Vans

-Originally posted April 15, 2007

Today I was about to step out into the rain when I heard a song coming from someone's apartment: "...now here comes the man--and he says the show must go on..." a song I liked very much but hadn't heard for awhile. It was "Ballerina" by Van Morrison, from the album Astral Weeks, which to me always sounds like a lush, green spring. Maybe it's the album cover...

I never thought about it before, but Van Morrison is a writer who often brings a lot of divergent ideas into one song. Somehow he's able to put an unexpected collection of people and places together and connect them all to a certain setting and mood. For those of you who haven't listened to much of his music, try to forget "Moondance" and oldies stations for a moment and consider a song like "Will You Meet Me in the Country in the Summertime in England," where he talks about W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and William Blake smoking dope, Mahalia Jackson (a gospel singer), Jesus, Avalon (mythic resting place of King Arthur), and the Church of St. John (someplace in England?), and they're all there, in the country in the summertime in England. Or there's "St. Dominic's Preview," where he mentions Edith Piaf's soul, Belfast, Buffalo, San Francisco, and the Notre Dame cathedral.

Van Morrison (born George Ivan Morrison) also brings together two musical divergences with his name: Jim Morrison, the singer for The Doors, and Van Cliburn, a famous classical pianist. Most people today know Jim Morrison, but few know Van Cliburn, though at one point his was a household name. In 1958 he won the first International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, put on by the Soviet Union to demonstrate Soviet superiority. Apparently, the contest's judges had to ask Premier Kruschev for permission to give the prize to an American, and Time magazine called Cliburn "The Texan who conquered Russian." His full name is Harvey Lavan Cliburn.

Wine and Talmud

-Originally posted Sunday, April 8, 2007

So, as was already pointed out, it's Passover. (It lasts seven days.) At the seder (Passover dinner) I went to on Monday, we had the typical Manischewitz (really sweet) wine, but also a "semi-sweet" (it wasn't really) brand of wine called "Rashi." I thought this was a little strange, considering the fact that Rashi is mostly remembered as the most respected commentator on the Torah and the Talmud. He lived from 1040 to 1105, mostly in Troyes, France. His real name was Shlomo--the name by which he is remembered is an acronym of Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (Rabbi Solomon son of Isaac). Rashi is one of those people who, being important enough in Jewish tradition and having lived long enough ago, has several legends attached to his name. The only one I know is about his birth: His parents wanted a child but could not have one. His father was very poor, but one day found a precious jewel. He took it to the jeweler, but it was worth too much for the jeweler to afford. The emperor (or king, or bishop, or whatever) heard about the stone and sent a messenger to Rashi's father to say he wanted to buy it to put on the head of his idol (or on his cross, or whatever). During the journey by boat to see the emperor, there was a great storm and Rashi's father pretended to lose the stone in the sea. When he returned home, a man was at his house and told him that he would be rewarded for not giving the jewel to an idol worshipper. Soon his wife had a son, and they named him Solomon.

Kind of a nice story, but it still doesn't explain why he would have a wine named after him. I looked at the "Rashi" label website, which says Rashi is remembered for his scholarship "as well as for his extraordinary winemaking ability. The pristine vineyards used in the Middle Ages by Rashi have served as models for today's Rashi wine vineyards located in the winemaking heartlands of Italy and New York State." They offer a full line of Kosher wines. Elsewhere I read his father was a winemaker.

But now that I think about it, the Rashi connection is not nearly as ridiculous as some of those that inspired the name of other wines I've had. Some examples: "The Long Paddock" Sauvignon Blanc (Australian agricultural history) or "Big Tattoo" Riesling/Pinot Blanc (tattoo artist-wine importer brother duo commemorate mother's death from cancer).

Arabic Translation

-Originally posted Sunday, March 25, 2007

Today I went to the coffee shop across the street from my apartment. When I got to the register, I put down on the counter the Penguin paperback I had been carrying. The girl behind the register asked me if I was reading it in translation. It was Don Quixote. I said yes, unfortunately I don't read Spanish. She said she didn't either yet but she was getting better. The guy at her bodega was teaching her.

The Spanish word bodegon means pantry, but is also used to refer to still-life paintings (this at least I know). This is because in the Spanish tradition still-lifes often depict objects from the pantry. Like for instance a coffee cup.

In France, they call bodegas arabes, after those who frequently own them.
Cervantes interrupts his narrative in Chapter IX to write that the rest of Don Quixote's history was recorded by "an Arab historian."

A Clockwork Eclipse

-Originally posted Sunday, March 4, 2007

I came home today to find some unrecognizable music coming from behind my roommate's closed door (usually his choices run in the Sufjan Stevens-Belle and Sebastian-Wilco vein). At first I thought it might be the soundtrack to one of the over-acted Greek movies he watches to practice for Greek class. But then I realized it was the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick's movie A Clockwork Orange.a cd of the soundtrack in a record store in December and bought it. I gave it to my mother for Christmas because she has the album on LP, but recently my parents' record player broke, and at the moment I can only afford to buy them a cd and not a record player. My roommate owns a copy of the movie, so he had wanted to burn the cd before I gave it to my mother. I had forgotten about the gift until tonight. On a whim, I Googled 'clockwork orange soundtrack.' For anyone who hasn't seen the movie, much of the music consists of famous pieces of classical music redone with 70s-era syntesizers, in arrangements by Wendy Carlos. I found out that Carlos was famous for similar classical-synth albums like Switched on Bach in the 60s, and that she had been born Walter Carlos in 1938. All of her albums were released under this name until she had a sex change operation in 1979.
This all sounded vaguely familiar, and then I realized I had heard the whole Wendy Carlos history rehashed in an essay by Sarah Vowell. Vowell is an essayist who has written several books, but who I only know from the NPR show This American Life. In fact, I probably heard about Wendy Carlos from a Sarah Vowell reading on the radio show years ago.

Did I really forget all this and then rediscover it? Or was the Kubrick-Carlos-Vowell connection triggered as soon as I heard the synthesized Beethoven coming from behind my roommate's door, and it just took me awhile to reassemble it? I finally read the last page of Borges' Dreamtigers last night. There he suggests that most of what we call our memory is just disassembled impressions of things we have read or heard. For him this was perhaps more acutely true: he writes that few things that actually happened in his life are more worth remembering than Schopenhauer's words or the poetry of English literature.
---
Wendy Carlos may have disagreed with Borges. She is a coronaphile--someone slightly obsessed with total lunar eclipses--and has apparently spent a large amount of time and energy capturing these non-verbal phenomenon in photos. This one was taken in 1999 in Bucharest, Romania:

Boring

-Originally posted Sunday, February 27, 2007

Visiting the websiteof Kenneth Goldsmith (“the most boring writer that has ever lived”) reacquainted me with an old friend I had forgotten about. Goldsmith is the founder of the website ubu.com, an online collection of experimental writing, music, and film. I first heard of the site about a year ago while I was studying abroad in Paris from someone in my program. One of my almost daily tasks while in Paris was going somewhere with free wireless internet, as I had none in my apartment and wanted to spend as little time at the NYU center as possible. On rainy days, the closest place to my apartment was the basement of the McDonalds on Rue de Passy (“the most boring neighborhood in Paris”—A.D.). It was here, probably eating french fries or drinking bad espresso from a Styrofoam cup, watching Passy teenagers on after-school dates, that I first visited Ubu. I don’t remember what else I looked at that day, but I wrote this in my notebook:

come the torch comes
feet quick come
the women of the past come
thick grass come out of
from thick bushels come outside
on the paths of gods always lie

from “The dance of the greased women”
Nauri [Africa]

and dated it March 20, 2006.

Today, I went back to the site for the first time in awhile. I started to watch a Discovery Channel-type documentary about Borges (“he was destined to become one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century...”—pretentiously-accented narrator), but quickly decided against it. Instead, I watched a video of a performance of a composition for 100 metronomes by György Ligeti (1923-2006). Titled Poème Symphonique (“une des pièces la plus rarement performé du monde”), the performance was bizarrely introduced by two identical computer animated women in green t-shirts, speaking at the same time, one in German and one in French. The composition itself features one hundred mechanical metronomes on a set of tiered shelves, which are triggered to start ticking at the same time. They continue for a few minutes until each one stops from inertia. I was reminded how, when I used to practice music when I was younger, I always preferred the old wooden mechanical metronome that sat on our piano to the plastic electronic one my teacher had me buy. He explained that the electronic one was much more accurate, but I couldn’t understand how anything could be more accurate than gravity. Ligeti’s piece can only be performed by mechanical metronomes, because electronic ones would only stop when their battery ran out. But the amazing thing about the swinging metal arm of the old-fashioned metronome is that, up until the moment its own weight brings it to a halt, it never slows down, but continues to click at exactly the same rate.

Watching Movies Alone

-Originally posted Monday, February 26, 2007

The other night, inspired by My Best Fiend, I watched Woyzeck, a 1979 Werner Herzog film starring the ever-deranged Klaus Kinski. It's about a low-level soldier in a small early-nineteenth century town whose mind deteriorates, possibly from a crude medical experiment and possibly from jealousy, so that he is driven to...Well you should see the movie. I found it haunting and poetic (Kinski's Woyzeck may be mad, but he speaks in a sort of lunatic reverie that is poetry compared with the rationalist gobbledygook that surrounds him), so I was rather disappointed when G., with whom I was watching the movie, fell asleep about half-way through. It may have had something to do with the fact that she was sick, but wasn't that why I had suggested we rent a movie on a Saturday night in the first place?

I'm joking, but I always feel somewhat offended when someone falls asleep during a movie I'm really into, and I seem to have a bit of a history of it. There was this summer, when I explained to one of my best friends that 8 1/2 was possibly the greatest movie I had ever seen (I had just seen it for the first time a few weeks before) and that we had to rent it immediately, only for him to fall asleep about halfway through.

There was last spring, when my girlfriend was visiting me in Paris and she didn't want to go out and I told her that was fine because she had to see Godard's Bande a Part. She didn't even make it to the Billy the Kid spoof scene. Then there was last New Years, when I was visiting said girlfriend in North Carolina and she wanted to rent a movie for the third time in one weekend and I conceded to getting something called Russian Ark that she suggested instead of the French New Wave film I had been meaning to see. Russian Ark turned out to be an amazing and baffling movie, shot in a single, beautiful, time-warping, two-hour-long take in St. Petersburg's Winter Palace, which I was very glad to see, but which my girlfriend fell asleep about halfway through.

Maybe the earliest example is seventh grade, when I had a bunch of friends over and I suggested we watch 2001: A Space Odyssey, and one of my best middle-school friends fell asleep halfway through.

Monkeys

-Originally posted Sunday, January 28, 2007

Last Sunday I went to the Brooklyn Museum to see an exhibition of Ron Mueck, who makes frighteningly lifelike sculptures of humans in very inhuman dimensions and bizarre poses. The Mueck exhibit was interesting and impressive, and clearly the major attraction at the museum--there was a long line to get in, and it was always hard to get an unobstructed view of the silicone statues. But for some reason another exhibit caught my eye, even though I had never heard of it and it didn't seem to be drawing as many people as Mueck's. It was called "Tigers of Wrath: Watercolors by Walton Ford," and the advertisement for it at the museum entrance made me think it was a group of naturalist paintings from the 19th century, like Audubon's watercolors of America's birds. Maybe it was this impression that I would be looking at something antique that interested me; or maybe reading Borges' Dreamtigers--as I had been doing, a chapter at a time at a friend's apartment, since I discovered it on her desk--triggered my interest in the paintings. It turns out Walton Ford is actually a contemporary artist, and his watercolors were done in the past fifteen or so years. But his style consciously imitates Audubon's naturalist illustrations, and his vision is not so far from Borges'. Each painting depicts a wild animal--tiger, leopard, wolf, the extinct elephant bird of Madagascar--in a 'natural' pose, and includes the animal's scientific name. But the apparent subject of each 'naturalist' study is also unwittingly tied into a larger human history that Ford implies through fragments of texts, allusions to legends, and glimpses of crumbling empires integrated into the portrait. For instance, in one group of paintings, Ford imagines the group of monkeys that belonged to Sir Richard Burton, a nineteenth century British military officer, explorer, and 'orientalist,' who supposedly spoke 29 languages, translated the Thousand and One Nights and Kama Sutra into English, and was considered one of the greatest fencers of his time. According to his wife's writings, Burton also at one point during his time in India kept about forty or so monkeys and was quite successful at learning their language, to the extent that he was able to compile a monkey dictionary. The dictionary was unfortunately lost in a fire.

Walton Ford graduated from the Rhode Island School of design in 1982. Last night a friend of mine who goes to RISD was in the city, so we hung out at a bar near my apartment that always has a big glass jar of unshelled peanuts and I told her about "Tigers of Wrath" and we ate peanuts.

An Introduction

This is a blog. The first posts originally appeared elsewhere. Posts will appear irregularly at first, regularly later, hopefully.