Creature of the Shade

Paris: The Listener

Back in Paris, as always possibly for the last time.  At the beginning of the last day of the trip, I decide that of the infinity of art and culture and history and struggle that this city is, this is the center:

Écoute ("Listen") is perhaps not a pinnacle of Western Art.  Its sculptor, Henri de Miller, doesn't even rank a Wikipedia page.  It's beautiful but aimed at the masses, among which, when it comes to sculpture, I count myself.  It's a simple idea: a head, eyes dreamy, and a hand as though cupping the ear to hear.  Up close, ridges and grooves in the surface suggest the oscillation that is sound.  

Children are welcome to climb all over it.

It was installed in 1986, the same year that I lived in Paris for three months, so I remember it when it was new, a revelation of serenity in the noisy polluted mess that raged around me then.  It was unusual then, in its dreaminess and cheerfulness, but there are more things like it now.  It has aged well, with little sign of wear.  

The space around it has churned and left it as it is.  The modernist tomb of Les Halles, built on the ruins of the old public market, was remodeled in 2017 to create the Nelson Mandela Garden, framed on one side by a shopping center entrance that looks like an airport terminal.  Unchanged is the wall on one side, nearly the same color as the statue.  It's the giant Renaissance church of St Eustache, Paris's largest functioning cathedral now that Notre Dame us under repair.  The church and the sculpture seem to like each other.

I choose this as the center of my Paris, and set the city orbiting around it.  It is not far off the geographic center, but every spot in Paris is the center of something, so to organize my map, give it a form and north arrow, I must choose.  Écoute grows naturally from some of France's most beautiful impulses -- art nouveau, say, or the world's best public transport logo, which also suggests a dreamy, reclining figure:

But Écoute is both middle and end.  I usually stay east of it -- this time I'm lodged next to Gare de Lyon -- and my first long walk is always west.  As a younger man I did the athletic hike along the river all the way to the Eiffel Tower.  I'm still fit enough to do that walk, but as I grow older I care less about goals, so the walk gets shorter and more meandering, and now it ends at Ecoute. 

This time, I took a bit of the "High Line of Paris," then meandered happily in the Marais, and detoured south to visit the fenced modernist fortress of the Cité Internationale des Arts, where I lived in 1986. From there I checked the price of a baguette on Île Ste Marie, which are now in euros what I once paid in francs, and admired the scaffolding of burned-out Notre Dame.  Then it was finally back north to Beaubourg, past Centre Georges Pompidou, and then Les Halles and Écoute.  Further west I no longer go.  The next thing after Écoute is the stock exchange, and then you are into the most boring part of Paris: all elite shops mixed with tourist traps, wider streets, more rushing cars.  That part of Paris is all about money or the longing for it, so I avoid.

Paris remains for me a constellation of glorious places, set in a structure that over time charms me less.  The historic architecture is all grey and beige, less quirky and lived-in than that of Barcelona, which I am coming to love more as a city for wandering.  But for art,  public and in museums, and for a city that manifests art in all aspects of its being -- even the public transport logo -- there is still nothing like Paris.  I'm here for that.  But I'm not here for the elitism of the arts, too close to the elitism of money, so I stop before I get to the stock market, and orbit Écoute.

Mirra Meyer: Batik as Modern Art

My late mother Mirra Meyer, who passed away in April, spent much of the 1970s and 1980s developing batik as a modern art form, while also doing important work in several other media.  We're delighted to announce her first solo exhibit in decades, at the Michael Parsons Gallery in downtown Portland. 

We had a good opening reception so we think we'll do it again.  Please also join us for a "one week before closing" reception at the gallery, Saturday, August 24 at 1:30 PM.  The show is open now and runs through the end of August.

The gallery at 716 SW Madison St, and is open 12-5 PM Tuesday through Saturday.

Christchurch: Art, Plants, Marketing, Mourning

-43.532  172.636

Almost five years ago, the heart of Christchurch, New Zealand was smashed to rubble.  The February 2011 earthquake didn't just take lives and destroy property; it wrecked almost everything that defined the city's character and formed its face to the world.  

(Should I speak only of the face, then, rather than the heart?  Are travelers in any position to know the hearts of cities, however often they return to them?)  

I look now at the photos from my joyous 2009 visit to the city, which I posted after the quake but before I returned there.  Almost everything I had photographed is damaged and closed (the Art Centre) or ruined beyond repair (the Cathedral) or simply gone (the intimate mainstreets, and the historic buildings of nearby Lyttleton).  Gone too are many things I wouldn't have photographed: an entire skyline of concrete modernist buildings has vanished. Just a few still stand, plywooded and tagged.  This one has a new banner promising it will be a hotel next year.

Here is the former visitor's centre, the clock an absent face:

One concrete building, once part of a long row of brick or wood storefronts, is now the sole fossil of a vanished row of shops.

And it is hard not to look at the cathedral, still easily mistaken for a ruin of war:

Of course the work and talk is of recovery.  What else would humans talk of?   Urbanists heap praise on the downtown shopping area made of shipping containers, an  early attempt to create some life in the ruins.  One fine new building, a public transport interchange, is already up and running, and within a few years there will be a 5-10 story brand-new city in the blocks around it, just south of the cathedral square.  A department store has reopened downtown, which is more than many cities this size can boast.

But forgive me if that's not all I notice on cold overcast Sunday evening in the nearly deserted city.  Like anyone who knew Christchurch as it was, I walk through a city of absences, the lost city always flickering in peripheral vision.  If I turned quickly enough, and with a certain intent, I might be back in the mainstreet of local shops, ordinary or eccentric, each with an office or residence above. A shopkeeper chatting with friends might look up at me casually, willing but not desperate to sell me a thirdhand book, or a piercing, or a faded Victorian pillow.  Nobody was rich or striving on that street, but visitors like me loved the dusty oddity and gentleness -- qualities that no amount of money can restore.  

A few of those people died in their shops, and all were scattered, lives and livelihoods smashed.  So there's been loving and grieving to do, and art does most of that work.  New Zealanders have long done quirky and cheerful public art.  (The traffic sheep, which are both bollards and benches, are a fine example.)  Kiwis are also among the world's great gardeners, especially with their brown-and-teal native flora.  Here all that comes together around the Cathedral's ruins.

  

Over and over, I saw art and plants patching things together:  Here, a fine mural on a damaged building, a row of planters hanging from a fence, and, in the lower right, a shiny designer bench.

 Art is the key, so let me end, as I did in my last Christchurch post, at the Art Centre.  A re-use of an old college, it was a huge warren of little artists' studios, the sort of place that made a life in the arts possible for many talented people.  Mercifully, it did not quite fall down.

New Zealand rarely experiences huge floods of investment -- what Jane Jacobs called "catastrophic money" -- and on balance this is one of its virtues.  The money hesitates and dribbles.  There are plenty of questions.  What is Christchurch about now?  Is it just a regional service center for the South Island, a place to go for surgery or furniture?  Will it find a new purpose?  

Or will the arts and plants be its salvation?  Both remain the essence of what Christchurch will still have when all this is over.  The great parks are still here, and the Botanic Gardens still have their astonishing trees -- including Californian giants that can't be 200 years old, but look much vaster and older.  The Art Centre will be put back together, and manages to look like art now and then in the process:

Across the street, the Art Gallery tells us, in neon, from behind its cyclone fence, that "everything is going to be alright." Only the doubt-admitting voice of art can say this with any credibility.

Art and plants.  There is no other way, I think, to market and mourn a city, at the same time.

on abandoning novels in hotels: Franzen's Freedom

Canberra

(Contains plot spoilers.)

Some novels are meant to be abandoned in hotels. 

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom is so ideally suited to being abandoned in a hotel that I have already done it once, by accident, and will soon do it again, by intention.  Of course, that means I've bought it twice, and therefore had an outsized impact on perpetuating all the ravages of bestsellerdom.  And that means I owe the cosmos a small apology.

I bought it because, well, I enjoyed The Corrections, Franzen's last major novel published nine years ago.  I certainly didn't experience The Corrections to be major groundbreaking literature, because when you subtracted the obvious influences of Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, there wasn't all that much left.  But it sounded like a talented young writer riffing in admiration of his own influences, and that's a perfectly sound basis for a first book.  Obviously, being published a week before 9/11 will make any book seem prophetic, and if The Corrections helped readers discover the genuine originality of De Lillo and Wallace, a purpose was served.

So I bought Freedom.  I hesitated, because I prefer to buy books that appear in modest single piles, if not in singles on shelves, and it was hard to find a bookstore that wasn't shoving it at me in big standing displays that presented 15 copies of the book, face out and side by side, as though I might want to choose among them. 

But hey, I thought.  I admire De Lillo and Wallace, and so does Franzen, and I'm going to be in a lot of hotels.

The first time, I abandoned it in a hotel by accident.  I realized at the time that I could live without finishing it, but it was my read-in-bed-before-going-to-sleep novel, and one wants a certain comfort and reliability in that genre.  By that time, about 1/3 of the way through.  I knew the characters, enjoyed watching them bounce around in their box, and most important, knew that they would never do anything to really upset me.  They were like very small mammalian pets who are adorable precisely because they take their lives so seriously -- even though to me their lives look pretty small and, well, now that you mention it, it's kind of hard to tell them apart.

Fortunately, I don't need to write a review, as a lot of people are having this reaction.  Here's Paul Constant in The Stranger:

[T]he (admittedly brilliant) storytelling loses some of its luster when you consider what Franzen is employing his formidable talents for. This is yet another book about white upper-middle-class comfortable assholes who do horrible things to themselves and each other because they can't seem to make their lives as perfect as they would like them to be.

It's more extreme than that.  Everybody in Freedom is white, straight, and more or less middle class, with the rule-proving exception of a young South Asian woman whose purpose is to be the light of Walter Berglund's late middle age.  She makes him feel young again, encourages his idealism, and therefore dies in a car crash as soon as the time comes for Walter's family to come back together for a happy ending -- all well-trodden clichés for a feminine Other.  This woman has a sparking personality and intelligence and interesting flaws, but of course we see nothing of her inner life.  Only white people have those.

In fact, only one character in the novel could even be called creative or artistic, the rock musician Richard Katz.  He, too, has a standard role to play: Walter's lifelong friend and sexual rival, who is finally reduced to irrelevance by his own inability to commit to a woman for more than 15 minutes.  Katz does have some inner life: he ruminates endlessly about right and wrong, Hamlet-like, while deferring to "the divining rod in his pants" to handle all the exigencies of action.  Even artists are a cliché in this book.  Good thing none of them are reading.

It feels shallowly politically correct, in a narrowly American way, to judge a novel based on a demographic census of its characters, but I did really feel hit-over-the-head with the lack of diversity of any kind.  Can the literary triumph of 2010 really be a novel in which only straight, white, middle class, non-artistic people are expected to have interesting inner lives -- and who use their 550+ pages of fame to reveal that, well, they're cute and harmless but not really all that interesting? 

Sorry, Jonathan Franzen.  Your time's up.  And my baggage -- in every sense -- is heavy enough without you. 

on art nouveau

I have little to add to my Human Transit post on Art Nouveau, except that ---

Except that I think it's the first period of design that's fundamentally kind. Compared to it, every older style seems to be so clearly about power -- the power of one dead man over others.

 

This isn't to say that the builders of the Gothic cathedrals or the painters of Baroque gold leaf weren't kind people, but still, those styles, indeed, all the styles I can think of before about 1890, were clearly meant to convey power, to put you in your place. They were about the power of God, or of the state, or in most cases both kinds of power in symbiosis. 

Why does Art Nouveau seem so unsuited to the eternal agenda of power? Is it because, for the first time, a style of design seemed to reflect the raw beauty of the organic, of life itself? 

Until then, the only beauty that design had noticed -- apart from landscape as captured in painting -- was that of the human body. Art Nouveau took its inspiration from the calmer beauty of plants, a beauty that's really unsuited to power agendas of any kind.  The artist, of course, is appearing as a power center for the first time in these years. Art Nouveau could serve the cult of the artist, of course, but it doesn't transfer well to any larger power, whether of state or church.

Even Impressionism in painting -- barely a decade older than Art Nouveau -- is always very much about how nature strikes human eyes. It's about the psychology of human perception. And while there's no avoiding that topic when discussing any art, Art Nouveau seemed aware of an organic essence of all things, and that this essence would would go on without us, and that it could be beautiful. 

harold pinter, 1930-2008

Sydney

Several working-class straight men are sharing a flat in London, all leading what seem like tedious and despairing lives.  Suddenly, a man who used to be one of them comes home to visit, and brings his new and attractive wife.  It feels like she's the first woman they've encountered in years.  One of them offers to pour her a glass of scotch.

HE:  Rocks?
SHE:  Rocks?  What would you know about rocks?
HE:  We have rocks, but they're frozen stiff in the fridge.

This joke is all I remember of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, but it's enough.  The whole play is right there.  As soon as you recognise that rocks = testicles, you've got the big payoff, but as in both fireworks and sex, the significance of the big explosion relies on the little explosions all around it.  (Perhaps I should just call them plosions, as they are really both ex- and im-.) 

I don't have Pinter's texts with me at home in Sydney, and have scarcely looked at them for a decade.  Today, reading of his death, I marvel at how much of it is still in my head, remembered the way one remembers great passages of poetry. Yet most of Pinter is not poetic.  Poetry requires at least the pretense of a subject, an observing and experiencing consciousness; in Pinter, there are always at least two people in the room, and his subject is not their consciousness but the tightly-stretched cord of mutual dependence that stretches between them, throbbing.

The Pinter play that sticks with me best is Old Times.  A married couple are visited by a third woman, a very close friend of the wife from the years before she met him.  Was it a lesbian relationship?  Pinter uses that uncertainty to unfold deeper ones, so that by the end the question seems trivial and reductive, like reducing Buddhism to the question of whether to eat meat.

Here's the opening, also from my memory.  The couple at home in the livingroom, sitting apart:

 SHE:  Dark.
(pause)
HE:  Fat or thin?
SHE:  Fuller than me I think.
HE:  She was then?
SHE:  I think so.
HE:  She may not be now.

Again, it's all there.  The other woman's place in the wife's memories, her husband's relentless curiosity about those years, his desire to conquer and own them.  Failing that, his need to build the wall between then and now, to defend his turf. 

The other woman turns out to be lively, extroverted, and powerful, quite the opposite of the wife, so it's this woman who tells most of the stories about their time together ("Queueing all night -- the rain! -- do you remember?")  But finally, near the end, the wife turns to her and says:  "But I remember you.  I remember you dead."  From this unfolds a soliloquy in which she remembers sitting naked by the dead woman, watching her decompose, feeling "that by dying alone and dirty you had acted with proper decorum."

I haven't spoiled the ending, because there isn't one.  After all, the "dead" woman is there, in front of us, looking not just alive but lively.  The sense that this play makes lies outside the play's events, in the cords that form the triangle without which none of these people could exist at all.

I'm not usually very interested in love triangles, but Old Times is the play I would most want to direct if I ever went back to directing. It is Pinter at his best, and at his least political.  If you feel like reading a play to remember him, read it.

why theatre professionals never sit in the front row

Sydney

From today's Sydney Morning Herald review of a local production of Heiner Müller's Anatomy Titus, Fall of Rome:

Based on Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare's most bloodthirsty tragedy, the script by the German playwright Heiner Muller [sic] breaks up the original text with poetic commentary about the futility of war. The Sydney audience will receive the message in particularly graphic fashion; the shape of the Opera House stage means blood flies off the set and on to those in the front row.

"But don't worry, it washes straight off in an ordinary spin cycle," said the stage manager, Peter Sutherland.

I guess we won't be going out for drinks after the show.

In one of my former lives, I did a PhD in theatre and spent many days in "black boxes," theatres so tiny that mishurled blood might as easily hit the back row as the front.  Last night, walking home through Sydney's arts-and-warehouse district of Surry Hills, I took a back street and noticed a man standing up ahead, gazing at me expectantly.  As I approached he asked "Are you here for the performance?"  He was facing an open door in a nondescript industrial building, with very small-print newspaper articles pasted up in it -- reviews, no doubt.  We were the only two people on the entire street, and there was no sign of anyone inside.

I was him once.  I could still be him -- he was about my age.  I don't think for a moment that my choices were better than his.  And yet the desperation of microtheatre and startup theatre and the black box in general feels like another era right now. 

"No, I'm sorry, just walking home."

"Are you sure, mate?"

Sigh.  Don't ask me that.  I'm never sure.  In fact, it was my years in theatre that knocked all the sureness out of me.  All I could do was keep walking, and hope I hadn't just turned down a life-changing offer from the angel of sincerity.

monochrome

The jacarandas have bloomed in Sydney, a little later than usual.  For a week or two, the city was covered with big lavender polka-dots, standing out like the aliens they are against the ambient green and orange.  The trees themselves aren't interesting to photograph, but I had a pleasant half hour looking at lavender blossoms on someone's dark blue car.  It yielded a monochrome effect, with reflected accents of both city and tree.

look familiar?

Recognize that shape?

To me, it was beautiful even when I didn't, and the vague sense that I should recognize it created a not-unpleasant bridge between my sense of abstract beauty and my daily anxiety about knowing the right stuff.

It's a sculpture by James Koester, part of a series now showing through Sunday at JEM Gallery, 225 E Broadway in Vancouver, BC.  Stop by if you're in town.

It consists of phosphorescent green lines of metal, floating on pins in a metal box.  (In some pictures, you can see the line's shadow on the box, which creates a quivering feel.)  The phosphorescent lines glow in the dark, and also look good peering through fog.  (A fog machine was provided at the opening just for this effect.)  One version of this sculpture is 10 feet long.

Once I did recognize the shape all kinds of interesting stuff flowed in.  It's an spot of geography most of us have stared at maps of at one time or another, one that carries an almost unbearable spiritual and emotional charge:  The long line is the Jordan River, with the Dead Sea on the left, the Sea of Galilee on the right.  For countless people, this is a map of redemption, or covenant, or terror, or despair, though it is also quite plainly a map of water in the desert, which is all that will matter in the end.   As water, it is also a map of history, since the Dead Sea has shrunk quite a bit since James selected this image.
 
James's work with geography obviously touches an obsession of mine.  He chooses simple water-lines out of the "real world," then renders them as abstract.  Like photorealist painting, or photography for that matter, the art is partly in the frame -- the fact that artist's chose this exact bit of geography, and that every fjord in Greenland, for example, deserved his attention.

But they're also simply beautiful shapes, whose beauty is in both their realism and their abstraction.  Koester's work invites me to open an atlas and experience each coastline or river as he would render it -- a wiggling form in space.  And since rivers and coastlines change every day, it is a beauty that we will always have, in abundance.

the camera in suburbia

Two weeks back, I wrote briefly about the unphotographable nature of autumn in the rainforest belt, where Vancouver lies.  It's a particular type of unphotographability, one where the world is still rich with detail, but the enveloping grey has pushed everything closer together, so that one can no longer stand back.

Here in Tucson for a few days, I have encountered the opposite problem.  It's sunny, perfect photography weather, but I can drive for mile after mile after mile through the perfect one-mile grid of arterials and see literally nothing that matters.  Nothing that's distinct.  Nothing that deserves to be remembered. 

Perhaps someday a genius interpreter will read the suburban boulevard as music, with "Burger King" and "Payless Shoe Source" etc as the individually tedious notes whose arrangement is as unique as a snowflake, and that marks the 4300 block of Speedway Boulevard as a work of art.  I'm sure that however uniform it looks, there is indeed only one place where the Burger King is direct across from the Super Valu, followed by McDonalds, Arby's, Radio Shack, and Wells Fargo Bank, and K-Mart in precisely that order, with the mobile-home java hut configured just so in the parking lot.  Perhaps there are esoteric patterns in the citywide constellation of Burger Kings that speak to a city's soul.

But I am not that genius interpreter.

James Howard Kunstler was here long before me, in Home from Nowhere, with the simple articulation that in the suburban arterial grid, we have succeeded in mass-producing places that are not worth caring about, places that can barely support the appellation of "place."  (In fact, he seems to be back on this topic just today.)  I've known this for 20 years, but now that I travel with a digital camera, I become more conscious about what moves me to photograph.  And it's not here.  Or when it is, it's the desperate exception that proves the rule: