Back to the Real World

Tonight is our last night in Sacramento. I am facing the return to the Bay Area with mixed emotions, as I am always glad to be back by the bay, but there is something good about being here, too. It has been a long time since I have stayed a whole week here, and I am always amazed by how easy it is to return to a regular routine while here.

However, work is in the Bay Area, our home is there, at this point most of our close friends are there, so off we go.

On our expedition to William Land Park, the big park on the South side of town, I was reminded of the mixture of stark trees, their leaves shed for the winter, and the crystal clear blue skies. Looking up at the tangle of trees in a place that I know as well as any reminded me of my early inspirations towards drawing and later to painting.

My elementary school did not have extensive grounds so we had PE as well as many a science and art expedition to this park, which is right across the street from the school. Mr. Marcroft, the science and art teacher would give us our lessons in perspective indoors and then take us to the park to work from real life. Those webs of branches crisply defined against the sky were always a source of wonderment and excitement. When I saw Mondrian's work that led to his pure abstraction I always think of drawing those trees.

However, when I am not in Sacramento and I think of the light typical of the area I do not think of winter, rather late summer, when the shadows are long, cool, and inviting. Although Wayne Thibaud credits Richard Diebenkorn with the idea of using French ultramarine for shadow, I cannot help but think that Thibaud was really reflecting a bit of the hot, Central Valley summer where the shadows really do seem purple, in contrast to the intense heat and uncompromising light around them.

There is also something of the dusty golds and greens of the French symbolist painters to be found in late summer in Sacramento. It is probably for this reason, in addition to always being taught the supremacy of drawing over painting, that I always gravitate to the cloissonisme of Van Gogh and Gaugin.

Of course this sort of heavy outlining is contrary to the notion of pure painting.

"It is a pity that Vincent Van Gogh never learned how to paint," said Wayne Thiebaud at a lecture a few years back, "but boy he could draw with a paintbrush."

Thiebaud, of all the painters I can think of, is the best at dancing on the line between drawing and painting. His paint handling is magnificent, but often his forms are distinctly outlined in contrasting hues, often in rather heavy lines, sometimes even by means of sgraffito, in which the overpainting is scraped or restrained from the contrasting underpainting. While he may build a line of paint over these sections, I am confident that he almost always works this way. Little sections show through the thick-as-frosting outlines to show a methodical building up of color.

Thiebaud is our local hero. He was not born in Sacramento, but lived there most of his life. Now he divides his time between the Bay Area and Sacramento, but the key to understanding his approach to color has to be a good look at hot and dry summers here. Just as Diebenkorn is the master of Bay Area fog, Thiebaud is the artist who best understands this region.

Thiebaud's style is often copied, but rarely with any finesse. He won his individualistic vision through years of hard work, careful observation and stubborn determination. Any attempt to reduce him to formula will inevitably fail, as his paintings are too carefully constructed to be easily imitated.

Thinking of the cultural world's great contributors always leads to two writers: Joan Didion and Richard Rodriguez. Didion went to C.K. McClatchy High School, where I went. Rodriguez went to Christian Brothers (I think). They write from radically different perspectives, yet share an approach to the language that comes, in part, from the anxiety of growing up in Sacramento.

When one has artistic aspirations in this town, one has relatively easy access to the hip, exciting Bay Area, combined with enough belief in culture to not feel a complete oddball. There is not quite enough culture to distract, and the culture that is here is enough out of step with New York/Los Angeles/Bay Area trends that have almost completely destroyed the visual arts. A sheep's head in preservative would not make it in a gallery in Sacramento, at least not yet. A re-examination of techniques and ideas of the impressionists would not be laughed off the street as hopelessly retardaire either.

I think that the only direction open to painters is to retrench in the sanctuary of good technique. Matters of style are no longer relevant to making art that is original. Inventing radical ways of painting is a dead end that only leads to the grotesque. As a firm partisan of Abstract Expressionism, and the various post-AbEx styles that were anchored in good technique, firm composition and intelligent use of color, I am certainly not calling for a "back to beaux arts" movement.

Art never can go back. We must learn from what has happened, and part of that is realizing that "outmoded" forms are always fair game for reinterpretation, so long as this is not based in simple imitation. The pre-Raphaelites had a style that would have looked startlingly out of place in the era they championed. There were not simply attempting to turn back the clock, as many propose doing today.

Meanwhile we have an entrenched caste of idiots at the helm of our arts establishments. It will take a long time for them to realize that the chicanery and two-bit political pranksterism that masked as real innovation are even less viable and interesting today than they were thirty years ago. So the art museums in the big cities will continue for some time to slide into the abyss. Finally they will realize that they have been out of it for a long time, and they will have to turn to the smaller cities that have the resources to encourage young artists, enough cultural insight to realize that art is worth doing, yet enough isolation to ignore the crap that poses as art in the "hipper" places.

I would look to Portland, Oregon, Sacramento, and other towns of that size to produce the next generation of artists. Meanwhile, I will keep pushing on in the Bay Area. There is something to be said for being the malcontent who insists on pushing the envelope of 1956 Berkeley (or 1976 Ocean Park). Someone needs to be there to laugh out loud at the openings. Also, I have a deep love and attachment to the Bay Area. So I will stay for now, although when I see a great craftsman bungalow in the shade of a magnificent elm tree only a short bike ride from the Coffee Works or Corti Brothers or the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament (which promises to look really good after the restoration), I am tempted to throw in the towel on the Bay Area to come back.

Of course being a restaurant reviewer in this town could be a fairly limited gig!

Reading

One thing that I have noticed is that my preferences for reading material change when I am in Sacramento. It might be the drizzly grey weather, or the quiet of the place, but I always seem to have a Sacramento book going that only gets read in Sacramento, at least on the current round of readings.

The problem with this is that when I am in Sacramento for any extended period of time I often pack the wrong books. So I get here and have a bag of books that are great reading in my Bay Area mood, but not for Sacramento.

There are some types of books that work equally well in either place, but I did not seem to pack any of them this time.

One thing that is a constant is that I get most of my reading done late at night. Even in the days before Amalia, I found it easier to focus on serious reading after my evening espresso. Being in Sacramento is no different. When the day is fresh I am much more inclined to read lighter stuff: Rumpole, Don Camillo, etc. But after that 9pm espresso, I am in the mood for something I can dig my teeth into.

For this reason, I do not read in bed. I must maintain my reading space in a different place than my sleeping space. When they get confounded I end up reading until 4am. A book by the bedside is deadly. If I find myself awake only minutes after going to bed, I assume that I have insomnia and grab the book. I learned this the hard way. After a few nights of only a couple of hours of sleep, one's body rebels.

Anyway, I am not happy with any of my choices of fiction, and have not been in the mood to read Jonathon Culler's Structuralist Poetics, which I have been finding amusing the last days before coming to Sacramento. When I look through the bookshelf in my old room I keep lingering on The Lord of the Rings. I have not read it since I was in Junior High School, so I might just give it a go. It should be interesting to read it again, as my memories of it are not that great (I get the books all mixed up and have to admit that my eyes glaze over when my Tolkein fanatic friends talk about how Peter Jackson missed this or that point from the book).

With that, Hobbits are calling!

More on Meyer-Briggs

Another Meyer-Briggs comment popped up on my old rant against it. Since the only way you can find it is to hunt back through the archives, I have decided to post it here. It is from a fellow named Mike. I laughed very hard when I read it, because he describes someone I know who is very into MBTI fits his description amazingly well. While I am not sure the exact etiquette of pasting an entire comment into the main body of the blog, this is so good that I am just going to do it and hope that I have not offended this fellow:

Of course Meyer-Brigss has an "elegant simplicity". There's nothing in the scales that can't be deduced form rading the questions. "Hey, according to Meyer-Briggs, I'm shy! I had *no* idea!"

The test is entire ad-hoc, has never been validated against another instrument, and has no predictive value whatsoever. It has a great pseudo-intellectual appeal, though. I've noticed that it appeals to people who are very rigid and lack creativity- the sort who are good at cataloging data but aren't very good at coming up with original ideas. It's also popular with the sort of person who likes to brag about their Stanford-Binet test score.

(I have a *little* bit of knowledge about this sort of thing... a Master's in psych and most of my PhD work)

On the Ugly German Composer

Maybe in my musical autobiography, I gave the impression that I detest everything Johannes Brahms ever wrote. This is not the case. I tend to like his large ensemble music. It is his chamber works that drive me to fits of rage, especially his piano music. I have no beef with the orchestral or choral works (in fact, singing the Neues Liebeslieder Walzer was one of the great musical joys of my life).

A similar situtation is found in Ravel, who could orchestrate like none other, but wrote the noodliest piano pieces known to man. I never could find anything to like in his piano music, even when I played the piano. It just seemed that one was wasting time playing Ravel, when one could be playing Debussy.

I woke up this morning...

Not to sound like a blues singer, but I woke up this morning with the vestiges of my cold causing me far more grief than they really should (I am an impatient Kraut, so ven tings are supposed to get better, zey must get better now or somevun ist going to haf some explaining to do!). Anyway, I had a little sniffle and that made me think "not another day!" But it went away (notch another one up for the martini cure - last evening, sick and tired of slow but steady progress, I drank a martini and ate a rich meal. Sure enough, symptoms faded to near nothingness).

But, not content with a 99% cure, I signed on to the Internet to check email and found that I could have started my day by being found, shivering, dirty, long-haired and afraid in a hole in Iraq, and it dawned on me: any of us who are not Saddam Hussein should be very happy. If he thought that losing the war was bad, wait till he gets a taste of a public trial, which will be tremendously humiliating for him. And just when he thinks that is bad, if he does not repent, just wait for the Last Judgement.

So, since I did not get aroused by many heavily armed soldiers from a dirty hole, with long hair, and facing at least public humiliation and most probably eternal damnation (if you were the confessor, what sort of penance would you give the guy?), I really can't complain.

Instead it was a beautiful fall day (depends on the block, some of the Bay Area is still in fall foliage, other parts have begrudgingly accepted winter. We are in the autumnal sector), mass was beautiful, and Amalia behaved perfectly. I was on head usher duty and did not have to deal with any madmen (the biggest drawback to the job in an urban church is fending off the madmen. If it were just a matter of shooing them away, it would be simple, but seeing as how some of these poor fellows need the church the most, one must always try to get them to first just sit down and not disturb anyone. The second biggest drawback is fending off the ones who think that I must have a direct line to the archbishop (I am passing out programs after all!), and can DO SOMETHING about the outrage that Fr. Such and Such commited at mass last Wednesday).

But we had none of that today. Indeed the only person who was tempted to holler at His Excellency was me, and it is over a trivial matter that really should be discussed first with the offending party, who is really a kind and caring priest. So, it was a very good day, topped off by the smell of braising sauerkraut and pork spareribs.

But we still have the issue of this poor bastard in the brig. Tyrant, monster, genocide, etc. The score is pretty bad. However, if we are to take the Gospel at all seriously we have to look at Saddam and see the Face of Christ.

You see, I read all the CL stuff, and accept that intellectually. But to actually do it. Let's face it, it is tricky enough to accept the guy who stole the parking space from us this morning on Grant Avenue as our brother, how do we take this leap with a man who gasses women and children? Who kills his own family members?

Always something to pray about, I guess.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

In writing the Friday Five answers and dealing with this cold, I got to thinking about a Christmas a number of years ago when I came down with a really nasty cold on Christmas Eve. I had to skip going to the cousin's for dinner on Christmas Eve. It was after I had taken over Christmas Day cooking duties, so it was looking doubtful if we would even have anyone over.

I was running a high fever and sleeping/waking/reading for a bit/sleeping/getting up for more orange juice/sleeping, and was not in the mood to change records, and feeling that a lack of any music was just too gloomy, so I had the radio on to the classical station. Naturally no programmer wants to be putting together really exciting shows on the one day when almost no one is listening, so it was a steady loop of Christmas favorites: Mormon Tabernacle Choir doing the classics, some Mozart, Nutcracker, and Leroy Anderson's "Sleigh Ride," complete with whips and bells.

I don't know the exact frequency of that stupid sleigh ride song, but it seemed to be on incessantly. With my high fever I half dreamed, half hallucinated this stupid song into a music video featuring Benny Hill. To this day I cannot hear that song without picturing Benny Hill in a Santa Hat. I can't say that this image makes the song any worse, although I do tend to giggle when I think of it.

It turned out that the day of rest worked out and I was able to get up at 6am to start making the bread. By the end of the evening, all was well and the cold was gone.

Maybe if we hit them over the head with the Catechism something will stick!

Last night I was talking to someone who went to a different church than I did on Monday. We were talking about the homily and sure enough the priest had to explain that Monday did not celebrate the conception of Jesus, rather the conception of Mary. Guess what? Our priest had to explain this as well. Looking around St. Blog's, I see that the priests here had to explain that, too. My friend had even encountered an ordained deacon who was confused on this issue!

I don't know about the rest of my readers, but this always seemed a pretty basic thing, something that you maybe had confusion on very early on, but certainly did not get confirmed without this basic distinction explained somewhere. I don't think these priests are explaining this for the fun of it, I imagine that they encounter the confusion all the time. It is just hard to imagine that the sort of Catholics who go to mass regularly are confused on this.

Soundtrack for my life.

It started with Eve Tushnet, then spread to Don (at my goading), so it is only fair for me to get around to posting this. It is more of a musical autobiography, mostly because if I were to list recordings, I would feel obliged to list all the catalog information, and that would be too much work (sorry, but it is that paying writing taking priority over the blog).

Starting with my early years, you must understand that I was raised almost strictly on classical music, with a smattering of folk and some jazz and even less rock. We listened to a lot of Bach. Now, my parents have always gone for lively performances over historically informed performances, so we had a lot of Academy of St. Martin in the Fields and that sort of thing, which I still enjoy, although I much prefer the Academy of Ancient Music nowadays.

When the McClatchy family got out of radio broadcasting classical music programming in Sacramento was left to KXPR, a public station. When my family joined they put the membership in my name. For a premium I got a gift certificate for any Nonesuch title. That was the first record that I ever picked, a collection of Telemann. I still have that record and still listen to it.

So, for my first years, you can basically pick any Bach, any Saint-Saens, any Beethoven, or just about any classical recording except opera.

My views changed regarding opera when we went to the Vienna State Opera and had Standing Room tickets for The Marriage of Figaro. I was 10 years old and hooked. From then on, I listened to the opera broadcasts just about every week. La Boheme and Aida were big favorites for many years (I still like both, but now tend towards Puccini).

That same year I heard yodelling and have been a yodelling fanatic, an affliction that I still carry to this day. If you give me one too many martinis, I might just give you a demonstration of my own yodelling. It ain't pretty. Back then I was more of a purist, only really into Alpenjodl (if anyone knows the Tirolean dialect they can correct my spelling, but I think that is how they spell it down there), tolerating cowboy yodelling only as a rare diversion. Now I go for any and all yodelling, much to the chagrin of the neighbor's hounds.

Two years later I was turned on to Flamenco and Fado. So add that to the list.

About the same time I was listening to the music my peers listened to as well: standard-issue pop music of the 1980's. Of that stuff, the only ones that I can listen to at all anymore are Prince and maybe Duran Duran, but only because I love the synthesizer that they used.

Then we get to highschool.

I was into the 1960's rock and roll, folk, blues, soul, and folk rock, with particular interest in Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead (a band I still admire tremendously), the Beatles, CSNY, the Velvet Underground, Hendrix, Credence Clearwater Revival, Steeley Span, Arlo Guthrie, Woody Guthrie (OK, not 60's, but influenced the lot of them), Ramblin Jack Elliot, Leo Kottke, Pink Floyd, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, etc. I also started to listen to reggae, ska and rocksteady, particularly the old Studio One recordings. I still listen to that stuff, but not that often (with the exception of the Dead and Leo Kottke).

The Grateful Dead, via Workingman's Dead, got me into country music, first the Bakersfield sound (they played a Merl Haggard tune on one of their live albums, and I had to check this guy out), then all the rest. Later on Jerry Garcia's acoustic work got me into bluegrass, so I owe a huge musical debt to the Dead.

At the same time, I was starting to listen to jazz. Charlie Parker, Gerry Mulligan, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, Modern Jazz Quartet. Of all the music that I listened to in highschool, jazz is still my favorite (well, second to Baroque).

It was in highschool that I started becoming a record collector, and Thelonious Monk who was the first artist whose titles I bought every chance I could get. I loved his harmonies, his unique rhythmic sense, his incredible compositions. The first Monk record I had was Underground. It was also the first record that I wore out (it was on cassette, a horrid format that is mercifully all but dead).

The first jazz record that I bought, though, was Stan Getz with the Oscar Peterson Trio, a record that still is a favorite. The first major name that I saw live was the Modern Jazz Quartet, and the first major jazz performer I shook hands with was Dizzy Gillespie, at a free concert in McClatchy Park that I rode my bicycle to.

I had a cassette of Columbia jazz recordings that had Dave Brubeck's Take Five on it. I liked the whole thing, but what particularly got to me was the elegant horn work of Paul Desmond. The guy thought in phrases that were worthy of Bach! He would take an idea and spin it and respin it, all the while maintaining his relaxed tone. One time I found a rare Italian issue of Desmond with Mulligan, and was so excited that I did not even want to play it, for fear that I would wear it out and not be able to replace it (my friend's father gave me the good advice of making a cassette of it - for personal use, no piracy here, thank you - and listening to that, which I did and subsequently wore out. The record is still in good shape, though).

Other musicians that I started to get into in highschool were Mel Torme, Erroll Garner, Chet Baker, Benny Goodman (the Carnegie Hall recording of Sing Sing Sing was on that Columbia collection), Miles Davis, Lionel Hampton, Zoot Simms, Al Cohn, Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Sandy Bull, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, in short, just about all of the various strands of jazz.

In exploring jazz, I gradually lost interest in the pop music of the day. It just was boring, with dull, repetitive harmonies, banal lyrics, and inspipid rhythms (and it has only gotten worse since then - once in awhile I will listen to one of the pop radio stations and am amazed at how even the craftsmanship, which used to be good, has declined). I think the last pop band that I paid attention to was Portishead. I am told that I would like Radiohead, but I have yet to hear them. I admit that I am somewhat intrigued by Trip Hop and even some of the electronica out there, but am very picky.

Thanks to the great world music programming at KXJZ, I got interested in Middle Eastern music, African music, Bulgarian music, and a whole host of others. Thanks to my friend Ann, who played Taiko, I got interested in Japanese music as well (which later on probably led to my interest in other Asian music: Peking opera, gamelan, etc.).

I also got into Irish music around the same time: Planxty and the Pogues being two bands that I really liked (and still like).

I was just starting to get interested in Avant-garde music as a senior in highschool, but only knew a little bit about it. Shoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire comes to mind, as does Laurie Anderson. In college I studied the history of electronic music with Gordon Mumma, and really got interested in the avant-garde, Karlheinz Stockhausen in particular (if you only can hear one of his recordings, Hymnen is the one to listen to). I found that I really liked where the world of avant-garde classical music and jazz met and started to collect Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, and late Coltrane. I also discovered Kraftwerk, first through their magnificent Autobahn, then Radioactivity and the rest.

Getting excited about Stockhausen is probably what turned my into a music major. Naturally all that German electronic music led to an interest in 12-tone music, and I was particularly excited by Alban Berg, although Webern was a close second. Then came hyper-rationalism and Xenakis.

Now, don't think that all my early college listening was Teutonic 12-tone (as a music major, I obviously was listening to all of the Western Canon). I was also playing saxaphone in a ska band, and listening to both 2-Tone ska as well as the early recordings (not to mention a lot of Latin jazz at the time, as I found that I got better melodic ideas from that than I did simply trying to sound like Roland Alfonso). I was also listening to a lot of Tango, both traditional as well as the Nuevo Tango of Piazzolla and Dino Saluzzi (if Saluzzi's Mojotoro were not on CD, I think I would have worn it out).

It was also about this time that I started listening to a lot of Lou Harrison, which was perfect for what was to be a major turning point for me as a musician. My piano teacher had been railroaded by a couple of loudmouth no-talents who insisted that he was mean to them and a sexist to boot, completely unfair allegations. The teacher who replaced him was fresh out of grad school, was a heavy-handed pianist, and did not strike me as a great mind either. So I asked the harpsichord teacher if she would accept me as a student, which she did.

Here I was, in a full circle return to my baroque roots, and eager to tackle Scarlatti, who I had become increasingly fond of. I also was interested in playing the sonatas that Lou Harrison had written for the instrument (one of which he dedicated to my teacher). I was listening to a lot of early music, especially Monteverdi, Scarlatti, the ars nova composers, and Bach.

Around the same time I was studying percussion, playing Harrison's percussion music, so Harrison definitely needs to be on the soundtrack of my life. Naturally one cannot listen to Harrison without delving into Ives, so add him. I also was into George Crumb quite a bit.

In all of the switching of instruments I developed a loathing for the sound of the piano (except in jazz, where I continued to listen to it, and also a few works, like Berg's Piano Sonata, Debussy's piano music, and Chopin). However, late one night I was driving back from campus to the house where I lived with a string quartet (that is a whole other set of stories, including part of the reason that Brahms still sets my skin crawling), and some incredible music came on the radio. It sounded otherworldly, and it was played on the piano. I was so moved that I had to pull the car over and just listen. It turned out to be Franz Liszt, a composer I thought of as a bunch of bluff and bluster. But this was a late work, when he had become a tertiary in a religious order, and was paring his work down to the bare essentials.

So, I started to listen to the piano again, first these late Liszt pieces, then Morton Feldman's String Quartet with Piano, then eventually finding myself listening to Shubert and Beethoven, and all the other great 19th century composers.

My last couple of years in college I was listening to a lot of Tony Bennett, as well as Frank Sinatra, Louis Prima, Johnny Cash, and Hank Williams.

After college I continued to listen to jazz, avant-garde, world music, early music, but started to get more and more into country music and fado. Moving to the Bay Area put me in the same region as KCSM, a 24 hour jazz station, so I was able to keep up with the jazz world much better.

About four years ago I started listening to more and more Italian folk music, both traditional as well as modern. Daniele Sepe, Banda Ionica, I Tre Martelli, BEV, Allesandra Belloni, La Ciapa Rusa, and Riccardo Tesi have all had some pretty heavy turns in the rotation, as well as the Lomax field recordings and lots of Tralalleri (amateur all-male a capella choirs, traditionally made up of Genovese longshoremen). About the same time I started to collect recordings of bagpipes, particularly Bulgarian and Italian bagpipes (and one cannot be into bagpipes without getting into hurdy-gurdies, so drones have been important for the last four years).

I also got into Portuguese and Portuguese-influenced music more and more. Morna from Cape Verde, Samba from Brasil, Fado from Lisbon and Coimbra, noisy string ensembles from the Azores, even a recording of Portuguese creole cowboy yodelling from Malacca and a recording by Maria Ana Bobone of fado with harpsichord (and 12-tone pieces on the Portuguese guitar).

I ended up working at Arhoolie Records, where I was constantly immersed in the world of folk music, particularly blues, cajun, zydeco, norteno, and bluegrass.

I still listen to just about everything on the list above, although I have been finding myself in an early music kick again, particularly the pre-classical composers who were associated with Scarlatti in Spain. I have also been listening to Respighi a lot (I never paid much attention to him before, but have found him really quite good).

So that is that. If anyone wants any details on a particular composer or a recommendation on something or a catalog number, I will be happy to provide specifics on request. I am just too busy to go digging around for all of the music that I have been into.

Back from Under the Volcano

No, not Mexico (although with this weather, I wouldn't mind being down there right now), rather Redding, California. It was great to see Melanie's family and to spend time up there. I did not connect to the Internet once, and that was a nice vacation as well. Of course, now that we are back work is piled up, and it will take a couple of days to get my schedule in order, so blogging will be somewhat light. I have been working on some big projects, and that always gets me thinking, and that tends to bleed into the blog, so you might get a rant against excessive measures to protect Spotted Owls ("it's what's for dinner," reads a not-uncommon bumpersticker up North), you might get reflections on country music, you might get some long, boring reflections on watching salmon go up the fish ladder (you should see these monsters - four feet of muscular fish leaping clear out of the water to swim upstream against a raging current). Who knows?

Right now, however, it is late, and I have some hundred emails to sort through and to read, so you will have to settle for this note that basically says that I am still here and will be here more in the next few weeks.

I hope you all had a pleasant Thanksgiving!

Secular Relics

As I may have mentioned earlier, I have been reading Etienne Gilson's Painting and Reality (at least I think that is the name of the book, I left it in the car and am too lazy to get it or to google it). I just read the part about Authenticity, which is an interesting aspect of painting. I will not at this point get into all of Gilson's excellent points on the matter, but something struck me. He talks about what happens in our perceptions if a painting we admire is suddenly revealed to be a fake. Obviously the art is still the same. The pigment does not magically rearrange itself upon discovery that the painter was not Mr. Esteemed X but Mr. Obscure Y. However, we pay a lot of attention to such things, and if the painting in question turns out to have been a recent one, it fades from the general discussion of art.

Of course, as Gilson later points out, what the interest is in such a painting is art history rather than art itself. I understand this distinction, as I come from a school of thought that always sniffed at historical musicologists, seeing them as the bastard cousins of theoreticians who can actually tell us something about the music, rather than gossip about the composer. So it is in art history. Too often art historians are painfully ignorant of art qua art. They can place a painting in a historical context, which is valuable, but they often fail to tell us much about the painting in terms of the painting itself.

As I write this I can think of many exceptions, but I have encountered this type of art historian too many times.

However, this was not meant to be a rant against art history. First, I will be the first to recognize a valid and valuable place for art history in the world. Second, what got me thinking was the very notion of historicity of an object.

We Catholics recognize relics as something worthy of veneration. We find examples in Sacred Scripture of things like the shadow of St. Peter healing the sick (what class of relic is that anyway?). We have the garment of Christ healing, etc. The thing about it is that we have a well-developed theology around relics. We can speak with the authority of the Fathers and Holy Mother Church on how the veneration of relics benefits us.

In the secular realm, relics completely baffle me.

Take a ball point pen. An ordinary Bic. You know the one, the warhorse that keeps on writing after all of your Parkers and Cross pens have gone belly up. Ordinary pen, useful tool, worth a few cents. Now, take the same pen and put it in the hands of the President. Already it has increased in its secular relic value.

I can see it on eBay: this vintage Bic ballpoint pen was used by President Bush.

Now, take said pen and use it for a historic event:

This vintage Bic ballpoint pen was used by President Bush to sign the Really Really Big Deal Act.

I remember watching Clinton signing some piece of legislation, and he used multiple pens, signing and passing the pen on and taking another and signing another copy, and so on. Obviously these pens went to big backers of said legislation so that they could each own "the pen that President Clinton used to sign the Very Really Important Act of 1998."

What is it about these things that makes them valuable?

What about the first flag of the State of California (bonus points to anyone who can tell me its distinguishing feature)? I can kind of see this, as the object itself is the historic event. The bullet that killed Lincoln, perhaps, as it touched death directly, and that has to be somewhat sacred. But a standard item that Lincoln used as a means to some other end, for instance (back to pens again!?! C'mon Keilholtz, I know it's 1:30 am, but can't you do better?) the pen Lincoln used to scribble the funeral address at Gettysburg just does not strike me as something that exciting, although if I had it, I could probably make a fortune on eBay with it. The manuscript itself, certainly, as that was the unique thing, but the pen, or the spitoon Lincoln used before writing it, or....

The baseball that Bonds broke the homerun record with?

I never could understand that one. The thing that makes a baseball worth having is that it is uniquely suited for playing baseball. This particular ball should still be a good ball for batting around, playing catch with, and so forth. But it will not be used for what it is perfectly suited for. Instead it will sit on a shelf as a reminder of one memorable flight at Pac Bell Park.

Now, this sort of sports fetishism is bizarre, but harmless. What really galls me is that Stradivarius violins, prized for their sound, sometimes end up in glass cases, where they look like fine fiddles, but do not offer nearly the enjoyment to the eyes as they would to the ears (and that is not even getting into the fact that one of the worst things one can do to a musical instrument, preservation-wise, is to not play it).

But this is a Stradivarius, it must be kept from accidents! No risking it on the road! Here is can be seen by all!

So what? It is another lovely brown fiddle. Why not display some other equally lovely brown fiddle, one that does not have such a magnificent tone, and allow musicians to demonstrate what it is that makes this fiddle particularly valuable?

Of course my Cajun musician friends assure me that Stradivarius fiddles are not that uncommon. Why, of the few hundred (or thousand, I really don't know the count) that he made, 30,000 of them are in use in Louisiana! I would rather that Michael Doucet, who may be the best living fiddle player in folk music, have access to a real Stradivarius (I can't wait to hear the protests from classical snobs on that one) than have a Stradivarius sitting unused in a case.

Anyway, that is a brief window into what I think about on a cold night (how did I ever tolerate this weather when I lived here? Sacramento is cold in that damp, get under your skin way. Not cold enough for snow and winter wonderland sort of doings, in a Minnesota-style so-cold-it-makes-you-glad-to-be-able-to-feel-your-extremities-and-won't-a-cup-of-cocoa-consumed-indoors-by-the-fire-be-just-the-right-thing-particularly-the-indoors-part way, but cold enough to really make you wonder why anyone would live here. Oh well, at least it isn't cold and foggy in July). More thought on this later, when I have had time to think about it and not just watch random thoughts bounce around.

Speaking of later, as I mentioned earlier, blogging will be light for the next week. I will be in Redding and have no idea how much time I will have for this sort of thing. For those of you who celebrate this Thursday as Thanksgiving: have a great one. For those of you who see it as Penance: well, may every bite of dry, mealy white meat covered in brown glue and every conversation with that black sheep you only see on holidays draw you closer to God! We had our fun last week, now it is time to prepare for Advent.

Saturday fun and reflections

Today I had to make a run to North Beach to pick up something, so I suggested to Melanie that we all go and have duck rillette sandwiches at the Ferry Building. She agreed, so we loaded up the car and headed over to the city.

In the summertime we will often have beautiful, warm, sunny weather on this side of the bay only to find cold wind and fog over San Francisco. Today was the opposite. It was still gray and drippy in Oakland, but the sun broke through in the City, so after eating duck rillettes, making our rounds at the farmers' market, and taking care of business, we wanted to do something else, but weren't sure what.

Since we were driving on Broadway, and Amalia is almost as smitten by tunnels as by trains, I figured I could give her a good treat by driving through the Broadway tunnel. She loved it, but then one is on the other side of Russian Hill, so one might as well do something over there.

Not really knowing what to do I just kept driving West, making suggestions to Melanie. I thought about a hike at the beautifully restored Chrissy Fields wetlands, and that made Melanie think of Marina Green and the two kites that we keep in the car, and next thing you know Amalia was having her first kite flying experience.

Some days the light and sky over the marina are beyond description. Alcatraz stands not too far from shore and looks almost inviting, the Golden Gate Bridge seems to glow. The Marin headlands take on colors normally only found in paintings. A blimp kept buzzing us, birds kept flying by, dogs chased frisbees, and the mansions of the Marina still sported their mayoral allegiances (including the ones extolling candidates who were finished in last week's election).

To fly a kite in this atmosphere is one of the great pleasures in life, and I am not entirely sure why. Kite flying at the level we do it is not a great challenge. We are not performing aerobatics or exhibiting monumental sheets of nylon, rather we have two good but simple kites that we were simply keeping aloft. All three of us were completely mesmerized by the whole thing, though.

There is something beyond fun in flying kites, and I am not sure I can put it in words, just as I have been having great difficulty putting into words what I expect a painting to do recently.

After we flew kites we drove to Fort Point, the Civil War era fort that guarded the Golden Gate, and now sits, perfectly preserved, under the famous span. Then through the Presidio, and it hit me as I took a glance at Chrissy Fields from the vantage of the Presidio and saw not a landscape but a painting.

Well, it did hit me then, but it took me a few hours to synthesize it, and it will take me many hours to articulate it. When I do, you will read it here first, but I think I may have found a breakthrough in my painting rut, which is my first concern. Articulating theory of art is much lower on my list than making art.

Of course this one view did not really open everything up at once. I have been working on the problems for quite some time, having read and reread theory, studied paintings with a vigor that I have not put to use for quite some time, and so on. Just this week I stumbled on a used copy of the second printing of Etienne Gilson's Painting and Reality, which has really helped me focus some of my thoughts, so this little epiphany did not come from a vacuum.

It makes me think about prayer and contemplation, as well as learning music. I don't know how it is for the rest of you, but I learn things in uneven steps and tend to get discouraged with plateaus. Spiritually it is the same. Obviously it would be semi-Pelagian to claim that we earn spiritual wisdom through our prayer disciplines, but it seems that God's grace often works in the same rhythm as the one that governs how I learn a piece of music.

There were times, particularly on tricky French baroque pieces that I almost gave up, threw in the serviette and said, "this is just too difficult. I am not ready" only to find that in the next week the difficult passage was there at my fingertips and was not only quite easy, but rather natural as well.

It all makes me wonder whether the intellect imitates the way Grace operates, or does God bestow Grace on us in a way suited for us to get it and to cooperate?

Anyway, it is a quarter to two in the morning, and I only meant to post a little thing about the joys of flying kites, with maybe a brief mention of how the Ferry Plaza is quickly becoming one of the world's great foodie meccas (it really is. If you want a foodie vacation, make a reservation at the French Laundry in Yountville, Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Oliveto's in Oakland, then spend a Saturday at the Ferry Building. I mention the French Laundry first, as it is notoriously difficult to get a reservation there, so once you do, schedule the rest of the trip around that). Instead I got off on something else entirely and am not really doing it justice.

The "Oh Crap" button

As soon as I hit the "send" button when I submit a story I get this immediate feeling in my gut that I have just done something horrible, that there is a section in the middle that is totally incomprehensible, nothing more than the deranged ramblings of a maniac. I first dread the phone calls from the editor: "uh, Erik, what is this relentless gibberish in the twelfth through fifteenth grafs all about?"

When the phone remains silent, I almost go into a complete panic: the dread silent treatment. This one was so bad that they are not even going to bother to call for clarification. In fact when I run into my editor downtown, she is going to avert her eyes, pretending to have animated conversations with whoever seems to be near.

What usually happens is a call for a minor clarification, and the incomprehensible gibberish seems to not be there when it appears in the newspaper, although I am not always convinced that it is because they edited it all out in charity. But when I look at the original and compare it, usually it is pretty free of totally incomprehensible gibberish, but there is always that brief panic when I hit "send."

Anyway, send has been sund and all is well. St. Gerome, pray for me, a miserable sender? Sounds fair. Stop me now, before I send again?

Weekend is here! Weekend is here! Any more writing I do in the next two days is for you, dear readers of the blog, and will be strictly for fun and not profit, so until then, go out and do something with your Saturday!

Plunk. Plunk. Plunk.

Most of California is a Mediterranean climate, that is, semi-arid. It stops raining sometime around April and starts in October, more or less. We depend on stored water for the dry season (as well as for more arid regions that have been settled or farmed). We need rain. Without rain we have terrible fires and water shortages.

So, I realize that I am being a complete ingrate when I whine about the rain, especially since we have not really had that much this week, but it is driving me a bit buggy. We had great weather, perfect for long strolls and for chasing around Amalia in the park, just a couple of days ago, and I have to admit that I miss it.

Staying inside should inspire me to get some projects done, and it does, but I still feel somehow cheated every day that it is not 80 degrees and sunny with 15 hours of daylight. But so it is with seasonality, and we have other consolations (persimmons, pomegranites, pumpkins).

Anyway, not much more here today, as I have another concert to review tonight (and it comes with a brutal overnight first thing in the morning deadline), so this pathetic little whining will have to do. I am sorry. Hopefully I can post some more interesting reading matter over the weekend.

Making Progress

Two concerts down, and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel (until a new batch of assignments comes crashing down on me, which I hope and pray is the case). Unfortunately, on top of it all, Melanie and Amalia both came down with the flu, so in addition to writing, cleaning house for the inlaws' visit, and so forth, I have been the family nurse. Since I have the bedside manner of Dr. Frankenstein I hope I have done right by them.

"Vat? I did not get zis alleged flu, it must be in your Kopf, no? Vat you need is fortitude, ja? No more bellyaching! Ve must march! Onvard! No complaining! Links! Rechts! Eins! Zwei! Eins! Zwei!"

They don't put up with it, though. I suppose they have a point that one does not generally fake a fever like that. I still cannot figure out why it has passed over me, when I have been burning the candle at both ends, staying up to 2 each night, and waking up at 7. I am not designed to operate on 5 hours of sleep, so a crash is probably inevitable. Uggggh.

Anyway, I saw Paul Simon and that funny looking blond fellow with the frizzy and balding head who acts like he is on dope. Good show, but the Everly Brothers, who were on as guests for three songs, sang circles around Simon and Garfunkle. Watching Paul Simon do this strange little rock and roller strut with his acoustic guitar, completely overpowered by the orc-looking fellow on electric was amusing. At all of 5' not many" poor bald Simon looks more like the fellow who sweeps the service station in the mornings (and is not to be trusted with complex tasks like pumping gas), out for an evening at the local tavern, doing his little strut to the jukebox after a couple of beers too many. He has a silly serious look while he is pounding his leg while strumming an acoustic. Giggle.

Great song writer, though, and he still can sing quite well.

Tonight was Andrea Bocelli, who deserves a full entry in this blog. I went expecting to be pleasantly amused, and came away really admiring him. The problem that most classical and opera folks have is that they try to see him as a classical singer, and he isn't. His tradition is a pop music tradition. Mario Lanza is much more the model than Domingo.

Anyway, I will post a review when I get it done (it is due Monday at 8am), or when it goes to press (I really do not like to scoop the paper on my blog), but the thing that struck me was how well he sang the operatic material. I have always found his voice on recordings to be a little thin, often strained, and overemotive, but in concert he was in full control of his voice, which was rich and full, and perfectly suited to the material on the program. Basically, I would recommend seeing him if he comes to an area near you.

He was with Maria Ana Martinez, who is quite a good soprano, so that was definitely a plus. I detest ex-Mrs. Lloyd Weber's voice, and was very glad that she is not touring with him.

So, that is where I have been these last couple of days. I have more writing to do, more deadlines, etc., but I will really try to keep all of you, my loyal readers, entertained and enlightened!

Exhausted

I am terribly sorry for the lapse in posts. I have been working under deadline as well as researching for the Dante presentation. In re-reading long forgotten material about the Italian Ars Nova, I began to question some assumptions I had been making about music history in general, so all of my spare time has been used digging around music texts.

Part of the difficulty is that what we know about the way music sounded is an educated (more or less) guess, always in flux. What I could write about with confidence this year could look utterly silly as soon as a new source is found, but then could look good again, if something casts yet another light on the matter. Generally it is a matter of fine-tuning our knowledge, not a matter of drastic reversals.

One of the big problems, of course, is rhythm. For an modern example of this, look at the difficulties encountered in notation "swing" rhythm. Without phonorecordings of jazz, it would be really interesting to see what future scholar-musicians come up with as the sound of jazz (and I am not even getting into the difficulties of reconstructing improvised solos and comping figures based solely on written sources). Of course the recordings are going to be the source for this stuff, so unless the various media are forgotten, they will have something quite accurate to go by.

At least 14th century musicians were debating the questions of rhythm quite fiercely. The more debate there is over a stylistic point, the more precise writing there is, since musical battles (at least at the theorists' level) are battles of the significance of minutiae.

The big point of contention between the Ars Antiqua defenders and the Ars Nova defenders was over the relaxation of the rhythmic modes (corresponding to the types of poetic meter), and the increased use of duple meters. Fairly heavy dissonance was accepted by both sides (it just was not seen as that important an issue).

In contemporary times we debate dissonance, although really what most people have a problem with (as Michael Tilson Thomas points out often) is density, rather than dissonance. There is a theory that I have always accepted, since it came from James Tenney, a composer and theorist I have long admired, that we have, as a people, an ever-increasing amount of dissonance that we are willing to accept, with major changes happening at certain points (Monteverdi, Satie, Schoenberg, etc.). It is a tidy theory that perfectly conforms to the notion of progress in music, but when you look at 13th and 14th century music, it does not work.

The other day I was listening to a Machaut motet and it really struck me as how dissonant it was, even on strong beats (not all voices had to be in consonance, just a couple). The rhythm was complex, but did not strike me as that out of order.

So, forgive my long-windedness on this, but I have just a little time before I have folks coming over for paella, and wanted to post something to let you know that I am still here, and that you can expect more musings on this topic.

Happy Columbus Day!

Three cheers for the heroic Italian navigator who brought the Holy Catholic Faith to the New World! History records often dirty business, and so the dealings between Europeans and Indians are often clouded by such misfortunes, but in the long run I have to say that this one aspect of Christopher Columbus' doings is the greatest thing that ever happened to the people of the New World. Even a cursory reading of the grotesque human sacrifices, the cannibalism, the superstition, the animism, the cultures of people entirely subjected to the cruelties of nature (which is, of course, often trumpteted as noble), and the barbarity of pre-Columbian Americas will show the Spanish conquista as one of the greatest triumphs of all humanity ever known.

I was hoping to celebrate by being at a great bullfight, but that will have to wait. Instead I will be in North Beach for mass, then the festivities (complete with the stunningly lovely Blue Angels roaring overhead).

Interview Questions for Steven Riddle

I ended up not going to San Diego this weekend due to a scheduling foul-up. Instead I have been enjoying the lovely autumn weather, the corn harvest at the Ardenwood Historic Farm (picked lots of corn today), and finally got around to writing the promised questions for Steven. I have been in a particularly poetic mood these last few days, so:

1. Steven, you are obviously keenly interested in and deeply knowledgeable of poetry. What do you expect from a poem?

2. Who is the most striking example of a Catholic poet that you can think of, off the top of your head? I mean Catholic in terms of spirit of the poetry, not in terms of the actual confessional status of the poet (for instance, I consider Rembrandt one of the great Catholic painters, in spite of the fact that he was a member of the Reformed Protestant Church). Please explain.

3. In your field (modern science in general, and museum crowds in particular) you must be a rara avis as a faithful and devout Catholic. What are the conflicts that come up and how do you deal with them?

4. If you could be any kind of tree… No, just kidding. The real question: has the writing of Teilhard de Chardin influenced you much? I do not mean this as a gotcha question. We all know that he had some iffy ideas, but he was deadly serious in his attempts to reconcile anthropology and theology. How have you interacted with his better ideas (that is, if you have given him some serious study)?

5. What direction do you see poetry going in? Any particular poets that do it for you these days?

Great Day in the City!

Today Amalia and I spent the day in San Francisco, interviewing Michael Smuin and watching the Smuin Ballet rehearse. Amalia was particularly well-behaved, and watched the dancers (for 3 hours!) attentively, with only a couple of breaks to snack, have diapers changed, or to play in the empty studio that Michael Smuin graciously let her run around in (he even provided a couple of those gigantic balls that dancers use in their stretching).

The way there involved two choo-choo's, which, for Amalia, was probably the highlight of the day, even though she really did seem to enjoy the dancing. Walking back (Amalia fell asleep around Civic Center, so I kept walking, all the way to the Embaracadero) was interesting, as I got to pass many of the places I used to pass every day when my office was in the City.

It is interesting what changes, and what does not change, at who is still around (you get to know the regular Market Street folks, from the businessmen who walk the same route, like clockwork to the homeless who shift from one side of the street to the next, depending on the light and the traffic). One of the people who I half expected not to see was there, one of my predecessors as Chairman of the Student Senate in college, the one I tried to model my reign as exactly opposite as possible. This fellow runs a rather upscale magazine shop on Market Street, something he has done for several years. He does a good job, and I am sure that they have a whole bunch of procedures for everything. If Adam (if I told you his last name was Smith, you wouldn't believe me, but it really was (and is, I presume)) was about anything, it was procedure. I, on the other hand, have always believed in the politics of personality. Adam would try to carefully negotiate consensus. I would try to do as much by fiat and out of the realm of voting as possible.

We always got along, and I am happy to see his shop thriving and continuing to carry such a good selection (one of the crucial elements to good civic life is good magazine shops in the downtown areas, along with bars and caffes I would rate this as one of the highest priorities).

Many of the other businesses I knew, at least by sight, are gone, however, and I think there are two more Starbucks on Market Street that I did not know about. The biggest shock was the fact that the Chevron building is no longer the Chevron building. I knew it was the case, but seeing it on foot (always more of an impact than passing in a taxicab or car or bus), really struck me.

Market Street seemed a little grubbier than usual. The skies were gray, and that always makes it seem sad, and it goes in cycles. Some days Market Street is full of life and excitement. Other days it seems more full of broken men, angrily muttering to themselves, to their fathers, to the world in general. Today seemed to be full of lost folks, clearly on ebb of their fortunes, but not energetic enough to even panhandle. It could be the weather, it could just be a cyclical thing, as it always has been, or it could be a new trend. I have been away from Market Street for awhile. As we do our weekly museum visits I am sure we will see more of Market Street.

Anyway, the Smuin Ballet looked fantastic in this, their tenth year. I was impressed by Smuin's views on music and dance and equally impressed by his company. He has assembled some excellent dancers. The current program (that opens Friday), is Les Noces (Stravinsky), Short Pieces by Gershwin, a short piece by one of his dancers, and Tango Palace, a fantastic take on tango, with an Amalia Rodrigues fado and an Edith Piaf song added in. Then they will be doing their annual Christmas Ballet, which will feature a section of Mozart's c minor mass. Yet another reason to make a trip to the Bay Area!

Shortly I will be back in the City for the Transitus of St. Francis, which will be observed at the National Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi, followed by an event at Campion College, followed by a fiftieth birthday celebration of one of the Campion faculty members, then tomorrow we will be off to Gilroy and Santa Cruz, so blogging might be light over the weekend (unless I have too much espresso after the birthday celebration, so watch out for those late night postings).

Have a blessed feast of St. Francis. If you need something to meditate on may I suggest the Canticle of Creation and Thomas of Celano's second biography of St. Francis?

Interview questions by Alicia

Alicia has asked the following questions as part of the St. Blog's interview:

1) Your blog refers to food, art, music, bullfighting, and politics. How do these connect to Catholic Theology?

As I believe you or Kathy the Carmelite pointed out, our Catholic Faith is an incarnational one. "And the Word became Flesh." Of course the Incarnation was the key to understanding what God has already revealed, from Genesis on: "He looked over His creation and called it good." Our Roman calendar is organized in terms of feasts and fasts. We commemorate our great saints and even martyrs by celebratory feasting. Our liturgy is centered around the great sacrament of the Eucharist, which has got to be one of the most sensual, amazing realities of our faith, second only to the Creation ex nihil of the universe itself.

However, we must temper our love of Creation, expressed in the love of food, with the virtues of prudence and charity. We must avoid gluttony, and I see the sin of gluttony in how the average American eats: excessive processed food eaten on the go, or alone, outside of the context of the family meal or parish feast. Even the reliance on processed food is a form of gluttony: the stuff only exists so that the maximum profit may be squeezed out of the market. Quality suffers, the intricate relationship between man and fellow man, between man and God's creation are all ruined by the likes of modified food starch, hot house tomatoes, soil sterilization and the like. Factory farming is dependent upon poor stewardship, appalingly cheap labor, and an emphasis on quantity over quality.

Good food, centered around the family meal, along with a place at the table for needy friend and foe alike, made with love and care and constantly in mind of the splendor of God's creation, is the cure for the fast food culture. One of my favorite Italian traditions is the feast of St. Joseph. Here we get to suspend our Lenten fast, to prepare a sumptuous banquet in honor of the husband of the Blessed Mother of God, the step-father of Christ himself. We make fruit fritters, and fill a home altar with food, which is blessed by a priest. After our friends and family have eaten, we take the food on the altar and give it to the poor. What a tradition!

Along with good food, we must have art. Art is one of the few things, along with prayer (and combined in liturgy), that "stops time" for us. It draws us into a world of contemplation of beauty, initiates an internal dialog that allows us to experience beauty both intellectually and emotionally. When we really look at a good painting, whether it is realistic, impressionalistic, expressionistic, or abstract, we are able to get a glimpse of the world that was not previously known to us.

I like art of just about every era and place. Whether in the geometric tilework of the near East or the subtle fresco work of Piero della Francesca, or the calm abstraction of a Richard Diebenkorn, or the heated emotion of a German Expressionist, we can, if we are properly disposed and can look deeply, see the work of man in the image of God. Even in the work of a notorious sinner like Picasso is the basic goodness of humanity evident.

Of all the arts, my favorite is painting, followed by music. In certain arts, like opera or dance, the visual is combined with the musical (and often the narrative) to create an experience that really takes us out of our daily worries. Of all of these synthetic arts, the bullfight is one of the most glorious. To Northerners who do not understand the art, bullfighting is a cruel sport. It is no more of a sport than ballet. One cannot bet on bullfighting. The outcome is as much a constant as the outcome of Hamlet.

As to the cruelty, the bull is an animal with little ability to contemplate. It enters the ring in full fury, and receives his wounds in hot blood. I have received wounds in hot blood, and the pain is minimal. When enough time has elapsed for the bull to really feel the pain, it is dead. The bull is in the ring for about twenty minutes, and dies at the end.

Meanwhile the bull, in concert with a talented torero, provides the viewer with an art that is breathtaking. We see clearly the interaction of the wild with the civilized, with the human and the beast, the rural with the urban. In those moments of supreme art (a series of linked naturales, with the bull slowly spinning around the matador, slowing and starting at the matador's command), there is complete union between the two. Nowhere else does an animal get a chance to participate as gloriously in the unique human undertaking of art as the bull does in the bullfight.

If we view the Eucharist as the moment when the human and the divine mingle, we can see the bullfight as the next rung down on the ladder, where the human and the natural mingle as they do nowhere else. In this act, we can gain an amazing understanding of our Divinely ordained place in the universe, and time stops while we are participating as spectators.

Politics, alas, is the least of human affairs. I am more and more convinced that to solve the problems of our society, we must bring about cultural change, rather than engage in the arena of politics. However, we are commanded to love our neighbor, and to do this we must take keen interest in the affairs of the polis. Because we are of a fallen nature, this means coming up with solutions to the effects of sin. So we have the dreary art of politics.

Thankfully, we are not left alone in these matters. We have, first and foremost the Gospels. Then we have the Sacred Tradition, especially as manifested in the great social encyclicals. I am convinced that we need a Syndicalist state, with liberal borrowings from Franco, as well as careful readings of the Rule of St. Benedict, the Rule of St. Francis, the encyclicals, the Dominican constitutions, the Distributists (although they should be seen as outlining a goal more than a practical economic theory to obtaining that goal), as well as the writings of learned men outside the Faith, classical and modern.

I find myself more admiring of Francisco Franco than ever, but realize that he did not create a perfect system, just as I realize that the Cheese Board Collective in Berkeley is a step in the right direction, even though its members may have some goofy ideas as well. I have been called a right-wing hippy, and perhaps I am, but I will always favor the small and the local over the megachains.

While believing strongly in subsidiarity, I am extremely wary of democracy, especially as it is practiced nowadays in the West.

2) I understand that you are a graduate of the University of California's Santa Cruz campus. This campus is not exactly known as a bastion of conservative thought. How did your values system and the university work together during your years there?

I started out as an athiest libertarian and ended up as a Catholic Franquisto. I was somehow elected as chairman of the student senate, and was, I think, the only chairman to have a portrait of Franco and a portrait of the Pope over my desk. I found the exchange of ideas, the atmosphere of debate, the constant challenging of each other to be wonderful. There was the aspect of political correctness, no stronger nor weeker at UCSC than any other modern University, but I found that it primarily hindered the coward. One of the reasons I stopped writing for the conservative newspaper was that I found that every case of someone "persecuted" for thought crimes was basically a jerk and a whiner. Sure, people challenged my ideas, and I grew from that, but I challenged theirs as well. I was always able to find a circle of intelligent, thoughtful people to drink coffee with and debate until the wee hours. These folks were from all parts of the political spectrum.

I have found that so-called conservative colleges are as much into group-think and self-validation as any Womens' Studies department. I decided that I would not consider a school that offered a business major. I do not think that the UCSC general ed requirements guarantee an education. One had to find one's own way, but if one wanted a good education, one could find it.

3) You seem to be a talented cook as well as musician. Do you see a connection between the culinary and musical arts?

All of the arts basically use the mechanics peculiar to themselves to strive for the same basic ideals of diversity in unity. Cooking and music share timing, texture, counterpoint, balance, craftsmanship and the need to reach the audience through the senses. When art neglects these crucial goals, it ends up as that horrible hybrid known as conceptual art, which is either bad literature dressed as art, or bad art under the cloak of literature.

4) What prompted you to become a virtuoso in the kitchen?

The Bucchione family has taken food seriously for generations. Being stubborn and competitive made me want to do things just a little bit better than the rest. Sharp, quick slaps upside the head from my 4'11" nonna, kept me true to the great traditions of Tuscan cooking. Driving through the South made me keenly appreciative of regional distinctions and made me want to find a genuinely Californian voice in the kitchen. Then I read Paul Bertolli, Alice Waters, MFK Fisher, and the rest.

When I started to take my Catholic Faith seriously, the elements of food outlined in my answer to the fist question motivated me even further.

5) Who would you personally like to see as the next Pope?

An Italian or at least a Latin. It is good to have some transalpine blood in the Vatican once in awhile, but I hope it is not a general trend. I do not worry about specifics, as that is the job of the Holy Spirit. In some ways I think it would be great to have a Rembert Weakland or Roger Mahoney as Pope, because what a wonderful example of the charism of the office of Peter it would be to see one of these men solemnly embrace orthodoxy, as they would be guaranteed by Christ Himself to do.

Barring all that, I think the Panzer Cardinal Ratzinger would be good, as would Arinze.

Super busy...

Today is my last day at Arhoolie, so between having to explain my procedures to the crew, and being kidnapped at lunch and then tonight I am hosting a dinner party for Amália's godfather's birthday, I probably will not be blogging much until the weekend. Then we will be in Redding for a few days, so I am not sure I will get much done there, but I will post when I get brief chances, or just need a little break (like now).

Office artifacts

I don't know how it is in other offices, but here at Arhoolie, each of my predecessors has left behind a section of files of supposedly useful stuff that never gets touched by subsequent folks. As I am tidying up my office, and notating things so that the crew here can do what needs to be done when I am gone next week, I find myself chuckling over stuff that I am discovering: stuff that should have been tossed out years before I even got here, but no one knew if the hidden secret to selling records was to be found there, so it was duly saved in a box. As much as I like to think that I am leaving something that can easily be taken over, I am realistic. What seems perfectly logical to me may make not a shred of sense to the rest of the world, and I can explain it until I am blue in the face, and they still will not see. Undoubtedly some of the artifacts of the Keilholtz years will be here as long as Arhoolie is around, which should be for a very long time. I suppose one could construct a case study in the eccentrics known as record publicists just looking at the remnants of our various tenures here.

It all makes me wonder what the weight of utterly useless paper is in the average office. How much stuff gets kept for mysterious reasons? If we ever have paperless offices, what will they have done with it all? I think we would clog the recycling centers and the landfills as well if it were all dumped on them at once.

I am doing what I can to eliminate the useless detritus of three publicity directors, but I am probably being overly-cautious as well. I imagine in a few years, someone around here will wonder, "why do we still have this? Hmmm. I don't have time to go through it, so I will just keep it here." Even in the computer database I am reluctant to actually delete people. "But what if they show up at another publication in a few years? We should have a history!"

OK, Keilholtz, but explain why you have a code for dead people? Will they be writing reviews after the Resurrection? Well, no, but if a journalist is doing a story on a writer and asks us for stuff, it is the easiest way to find information. And how many times has that happened? Just leave me alone. I like my system.

Today is the first day of my last week at Arhoolie Records. As we release fewer titles each year, with a smaller amount being completely new recordings, it just does not make sense to have a full-time publicity person (we can push great records like this all we want and they still will sell only so much, and the cost per sale does not come down with more and more dollars thrown at it). It has been a great three years here, and I have met some incredibly interesting folks.

With the general slump in the record business, I am not too hopeful of finding a similar position in the near future (add to my nearly complete and total unwillingness to relocate anywhere between the Berkeley Hills and Viareggio and the fact that I will not work for a record label that does music I am uninterested in, and the chances get slimmer indeed). I am probably only going to call a few labels I know people at just on the lark that they are not spinning into recessionistic lay-offs, but I am not really going to be digging too deep for full-time record label work just yet (in a year, when the dust settles and we figure out how to make this Internet thingie work for us, then I will probably look for something again). I am going to be doing more and more writing for the newspapers and will be taking on some other projects involving writing for magazines as well as doing some record label projects (and the occassional Arhoolie project as things come up). I actually have enough work lined up for the upcoming month that I will have to carefully manage my time to get it all done, so I am not really worried about the whole thing.

One big thing that will change is that I will probably drop my nome de plume for writing record reviews. I don't know, but perhaps old Pete will get to retire for a piece. I might revive him if the situation changes (or if I am worried about brand dilution in publishing writing in different fields, as I would not want people to read food writing and think, "oh, isn't he the music critic?"). We will see, but I may send my Anglicized Puerto Rican buddy off on a long vacation. Who knows, maybe people will clamor for old Pete (I can imagine a letter, "what happened to Pete F.? This Keilholtz guy is an idiot!").

Another change is that I will not be blogging at lunchtime. I might blog at nap time, but my Arhooligan buddies will tolerate me munching on a sandwich in my office, but Amália will tolerate no such anti-social balderdash. Lunch must be spent talking about each piece of food to be eaten: "hmmmmm! Cannalope! Amália cannalope! Here, Babbo: Cannalope! MMMMMMMM!" No sitting at the computer stuffing whole sandwiches in my gob while demonstrating my typing prowess (as in, "that's not writing, it's typing").

Yes, starting next week, I will be a stay-at-home dad (well, our little apartment is cramped and dark, so we will probably be out and about, exploring the world quite a bit), working my freelance writing gigs in the evenings and at nap times. Otherwise, Amália begins her art history education, with a museum a week being the scheduled program (memberships are grand!), as well as lots of time hiking, riding choo choos and splashing around at the beach or Lake Temescal. We are going to shoot for daily mass, but I will start more moderately, with two being the first week's goal, then upping it to three after a few weeks, then four and so on.

We will probably make a point of pestering Jared, because he is a fun guy, because we periodically visit each other's studios to critique paintings, and because, well, Jared lives half a block from Lakeside Park, with a great playground, a giant bird sanctuary, botanical gardens, and Children's Fairland. In a month, Jared will probably start hiding and refusing to answer his door, but we will see. We will probably spend a good deal of time visiting Amália's godfather/Latin tutor on the days or afternoons he is not teaching. We will probably drag Mamma from her office once or twice a week to go down to Jack London Square to eat our lunches and watch Choo choos. I will probably teach Amália how to swim in the next month, while we still have warm weather.

I am a little nervous, as I have never had to come up with such a busy schedule of fun, learning, playing, not-overtiring, not-overstimulating before (and still carve out due time for cooking, artwork, and writing). Usually Melanie is around, and it becomes a tag team effort: you take Amália to the library while I prep our dinner, and I will give her her bath while you put away the dishes.

If someone suggested that this is what I would be doing a year ago, I would have sniffed, "oh no, I read Lileks, but I have no plans of following his footsteps." It is all a bit scary, and a lot exciting, and should really be a great adventure.

Two important commemorations today!

Once again, thanks to Gerard Serafin, I have found a couple of important commemorations today:

September 17, 1179: Hildegard of Bingen, a German abbess, mystic, author, musician and preacher who received visions of God from the age of 5, dies at age 82.

September 17, 1776: 247 Spanish colonists consecrate their California mission of San Francisco, today a city of 725,000.

As my regular readers know, I am a huge fan of "avant garde" music, particularly Stockhausen, Varese, Webern, Xennakis, and Berio, but also of the first wave of avantgardisti, the ars nova practitioners, led by their ringleader and manifesto writer Bishop Philippe de Vitry. Now, this 14th Century avant garde was fantastic, but not without precedent. There was an earlier composer (often mistakenly called the first composer) who composed beautiful otherwordly music who has only recently (past 15 or 20 years) received her due. If you ever have a chance to hear Hildegard von Bingen's music performed live, do so.

The same year that the Freemasons were busy waging war against Anglicans in Massachussetts, out here in California the Franciscans were building a society based on the Gospel. We can argue until we are blue in the face how successful the mission system was (I personally admire it greatly. It was not as perfect as it should have been, but all of those Indians who received the Grace of Baptism are much better off than they were before), but the seeds of the Catholic identity of California were planted by Bl. Junipero Serra and his confrères.

Even as wave after wave of midwestern Protestants invaded southern California, the mission makes its imprint. As Richard Rodriguez points out, a California road atlas reads like a litany:

Sta. Barbara, ora pro nobis!
San Luis Obispo, ora pro nobis!
San Miguel Arcangelo, ora pro nobis!

And where else do you get Calvinist churches named after Popes but in California (San Clemente Presbyterian Church)?

Sometimes we might think we are losing the battle to materialists, neo-pagans, funnymentalists, etc., but we must never give up hope when we have such powerful patrons!

In many ways, when I think of the schizophrenic nature of California, which, as Jeff Culbreath points out, is like France (we have the best and the worst), I see the epitome in that in the Greatest City on North America: The City of St. Francis of Assisi. For all of its faults, geologic and otherwise, San Francisco is still a sparkling jewel on the Pacific. Nowhere else in the United States, besides perhaps Portland, OR, is the concept of a city as well understood. I get frustrated with her sometimes, even tempted to move to Gustine or Fiddletown, but a two hour walk through just about any of her neighborhoods changes that!

San Francisco suffers from smugness and a strange inferiority complex. I see both of those as the faults of not living true enough to her Catholic commission.

Semantics and Semiotics, part II

I am afraid that I am muddying the water more by my definitions than I am clarifying. I hate when that happens. Of course these are complex disciplines, and they are even further confused because they overlap. For instance, I don't think you can really jump into semiotics without some basic understanding of poetics or cultural anthropology (ethnography).

Another thing that makes it difficult is that the boundaries are still being wrestled over. I am tempted to say that semiotics is semantics applied to all of human communication (and by some of us Catholic nuts to the communication between God and humans, but this gets into really long-winded conversations that I do not have time for right now - please bring it up later). However, a more learned semiotician might object to this, saying that semantics is a particular discipline and that, while semiotics comes out of semantics, has grown and developed as to really be seen as something completely apart. He would probably be right, but I will stand with my simple distinction. I am a bit of a simpleton, and it works better for my gin-addled brain.

So here are a couple of examples of how semiotics can work:

A semiotician and a semanticist are walking down the road. They see a car cut another car off. One of the cars is driven by a 30-ish fellow with a "Kiss me, I'm Italian" sticker, as well as olive skin, dark hair, etc. The other is driven by another 30-ish fellow, but with a Harris tweed driving cap, a missing front tooth. and a shamrock pin. They pull over and the Italian starts yelling loudly and gesticulating madly. The Irish fellow gets out and quietly seethes, getting redder and redder, his fists clenching up. The Italian makes a gesture and the Irishman says something and the next thing you know they are coming to blows. A policeman walks up, calms everyone down and begins making his report.

The two academics offer their services as witnesses. The policeman says, "fine, go ahead." The semantics fellow talks about the words exchanged, looking at nuances of meaning and goes into some detail about the etymologies, and how they related to Gaelic Irish and Latin and Italian, and the possible shades of meaning that can be construed by the parties. The semiotician says, "well, yes, that is all true, but if we look at the gestures, even the choices of clothing, the care given to the cars, we can find evidence contraindicating the purely verbal exchange. For instance, when the Italian fellow said "figlio d'un puttana," he had his third and fourth fingers pointing to his own heart, a gesture we find in the third altarpiece of the Church of San Lorenzo in the village of Pienza, painted by an anonymous master of the 16th Century. Now, we know that the visual language of that time and that place were heavily influenced by late Byzantine visual language, so we look for a similar gesture in Ravenna, where we find one in the mosaics outside the restroom of the Orthodox Baptistry. Sure enough, the gesture belongs to Judas, so we have to take the later Tuscan gesture to have at least some degree of self-condemnation. When our Italian here was doing this as he said, "figlio d'un puttana" he was pointing the blame at himself. That the Irishman said, "sod it you git" was his own blatant misinterpretation of the cultural norm. I would say that the Irishman completele provoked the fisticuffs."

At this the semantician said, "well, that may be, and for the Irishman to have used such an Anglo Saxon term and in that context would imply that he was suggesting that the Italian perform immoral acts with his mother, prostitute that she may be..."

At this neither the Irishman, the Italian, nor the cop could take much more, and they got together and said, "this is crazy! Neither of them knows of this 16th Century altarpiece or any of this. How can you claim that they are some encyclopaedias?"

"Ah," said the semiotician, "but we see this gesture used in every single Fellini movie, every episode of Mike Buongiorno's show, even in political discourse. He would not have to know the exact origin, I just used that to use a precise example to clarify what it meant. He absorbed the meaning of the gesture every day in his upbringing."

So the cop agreed, and fined the Irishman for starting the fight.

Now it so happened that there was another semiotician lurking nearby, one who had made a thorough study of early Irish manuscripts. He stepped in and said, "now, this is entirely unfair. As you transalpines might not know, this gesture is found all over the Book of Kells to signify hostile intent. Padraig O'Fircthmornngnihm, an eighth century priest, brought over a copy of the Ravenna mosaic, but was confused as to who was making the gesture, and interpreted it as an early form of flipping the bird. You will find twelve references to it in Finnegan's Wake, and Malachy McCourt used it on the Tonight Show twenty years ago."

The cop was thoroughly confused. "But I thought you guys were supposed to bring out the hidden meanings of things! You are just making it all more complex.

"No, we aren't," said the first semiotician. "You are understanding more and more about the subtle layers of discourse. The problem is that it is a complex situation. Now, you could take all this complexity and become paralyzed, but that is to get so wrapped up in minutiae that you forget that a fight broke out and an immediate solution is called for (this is basically what certain French cultural theorists do on purpose - show the extreme cases of difficulty and claim that those cases prove the impossibility of any coherence anywhere, but, in spite of looking cool in berets and smoking Galoises and being hip, they are completely wrong). That is why when you are off duty you should pick up "Interpretation and Overinterpretation" by Umberto Eco. We have pointed out possible layers of meaning, but you have to look at the roles of the authors of these gestures as well. We call that the intentio auctoris, and that is what your job is to find out. Were these words and gestures 'fighting words' or not?"

The cop thinks for a moment and says, "but surely you are not saying that these men are just slaves to the flow of language."

"No, not at all!" says the semiotician. "We are all Catholics here. We believe in free will. It is just that in using language we are wielding a powerful tool, that comes with a lot of extras loaded on."

"OK, I buy that," the cop says, "but it would really seem that this is not super useful here. Now, when I am looking for relations between Giotto and Dante, I can see how this would help me, because a slight variant on a speech might drasticly change the theological tone of the Divine Comedy, but here..."

"Not only is language a powerful tool, but so is semiotics. It would seem that you are perhaps using the wrong tool by calling our expertise up."

"But you offered your services," the cop interrupted, testily.

"Well, yes, but your job as reader is to apply the right tool to the right job. We talk about the intentio lectoris, the intent of the reader, in this case the empirical reader, namely you. We offered our tools, but it is your job to decide if our tools are the correct ones. We might think that the case calls for it, but we are implying an intentio lectoris that can be called the intent of the model reader."

Realizing that his colleague was putting his foot in it, the second semiotician suggested, "well, we are really delving into metalanguage here. The reader of the sign would have to be the Irishman. The policeman, us, we are doing a metareadinn of the sign. If we are looking for intentio lectoris, it must be on the part of the Irishman."

This went on late into the night, although they moved it to a cafe. At the end they decided to let bygones be bygones and start a symposium on the use of gesture in a cross--cultural context, focusing on late Byzantine art and the Book of Kells.

I hope that makes it as clear as Guiness or espresso!

Semiotics

Semiotics versus General Semantics

Alicia asked the very good question of what is the difference between semiotics and general semantics. As is the nature of those who spend way too much time studying language, I am sure that Steven and I could go on for pages, but Alicia was wise and put a limit on the discussion.

Part of the problem is that semiotics is a fairly new branch of linguistics, and as a result the boundaries are not as defined as older disciplines. The ambiguity of boundary is further complicated by the trend for academics to claim as much material as possible in their particular fiefdoms.

Basically Semantics is concerned with words and the signifier-signified relationships inherent in them. Semiotics is concerned with, in the words of Umberto Eco, “a unified approach to every phenomenon of signification and/or communication.” (Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Indiana University Press, Indiana, 1976. p. 3). Since it could get terribly out of hand, Eco sets some practical limits. As he says in the same work, “The common objection to the ‘imperialist’ semiotician is: well, if you define a peanut as a sign, obviously semiotics is concerned with peanut butter as well – but isn’t this procedure a little unfair? What I shall demonstrate in this book, basing myself on a highly reliable philosophical and semiotical tradition, is that – semiotically speaking – there is not a substantial difference between peanuts and peanut butter, on the one hand, and th words /peanuts/ and /peanut butter/on t