08 October 2024
Trauma and taxes
And I share this personal information because, as wars rage around the world and our tax dollars support various sides and causes, one of the first things we do is forget that every single person involved in a war, whether on your side or not, carries with them generational trauma that affects an enormous number of people. Here we are, seventy-five years after one land mine exploded and injured my father, and I and my siblings still live with his scarred legacy of volatile mood swings, erratic emotions, and very little mental capacity for reflection and contemplation. And remember, he was just one young officer on patrol in Yanggu Province. What happens to the people of this current war in Gaza whose whole world is destroyed in front of them? When we care about people, empathize as fellow humans who live and grow in a community of friends and family, we remember their smiles, their passions and dreams, the things that make them human. But, when foreign policy decisions and irreparable differences between governments and states turn these people, who probably celebrate their children’s birthdays just as we do, into enemies, none of those human attributes and frailties matter. Instead, filtered through language and images that dehumanize the side that is on the receiving end of America’s bombs and bullets and logistics and supplies, we call an entire people fundamentalists, extremists or terrorists, forgetting that until bombs dropped on them, they were boys and girls who played with imaginary friends and laughed and played together.
Every victim of Hamas’s attacks on Israel last year has been remembered for what they brought to this life – the joy and hope of a generation. They were school kids and grandparents, fathers and university students, young lovers and doctors, and all of them are dead. The loss of each person should be mourned and their lives remembered. But how is it that in these United States it is hard to find a story of a child in Gaza who was killed by a bomb or the weight of a concrete building collapsing on her, and learn of her humanity, her dreams, her hopes? And why is it that if I, as a US taxpayer, disagree with how my government is allocating its resources and which states it supports, I run the risk of being labeled antisemitic? Is it not possible to disagree with a state’s actions and policies and activities and not hate, demonize, or dehumanize the citizens and civilians of that state? Throughout my life I have protested and criticized my government, and still I call myself a deeply patriotic American who loves his country. I should be able to criticize what our government is doing in Israel in the same way – argue about what our tax dollars are supporting, and not be labeled a lover of terrorists, or an anti-Semite. And I am not passing myself off as a Middle East expert, but I have a right and obligation as a concerned US citizen to engage in discussion about what we support with our taxes. And it feels like the lobby that argues on behalf of US support for sending weapons to Israel is as focused as the NRA – it brooks no dissent and has an influence that goes well beyond what it should.
I support Israel’s right to defend itself, and if the US continues to support Israel’s Iron Dome defense network, I will gladly see my tax dollars flowing in that direction. But Israel is no longer merely defending itself, and its continuous bombardment and destruction of Gaza in the past year has now spread to Lebanon and beyond. In one year, Israel has killed nearly fifty thousand Palestinians – which is as many deaths as the US suffered during the entire Vietnam War, and if I raise my voice in opposition to this, someone may very well reduce it to a pat slogan and say that I hate Jews. No, I resist that label because I don’t hate Jews or want to see the destruction of Israel, but I also do not want my tax dollars paying for weapons that kill civilians, and the overwhelming majority of people killed in Palestine are civilians – the very moms and dads and kids and grandparents who are the hope of the next generation. I wrote about my father because I wanted to point out how much trauma one person suffers over the life of an injury. What happens to the Palestinian people, who are facing a relentless orchestrated effort to destroy them? What will happen to their trauma and how will it ever heal?
For the past year, the US has paid for and provided an endless supply of bombs and bullets being used by Israel to annihilate the Palestinians living in Gaza, and one small thing Americans can do is allow for a space where we can discuss this, and be able to criticize our government – or Israel’s – and not be accused of hating Israelis or Jews. We have a right and obligation to argue about our taxes and foreign policy – it’s about as American as buying a bagel in New York or dipping a warm piece of torn bread into an olive oil-and-garlic-laden hummus. Peace.
21 September 2024
A bigger table holds more people
The al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait City, Kuwait
05 September 2024
Echoes
15 December 2020
The space between notes: listening to the whole of Beethoven in 2020 – Part II
Op.20 – Septet in E♭ (1799) – This is the first piece, a sweet and lovely piece for woodwinds, that jumps out with a sound that isn’t very Beethoven-like but has a lively, beautiful sound. My favorite recording is a YouTube live one with Janine Jansen and friends but it’s not on iTunes, where the rest of my selections can be found. It’s on this list because it was the first piece that made me say, Oh! Beethoven has a lot of sounds I don’t know.
Op.30 – 3 Violin Sonatas - No.2: Violin Sonata No.7 in C minor (1803) - This sonata feels like the first time we see Beethoven’s maturity and understanding of the piano and violin playing with each other seamlessly. The sonatas before this sound like he hasn’t yet figured out how the voices of these two instruments work together, but unfortunately many of the recordings still feel awkward like that. One of the things I noticed throughout my listening is that many of the “great” soloists who also perform pieces like this (duets, trios, etc…) want to remain soloists and instead of two instruments playing together there are two separate ones vying for dominance. The 1962 recording by David Oistrakh and Lev Oborin is breathtaking, especially the adagio, an intimate conversation between the two instruments, two lovers, so sensitive and gentle between these instruments/voices.
Op.53 – Piano Sonata No.21 in C, "Waldstein" (1803) – (See Part I for commentary.) Ronald Brautigam on the fortepiano and there’s also a live recording on youTube that is fantastic!
Op.61 – Violin Concerto in D (1808) – Violinists have written cadenzas (crazy-ass guitar solos, except for the violin) for this piece, beginning with Louie himself, who started the whole business for this concerto when he reworked the piece for piano and orchestra (Op. 61a) and wrote one, which others transcribed back to violin or wrote their own. This is a piece that I think has suffered from some of the great mid to late 20th century conductors who have weighed it down. Then along comes Patricia Kopatchinskaja (with Philippe Herreweghe conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony) who, for my Minnesota friends, is a Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra Artistic Partner, and her blazing energy and profound sensitivity reignites the greatness of this piece. Her violin emerges from the unanimity of the strings, pulling them, drawing them out, dancing above them and never dismissing them – although sometimes leaving them, and everyone else – behind, as she goes into raptures. Again, this is a recording that needs good speakers – the violin’s high notes will sound like a screech without it.
Op.67 – Symphony No.5 in C minor, “Triumphal” (1808) - Da-da-da-daah! We hear those four notes and think we know the 5th symphony, the most familiar notes in all classical music, the equivalent of “To be or not to be.” The joy, the majestic narrative sweep of this symphony never hit me until I had the thrill of listening to a live recording of John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique wearing a good pair of headphones with the volume turned up and the swell at the beginning of the fourth movement shivers me and I think this symphony should be called the “Triumphal” symphony! A pioneer in historically informed performances – thus sayeth his website – Gardiner and the ORR – so sayeth me – brings clarity, energy and the musical tension of different voices in the orchestra by letting them be heard.
Op.95 – String Quartet No.11 in F minor, "Serioso" (1810) – Holy shit, listening to the Chiaroscuro Quartet playing on gut-stringed period instruments with an interpretation that sounds like Beethoven doing acid with John Cage. Wow. There are times when the music almost falls apart and at its edge, the dissolution of sound, he pulls it back together with an aching beauty. The end of the second movement, the third movement, is breathtaking. Like Op. 30/2, he pushes sound beyond what it’s been capable of before, a sonic dissolution that threatens the order of sound and, for a moment, sound decays the structure of the known world until by the brilliance of the composition and playing, the world comes again into focus and when I hear it I think of the ending of V. Woolf’s The Waves, where language breaks down until its limitations render Bernard and others incapable of speech and word but still, still, they fight against this cosmic anarchy and return to a pattern of the world that allows for human connection and contact, lets us be in each other’s presence and be able to communicate.
Op.97 – Piano Trio No.7 in B♭, "Archduke" (1811) If Beethoven was alive today he’d be a hip hop artist called Fat Louie and he’d be sampling and mashing sounds and making new ones like no one’s business. What fascinates me the most about Beethoven now is when his music decays and almost falls apart and yet there’s a tension in it that even at the edge – especially at the edge, of dissolution its belief, hope, certainty – what do I call it? – in life and the ability or power of music to bring back to life that which was on the edge of death or non-being – silence, in fact, nothingness, no atoms against which to collide and create friction and heat and energy and love and life and he stares into the abyss of silence and draws even greater energy from it, and the indomitable spirit of his, even in despair, affirms life like nothing I have ever heard, and it is the musicians who bring this music to us today, their courage and sensitivity to devote themselves to being instruments themselves, a discipline that is monastic in its intensity and focus, and what they bring to us is this vision of life, of light, of sound on the boundaries of silence, joyous and alive. Two equally brilliant recordings are worth listening to: one by Isabelle Faust, Alexander Melnikov and Jean-Guihen Queyras, and the other by the Van Baerle Trio.
Op.106 – Piano Sonata No.29 in B♭, "Hammerklavier" or “Symphony for Piano” (1818) – What a wild sonata! I keep listening to it – I don’t know if it’s my favorite but I keep coming back to listen again and again because there’s so much in it. This sonata keeps growing on me, layers and textures of sounds and themes and melodies and at first it was just a big mash and now I’m listening for how these parts of the sonata make a whole. It’s like Beethoven had three different things to say and put it all in one place, with digressions, sidebars and an eventual return to the points he wants to make. Rather than naming this a sonata, perhaps it should be called a “Symphony for Piano”. But to come back to Annie Fischer (the Bruce Springsteen of the piano,) she plays with an intensity that Beethoven would appreciate, especially for this sonata. And then a definitive interpretation by Ronald Brautigam, who demonstrates the tension in the fortepiano better than modern pianos and techniques, clearly articulating the different voices.
Op.120 – Diabelli Variations (1823) It’s like someone takes your PB&J sandwich and turns it into a 33 course Michelin-starred meal. So many choices – Alfred Brendel, Daniel Barenboim, Ronald Brautigam, Andras Schiff…
Op.125 – Symphony No.9 in D minor, "Choral" (1824) – Go old-school on this one, or maybe David Zinman conducting the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra.
Op.130 – String Quartet No.13 in B♭ (1825) is searing, he takes apart sound, dissects patterns he sees in it, pushes instruments to the brink of what they can do to further this exploration of sound, relying on the sheer will of the music and the performers to accomplish this exploration of sound. There is literally a struggle in the music, the performers, and my goodness, the Artemis Quartet, struggle to actually play the music, there is struggle in the music because the sounds have not before been shaped this way, put together in this fashion and the actual struggle is aural and so is the resolution and consummation between instruments, performers and audience. We are baptized, confirmed, and married in this music and shall be sanctified in its last rites.
Op.132 – String Quartet No.15 in A minor (1825) – Starting this penultimate quartet with a 1930s recording of the Busch Quartet – great playing! These last quartets are religious. The third movement – molto adagio, is trembling. His dive into the human spirit and the depth of feeling is revealed so beautifully in this movement, and it’s so different from other pieces where he is pushing the boundary of sound or an instrument. Here, he teaches us how to pray – with all our heart and attention and devotion. Layer after layer of sound coming in waves, pushing down the music that precedes it and building upon it in a slow rhythmic swell after swell, and the Hagen Quartett’s end of the third movement is spectacular.
Op.135 – String Quartet No.16 in F (1826) And here we are at the end, together again, beginning with Artemis Quartet. Jesus, the relentless strings of the 4th movement before it resolves itself.
It shouldn’t be difficult to share how profound this year-long endeavor was but it reveals the gap between art and our apprehension of it, demonstrates that unless the art itself is seen heard read touched or otherwise engaged with by you the reader then it’s as worthless as the ingredient list on the side of a cardboard cylinder of Comet cleanser with its bright green color and in a small font at the bottom there’s a number to call if you have questions and maybe pieces of art should include a number to call and likewise a warning label because as an old girlfriend and I wrote on the tee shirts we made, poetry kills, and unless the viewer reader listener engages with the work at hand it’s just a bunch of scribbles or words or sounds and it’s why we can say, I don’t like jazz or I don’t like contemporary music or art – we have failed to engage with it and art is an act a verb and the viewer is an integral part of the art and whether it’s Pablo Casals who found sheet music for Bach’s cello suites in some back alley music store as a boy and committed himself to understanding and explaining them with his cello, pulling them from forgotten obscurity and ensuring they don’t remain just squiggly lines of ink on pieces of paper, or you on a Tuesday evening walking through a vacant lot with dandelions pushing with insistence through cracks or maybe a cleansing bone-cold day in late January when the air you breathe hollows your lungs or perhaps any other time when you look, listen, write,
12 December 2020
The space between notes: listening to the whole of Beethoven in 2020
The one time I visited the Vatican museums I stayed in the Sistine Chapel for nearly five hours, but before the famed Chapel Raphael, Matisse, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and a beautiful Redon, always the delicate pastels, a cruel Max Ernst crucifixion, just like his slabs of meat, a stunning hall of cartography, but nothing, nothing like the Sistine Chapel, the scale the perspective the narrative sweep the wholeness of the space, but wandering in I first thought to myself, is this it? Is this all it is? Maybe I was looking for something familiar so I could say to myself, oh, this is God creating man, feeling that if I identified it I had seen it, or maybe I was surprised that it was a finite, contained space. Instead, I wandered, and hours later, was floating in a sea of perceptions, each one informed by the order and the framework that Michelangelo painted across the vault of the Chapel, giving us time to consider his art. If tasting wine is about allowing our taste buds to be receptive, to taste what we taste not what we want to or think we should, but to let the wine roll across our tongues, cheeks, throat, and just look, look, what do you see? Not what we know, not what someone has pointed out to us, although those bits of information can guide us at certain points, but first, or second, or at some point we have to pull up our anchor and let the winds push us, float across the deep blue sea and travel on fresh water and waves, not where someone else is leading us but alone, alone in the wind, the night, the dark sky the blazing sun, letting our own senses guide us as we look into the work before us, asking, what is that, and letting the work speak through its color, form, composition, narrative structure, and giving ourselves the freedom, the right, the responsibility to look at Michelangelo for the first time, to be alone with his art and say this is what I see, this is what unfolds hour after hour, as this arch and that takes form, as one panel leads to the next, the beginning of time to the creation of light and darkness, the creation of sun and moon and the glory of mankind, and always looking, looking, at aspects large and small, the overall scope and scale to the details of one look, the direct eye gaze of one African wise man staring right at us as only the one man on the altar wall, one hand covering half his face, Michelangelo himself, perhaps, gazing and gaping, is this all there is, is this the end, is this it, but the wise man with a kind, compassionate, intelligent and sophisticated plain look stares straight at us like no one else in the whole chapel and I wonder, who is this man, who is he? And down at the other end the Last Supper and I wondered where Judas was and I look and see a devil on his back, black and winged, whispering into his ear his heart his thoughts all the while sitting there with Christ and yesterday in St Peter’s a man talking below in a chapel in the crypt, evangelical almost but moved by the power of the place, and saying, god is there when you are broken, a failure, riddled with mistakes and half formed ideas, broken hopes and bad decisions as parents, spouses, humans, and we think about our glory when perhaps we should be more open to our frailty, our faults, our many almosts, and perhaps why the Church really survives, because God is God but we only know that when we’re weak and incomplete, filled with failure and regret, there’s the space where we’re receptive and open, willing to admit what is right before us and that’s our own shortcomings and failures and know that we’re only vessels for god’s word, God’s ability to – no, that’s not it, that’s not how I started, I meant to say to think to express that in our silence we can hear something besides our own voice, but that’s not it either, because – right before the Sistine Chapel a glorious delight of Matisse, a man filled with the joy of the Church – the pilgrim church on earth – long before Vatican II gave permission for joy; in 1950 or 1952 he made a vestment, simple crosses, a tree of life, a joy in creation and God, and a large Mother and Child and she is a vessel, a face of circles, the eternity of infinity, wise and joyous, a church that is procreative and open to happiness. Michelangelo is glorious. He praises God forever with his work, and the Pieta is the most sublime sculpture imaginable, a liquid, limpid, sensual, dignified, caressed piece of marble, coursing with the soft quiet of sorrow, the deep sadness of death of loss and the ultimate triumph of life after all.
02 October 2020
Election day
13 April 2020
Home life
I’ve been happy to read that yeast is in such demand these days that it is selling out in stores around the country, and when I look at our own kitchen I’m not surprised. My youngest daughter loves to bake and it seems like she’s in the kitchen most nights after dinner, wondering what she can make. Sourdough breads are experiencing a home renaissance, too, and as a dedicated sourdough baker I am so happy that people everywhere are beginning to taste how good a loaf of home baked sourdough is, and that yeast shortages aren’t a cause for concern! Hopefully it’s more than a Covid fad and more people begin to bake their bread regularly. I have never been exact with timing or measurements when I make bread and as a result I’ve had my fair share of loaves that have failed to some degree, but I’m okay with that because I bake through the ups and downs of work and parenting and schedules that pull me from the kitchen, and my indifference to most schedules and rules for kneading and rising has shown me that dough has a very wide range of tolerances. The gold standard for a good sourdough loaf these days seems to be those big-holed, high hydration loaves that taste great and look beautiful on social media, but in my many years of baking I’ve never aimed for them. Maybe I don’t have the patience for weighing my water or taking notes, but I also like a more uniform crumb so when I make sandwiches the butter and honey and mustard and melted cheese doesn’t fall through the holes. Pragmatic failure, perhaps.
After St. Patrick’s Day my son and I made a big batch of sauerkraut and this weekend, a month since it began percolating on the kitchen counter, I put a half gallon or so into a smaller container in the fridge, and put the remainder into a cool, dark corner in the garage. With a diagnosis earlier this year of high blood pressure, I have significantly reduced my salt intake, much of which comes from fermented foods, and this batch of kraut is the first since I’ve started taking medication, so in response to it I’m rinsing all the kraut off before I eat it; I think a significant amount of the salt remains in the brine I dredge the sauerkraut from, and by further rinsing it I hope that my blood pressure remains in a healthy range. If not, it may be the end of fermented foods for me, which would be sad because I have a big crock of Korean doenjang fermenting for more than a year on the back porch, and an even larger crock of gochujang right next to it.
We go through phases of eating certain things and when my wife recently found an old pack of sprouting seeds I began watering them, and am happy to see that long-expired seed still has good viability. The sprouts will be ready in another day or two and after a few batches we’ll get sick of eating them and won’t make another batch for a year or two. As long as we don’t lose the strainer lid, we’re good to go whenever the mood strikes us. Eat well, stay well!