movements were only gathered into a single unit a few years later, when I needed a string quartet: and the performance I heard on that occasion so pleased me that I now find it difficult to think of the three movements as separate entities.

Throughout the late 1960s I was concentrating on the quartet idiom of instrumental concert music. Conventionally this idiom has reached its apex in the string quartet, as it developed from Haydn through (at that time) Bařtók, Cage, and Feldman. What fascinated me, in the quartet, was the ability and the necessity of each of the four musicians to remain independent, focussed on his own material, but aware of each of the other three and of the evolving product of their simultaneous work.

As you see, the music is written out in "graphic notation," which was en vague in the 1960s. I was not particularly concerned with pitches at the time I composed them: I was thinking of representing the sounds of the music as elements in a spatial analogue of the psychoacoustical dimensions in which music is heard, freeing the music from the constraints of conventional melody and harmony as they are attached to a system of pitches, allowing them to become present as the musicians more or less intuitively are led to produce them.

As already noted, Screen was the first of these three movements to be composed. The title refers to the idea that the piece could be performed simultaneously with other compositions, and heard by the audience as a sort of acoustical screen through which the other music would be filtered. Although I intended the piece to succeed if standing alone, I did in fact combine it with other pieces; it appears as an aural ingredient in the early From calls and singing for chamber orchestra and in the opera The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even and with the Variations for harp with optional chimes in another chamber piece, Voie lactée.Screen was thought of as a string quartet, but I was drawn to the string sextet configuration as well, and from the beginning intended it to work for any four to six bowed instruments. The other two movements, though, were quite specifically written for four and only four instruments, though the specific instrumentation is not determined. (On the performance whose recording is linked to this post the three movements are played on violin, viola, cello, and contrabass.)

The titles of the outer movements refer to passages in Marcel Duchamp's great painting on glass, La mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même, which — together with the verbal notes Duchamp assembled to accompany the painting — form the subject of the opera alluded to earlier. En balançant describes the physical state of an important part of Duchamp's upper panel, which represents the Bride as a "pendue femelle"; Vie lactée was my unintentional pun on the voie lactée (Milky Way) which spreads across the top of his painting, representing the Bride's aura.

While Screen is quite free, its ten pathways playable in any order, left to right or reversed; the outer movements are more directed. They are to be played in sequence, left to right only. En balançant presents only two pathways, and is meant to be played as a canon, the second pair entering whenever they desire. The balancing act is meant to be performed by each pair, and by the pair of pairs.

Vie lactée is even more conventional, requiring the quartet finally to play in tight ensemble, free as to the specific pitches and the relative loudness and tempo but determined by attentiveness to the score. The three movements therefore represent a sort of catalogue of quartet possibilities, ranging from the equipoise of the opening movement, through the loose lyricism of the second, to the coherent expression of the third.

I have heard a number of performances of the quartet (though many more of Screen), and I've been pleased with all of them. My favorite, though, both for its performance and for its instrumentation, is the one linked to this post. It was in fact the first performance, played in 1971 I think. I no longer have a program from the performance, which probably took place in the Berkeley concert hall 1750 Arch; and I'm not even certain of the personnel. I know the late Nathan Rubin played violin; I think Ron Erickson played viola, Tressa Adams cello, and Jedediah Denman contrabass. Perhaps someone reading this will know.

I listen to this recording every night as I fall asleep, and am surprised at how often its sounds fall together in configurations that seem new to me. This was of course the intent: to provide notation that would allow musical sounds to develop, combine, separate, adopt changed configurations, and exist completely free from anyone's ego-expressive intent. Perhaps falling asleep to the music explains my fairly rich dream life.

You can listen to it too: just click on the titles under the score pages. Let me know if it puts you pleasantly to sleep.
Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-58335847097924836832014-09-02T07:52:00.001-07:002014-09-02T07:52:08.162-07:00That second sonataProfiting from an early rise, while we still have unlimited bandwidth, I've uploaded sound files to my second piano sonata, Sonata compositio ut explicatio, to my website, and you can hear the whole piece now by streaming it.

It's an undertaking, for the sonata is an hour long. I've written about it here before, and won't add anything more here.

The three movements are available separately, but of course I'd prefer you listen to the whole thing, perhaps as background music…

First movement (32:15)
Second movement (5:21)
Third movement (20:04)

You're welcome.Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-83318625149033455762014-08-29T23:25:00.001-07:002014-08-29T23:31:52.539-07:00Top TenA friend posts, on Facebook — yes, I spend some time there every day —
[A friend] tagged me, asking for a list of ten books that have stayed with me in some way, so here goes, off the top of my head, right this minute:

Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook
Lou Harrison, Lou Harrison's Music Primer
Vergil, Georgics
N.O. Brown, Closing Time
Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State
Benedict Anderson, Language and Power
Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam
Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin
Edward Gorey, The Raging Tide, or the Black Doll's Imbroglio

"Rules: Don't take more than a few minutes and do not think too hard. They don't have to be the "right" books or great works of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way. Then tag 5 friends including me so I can see your list. Don't make fun of me. No particular order." So, on to:
and then, of course, he leads a list of five Facebook friends with me.

After nodding at three of his choices and agreeing with their worth I gave the matter a little thought, more than a few minutes, because it's in my nature to disregard direct instructions. So many books came to mind: Montaigne first, curiously; then Robert Nathan's One More Spring, of all things; Crime and Punishment, Shakespeare… would it be fair to consider the Encyclopedia Brittanica one of ten books? Even Brittanica Jr., which meant so much to me in my childhood?

Finnegans Wake. Tender Buttons. How restrict myself to only one Henry James novel, or one Austen? What about Tristram Shandy? Gulliver's Travels? The Great Gatsby?
How could I exclude Mallarmé, or the Tintin books, or Chekhov, or Turgenev? Pirandello?

Look at the relatively recent reading: Manzoni, Herman Bang, Harry Mulisch, Sebald, Walter Benjamin, Geert Mak, Woolf, Lady Murasaki, Vittorini, Levi, Patrick Leigh Fermor…

No, I'm sorry, Daniel; this is not a matter for the top of my head. Or, rather, this is the way the top of my head seems always to work — perhaps simply because, at my age, I have the leisure to take my time getting to the top.

In the end I think I've been honest: these are the — well, yes, eleven — books that have stayed with me in some way, over rather a long span. There's not a title here that hasn't been staying with me for at least twenty-five years, maybe thirty; and two or three of them made their first impression close to seventy years ago.

Are they in no particular order? No: they're in the order in which they occurred to me, in the course of the great sifting; and perhaps the last retrieved, of the eleven, were the first to make their impress…

Don't make fun of me.
R. H. Blyth: Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics
John Cage: Silence
Christopher Alexander et al.: A Pattern Language
Wallace Stevens: Collected Poems
Francis Ponge: Le savon
W. A. Mozart: Letters
Georges Perec: W or the memory of childhood
Marcel Duchamp: Notes to the large glass
Homer: Iliad
Deems Taylor (ed.): A Treasury of Gilbert and Sullivan
Laura Ingalls Wilder: Farmer Boy
I've sent this on to five friends, of course, staying with Daniel's game. It'll be interesting to see if they join in…

Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-62312770032025084442014-08-26T22:21:00.001-07:002014-08-26T22:23:28.432-07:00Requiem with oboe

•Charles Shere: Requiem with Oboe.
Healdsburg: Ear Press, 2014
Full study score, 6x9, 48 pages
Available at Lulu.com, $9.99

<big>F</big>INALLY PUBLISHED: the full score to my short Requiem Mass, with the interpolation of two poems by Wallace Stevens, set for eight solo voices (or double chorus) with obbligato solo oboe.

I composed the music in 1985, shortly after the death of my mother, just short of her seventy-fifth birthday. You see her there at the left, probably about eight years old, one sock up, the other down, in an old snapshot taken I suppose in Shanghai where she spent her first twelve years, the third of nine children born to a high-school teacher from Sonoma county, in China to avoid a mother-in-law who was apparently giving him trouble. (The family returned to Berkeley as soon as she died.)

My mother admitted freely that she had a tin ear, and I never heard her play the violin, or any other instrument. Or sing, now that I think about it. She recited poetry, sometimes in German, but she was not what you'd call musical. My father was: though he never finished grammar school, he was an intelligent man and a constant reader, and fond of singing, and could play any instrument put in his hands (though I never put a bowed instrument there). But my mother, no.

In her middle years, when she'd returned to college to get a teaching credential, she most improbably signed up for a music-appreciation course. She had her own way of memorizing themes she was supposed to recognize at exam time: I remember her chanting
see the hor-ses run-ning up and down and up… and… down
to a frisky tune in Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, for example. But she never really cottoned to the standard repertory. I can't recall her ever going to a concert. Dad did, once, when I was sick in bed, and couldn't get to a performance of the Santa Rosa Symphony; for some reason he went in my stead, and found it lengthy but occasionally rousing, and even brought me the program, autographed by the night's soloist; who, I don't recall. But my mother, no: she wasn't interested.

The only music I ever heard her approve was, for some reason, Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. I had an ancient recording, conducted by the composer himself, with Erica Stiedry-Wagner sprechtstimming the solo part, and she used to listen to it every now and then, with a determined look in her eye. She said she liked it because it didn't fight with itself, by which I think she meant the lines were clear. I wonder how many of the lay public would have agreed with her. I never thought to ask precisely what it was in the piece that interested her: now that I think about it, it may have been the poetry, written originally in French, translated for Schoenberg's purpose into German — both languages she'd studied, how thoroughly I never really knew, in school, in China.

At any rate, my Requiem. It was commissioned (though no money ever changed hands — a common procedure in those days, at least in my experience) by Christopher Fulkerson, a composer of determinedly modernist bent himself, for his chamber chorus Ariel. This was a vocal octet, the conventional SSAATTBB configuration, but comprising eight very good singers with experience with modernist music, good ears, quite clear diction, and supple phrasing. Chris was a good conductor, too, shaping the lines well, maintaining the pitch, balancing the dynamics, bringing out the poetic heart of the texts.

(A few months earlier, Chris had been instrumental — vocal, I mean — well, no, he didn't talk all that much, he was in fact instrumental — in the production of about a third of my Duchamp opera, at Mills College: he found and rehearsed the chorus, some of whom came from Ariel, and took a solo line himself, very nicely.)

Chris had asked for a piece for a cappella voices, but for some reason I wanted to add the oboe. I wanted an aural emblem of a creature from another dimension, to bring the listener out of the contemplation of dying that any Requiem necessarily involves, and take the listener instead to a dimension we do not yet know, and an oboe in its highest register seemed appropriate.

Nor did I set all the usual text of the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass. The scary Dies Irae has become a cliché, and anyway death doesn't seem scary to me, in any case shouldn't be dwelled on, I think, as a thing to fear, since after all it is inevitable. And of course the parts about a personal savior don't comply with my own view of things, so I couldn't represent myself as agreeing with certain other components of the Ordinary.

For those parts I substituted two poems by a favorite of mine, Wallace Stevens, who I had reason to believe my mother had also liked, though like so much else his poetry was something we'd never talked about. Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself, with its window on "a new knowledge of reality," gave me a chance to introduce the high keening oboe, and "Of Mere Being," whose "palm at the end of the mind" seemed to promise a symbolic destination of sorts, provide me, at any rate, with a more spiritual, less sentimental, unearthly alternative to conventional ideas of afterlife.

I wasn't around for the rehearsals of the Requiem: as I recall, I first heard it at its premiere, oddly given in the old Vorpal Gallery in San Francisco's North Beach. I thought it went pretty well. I wish I had a better recording of it: the voices in the live recording made, I don't know whether at rehearsal or performance, seem a little off-mike.

I don't have a program of that performance, and I don't know who the eight singers were — a pity. The high soprano, whose coloratura takes her up to a high E, was really spectacular; the two basses were properly sepulchral; everyone in between negotiated the lines splendidly. And Marilyn Coyne — the one name I do know, apart from Chris Fulkerson's — handled a difficult oboe part with grace, drama, and total musicality.

And, while I agree with the painter Jack Jefferson, who told me once, about reviews, that if you agree with the good ones you've got to buy the bad ones too, I can't help liking the review that showed up a couple of days later in the newspaper:

A Program of Modern Works By the Ariel Choral Group

... The night's outstanding item was the premiere of Charles Shere's moving "Requiem With Oboe" (1985). ...

Shere's Requiem both uses and shuns the traditional Latin text. Two of its four sections use the Roman Catholic liturgy — "Requiem aeterna" and "Hostias et preces." But the larger part of the work employs two Wallace Stevens poems: "Not Ideas About the Thing, but the Thing Itself" and "Of Mere Being."

Shere's Requiem begins with a trope, "Requiem (mater) aeternam" — "mater" being an insert. Bits of the Latin text turn up briefly within the Stevens poems as well. To all this, Shere added snippets of oboe solos (played by Marilyn Coyne — mostly in the high register) as a kind of genteel wailing (the piece is dedicated to his late mother).

Shere set all this in a devoutly simple style. The idiom strongly leans on 14th and 15th century principles of counterpoint. What is heard is something of the motet manner, only updated into a freely atonal idiom.

What emerged was a softly lamenting cantata, liberated from violence or threats. There is, for instance, no hint of the Last Judgment. Shere has produced a work of tenderness roughly comparable to the Faure Requiem in mood.

— Heuwell Tircuit, San Francisco Chronicle

You can get a copy of the score from Lulu.com for a measly ten dollars plus postage. (Of course the postage is a little exorbitant: be careful the sale site doesn't default to a next-day delivery!) I think you might even be able to download the score as an e-book, though I'm not sure about that. If you don't read music, buy a copy for your local library. If you sing in a chorus, or know someone who does, give it a look. It's not my favorite of my pieces, but I like it. I wouldn't mind hearing it again, maybe even sung by a full chorus. Besides, I've been thinking a lot about my mother lately…

Technorati Tags: My music

Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-55853638599177205082014-08-08T05:46:00.001-07:002014-08-08T10:23:59.664-07:00Terry St. John: paintings

•Terry St. John: New and Recent Paintings and Drawings.
Dolby Chadwick Gallery, 210 Post Street, San Francisco
Exhibition continues through August 30

Terry St. John: Thai Woman with Cup (2012), oil/canvas, 48x42 inches

<big>W</big>HAT A FINE PLEASURE to see these new and recent paintings by Terry St. John! For decades he has been a significant part of the Bay Area painting scene — a scene of international significance, profound, impressive, and vital. But he has been a quiet participant, working steadily in a community of neglected artists: I think of those three great underrated J's of the Bay Area abstract expressionism: Julius Hatofsky, Julius Wasserstein, and Jack Jefferson. I thought, too, looking at these new St. John paintings, of another J, certainly not underrated or neglected, the phenomenal Jay DeFeo.

St. John was born in Sacramento in 1934 but grew up in Berkeley — he was a schoolmate of mine at Garfield Junior High School in the late 1940s, though we weren't friends at the time. He came to painting only in his last year of college, when on seeing work a friend was doing, studying at the time with Richard Diebenkorn, he was struck by the clarity and presence of purpose the discipline offered. Frances Malcolm quotes him in her introductory essay in the catalogue to the current exhibition:
<big>…above all else, I just wanted to paint paintings. Painting somehow gave me an opening to the future and a sense of hope… it was salutary.</big>

St. John worked among other painters in his early days. He was a great friend of Lou Siegreist, the youngest and last surviving of the legendary Society of Six early modern Bay Area painters, and of his son Lundy; the three often painted en plein air in the local landscape, particularly the slopes of Mount Diablo. St. John worked for years at a day job, curating modern painting at the Oakland Museum. He taught, too, at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont.

In spite of his sociability, though, he has always impressed me as a kind of solitary — a man who knows and keeps his own place and counsel. You have the impression it is the solitary discipline of painting that holds and informs him, that defines his address to life and to context. Whether working in the landscape or in the studio, it's the sense of the passage of time, as Malcolm suggests, that energizes his work, leaves traces of light and shadow, develops the evolving colors, finds the balance of recessive depth, spatial organization, visual meaning.

I have loved his work for years, and am pleased to have a small landscape. But I was unprepared for the new and recent work now on view. I had lost touch with both him and his work in the last ten years. His painting has developed great strength, depth, complexity, and certainty. As can happen this late in life, he has found a great sense of assurance — these paintings are vibrant and full of energy, God knows; but they are serene, objective, composed, competent.

I like the way so much painting history, internationally and locally, is contained, even referred to, with knowledge and intelligence, on completely equal terms, without his work ever seeming the slightest bit derivative. Thai Woman with Cup, for example, is fully aware of Cubism; it makes me think of the CoBrA school too; its window recalls the Matisse behind Diebenkorn; the seated nude brings Elmer Bischoff to mind: but the complexity of the left third of the painting oddly balancing the cool window on the right is something new to me — and the red shoe!

The newest canvases here, from 2013. are exclusively paintings of the nude, mostly in interiors though occasionally ambiguously so, perhaps in tropical landscapes — for a number of years St. John was spending part of each year in Thailand. There are a few smaller landscapes, though, from not that long ago, showing the artist is loyal to the Bay Area, and that its views continue to ground the solidity and geometry of his vision, as well as the texture, color, and light.

Wine Haven (Pt. Molate) (2008)
Diablo (2010)
Woman with Green Bottle (2014)

I was asked, in the gallery, which painting I'd take home with me, if I could. (I couldn't afford any of them, of course; and in any case every one of them seems already to have been sold.) Woman with Green Bottle, I said. The strength and solidity of the others is here, but I like the comparative simplicity, the domesticity, the classical subtlety of its geometrical relationships, the relationship of bottle, drapery, and the painting on the wall. I like the sense of history. And most of all, I think, I like the humor pervading the entire vision. St. John seems to have arrived at a sense of unusually sure and engaged and bemused awareness of existence, and I'm glad for the opportunity he gives of sharing it.
Bay Area Expressionism
I leave him, and you, dear reader, with a quick survey of some of the painters I've mentioned above, to provide some context for this sumptuous show of a painter arrived at mastery:

Lou Siegriest
Jack Jefferson
Julius Hatofsky
Julius Wasserstein

Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-6267691249546669032014-08-05T21:20:00.001-07:002014-08-05T21:20:52.285-07:00Reading (and not reading) FermorChristmas 2010: My dear daughter-in-law, the granddaughter of a Nobelist on the Berkeley faculty, brought up unconventionally in Berkeley (as was conventional in Berkeley), the owner of a feedstore in Mendocino county, gives me a copy of Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts.

I read it the following spring, and by May 15 had also read its sequel, Between the Woods and the Water.

Then last month, July 7 to be exact, I read the final book in the trilogy, The Broken Road. I know these dates because I have the habit of writing the dates I begin (usually) and finish (nearly always) a book on the first and last page (respectively). I also tend to tick margins and write notes or at least page numbers down on the end-paper, though these days I'll sometimes just photograph a relevant paragraph, either for posting here as a Commonplace, or for filing in a folder of Reading Notes someplace.

(Technical note: I convert the photo on my iPhone using an app called Pixter, and usually file the result in Evernote.)

A search of this blog finds Fermor mentioned only twice so far:
December 30 2011: So many books read this last year, so few of them commented on here. End-of-year reflections will haunt me for the next seven weeks, I'm sure — I'll be too busily distracted for them after that — so I won't anguish over my failure to share notes on Frederic Tuten, or Patrick Leigh Fermor, or Carolyn Brown, or Patti Smith, to cite only the most impressive of the authors I've learned from recently.

November 21 2012 (written in Australia): The shop reminded me of those of fifty years ago, a series of small rooms with crowded shelves, well enough organized but better suited to browsing than go-and-get shopping (except that my age and size make the necessary floor-crouching difficult between close-set bookshelves). I looked for a copy of something by Patrick Leigh Fermor to give to my brother, who's done his share of global wandering, but found only the new biography, which I must hasten to obtain. (It was far too large to carry on the airplane). What I did find was [Laurens van der Post's] Venture to the Interior, in a dog-eared Penguin paperbound that must be thirty years old.

P. Leigh Fermor has been recalcitrant, mysteriously so. He's considered one of the great travel writers. He began traveling in December 1934, only sixteen, by setting out on foot, with five pounds sterling in his pocket and another five promised monthly at waypoints, heading from his rural English home for Istanbul. December, 1934, crossing Germany on Foot! What was his mother thinking of?

He kept a journal, but lost it, later found it, lost it again. He met rich men and paupers, royalty, diplomats, shepherds, thieves. He supported himself for a while painting portraits of strangers. He fell, memorably, in love. He struck up amazing friendships.

And he walked — which is what excited me, in 2011, when my own recent walk from Geneva to Nice was still in my mind (as it continues to be; will always be).

A Time of Gifts appeared in 1977; it was later reissued by the New York Review of Books; I don't know what brought it to my daughter-in-law's attention. I read it hungrily, excited by the walk, but also impressed by Leigh Fermor's wide-ranging intellectual curiosity (history, art, food, languages, high and vernacular culture) and his detailed, enthusiastic accounts. As soon as possible I went on to Between the Woods and the Water (1986; also reissued by NYRB). Since my grandson Henry, who'd accompanied me through the Alps, had already read the first book, I lent him the sequel as soon as I'd finished it.

Then I waited, impatiently, for the third and final volume. Trouble was, Leigh Fermor had not written it, and he was getting on, and it was likely it would never appear. But, of course, it has appeared, in a sense — posthumously, edited by Artemis Cooper. (It was Cooper's biography, Patick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, that I'd neglected to buy in Australia; it too is now available from NYRB.)

No one would claim the result would have satisfied the author, who'd put the project aside decades before, then was talked into revisiting it in his final years. I'm sure his mind was sound to the end; but I think he may have lost interest.* It had been a long time since he'd finished the second volume; a much longer time since the events themselves had unrolled.

Still, *The Broken Road* is a wonderful book, vivid, interesting, a bit nostalgic. It made me want to see Bucharest again, and explore Bulgaria. It certainly makes me want to hit the trail again soon — I'd hoped to get up to the Sierra this summer, but that looks increasingly unlikely.

But here's the reason I'm posting this: Lindsey finally got around to A Time of Gifts, and was as impressed as I, and wanted to go on immediately to Between the Woods and the Water. Would I find it for her? Sure, I said, it's around here somewhere. (FERE ALIQVVBI HIC ILLVD SCIO, says Bhishma's handsomely calligraphed note, pinned next to the computer.)

Trouble was, it was nowhere to be found. Then I remembered loaning it. Never do that with a book you love. Finally I ordered another copy, reasoning the loan had turned into a gift in its turn, and why not?

Immediately, of course, the first copy materialized — on the dining table, in plain sight.

This surpasses all rational reality, I said to Lindsey, who was not so sure. I've been reading (and tremendously enjoying Harry Mulisch's The Discovery of Heaven these last few days, and the oddly erratic realities enveloping his characters may have begun to appear here…

*I may be projecting here. I've dropped more than one project after too many years of fussing…
Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-45978081462977840962014-07-18T22:47:00.001-07:002014-07-18T22:47:42.933-07:00On death
"

<big>D</big>EATH JUST MEANS YOU'RE NOT INVOLVED ANY MORE.
—Wendell Berry

"

Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-86299913507469479212014-07-09T11:54:00.001-07:002014-07-09T11:54:04.148-07:00Easy reading

•Célestine Vaita: Breadfruit.
New York and Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2006
ISBN 978-0-316-01658-2
•Célestine Vaita: Frangipani.
New York and Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2006
ISBN 978-0-316-11466-9

<big>S</big>UMMER IS THE TIME, they say, for light reading; now and then I get nostalgic for French Polynesia; and a favorite friend recently recommended the novels of Célestine Vaita. So before last month's road trip — yet to be documented here — I ordered two of them, used paperbacks, from sources online, hoping they'd arrive in time for the trip. They didn't, alas, but I made short work of them on our return.

I enjoyed them. I don't usually read things of this sort, and I'm not sure if they fall into some genre or other. I note that my copy of Frangipani ends with a "Reading Group Guide" including a short interview with the author and a series of suggested discussion topics — oh dear: is that what book groups do, sit around responding to publishers's suggestions? And my copy of Breadfruit turned out to be an advance copy, with odd typographical problems (double quotes for apostrophes, for example). So I suppose the novels are book-group fodder, and perhaps even Young Adult, and certainly directed toward women more than men.

In fact that may have lay behind my friend's recommendation: she feels one should read as many female authors as male, at least when it comes to recent and contemporary publications. Perhaps she's right: one of the things I very much enjoyed about these novels was their strong central character, Materena Mari, a fortyish woman living in a fiber shack in Faa'a, the town adjacent to the international airport outside Papeete. Materena.

Vaite was born there herself, and there may be a certain among of autobiography in these stories — Materena may have been modeled on her own mother. There are parallels, too, between events of Vaite's life and those of other characters, particularly Materena's daughter Leilani, a serious student.

Vaite's mother language was, I suppose, French, and she must have been frequently heard and occasionally spoken Tahitian as well; but these novels were written in English, in Australia, where the author settled with her Australian surfer boyfriend, later husband. A lot of the charm of the novels is in fact their language: breezy English, using the conventional French present tense regardless of the actual time being written about, occasionally translating French constructions in an awkward literal manner, occasionally sprinkling in a bit of Tahitian. The writing is constantly oral: you hear the voices of the characters, and through them, I imagine, that of the author. "Ah oui," they say, rarely simply "oui," and aue bof; statements are frequently preceded with "eh"; daughters are addressed as "girl."

And what does she write about? Daily life, which seems to be relatively easy. The ambience reminds me of Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat, fondly recounting everyday incidents among ordinary but colorful people whose relatively simple pleasures and easygoing setting emerge from communal life, not upward mobility. Tahiti is depicted, probably accurately at least for the time period, as a comfortable blend of French structure, socialist humanitarianism, and easy weather. You could grow to like this kind of life.

It might not be a stretch to think of Célestine Vaite as a contemporary, female Marcel Pagnol, substituting today's commercial-based culture for his more agrarian one (thinking of his rural novels, not the Fanny trilogy set in Marseilles). The warmth, gentleness, humor, and inevitability common to extended families, and to relationships between men and their women, women and their children — those qualities are universal, both these authors remind of us, if you strip away the striving and yearning and ambition that so often distracts us from them. They are what finally counts, those qualities and the everyday rhythms of sleep and mealtime, love and irritation, work and pleasure and occasional sadness. It's a good idea to be reminded of this from time to time, and it doesn't hurt if the sermon is light-hearted if it's as deftly written as these books.

Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-37606421033662626112014-07-08T10:32:00.001-07:002014-07-08T14:26:32.029-07:00On translation

•David Bellos:Is that a fish in your ear? Translation and the meaning of everything.
New York: Faber and Faber, 2011; 978-0-86547-857-2

for Richard

<big>D</big>AVID BELLOS IS a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where he directs the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication. Although he is a respectable, even a powerful presence in literature, having written biographies of Georges Perec, Jacques Tati and Romain Gary, and having translated a number of Perec's books — no mean feat.

I am a Perec enthusiast, though I confess I know his work only in English translation. For that reason I haven't read his best-known novel, La disparition. Perec was a member of Oulipo, the "experimental" workshop in litterature potentielle which is often written under arbitrary, amusing, and ennabling constraints; and La disparition, by no means a short novel, was written without using a single "e." Since the English translation respects that constraint — it's titled A void — I've determined to read it only in parallel with the original; and I'm afraid I've bogged down a number of times.

I read occasionally in other languages than English, which is of course my mother language. I can get by, by ignoring subtleties, slang, and jokes, in French or Italian or sometimes in Spanish or even in Dutch — but only with dictionaries, or the Internet, or best of all with a translation into English at hand. A couple of years ago, for example, I read the first book of Don Quixote both in Spanish and in a recent, well-received translation into English by Edith Grossman. It was easy to see that Grossman respected Cervantes's text, maintaining his slightly formal irony but also the fluidity of the narrative. (There's an interesting discussion of her translation, contrasted with John Rutherford's of two years earlier, online.)

Similarly I've worked my way through a few books by Geert Mak in both the original Dutch and English translation, and novels and stories by Moravia and Pirandello in both Italian and translation, always with the hope that one day this process will enable me to rely only on the originals — a hope as illusory as elusive.

(I'm also engaged on a publishing project, hoping to bring out the complete Skagen un roman de l'europe by the French author Jean Coqt, as translated into English by Charles Lunaire: but so far only the first two installments have been sent to me, and I can't say much more about this just yet.)

So translation is a matter often on my mind, and I looked forward to reading Is that a fish in your ear with a good deal of eagerness. In many ways I wasn't terribly disappointed: Bellos writes easily, interestingly, ranging over a number of my own enthusiasms; and there's plenty of humor in the book — beginning with the title, of course.

("Say — is that a fish in your ear?" No answer. "I said, Is that a fish in your ear?" Again no answer. Louder this time: "Hey! Mister! IS - THAT - A - FISH - IN - YOUR - EAR?" Pause; then "Sorry. You'll have to speak up. I have a fish in my ear.)*

But his book centers on the problem that lies in its subtitle: "The meaning of everything." In nearly every one of his short, engaging chapters — many of which sound like class lectures, approaching such individual subjects as dictionaries, dialects, vertical vs. horizontal translation, interpretation, and the like — he seems determined that translation is at bottom a matter of communication, of re-stating the content of a text in a like text in the second language.

The big question that's begged is of course the meaning of meaning. It's addressed in an early chapter, "Meaning is Not a Simple Thing," where Bellos writes "an adequate translation reproduces the meaning of an utterance in a foreign language," and goes on to investigate various kinds of meaning. Symptomatic meaning — "the kind of meaning that things have just by themselves": Jacques saying "bon jour" means, among other things, that he speaks French. Contextual meaning. Meanings latent in the very grammatical forms of the "utterance" in question.

And then, toward the end of the chapter: "No sentence contains all the information you need to translate it." You have to know the genre of the text, apparently — poem, novel, speech, timetable, movie title, for example — so that you can approach and frame your work appropriately.

Poetry is notoriously resistant to translation, at least, Bellos writes, in the popular mind. He denies that it is impossible. Last week a French friend asked me to translate a little poem from French into English, and the request triggered a short discussion in e-mail:
Amélie is convinced that it is impossible to translate Poetry : "you have got to respect the polysémie of the words and if you do one traduction litterale it doesn't work into the other language"
To which I replied
I agree with Amėlie you can't translate poetry

You can however translate poems
…
you can only translate a meaning and poetry tends as Amėlie points out to be polysėmique, perhaps there's an English word for that, I don't think so, "to have many layers of meaning"

So a true translation would be a number of versions perhaps

Then there s another big problem about translation, the fundamental one

The idea that it can exist presupposes the idea that you can kniw what a statement ( sentence, poem) means

With only a few exceptions (huis clos, sens unique, STOP) I think you cannot, can never
and then I went on to translate the poem. (I'll set the two versions at the end of this post. It is by the way not my first attempt at translating poetry: earlier this year I made an attempt at Horace's Diffugere nives, where the attempt was to preserve meter and formality of the original. But more about that another time.)

<big>A</big>T THE BOTTOM of my problems with Bellos's discussion of translation, the art of, is the assumption that one can know meaning, can extrapolate from an utterance — perhaps even simply an event, natural or artificial, but let's not complicate things even further, not just yet — can extrapolate from an utterance a meaning intended by the speaker. This seems to me to be a great leap of faith, involving taking an utterance at its word. Poetry, humor, irony, negotiation, and other everyday uses of language depend, I think, on a disparity between statement and intent, deliberate or casual.

The problem goes even further: Can we know what our own statements, even thoughts, "mean," even to ourselves? Does their "meaning" not unfold, over time, through contemplation and discussion, evolving as they conform — or don't — to their changing context? (Perhaps this is one reason for the frequent assertion that every generation needs its new translation of standard "classics," to "keep them fresh", relevant to a changed societal context.)

If meaning evolves, there must be aspects of the utterance — the text, the expression, the thought — that have yet to be known: ineffable, if only provisionally. Bellos addresses this:
Some people doubt that there are any affects or experiences that cannot be expressed, on the commonsensical grounds that we could say nothing about them and would therefore have no way of knowing if they existed for other people. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein presumably meant to adopt an ag-nostic position on this issue in the famous last line of his Tractatus when he wrote, "What one cannot talk about must be left in silence." The infinite flexibility of language and our experience of shared emotion in reading novels and poems and at the movies must also cast doubt on whether there are any human experiences that cannot in principle be shared. On the other side of this thorny tangle is the intuitive knowledge that what we feel is unique to us and can never be fully identified with anything felt by anyone else. That inexpressible residue of the individual is ineffable—and the ineffable is precisely what cannot be translated.

…

Translation presupposes not the loss of the ineffable in any given act of interlingual mediation such as the translation of poetry but the irrelevance of the ineffable to acts of communication. Any thought a person can have, the philosopher Jerrold Katz argued, can be expressed by some sentence in any natural language; and anything that can be expressed in one language can also be expressed in another. What cannot be expressed in any human language (opinions vary as to whether such things are delusional or foundational) lies outside the boundaries of translation and, for Katz, outside the field of language, too. This is his axiom of effability. One of the truths of translation—one of the truths that translation teaches—is that everything is effable.

To which Wittgenstein would reply — the young Wittgenstein, anyway — well, you know. (And this is the problem with Wittgenstein's remark: we cannot remain silent, even (perhaps especially) confronted with that of which we cannot speak.)

Bellos ends this particular investigation with a breathtaking statement:
From infancy to the onset of puberty, children of every culture have always known that animals have things to say to them. There's no folklore in the world that doesn't similarly break the alleged barrier between human and other. But in our Western script-based cultures, growing up (which is so heavily entwined with formal education that it might as well be treated as the same thing) involves unlearning the instinctive childhood assumption of communicative capacity in nonhuman species. No wonder our philosophers and priests have long insisted that language is the exclusive attribute of humans. That self-confirming axiom makes children not yet fully human and in real need of the education they are given.
In other words, language is communication and must be effable. But is Bellos's final sentence, in the previous quotation, "meant" literally? Does meaning not lie in signals as well as statements?

——-
*Or does the joke go some other way entirely?

——-
The French poem and its translation:

Une main chemine dans mes cheveux
passe / arrache
devant les yeux
la mèche
rebelle-peroxydée
sous les franges des filles
coupe-coupe
pour tes regards sur le haut de mon dos
Ma nuque courbe l'échine
racines sèches
shampoing après shampoing soin
Ta kératine
coupe-coupe court
rase petit sabot
de près petit salaud
des bigoudis plein le front
j'ai mis de l'air dans mes cheveux
brosse à bout rond en poils de sanglier pour brushing "sans électricité statique"
blond vénitien roux flamboyant brun auburn blanc mort
perruques en authentiques cheveux de filles perdues
filez doux longues chevelures : le temps des crânes est revenu
jolie itsi bitsi tini ouini tête crépue
tu tournes en boucle bourrique
taille-taille
ton cuir est dur
vieille chevelure
On reprend la coupe?
 —Emmanuelle De Baeck	A hand traces through my hair
through / and out again
before my eyes
the unruly bleached lock
of hair
under the girlish bangs
straightedge
The bones of my nape curve
that you may glance at it
dry roots
shampoo conditioner hairspray
your keratin
shave it short
with the close clipper
really close you little bastard
curlers over the forehead
i've put air in my hair
soft round brush, boar-bristles, to avoid static electicity
venetian blond flame red auburn brown dead white
wigs made of real hair from lost girls
away long hair it's time for skulls again
pretty itsy bitsy teeny weeny frizzhead
you go round in circles like a mule
cut-cut
your scalp is leathery
old hairdo
shall we do it over?

Suggested improvements are welcome.

Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-67928504871016650632014-07-02T15:41:00.001-07:002014-07-02T15:41:06.342-07:00Robert Erickson: the quartets<big>T</big>HIS IS HOW I like to remember Robert Erickson; he looked very much like this, as I recall, when I first met him, in 1963 or so.

He was then in his mid-forties, stocky, flaxen-haired, healthy though not particularly athletic, satisfied I think with his life, fully engaged with his metier. He was a composer, and a significant one, and I don't think he particularly cared, then or ever, about his place in history or even among most of his colleagues. He liked music of nearly every genre, and he liked much of the music being made around him, and he liked his own music.

He was recommended to me as a teacher of composition; but I don't think he ever had many illusions as to just what the teaching of musical composition could actually accomplish. He taught technical matters: the selection of pens and inks and rulers; the extent to which notation could be depended on; how scores might best be reproduced in those days before Xerox, and how they might be submitted in the hope of performance.

Most of all, at least in my case, he taught by example: staying with a project wherever it might take you; maintaining an open mind about your own work and prospects; not getting distracted by musical politics; not getting bogged down in taste — though on that last score he wasn't slow to announce his own tastes: he disliked tick-tick rhythms; he thought six-eight meter was particularly offensive; he especially disliked formula.

He'd been recommended to me by the composer Gerhard Samuel, with whom I was at the time pretending to study conducting — chiefly by attending every rehearsal of his Oakland Symphony, where I learned about orchestral balance, effective notation, the scaling of dynamics and tempo, and that sort of thing. Gary and Bob had known one another in Minneapolis, I think, and were part of what I've come to think of as the Minneapolis-California migration of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when they, and Will Ogdon, and Glenn Glasow, and Ernst Krenek all made that move.

I've written about Bob here several times, principally three years ago but most recently just last November, when I was pleased to hear his four string quartets performed in San Francisco and Berkeley, splendidly, by the Del Sol Quartet. They were then preparing to record all four quartets, and last night we were at the release party for the CD (New World Records 80753, two CDs), now available online or, I believe, through iTunes. You're better off with the physical CDs, of course, because then you'll get the liner notes, which I wrote.

The string quartet was an odd medium for Bob, I always thought; he loved innovation, thinking outside the box, and the quartet has a reputation for the hidebound. Listening to this survey, though, you see how he addressed the challenge. You witness the California "maverick" "avant-garde" sensibility engaging the great musical tradition: flirtation, then coming to terms; then finding entirely new purpose. As I wrote in the liner notes, the First Quartet (1950) is rather a conventional structure, though quirky and interesting and often, especially in the middle movement, quite melodic.

The Second Quartet (1956) is miles away from the First. From the very opening, even a casual listener will be struck by its greater openness, the ease and extent of its spatial dimension, the huge range of loudness, tone color, pace, texture. Where the conversations of the First Quartet had been contrapuntal, directed, like rational and logical disputations proceeding toward a logical outcome, those of the Second Quartet are fanciful, exploratory, playful but not according to so many rules.
Solstice and Corfu, the final two works for string quartet, are quite later, from the middle 1980s, and belong to Erickson's final period, when his music was oddly both expansive and innig, cosmic in outlook and scope yet intensely personal. They are, I think, valedictory pieces, and hearing Solstice again last night, in the immediate personal context of the matter of the previous post to this blog, was — not comforting, I don't feel comforting is anything I particularly need, but a reminder of eternal matters. I think Bob would smile, for a number of reasons, none of which he'd offer to bring up, if he heard me say, as I might, that I treasure these late pieces of his as participating with the late B**th*v*n. I'm sure he privately — very privately — aspired to that.

My biography, Thinking Sound Music: the life and works of Robert Erickson, is still in print. You can order a copy at the usual places online.

Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-79927443634038118332014-06-21T17:03:00.001-07:002014-06-21T17:05:28.901-07:00Timothy Buckallew Shere

Photo: Jim Shere, 2012

Eastside Road, June 21, 2014—
<big>I</big> HAD HOPED to report here on a fine road trip we have just taken, four thousand miles visiting old friends and relatives — but I came home a couple of days ago to find my youngest brother gravely ill, and find I am writing an obituary instead:
Timothy Buckallew Shere, a native of Sonoma County, died Friday morning in Petaluma of cardiac and pulmonary failure at the age of 66. He was born September 26, 1947, in Sebastopol, the youngest son of Charles Everett and Marjorie Crane Shere. He attended schools in Fort Ross and Santa Rosa before relocating with his mother and brothers to Berkeley, where he graduated from high school.

Gifted intellectually and a keen and amused observer, he was troubled from adolescence with an unstable hold on conventional realities. He never married or settled into normal employment, but lived in a succession of institutions, halfway houses, and board and care facilities. He loved reading, writing his poetry, and listening to the popular music of the 1960s.

He was grateful for his happy childhood, his family, and his memories. He is remembered for his gentle disposition, patience and forbearance.

In his last two years he was a resident at Windsor Care Center. He is survived by three brothers: Charles Shere of Healdsburg, Jim Shere of Santa Rosa, and John Shere of Warranwood, Australia; and by many nieces and nephews and their children.

<big>T</big>IM WAS TWELVE years younger than me and I never really knew him as a child. I was away living with my grandparents when he was born, and met him really only two years later; and I left home for college three years after that. Our parents had a troubled marriage which effectively ended with our mother's removal, with my three brothers, to Berkeley, about 1960; and perhaps to protect my own young marriage, already complicated with our own young children, she took care not to involve me in her problems, whether with her husband, soon to be divorced, or her younger sons.

Of them, Tim — I feel free to use his nickname, but he preferred to be called Timothy by those not closely related to him — Tim was the most vulnerable. He was born with a severe strabismus, was operated on in his early childhood, and never recovered the use of one eye. He was often teased by his father and, I'm sorry to say, one or another of his brothers. He seemed to me, at the time, not to understand the difficulties of daily life, whether at first, when we still lived on a broken-down "farm" in the country; or later, when Mom had moved out with him and his next older brother to teach in a remote country school; or after he'd been moved to Berkeley, where he must have been bewildered by the noise and distractions of urban life.

At some point in his early adolescence — I think he was fifteen or so — he was encouraged by a misguided church-going couple to leave his mother's home and move in with them. I can remember cycling up into the Berkeley hills to expostulate with them, urging them to return him to his mother. Our long-suffering grandfather, who'd been a prominent parishioner for forty years at least, actually left the church in disgust over the affair.

I never knew the circumstances of his finally returning. The other two brothers had left home by then in their turns, one into an early marriage, the other into the navy; and Mom continued to harbor Tim into his early twenties. Inevitably he too left, living at first with friends he met at the community college he occasionally attended, then in the series of residences I described above.

His life was a series of social-worker counsellors, psychiatry (badly misguided in my opinion), occasional commitments to serious institutions, and board-and-care facilities. Through it all, apart from a few frightening moments, he seemed to maintain a remarkably sanguine attitude. In conversation he dwelled on his happy recollections of childhood in the country and on the Sonoma coast; of road trips he'd taken with our mother; of the trip he and I took in 1987 to Tahiti and Australia, where we visited another brother.

When he was in better health, while I was still living nearby in Berkeley, we used to take walks together, sometimes long ones — once across the hills to Orinda; another time from San Francisco to Sausalito. I regret that on my moving away from Berkeley there were fewer of these meetings. I regret even more that his physical health began to decline badly ten or twelve years ago.

He had always suffered from an exaggerated tremor, worsened I'm convinced by the medications he'd been prescribed for psychological disorders. His gait and balance began to deteriorate in his early fifties, and his diet and regimen suffered from inattention, poverty, and personal decisions. He never lived "homeless" on the streets: the social-service offices of Berkeley and Alameda County found him relatively good housing and provided him with a certain amount of medical supervision. But two years ago my nearer brother and I decided to move him closer to us.

By then he was suffering from kidney failure, Parkinson's, and diabetic problems. In the last year he was no longer able to walk or even stand. Worse, in his opinion: his tremor had advanced to the point he could no longer write, either longhand or with his beloved manual typewriters. He considered himself a poet, and I am no one to argue the point. His writing was unsophisticated, artless, and focussed on gentle fantasy and nostalgia for his rural childhood and for the fancies of the flower children of the 1960s.

He was a unique man: I will never be able to comprehend his life, to visit the landscapes of his mind. I wish I could have; I wish I could now find a way to begin — but my realities are more grounded and more circumscribed. I would never have wanted to have lived his life, but I think I can imagine his eventual adjustment to it.

I had a good conversation with him a month or so ago, before beginning the long road trip we've just completed. He was confined to his wheelchair and unable to write, but spoke easily enough, about the old days for the most part, but also about Jack London and Steinbeck, whose books he enjoyed, and about Finnegans Wake, which we'd given him when it was clear his stamina for long-span attentiveness was slipping. He knew his health was deteriorating, but seemed realistic, not regretful.

Thursday, though — only day before yesterday! — when I spent half an hour with him at the care center we'd moved him to two years ago — I was shocked. He was almost unresponsive, slumped in his chair. He indicated that he wanted a Diet Coke, and fumbled his purse toward me: I extracted three quarters from it and got him the Coke, then a straw, and held the can for him.

I asked if he were in pain, or uncomfortable, and he indicated that he wasn't. I had the feeling his life was ebbing, that he knew it, and that on the whole he was ready. I asked if he wanted anything, and I'm almost certain the response was "no more books." As I left him he said something that sounded like "book… poems…"; then lapsed into silence. I told an attendant of my misgivings about him; then left.

Next morning I was awakened about six by a phone call asking my permission to have him transferred to a hospital, and an hour later was called by the emergency room, asking for my immediate attendance as it was unlikely he'd "get past this event."

My brother and I spent the morning at the hospital and the mortuary; then at the care center where we retrieved his belongings. There were three grocery bags filled with his clothes; two tote-bags sufficed for the rest of his estate: his iPad and a headset, a few pages of his own poems and drawings, his birth certificate, a few photographs, a small wooden bowl, two rocks, a postcard and a letter from me, and nine books.

There was also a new notebook in which he'd only written on three or four pages, probably because his handwriting was completely giving out. This is the last entry:

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muß man schweigen. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one be silent.

— Wittgenstein

Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-48628306093714648492014-06-07T07:17:00.001-07:002014-06-07T07:22:03.873-07:00A rant on pronunciation
WE'VE BEEN ON the road for nearly two weeks, and blogging has suffered — both here and over at Eating Every Day. Most of my jotting has been longhand on scraps of paper, or short comments on Facebook.

But the other day The Huffington Post ran a blog post, "30 Commonly Mispronounced Food Words (and How to Say Them Correctly)," by Alessandra Bulow, which was mentioned by a friend on Facebook, leading to some contemplation on my part.

(The article can be found at http://huff.to/1l6BHeZ )

My first remarks as posted to Facebook:

I find 7 of 30 agree with me, two more but only in one of two alternative, and one more I simply don't know the correct pronunciation: Huffington may well be right.

Twenty, though, I think either wrong or misleading: I show my versions below.

Note that no syllables should end with the usual (American) English "ee" diphthong, and that û is the French "u" (say "ooh" with mouth set for "ee", that "nh" stands for the French nasalization, not used in English except occasionally to express distaste, and that French almost NEVer stresses SYLlables as ENglish does.

Lindsey says CARE-uh-mul, I say CAHR…

A) ree-SOUGHT-toh

1. Aïoli : eye-oh-LEE

2. Ambrosia : ahm-BROH-zyah

3. Ancho ("AHN-choh")*. ok

4. Anise ("AN-ihss")* ok

5. Boudin : boo-DANNH

6. Bouillabaisse : bwee-yah-bess

7. Caramel : "KAR-ah-mehl" ok

8. Charcuterie : shar-kû-tree

9. Croissant : krwahss-sanh

10. Crudités : krû-dee-tay

11. Edamame ("eh-dah-MAH-meh")

12. Foie gras : fwah grah

13. Haricot vert ("ah-ree-koh VEHR") ok

14. Hummus ("HOOM-uhs") (oo as in book, not booze)

15. Jicama ("HEE-kah-mah") ok

16. Lichen : LIE-kun

17. Macaron : mah-kah-RONH

18. Mascarpone ("mas-kar-POH-nay; mas-kahr-POH-nay") ok

19. Muffuletta ("moof-fuh-LEHT-tuh") ok

20. Parmesan : PAR-muh-zun (it's English)

21. Prosciutto : pro-SHOOT-toe

22. Radicchio : rah-DEEK-k'yo

23. Rillettes ("ree-YEHT"; "rih-LEHTS") only the first

24. Raita : RYE-ita, where the "i" of the second syllable is slid past quickly

25. Restaurateur : ress-torah-TEUR, where the second syllable is slid past quickly

26. Sake ("SAH-kee"; "SAH-kay")* only the second

27. Sherbet : SHER-but

28. Tzatziki ("dzah-DZEE-kee") perhaps. I don't know.

29. Vinaigrette : van-eh-GRETT

30. Worcestershire : WUS-ter-shear

After another person commented on the open Italian O in "risotto," and on English final diphthongs — or, if you prefer, diphthong finals — I added:

Savio's exactly right about the diphthong and I should have stressed the point more. And of course he's right about English lacking certain sounds extant in other languages (and vice versa).

"Risotto" is a great practice word. Being Italian, it should begin with a slightly trilled "r": say "HREE " and gently flip the tip of the tongue against the roof of the mouth just after the "h."

The English word "sought" is almost exactly right as it lacks the diphthong, at least to my ear, probably because the "t" cuts it off.

You pronounce both letters of a double consonant in Italian, so the final syllable is "toe." Pure "O": no slide into the W of "tow"!

By the way my daughter Giovanna hears her name mispronounced far too often : it's jo-VAHN-nah, not jee-o-va-nuh.

Mispronunciation is mostly the result of inattention and, I think, a mark of laziness (unless impacted by genuine physical problems with hearing, or with palate, tongue, teeth, or lips —gosh, it's complicated!).

During her long tenure at Chez Panisse, one of Lindsey's jobs was to prepare pronunciation guides to certain food terms and menu items, so that floor staff might be saved from error. I don't know if that's still being done; perhaps it's no longer needed.

My own pronunciation is of course far from perfect, so if you have corrections to make, they're welcome…
Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-11274255282992552932014-05-20T23:27:00.001-07:002014-05-21T06:57:44.935-07:00Horace: Diffugere nives
With profound thanks to Bhishma Xenotechnites

(Finished for now, and constructive comments welcomed below —)

( Well, then, here's the result. I'm not sure why I have bothered —
 translation's not my game, and
lord knows there are versions enough in our English language;
 most of them much the same.
Still, I wanted to get inside both meaning and meter.
 Horace deserves no less. If
I have made an egregious error, I hope you'll forgive it.
 All I intend is a gloss
On this masterpiece from a time and a place quite removed from
 our more frenetic world, where
meditation on Nature's recurring cycles fell out of
 fashion — though now, as we've learned,
Her cards trump all we've tried to retain in our dealer's hands,
 grasping, we find, to no purpose.
Horace addresses his song to his friend, Torquatus, and sings of
 others we no longer know—
Tullus and Ancus were kings who died more than five hundred years
 Before Horace sat down to write;
Theseus we dimly know from legend, but few can remember
 Pirithous, rival and friend.
Still turn the seasons today as they did two millennia and more
 ago when these great lines were written;
Horace's moon is ours; our seasons obey the same law; like
 him, we will never return.)

All the snow vanished now, and the grasses back in the meadow

 foliage caps every tree ;

Earth goes through her familiar changes and banks are left bare by

 rivers whose waters are low ;

Grace, with the Nymph and her sisters, the twins, dares to go now, naked,

 leading them all in the dance.

immortality isn't for you, warn the years that nourish those

 hours that steal the days.

Cold gives way before breezes; Spring is trampled by summer;

 Soon herself to give way:

Autumn pours out her fruits; then Winter's lifeless fogs come

 Back, repeating the course.

That loss, however, is quickly restored by the moon in the heavens.

 We, when we have gone down where

pious Aeneas, rich Tully and old King Ancus have gone, we'll

 be just dust and shadow.

Who knows whether the hours of this day will continue, increasing

 by those of days to come?

Everything will elude even greedy hands of your heirs, friend —

 All that your spirit will yield.

When you finally perish, Torquatus, and terrible Minos

 makes his final judgement,

not your family, not your eloquence, piety —

 nothing will bring you back.

From that darkness not even the goddess Diana, though he's

 chaste, can free Hippolytus,

nor has Theseus the power to break Lethe's fetters, binding his

 dear friend Pirithous.

 —Horace, Carminum IV, 7 (my translation)
Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-91419273877948856332014-05-18T14:00:00.001-07:002014-05-18T14:00:33.183-07:00Tribes

• Nina Raine: Tribes
Beth: Anita Carey
Billy: James Caverly
Daniel: Dan Clegg
Sylvia: Christine Albright
Ruth: Elizabeth Morton
Christopher: Paul Whitworth
Directed by Jonathan Moscone
Berkeley Repertory Theatre, seen May 14, 2014.

Eastside Road, May 18, 2014—

<big>T</big>HE PRODUCTION HAS closed, but I want to write a little about this play anyway; it's had a considerable success since its 2010 premiere in London, with productions off-Broadway, at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the La Jolla Playhouse, the Guthrie in Minneapolis, in Boston and Washington D.C., and now at Berkeley Rep.

I want to write about it, chiefly in order to investigate my reservations about it. I think it's a play well worth producing, performing, and seeing; it gives rise to all sorts of contemplation. If it fails, in some respects, most of its small failures are the inevitable result, I think, of the complexity, the magnitude, and the audacity of its ideas.

The "tribes" of the title are, first (in order of presentation), a loud, foul-mouthed, undisciplined family of academic intellectuals dominated by an overweening father (Christopher); second, the Deaf community with a capital "D," as I've learned from the playbill, which gathers around its sign language to participate in a kind of society we hearers can hardly imagine.

The family comprises the well-written mother, Beth, and three grown children all still living with parents: Ruth, yet to find her passions; Daniel, neurotic, wilful and damaged; and Billy, almost completely deaf since birth but raised to read lips rather than sign language — a misguided intention of the parents, who think thereby to give him place in society at large, rather than surrender to that of the "handicapped."

Into this stew walks Sylvia, the child of deaf parents, fluent therefore in sign, hearing herself, but quickly going deaf. She introduces Billy to sign language and to more than that, including employment and, of course, romance. This is a total assault on the overbearing Christopher and all his arrogant assumptions; further, it disrupts a fascinating dependency Daniel has evolved on his brother's place in the family. A true theatrical crisis results, and Raine's writing rises to her play's demands.

But not always. At least in this production, much of the time the audience is cajoled into participating in the subtle catastrophe through crude, sitcom-like badinage. The six characters are not evenly fleshed out, and some plot details seem arbitrary, introduced perhaps to illustrate some aspect of the hearing-versus-deaf problem, then dropped before they distract from the central onrush.

What Raines does accomplish in this play is present the huge gulf that apparently exists between those who hear, and who communicate largely through sound and hearing (and in this case fury), and those who do not, and who must communicate through touch and sight. Behind and below this, of course, there's the matter of awareness, awareness and sympathy.

There's also the matter of language. We always think language is what makes us express ourselves and understand others: but as this play points out, language is just as often what makes us misunderstand, equivocate, and mislead, and certainly distract ourselves from confronting reality and especially the reality of the completely different views of reality experienced by those around us.

There was a lot to like about this production. The entire cast rose to the occasion, though I thought among them some were more capable with their roles than others. James Caverly, himself deaf as I understand it, was stellar in the central role of Billy. Christine Albright stepped into the role of Sylvia, originally set on Nell Geisslinger: she was moving and authoritative in the part. Paul Whitworth and Anita Carey were enormously effective as the parents, and if Dan Clegg and Elizabeth Morton weren't quite their match as the two hearing children, I think this was more the fault of the writing than of the actors.

Nina Raine has bitten off too much in her play. A few weeks ago we saw Tom Stoppard's trilogy The Coast of Utopia in a single day: Tribes is almost as thick with ideas and drama, but in two quick acts: it might better have been two more thoughtfully paced and fleshed-out evenings.

Jonathan Moscone's direction seemed straightforward; Todd Rosenthal's set was persuasively detailed; Christopher Akerlind's lighting and, especially, Jake Rodriguez's sound design were sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatically effective. I'm glad I went; I'll be thinking about the play for quite a while. It puts narrative plot in service of abstract and far-reaching idea. It will be interesting to see where Raines goes from here: Tribes is only her third play. I'm curious to see the others, Rabbit and Tiger Country.

Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-39226169990297446962014-05-05T10:01:00.001-07:002014-05-07T09:42:11.727-07:00Barns, and a personal note<big>P</big>ERSONAL NOTE first: I named this blog in a hurry, as one often names things, but with little or no subsequent regret. I live on Eastside Road, and the blog reflects my own view on a number of things. It's true I live on the west side of the country, a fifth-generation northern Californian, born in Berkeley with a mentality to match; but when I'm not looking out over the Pacific — and I'm not, as a general rule — my view is extended toward the east: over the USA, across the Atlantic, toward the European linguistic and cultural history that's so much a part of the American heritage.

My outlook is informed by sense of place, and you're looking at my place. Narrow country road, two-laned, bordered by hills on the right, a broad beautiful valley on the left. Here we're looking toward the north, maybe half a mile north of here, at something I'll never see again: a white barn silhouetted against a file of sycamore trees, adding focus to the valley.

I love vernacular architecture. This particular barn stood here for at least the last sixty years. It was made of redwood, very likely first-growth redwood from across the river: vertical siding painted white; and it was tall, twenty-five or thirty feet tall I imagine. I don't know its original purpose, but before this valley was vineyards it was prune orchards, and before that it was hopfields. The barn may have been built to protect hop-poles, but that's just conjecture.

Last Thursday the barn burned to the ground. It had been an unusually hot day here, nearly 100°. The fire broke out toward evening; there was no one in attendance. By the time the firemen got there the situation was hopeless. (You can read the local newspaper's account of the fire here; for once, the comments are worth reading as well.)

Photo: Greg Witmer

I stopped on Saturday to look at the site. Two men were standing under the blackened sycamore sadly looking at the ruins. They looked at me curiously and I explained that I was there to tell them how sorry I was for them on losing such a magnificent barn.

It was a beautiful barn, I said. It, and Hopkins's stand of poplars to the south, had always supplied a focus to the valley for me, it somehow completed the beauty of the area. I stopped, feeling a little awkward. I was talking philosophy and aesthetics; they were factory-farm workers.

I suppose some might say I have a romantic view of landscape and agriculture — a view formed by other values than mere productivity and profit. An important part of life, to me — my life, I mean — is finding and acknowledging and experiencing, as fully as possible, its place: origin, source, presence.

Always recognizing its presence is a matter of moment, transitional and fugitive.

The barn was a fine metaphor of what I'm talking about, and to me that metaphor was enhanced by its geometrical quality. There was something about its position, by the road, under the sycamores, at the edge of the valley, its straight edges (like those of the road and the rows of grapevines) expressing its man-made contribution to the soft fertility of the valley floor, the sinuous river beyond the low trees to the west, the soft hills beyond, where the redwoods grow.

To my great pleasure the two men knew exactly what I meant. You could tell that by their response, yes, it was a beautiful barn, and beautifully made; and very old, older than either of them. But you could also tell by their demeanor. It's no exaggeration to say that they were mourning, like me.

Over the years I've photographed the barn from time to time, and I hope others have as well. I suppose it can never be rebuilt as it was, but I hope its replacement is not a matter-of-fact industrial steel shed. Perhaps the owners are well-insured, and the policy will allow them to rebuild appropriately. Shape and color are important, as valuable, I think, as function.

Of course it would have been better had the original structure been made of stone — there are a few fine old stone buildings hereabouts, but redwood was cheap in those days, easily milled and easily nailed together. Today's steel, today's version of timber in this regard, can have durability similar to stone. I'm not asking for faux-history; all I want — perhaps already too much — is an equivalent to what was there.

Since this post is in the nature of nostalgia, here's another photo — a farmstead in Piemonte, out northwest of Cuneo somewhere as I recall, cropped and zoomed from an inadequate image shot quickly as we drove past, at least a dozen years ago. It has been part of my fixed mental landscape ever since — like the beautiful white barn on Eastside Road.

Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-45088211503146718452014-04-27T15:29:00.001-07:002014-04-27T15:33:17.929-07:00Three photos from Facebook<big>I </big>MAKE NO APOLOGIES for spending time on Facebook, where I "follow" a great many "friends" (and, of course, family) scattered across much of the world. Nearing eighty, spending much of my time either relatively secluded in the country or relatively adrift traveling, I frequently hunger for intelligent conversation. I have never much liked talking on the telephone, which entered my life rather late, when habits had been set. I would like to commune with my books like Montaigne. Facebook has enabled a new kind of intelligent conversation. It has its failings, principally difficulty with subtlety and irony; but it has its virtues: the conversation can be interrupted for hours or days at a time, allowing recourse to reference material or the slow ripening of ideas in the back of the mind while doing various little errands and repairs.

Yesterday, for example, three different "friends" posted three different images, each of which then drew comments from other Facebookers; and in responding to these — images and comments both — I found myself contemplating, once again, the uses of irony. But let's just look at the images in turn, and see what develops.

The first is the cover of the current issue of The New Yorker, originally posted with a comment by PETA but reposted by an online acquaintance with whom I share interests in nature, health issues, and literature, among other things. PETA's original comment on the photo was
The cover of this week's The New Yorker magazine says it all: Anyone who has a heart knows: it's time to BanHorseCarriages for good.

My comment: Um, that's not what the cover says to me…

Friend: Fair enough, Charles. To you, what does it say?

Me: Things are in a muddle.
It turns out that the artist who provided the cover, Bruce McCall, objects to horse-drawn carriages in New York City not only on the basis of "animal rights" but also for traffic-related reasons. (Find PETA's summary of this here.)

I feel strongly that horse-drawn carriages do contribute to the urban, not to mention metropolitan, experience. Of course they should not be forced to negotiate busy motor-vehicular traffic: but they are useful for negotiating the strip of sanity between the rush of taxicabs and the benignity of pedestrianism. Jane Jacobs was right, in her indispensable book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, to divide humanity between "car people" and "foot people." I am unabashedly a foot person; I think of my car — which we've driven 145,000 miles in the last five years or so! — chiefly as a way to get between my chair and an urban walk.

But the presence of horse-drawn carriages does more than ease that jarring gap between speed and tranquility. Let me mention two points.

First, humans have suffered, I think, from having removed themselves from the society of other animals. I think the sudden appearance of all those terriers — Yorkshires, Jack Russells — in the arms and at the feet of all those young flâneurs in Healdsburg is a {perhaps subconscious) acknowledgement of this. The society of other species is another bridge between states, the state of Nature and that of human invention; it reassures us that we are, fundamentally, only another species of animal, adjusting to an ecology badly damaged by our own doing it is true but governed by laws of Nature which really should be considered as they are likely to prevail.

When boys and girls attend daily to the needs of animals — I'm thinking, for example, of my own experience feeding pigs, tending the milk cow, dealing with ducks and chickens and rabbits — they develop a sensitivity to the needs, the fragilities, and the occasional threats coming from sentient creatures with whom verbal communication is tenuous at best. The difference between saddling a horse and adjusting a carburetor, or milking a cow and driving to the supermarket for a quart of milk, is the difference between a natural life and a mechanistic one.

(Interesting that the Internet will easily supply me with 48 synonyms for "mechanistic," and only two antonyms, neither of which works here: "nonmechanical," "handmade." An indication of the extent to which we've adopted a mechanistic mind-set.)

Second, horse-drawn carriages are by their very nature nostalgic. Nostalgia gets a bum rap these days (it ain't what it used to be, I'm tempted to write), because it's thought of as a distraction from the pressing matters of the present. But a full engagement with the present moment demands, I think, simultaneous contemplation of the past that has led to it. It's too easy to think of the city — our man-made ecology — as merely its present statement, rather than a living organism with a past and inevitable future as well as its present moment. In appealing to a nostalgia the carriages, the horses, even the driver, remind us of a historical source for the enlightened acknowledgement of the need for a Central Park.

I could go further. Economy, for example: the dollar value of what a "developer" might put in the place of a Central Park, versus the human value — ugly term, but nothing better comes to mind — of having its tranquility and, yes, its historicity. Kindness: the lesson implicit in the care of the handler for his horses, and by extension the sympathy between the riders and the handler (and the horses). Aesthetics: the sight of these handsome animals, so unlike us; the scent of health and life; the sound of the hoofbeats and the gentle murmur of the tires, so unlike the noise of the taxicabs…

Francis Ponge, from Trois petits écrits:

Pour la ruée écrasante
De mille bêtes hazardes
Le soleil n'éclaire plus
Quún monument de raisons

Pourront-ils, mal venus
De leur sale quartier
La mère, le soldat,
Et la petite en rose,

Pourront-ils, pourront-ils
Passer? Ivre, bondis,
Et tire, tire, tue,
Tire sur les autos!	Because they rush and smash,
These thousand wild beasts,
The sun won't shine again
But a monument of reasons.

Will they — unhappily come
Alas, from their poor slums —
A mother, and a soldier,
A child, dressed in pink —

Will they, will they be able
To cross? Drunk now, I leap,
And fire, fire, kill,
Shoot, fire on the cars!

<big>T</big>HE SECOND ILLUSTRATION is another magazine cover — Facebookers are nothing if not attuned to the present moment. Since I began writing this interminable essay the page has disappeared from Facebook — one of the annoying persistent features of that universe is its unpredictable evanescence. So I have to work from memory here.

The photograph is of the singer and actress Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter, who goes by only her first name. The image was posted by a Berkeley friend with a laconic comment noting that it shows the woman in her underwear, while the article inside the magazine refers to her as a feminist.

Thinking he was criticizing Time for cynical exploitation, I commented that there were multiple levels of irony here; whereupon another friend, an American expat in London these forty years, commented that there was "no inherent virtue in irony", which cheap politicians had been practicing for years.

Setting aside the question as to whether an essentially British mentality can ever appreciate the essentially Mediterranean device that is irony — after all, Brits, like Yankees, pride themselves on their plain-spokenness (which is itself ironic, n'est-ce pas? — I was taken aback by the concept that irony, or indeed any rhetorical device, might have inherent virtue. (Or, for that matter, vice.)

As I wrote here a little over a year ago, in a comment on Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending, I suppose it's the irony of our time that so many no longer understand the meaning of "irony," and take it to mean merely a state of being hiply flippant. (I don't mean to imply that my London and Berkeley friends make this error: they know the meanings of words.)

Such societal positions as Animal Rights and Feminism (and I don't mean to imply they are of equal value or significance) are problematic when they intersect with political action, because law and regulation are societal tools most practical when directed to specific actions and events, while positions — and affinity-group organizations whose motive is to focus those positions on political action — are necessarily concerned with larger and more vaguely defined issues, issues which connect to other issues. Society is like a brain; one doesn't attempt corrective re-wiring with a broadaxe or even a butcher knife.

In short, what I've called societal positions — one's position on such questions as "race," "gender," the rights of animals, public health and welfare — are collections of attitudes that tell us how to think of things, how to form and express our own opinions. They begin to lose value, I think, when they are asked to harden into matters of doctrine — precisely when they most reach toward irony.

Again, Ponge had a word for this, as I wrote in that post about Barnes: momon, "Texte qui inclut sa propre critique," says Larousse; and Ponge expands on this:
…toute œuvre d'art comportant sa propre caricature, ou dans laquelle l'auteur ridiculiserait son moyen d'expression. La Valse de Ravel est un momon. Ce genre est particulier aux époques où la rhétorique est perdue, se cherche.

…any work of art which includes its own caricature, or in which the artist ridicules his own means of expression. Ravel's La Valse is a momon. The genre is peculiar to periods when rhetoric, having lost its way, looks for itself.

says Ponge (Le Savon (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1967), p. 42-3.)*

The momon, a concept significant enough to be incorporated into English, hence no longer to be italicized here, is the intellectual attitude of our time, which is reeling still from the discoveries of Modernism, which depended on acceleration and dispersal; and so lapsed into the kind of apparent chaos every generation perceives in its own context. Earlier generations found refuge in such chaos in religion, in Enlightenment, in mechanics, ultimately in Romanticism — Fernando Pessoa has things to say about this; my generation found it in the momon.

(Pessoa:
Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, a terrible disease progressively swept over civilization. Seventeen centuries of consistently frustrated Christian aspirations and five centuries of forever postponed pagan aspirations (Catholicism having failed as Christianity, the Renaissance having failed as paganism, and the Reformation having failed as a universal phenomenon), the shipwreck of all that had been dreamed, the paltriness of all that had been achieved, the sadness of living a life too miserable to be shared by others, and other people's lives too miserable for us to want to share — all of this fell over souls and poisoned them. Minds were filled with a horror of all action, which could be contemptible only in a contemptible society. The soul's higher activities languished; only its baser, more organic functions flourished. The former having stagnated, the latter began to govern the world.

Thus was born a literature and art made of the lower elements of thought — Romanticism. And with it, a social life made of the lower elements of action — modern democracy.

[The Book of Disquiet, translated by Richard Zenith. New York: Penguin Classics, p. 212-13]

<big>W</big>HICH BRINGS ME, finally, to our third image, not a magazine cover this time but a snapshot taken in Amsterdam on Konigsdag, King's Day, when the entire city turns into a marvelous party and not a motor vehicle is to be seen (except, of course, the boats).

You should know, first, that Willem-Alexander, whose slender young frame you see here, sashed and bemedalled, was the first man to occupy the Dutch throne since the death of William III, in 1890. (William was succeeded by Queens Emma, Wilhelmina, Juliana, and Beatrix; he and his wife Queen Máxima have three daughters but no sons, so the Dutch tradition of gynarcy is likely to resume one day — but lang zal hij leve! )

The photo was posted by a friend who lives in Amsterdam. The comments soon appeared:
Do you need to bow and scrape?

Hip hip! Hoera!

Very convincing (minus the cheap sash!)

I thought that you made the sash just for him
But I think that one of the features that really makes the photo is the sash, and I can't understand why one would call it "cheap." Note that "The King" is in English, not Dutch. (I assume his left hand conceals the English word, not the Dutch "Konig.") The people around him must certainly be Dutch; they certainly look Dutch.

His sash is an exercise in humility, the opposite of irony; it recognizes the king's need of identification, even of explanation, in the contemporary Dutch context. The Dutch love their monarchy for the most part, much more good-naturedly (and generally!) than the British love theirs; but — it's a part of the Dutch temperament — they smile at their little indulgence, just as the king's sash is smiling at those medals.

Humility and a little bit of self-caricature, but without irony. And note: these are foot people, not car people. Like Facebook, they have a lot to tell us, if we only pay a little attention.Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-63398105423323333952014-04-16T22:11:00.001-07:002014-04-16T22:48:58.608-07:00Alexander Calder in Los Angeles

Installation photograph, Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic, through July 27, 2014, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, © Calder Foundation, New York, Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, photo © Fredrik Nilsen

Eastside Road, April 16, 2014—
<big>H</big>OW REFRESHING IT IS, to see an exhibition of an iconic artist, one whose work one knows well enough almost to take for granted, in an installation that restores all his energy, his significance, that reasserts his position within the most magical and optimistic areas of his century.

This is what happens in the current show of works by Alexander Calder, beautifully installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. We devoted only an hour or so to the show: next time we're in town, we'll have to go back. Let the museum itself describe the exhibition:
One of the most important artists of the twentieth century, Alexander Calder revolutionized modern sculpture. Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic, with significant cooperation from the Calder Foundation, explores the artist's radical translation of French Surrealist vocabulary into American vernacular. His most iconic works, coined mobiles by Marcel Duchamp, are kinetic sculptures in which flat pieces of painted metal connected by wire move delicately in the air, propelled by motors or air currents. His later stabiles are monumental structures, whose arching forms and massive steel planes continue his engagement with dynamism and daring innovation. Although this will be his first museum exhibition in Los Angeles, Calder holds a significant place in LACMA's history: the museum commissioned Three Quintains (Hello Girls) for its opening in 1965. The installation was designed by architect Frank O. Gehry.
Yes, Frank Gehry, the architect. Installing all these works — from table-lamp sized stabiles to enormous mobiles, from small maquettes to huge stabiles — required unusual consideration, and the LACMA website describes The Challenge of Installing Calder in a fascinating and well-illustrated blogpost.

You see three of the earliest pieces in the photo above, with the fascinating Object with Red Ball (1931) at the center. This photo, from a different online source, demonstrates the piece's variability: the red ball and the black "sphere"— in fact two intersecting flat discs — can be positioned at various points along the horizontal rod from which they hang. The piece is a study in spatial relationship, implying motion. I like to look at it, with one eye or both, while walking slowly and smoothly past it, also varying the height of my eyes. No doubt this looks funny to other onlookers: I don't really care.

Object with Red Ball is as significant historically as it is on its own sculptural terms. It was in late 1931 that Calder began homing in on the idea with which he's most generally associated, the gentle movement of various components of his hanging sculptures as they respond to drafts and breezes. His friend Marcel Duchamp gave them the name that's stuck: mobiles. I think we tend to concentrate so much on these kinetic mobiles that we tend to forget their source; the three pieces in the photo above clearly put the Calder of the late 1920s and the first year or two of the next decade in a Surrealist context, particularly associating him with the Catalan painter Joan Miró.

It's easy to think of wit, even whimsy, as the primary effect of these pieces; but it's interesting, I think, to contemplate just what wit (and even whimsy) consists of, just why it should be a significant, even serious component of "abstraction." The beginning, for me, lies in the humor inherent in the sheer physical presence of these objects, made of shapes and substances that are familiar enough, that are combined and integrated in configurations never before seen, that contrast the frailty of their means and substance with the evident permanence of their purpose. These pieces mean to stay. They are here for a reason, however intuitive Calder's method may seem to be. Calder states (via one of a number of intelligent wall-readouts):
The basis of everything for me is the universe. The simplest forms in the universe are the sphere and the circle. I represent them by discs and then I vary them. My whole theory about art is the disparity that exists between form, masses and movement.

Le Demoiselle, 1939
©2013 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Throughout the 1930s Calder developed a conversation, through an amazing amount of work, between stabiles and mobiles, relatively conventional free-standing sculpture and the continuously more graceful, floating kinetic pieces. The individual pieces making up these works increasingly drew inspiration, I think, from Nature: leaves, feathers, wings. Calder had joined the expatriate American movement in Paris in the 1920s, and, though he returned to Connecticut in 1933 and didn't open his French studio until thirty years later, he seems to have developed an intrinsically Gallic style. If his earlier work aligned him with Miró, it's hard not to see the work of the 1930s as somehow aligned to Matisse.

Calder's titles are almost always delightful, and delightfully apt. La Demoiselle (I don't know why LACMA's cut-line gives the word a masculine article) is redolent of the crisply feminine fashion-world of 1930s France; it is also both witty and graceful. A mobile hangs from the red stabile base, marrying the kinetic and the stationary — perhaps that's the reason for the hermaphroditic grammar of the title — but acknowledging, through its slender line and its improvised rear leg, the potential flight of even the stationary element.

The mobile had made Calder famous, rightly, and his primary colors, the wit and delicacy of his forms, the immediate pleasure of his work made it accessible. No one ever wondered what his work "meant." And if the man in the street could look at it and say "Why, my kid could do that," well, plenty of primary schools were quick to assign the production of construction-paper-and-coathanger knockoffs to children across the country — in the end only emphasizing Calder's apparently effortless mastery of what is, in fact, a rather tricky exercise in all kinds of balance.

After the war, commissions for large-scale public works began to rush in, and Calder worked away happily and productively into his sixties and seventies. This is the fiftieth anniversary of LACMA's commission of one of his most complex huge pieces, Three Quintains (Hello Girls), the grouping of three stabile-mobiles which for too long was relatively hidden at a corner of one of LACMA's signature ugly-Modernist buildings. I didn't see the piece last week, on our hurried visit to this exhibition; next time I'll be sure to say hello.

One of the most impressive of the big pieces is in fact "only" a maquette for an enormous work placed in Grand Rapids, Michigan: La Grande vitesse, over forty feet high, Calder red, massive, strong, yet lyrical. The maquette, also in plate steel, is only eight and a half feet high, eleven and a quarter feet long; but it crowds and dominates its room, inviting the onlooker to walk around and through it while allowing one to back off and take the whole thing in with one gaze. In the end, though it's forty years removed from Object with Red Ball, it similarly invites contemplation of changing configurations, and, through that, of its place — and the viewer's place — in the universe. Calder's universe, and ours.

Le Grande vitesse (intermediate maquette), 1969
©2013 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo: Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, NY

Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, California; 323 857-6000

Exhibition continues through July 27, 2014
Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-88714478426038743542014-04-15T12:55:00.001-07:002014-04-15T17:50:49.474-07:00Three plays in Pasadena: Tartuffe; Macbeth; Come Back, Little Sheba

•Molière:Tartuffe, translated by Richard Wilbur.
In repertory through May 24
•Shakespeare: Macbeth.
In repertory through May 11
•William Inge: Come Back, Little Sheba

In repertory through May 17
A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd.,
Pasadena, California; 626.356.3100
	Front: Deborah Strang (Lola); Back: Jill Hill (Mrs. Coffman)
in Come Back, Little Sheba at A Noise Within

Eastside Road, April 15, 2014—
<big>T</big>HE THREE PLAYS currently in repertory at A Noise Within, the Pasadena theater company we've attended for the last ten years or so, make a strange trifecta on paper, I think: but taken together they are probably the most consistently successful half-season we've seen here, and that's saying quite a bit.

We like the company, partly for its casting, direction, and productions, partly for its enterprising choice of repertory. Shakespeare, of course, on every season, usually with two vehicles. A classic from the European theater, usually French. And a classic from the American stage, often a neglected one. New plays are rarely produced; there are plenty of other theater companies working at that.

Molière's Tartuffe isn't exactly neglected — without going out of our way, we've seen four productions in the last nine years, as I wrote on this blog back in 2010:
The country's second-favorite play
This year? Moliere's Tartuffe, they say.
Second most frequently produced,
That is, and now its wit is loosed
On Ashland's public, and they see
That lust and greed, hypocrisy,
And false religion can be fun.
Depends on where and when they're done.
Heroic couplets, stylish sets,
Elegant costumes—no regrets
At seeing Moliere's play once more.
Trenchant satire's never a bore.
Otherwise, I've written enough about the play I don't want to repeat myself here. This production is a little zany, with over-the-top costumes (though often quite elegant) and some fine comic acting (Deborah Strang's Dorine especially) interestingly balanced by the sometimes soberly befuddled Orgon (Geoff Elliott) and the very sympathetic, sensible Cléante (Stephen Rockwell).
The title character was unusually sinister in Freddy Douglas's creepy impersonation of a Caravaggio sensualist, and the direction, by Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, sped along with clarity and good humor.
<big>T</big>HE SCOTTISH PLAY — twice now I've made the horrendous mistake of speaking its real title aloud in Noise Within's classy Pasadena theater — received a streamlined, effective, often gripping production, thoughtfully directed by Larry Carpenter, who explained, in a talkback after the show, that he wanted to present it as ritual, removed from its legendary setting, timeless and immediately relevant.

Apart from cuts, the only novelty was the setting of the three weird sisters on male actors, whose black featureless costumes combined with heightened gestures and vocal delivery and with effectively manipulated puppetlike props to bring a Kabukilike quality to the show. Elijah Alexander was an interesting, often powerful Macbeth, and Jules Willcox surprisingly both hypnotic and retiring as his Lady; the rest of the numerous cast were quite up to their assignments. Only Feodor Chin, as Malcolm, gave me a moment's pause; his catalog of self-deprecation interrupts the action toward the close of this play: but that's the fault of the text, which always gives editors and directors a lot to chew on.

It's a disgusting, ghastly, ghostly, powerful play. You pretty much have to believe in the existence of unmotivated Evil as a concrete presence to buy its thesis, and Shakespeare is pretty persuasive on that score. It's not a play I like to see often. But it should and must be performed, and this is one of the best productions I've ever seen.
<big>C</big>OME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA is another play that deserves a place in the repertory, though it's probably better known as the movie adapted from it lo these many years ago. It can be bleak and depressing in its treatment of a sad narrative — the lapse back into drunkenness of a reformed alcoholic, tipped past his margin when his idealized view of youth inevitably meets reality.

Geoff Elliott was really magnificent as the doomed Doc, tightly buttoning up his repressions through the first act, alarmingly releasing them in the second. The Lunt-like precision of his technique as an actor, especially his vocal technique, which can be distracting when he works with a verse play (though this was not the case in Tartuffe), was beautifully focussed on his character — both in itself, and in its relationship to his wife Lola and their roomer, the young Marie.

Whether speaking or silent, active or hesitant, Deborah Strang was a fabulous Lola. Face, voice, body, gesture — all seemed perfectly integrated in this characterization. Best of all, the role grew throughout the two hours of the play, finally overwhelming this member of the audience. It is her humanity, in its vulnerability, its insights, its hope and fear, that makes the production so telling.

I liked Maya Erskine's depiction of the flighty little Marie; Miles Gaston Villanueva did what he could as her boyfriend Turk, and Paul Culos similarly dealt with the role of her fiancé Bruce — but Inge is clearly out of his range trying to depict their affairs. Fortunately, that's not important. Perhaps it even underlines the major quality of the play, its portrait of the terribly repressed atmosphere of postwar America.

Ed Anderson, Doc's sponsor at Alcoholics Anonymous, is the focus of this portrait; and Mitchell Edmonds played the part beautifully. The character is patient, sympathetic, somewhat patronizing, ultimately futile, just like the American desire to return to some kind of sheltered small-town homogenous quiet after the tumult of World War II, after learning of the dangers and desires of sex, drink, and foreign ideas.

I think Edward Albee wrote a gloss on Come Back, Little Sheba in his (currently) better-known play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. By then, though, the bittersweet innocence and the explosive loss of that innocence that Inge deals with has become utterly unthinkable. Come Back, Little Sheba, like Inge's other plays Bus Stop and Picnic — both of which Noise Within has produced recently — is pivotal in the history of 20th-century American theater, significant for its position between O'Neill, say, and Albee; but important beyond that for its accurate portrayal of what we were, where we've come from.

And, as directed by Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and performed by this admirable cast, in an evocative setting by Stephen Gifford and costumes by Leah Piehl, Come Back, Little Sheba is gripping, exciting theater. If it weren't hundreds of miles away I'd go back to see it again. Bravo to all involved!

Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-36600776112082298602014-04-10T23:20:00.001-07:002014-04-19T16:32:02.311-07:00The Coast of Utopia

Tom Stoppard: The Coast of Utopia.
I: Voyage: through May 1.
II: Shipwreck: through April 19.
III: Salvage: through May 4.
Shotgun Players, 1901 Ashby Avenue, Berkeley, California; 510.841.6500
Marathon production of all three plays: April 26, May 4, 12 noon, 4pm, 8pm.

WE CAN ALL be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin .. if the question is, how do you make a роem Ьу Pushkin?— or, What eхаctly makes one poem or painting or piece of mцsic greater than another?—or, what is beauty? or liberty? or virtue? — if the question is, how should we live? .. . then reason gives no answer or different answers. So something is wrong. The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist ... "
That's Vissarion Belinsky talking, in a characteristically impassioned outburst in the first act of Voyage. He's a literary critic living in poverty in Moscow, way out of his depth, visiting the wealthy, complacent, cultured country estate of the Bakunin family. I have to confess to a great deal of sympathy for poor Bakunin Vissarion; I think I was similarly unsure in my youth. He doesn't know German or even French; he hasn't studied Hegel; he doesn't know how to approach the four beautiful Bakunin girls.

He could be a comic figure in a Chekhov play, but he isn't: this is the first of the three plays making up Tom Stoppard's trilogy The Coast of Utopia, which follows Mikhail Bakunin, then Alexander Herzen, from the dacha to Moscow to Paris and London and finally Geneva, over a span of 35 years from 1833 to 1868, interleaving romance, marital drama, and political philosophy in an engrossing eoght hours of theater.

Among the characters in this fascinating cast: the revolutionaries Bakunin and Herzen; the poet Nicholas Ogarev, the political philosophers Karl Marx and Ernest Jones; the exiled nationalists Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, Stanislaw Worcell, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Lajos Kossuth; Turgenev: wives, sisters, and mistresses; serfs and servants. Somehow Stoppard manages to juggle this huge cast, long history, and intricate conflicting and competing world views without bogging down or losing focus.

The plays are published in a handsome slipcased and hardbound edition by Grove Press, and I heartily recommend them as reading material — and especially before seeing the productions currently running in Berkeley. Some have complained, online, about losing interest during the reading; I found the texts gripping. In the theater, the plays, directed by founding Shotgun artistic director Patrick Dooley, seem perfectly faithful to the letter; and of course fleshed out on stage, spoken through actors in fine costume and rising generally quite to the dramatic pitch Stoppard offers, the plays are more present, more vigorous: but a prior reading helps the viewer negotiate this intricate voyage.

Stoppard's trilogy has two interwoven lines: the domestic and the political lives of his characters, and particularly of Bakunin and Herzen. Bakunin of course was the model of the impetuous 19th-century anarchist; but Herzen — the illegitimate son of a Russian mother and a German father — was the more reasoned, ultimately by far the more pragmatic. The play proceeds through conversation laced with outbursts, like Belinsky's quoted above; and, throughout, through pointed parries between the men and the women, condemned by the assumptions of their time to be as observant, intelligent, and deserving as the men, but less informed and less influential in public life.

The position of the men, endlessly comparing their readings of the great 19th-century German philosophers, is summed up in a wonderful speech given to the radical poet George Herwegh:

…being a stoic didn't mean a sort of uncomplaining putting uр with misfortune, that's only how it looks оп the outside—inside, it's alI about achieving apathy… which means: a calming of the spirit. Apathy isn't passive, it's the freedom that comes from recoginisirg new borders, a new country called Necessity… it comes from accepting that things are what they are, and not some other thing, and can't for the moment bе altered ... which реорlе find quite difficult. We've had a terrible shock. We discovered that history has no respect for intellectuals. History is more like the weather. You never know what it's going to do. … Political freedom is a rather banal ambition, after all … all that сan't-sit-still about voting and assembling and controlling the means of production. Stoical freedom is nothing but not wasting your time berating the weather when it's bucketing down on your picnic.
It isn't easy for an early 21st-century American to imagine the position of these leisured intellectual Russians in the 1840s, after the failure of the Decembrist demonstrations, all too aware of the backward, marginal position of their country in the European context. The Age of Reason had led to the French Revolution, the Divine Right of Monarchy had been questioned, republicanism had taken hold successfully in America but had failed in France; slavery had been abolished in most of Europe but not (yet) in America or Russia. The press was rigidly controlled in Russia; to have any idea of current thought in political or social philosophy one must be able to read English, French, or German and have access to banned publications in those languages.
On top of all that, there was no literature in Russian — only Pushkin. Women o the upper classes were lucky if they'd managed to learn enough French to read George Sand, who famously taught the dangerous injunction to Follow Your Heart. But if you think all this describes a situation with no relevance to our own time, consider this speech, the Slavophile Akssakov's outburst from Shipwreck:

We have to reunite ourselves with the masses from whom we became separated when we put on silk breeches and powdered wigs. It's not too late. From our village communes we can still develop in a Russian way, without socialism or capitalism, without a bourgeoisie, yes, and with our own culture unpolluted by the Renaissance, and our own Church unpolluted by the Popes or by the Reformation. It can even be our destiny to unite the Slav nations and lead Europe back to the true path. It will be the age of Russia.
Think about those lines the next time you look at Vladimir Putin's unsmiling face on the television news.

Stoppard's trilogy reminds us of the unending confusion of the 19th century, with its successions of revolutions and restorations, its civil wars, the hope of equality foundering between the intellectual shackles of Marxism and the cynical exploitation of the robber barons and railroad magnates, and the eventual plague of anarchism finally reaching its gruesome climax at Sarajevo, which precipitated a war that made the Reign of Terror look like a rehearsal. You come away from these plays reflecting that the excesses of that war, and the second world war, and all the proxy wars that followed, have been diversions, perhaps even diversionary tactics, to distract us from returning to the main problem: achieving a just society based on equality of access and sustainability of economy.

Fortunately, you also come away from these plays refreshed and entertained. They are, among other things, often very funny. The Shotgun production is well cast, on superb actors in the many lead characters; the costuming is splendid; the set modest but ingenious, the lighting and sound cues resourceful and suitable. You can't expect an opportunity to see this trilogy in one day, on an integrated cast, in a comfortable theater, at affordable prices, to return in any near future: it would be a shame to miss it now.

Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-20624395006830786212014-03-28T16:40:00.001-07:002014-04-19T16:36:28.754-07:00Three Plays in Ashland: The Cocoanuts; The Tempest; The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window Eastside Road, March 27, 2014—
<big>F</big>OR YEARS WE'VE SUBSCRIBED to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the impressive repertory company in Ashland, where ten or twelve plays are given over a season lasting nearly nine months. In addition to Shakespeare, the repertory these days runs through primarily American plays, including a number of new plays, a few revivals, and, recently, a musical or two.

We've been attending these plays so long we've seen the artistic direction change generations, and — getting on ourselves, and perhaps not as generous about change as we might be — I've been concerned about some of the change. I miss the international rep — Ibsen and Chekhov seem to have faded away.

I'm restless about some of the Shakespeare productions, which sacrifice the Bard's poetry too often to gimmicks apparently meant to make his substance more relevant, more accessible, to contemporary audiences. (The low point was a Troilus and Cressida set in the recent American-Iraqi war.)

Not all the new plays have seemed worth the effort to me, though some have offered interesting contemporary foils to Shakespeare — Tony Taccone's Ghost Light, for example, and Robert Schenkkan's plays on the Lyndon Johnson presidency. And some of the musicals have been sadly compromised by more of that gimmicky "updating": here the low points have been The Pirates of Penzance and My Fair Lady.

So this season we've bought tickets to only five of the eleven plays — only to find, this last week, that the first three of our choices were really very good, well worth the price of admission. If only I could find reviews I can trust of the remaining shows, I might be tempted to give them a chance!

The three plays we saw couldn't be more different. The Cocoanuts, with book by George S. Kaufman and music and lyrics by Irving Berlin, was written in 1925 for the Marx Brothers, who improvised or otherwise contributed a good deal of its shtick. Any revival faces the problem of those brothers, of course: they need to be recognizably Marx, but should go beyond simply presenting impressions. This is where the tight ensemble and even talent of the OSF company can really shine, and we were more than happy with Mark Bedard, Brent Hinkley, John Tufts, and Eduardo Placer in for Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and, yes, Zeppo (the romantic lead).

The Cocoanuts is vaudeville brought to the somewhat more legitimate theater, and the musical component is fairly important. Jennie Greenberry was a fine soubrette as Polly Potter, the female lead, with a really attractive voice and sharply defined comic acting; and K.T. Vogt did well with the heavy role of her mother. Kate Mulligan and Robert Vincent Frank were just as detailed and engaging as the villains, Penelope Martin and Harvey Yates; and the rest of the cast were up to the marks as well.

The play alternates between sweetness and zaniness, and David Ivers's direction managed that alternation with apparent ease, profiting from Richard Hay's design and Meg Neville's wonderful costumes. I'd love to go back for another look at the show later in the season, to see how they keep it so fresh and funny.

The Tempest saw a fine, thoughtful production in Ashland in 2002, when Penelope Mitropoulos took the lead role, changing Prospero's gender as Prospera, and bringing new, larger resonance to Shakespeare's theme of reconciliation through understanding, patience, and forgiveness.

Then in 2007 the play suffered, I thought, from a more equivocal, tentative production centering on a lead actor who — in spite of repeated successes in other roles here over the years — seemed uneasy with his assignment and uncertain as to the play.

This year the play again hesitates with its lead. Denis Arndt is a diffident, sometimes almost playful Prospero, relying on Daniel Ostling's design, Alexander Nichol's marvelous lighting, and Kate Hurster's often powerful Ariel, rather than on his own voice and stage presence, for the brittle, mercurial force and inventiveness of his magic.

But the production really works well. Shakespeare's familiar contrasting levels of society are acted and directed thoughtfully and effectively but also dramatically, even entertainingly. The Italian nobility, the mariners, above all Stephano and Trinculo (Richard Elmore and Barzin Akhavan), all address Shakespeare's lines, the plot's requirements, and the audience's engagement.

Wayne T. Carr was a fine Caliban, I thought, his resentment sympathetic and his role ultimately reclaimed. Kate Hurster's Ariel was perhaps a bit too big in its conception, but effective and often beautiful. Like her father, Miranda (Alejandra Escalante) flirted with diffidence. In the end, though, they seem like contemporary Americans looking on as their alter egos enact this great play, bringing yet another layer of meaning to the stage.

I wish I had time, patience, skill, and scope to write about Lorraine Hansbury's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window with the insight and substance the play deserves. It's a big, important, powerful play, addressing serious issues both societal and individual. It is narrative theater at its best, I think, set on a plot with beginning, middle, and end, presented through characters who are sympathetic, understandable, now and then surprising. And while the mood is generally serious and occasionally flirts with tragedy there is humor and affection.

The play was badly received at its opening in 1964 — it was too big, too "difficult" for the commercial entertainment critics. Hansbury was already dying (pancreatic cancer); if there were any thoughts of revisions, there was no strength to achieve them. I think some judicious cutting would improve the play: a long drunk scene seems perilously like a bitter survey of postwar absurdist theater.

But Juliette Carrillo's direction makes it clear that this is a perfectly workable, stageworthy play, and the cast pretty well nailed their assignments: Ron Menzel in the title (lead) role; Sofia Jean Gomez as his wife Iris; Erica Sullivan as her brittle, aloof sister Mavis; Vivia Font in the small but pivotal role of the third sister, Gloria; Armando McClain, Danforth Comins, and Benjamin Pelteson in the significant roles of Alton the (mixed-race) friend, Wally the politician, and David the upstairs gay playwright. We saw Jack Willis as the abstract expressionist down the hall; he was just as solid, detailed, and engaged an actor as all the rest.

As you can perhaps tell by the capsule descriptions in the previous paragraph, Hansbury weaves plenty of strands into this dramatization of social issues of midcentury America. It was fascinating to come to know the play just after a reading of John Steinbeck's last novel, The Winter of our Discontent, written just a few years earlier. Both writers deal with corruption; both are aware that it is an inevitable and perhaps even a necessary component of the social human condition, as the human reach for ideals always stretches beyond the grasp of the compromises without which daily life seems unbearable and impossible.Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-88948055333417699412014-03-22T11:11:00.001-07:002014-03-22T11:14:36.729-07:00A provisional commentary on Virgil, John, and Lou

Virgil Thomson (1896-1989)	John Cage (1912-1992)	Lou Harrison (1917-2003)

<big>I</big> MET LOU HARRISON in the early 1960s, probably at the Cabrillo Music Festival in 1963, when I attended one or two concerts there. Gerhard Samuel was conducting the Oakland Symphony in those days, and he, Lou, and Bob Hughes organized the festival, partly to give jobs to symphony personnel in the summer, partly to hear music off the standard repertory, partly as a spinoff from a series of concerts Bob and Lou had been giving in Aptos at a rustic watering hole whose name escapes me now.

In 1965, I think it was, Lou brought Virgil Thomson to our Berkeley apartment, on Francisco Street, for conversation, and from then on both men were occasional friends, I suppose you'd call them — Lou lived in Aptos, Virgil in New York; I was working double-time at KPFA and trying to compose on the side, not to mention keep the car running and the plumbing in line, all those things you do when you're raising a family on $75 a week in a one-bedroom duplex, studio in the basement.

Chez Panisse opened in 1971, and it wasn't long before Virgil came to dinner. I remember his liking Lindsey's crème anglaise, complimenting her on how little cornstarch she'd used in it. Alice was shocked: Oh no, she said quickly; there's no cornstarch in that crème anglaise. Lindsey smiled quietly: there was a tiny bit of cornstarch in it; subsequently she worked out a method that dispensed with it entirely.

We never went to New York, and still don't, not having formed the habit. But Lindsey spent a few days there every few years on business, and when we were there we always visited Virgil in his rooms at the Chelsea Hotel. We talked about mutual acquaintances, about the old days, about Mozart, about criticism — I was by then working as an art and music critic, and was interested in that often-reviled and usually badly practiced profession.

By the early 1980s we knew John Cage well enough, Lindsey and I, to be on a first-name basis. In that decade I was working on a series of composer's biographies for Fallen Leaf Press: I completed the first, on Robert Erickson, and got halfway through the next, on Lou. I was projecting one on John, too, and visited him a couple of times in his New York apartment, helping him make our lunch, talking about Duchamp, about Buddhism, about cuisine, about criticism.

I dropped the book about Lou after about 50,000 words, when I'd brought him up to his fiftieth year, when he was well settled with Bill Colvig, reasonably accepted in his corner of the music world, and had begun dedicating himself to gamelan, a music that didn't interest me. By then it was clear Lou would not need my help in being presented to the wide world; that was well begun. Even less would John need a biography from me: a number were already in preparation as he approached his eightieth year.

Serious biography of this sort requires detective work, solid musical analysis, real focus, and discipline — all qualities I have little familiarity with and, in fact, little enthusiasm for. Besides, unlike Erickson, both Lou and John had lived within a social context I knew nothing about. Most of all, I very much liked both of them, and treasured them as friends and colleagues, a relationship I sensed would be endangered were I to continue further in a biographer's role.

Lou and Bill visited us up here on Eastside Road a couple of times, and we continued to see them now and then in their Aptos house. (I remember one visit, when I was examining their house more attentively than usual, and Bill noticed. We were then planning our own house. I asked Bill whether he thought I should frame it in two-by-fours, the conventional approach, or two-by-sixes. "How long do you want to live in it?", he responded; and we framed it in two-by-sixes.)

We saw Virgil and John, or Virgil or John, every couple of years, on those New York visits, or occasionally when one or another was in the Bay Area. If it was John, well, he was always busy, and we saw him in passing. He and Virgil were quite different in that respect: John was focussed, dedicated, disciplined, driven; Virgil was retired, sociable, at ease. I must say I preferred his style, though I respected and envied the other's production.

The last time we visited Virgil at the Chelsea was a year or two before his death. He was quite old — he died in 1989 — but he was reasonably healthy as far as we could see. He mentioned that his sister had died at the age of 94, and he was certain he would not outlive her, and he turned out to be correct: he was two months shy of that age. I asked him if there were any way he could be reconciled with John. Not quite in those words, I suppose, but close. I was thinking about the idiotic rift that had set in between Satie and Debussy; how Debussy had died without seeing Satie again, and there was something in the Debussy-Satie relationship that had always rhymed, so to speak, in my mind, with the Thomson-Cage relationship. So many hours working in the trenches together, so many "values" in common, so much good conversation and shared experiences, all thrown away over some momentary thing. Virgil was not interested: John had gone his own way. I think perhaps in the end the hardest thing for Virgil was the progress, if you can call it that, of musical Modernism, away from his own day, into areas for which he had no interest, which were simply not to his taste, as gamelan is not to mine.

That same summer I saw John in his apartment. We had lunch together. We shelled peas, I think it was, or beans, and laughed at the cat on the catwalks, and talked about one thing and another. My problem with such interviews was always that there were so many things unsaid, because we both knew them, and agreed about them, why discuss them?

I did mention Virgil, though, and wondered why they wouldn't speak. John was obstinate. The least you can ask of people, he said, is loyalty.

Certainly two events fed this feud. One was the early life-and-works book about Virgil, published as Virgil Thomson: His Life and Music (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, Publisher; 1959). The book is published as having been written by Kathleen Hoover (the Life) and John Cage (the Music). A number of rumors fly around the book: John wrote it all, Virgil didn't like the Life section and assigned it instead to Hoover. Or: Virgil wrote it all, and assigned the credits away to mask self-promotion. Or Virgil extensively re-wrote passages. I hate waspishness, and you deal with a certain amount of that when you negotiate these waters. In any case, it's impossible to get to the bottom of such things; there are many truths.

The other event was Virgil's review of whichever piece it was of John's, I forget now, either 4'33" or the Variations (if that's what it was titled) that involves a number of radios, that pushed John's musical ideas beyond the threshold of Virgil's limits — beyond, I mean, what Virgil's sensibility and training allowed him to consider musical.

As late as 1962, in the introduction to the Peters Edition catalog of his music (called, simply, John Cage), John gracefully thanked Virgil (along with Peter Yates) for his understanding criticism. Criticism is at the center of the Virgil-John situation, and indeed to the Virgil-John-Lou group, to which in all humility I would add, at times, myself. I have always cherished and often cited the late Joseph Kerman's memorable, terse definition of the practice: "the study of the meaning and the value of art works." (Contemplating Music: challenges to musicology, Harvard University Press, 1986).

Virgil, John, and Lou, with a few others — Peggy Glanville-Hicks among them — created a community of criticism in that very sense, under Virgil's direction, at the old New York Herald Tribune, in the years following the end of World War II. I don't have patience to go further here into the extraordinary ferment of intellectual and artistic energy and knowledge present then and there: it was a moment like Paris, 1911-1928, or Vienna, 1770-1820. Such moments cannot be forced; they can only be exploited, and Virgil Thomson had the perfect intelligence and sensibility to understand that, and contribute further to it.

But criticism has its negative aspect, particularly when considered as it affects individuals, whether they are practicing it or responding to it. The Herald Tribune Virgil group, to call it that, comprised composer-critics. Who better to respond to music than a musician? But pride and sensitivity are easily involved, and the biographical results can be sad to contemplate.Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com