untitled (bedclothes) 2017

When I got up in the middle of the night I found myself captivated by the folds of my bedsheet and light summer blanket; to me they suggested a wild Böcklin or Friedrich landscape, only more abstracted (for more detail, turn up the brightness control on your computer).

Patti Smith Arthur Rimbaud's utensils n.d.

I came across this photograph by Patti Smith while looking on line at the very few photo images we have of Arthur Rimbaud. My short trip began with the news of Smith's purchase of a house in Roche, in the Ardennes, built near the foundations of the one in which the French poet had grown up (His mother's original farm house had been destroyed in the First World war).

While there may still be so much to be said about Rimbaud, all I'll say in this post is that once again I'm feeling a wee bit closer to him, and it's because of this knife and spoon, which had apparently been used by the great boy: They are virtually identical to some that I've been using for almost half a century.

They're old (nineteenth century), made of a material I know as 'German silver' [nickel silver, or Maillechort in France]. Their shapes are very fine, and they never tarnish. Like Rimbaud.

I now love them all more than ever.

my own couverts

[the image at the top is from The New York Times]

the first page of Stockhausen's piano score for 'Kontakte', seen seconds before 'Originale' began

I've uploaded 347 iphone images I had captured - with the enthusiastic encouragement of the curator, Nick Hallet - during the performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Originale" on November 7 at The Kitchen. They are of varying quality, but I show virtually every picture I shot, including a few blanks, or near-blanks, because the bricolage suggests the beautiful energy of the evening, along with its [suggestion of] mayhem.

I virtually grew up listening to Stockhausen. His music was broadcast by Westdeutscher Rundfunk [WDR] in the 1950s, and that station's avant garde music programs (which included the music of Hans Werner Henze, among other composers considered late-20th-century giants today) were carried by the CBC, to which I listened in Detroit, via their Windsor, Ontario outlet across the river.

While I missed the first performance of this piece, Stockhausen's first venture into theater, in Köln, in 1962, and was living in Germany when "Originale" was produced at Judson Church. I wouldn't have missed this one for the world, and I felt deeply honored to be at The Kitchen on Friday, where I rewarded far beyond all my expectations. I was in heaven, and when it was over, I didn't want to leave.

It was a very funny, and a very happy evening. Because of that I think I have a much better understanding - and even more love - for the composer's cycle of seven operas, "Licht", than I had before being immersed within this fantastic musical theater piece, and I already loved those operas dearly.

Unfortunately I'm unable to credit everyone, but this is a list, in order of their appearance, of the performers who appear in the album, together with the official description of their roles:

Rachel Mason (Action Musician)
Stephen Drury (Pianist)
Stuart W. Gerber (Percussionist)
Raul de Nieves (Child)
Nao Bustamente (Performer I)
Justin Vivian Bond (Model)
Nick Hallett (Singer)
Alexandro Segade (Performer IV)
Ishmael Houston-Jones (Performer II)
Lucy Sexton (Performer V)
Niv Acosta (Performer III)
Zach Layton (Conductor)
Saori Tsukada (Newspaper Seller)
Narcissiter (Animal Handler)
[unidentified photographer as one of two disco balls]
Joan Jonas (Action Painter)
Eileen Myles (Poet)

Loren MacIver Fishers Island ca. 1952 oil on masonite 44.125" x 57"

The Loren MacIver painting above jumped out at me while I was lazily scrolling through the Brooklyn Museum Bot (@BklynMuseumBot) this morning while still lying in bed. I thought it was very beautiful. Once awake and at the table with my laptop, I looked for more about the artist and her work. Very interesting, both.

Shortly after I began browsing, I thought of another modern seascape. Marsden Hartley's "Evening Storm, Schoodic, Maine No. 2". That painting became a favorite of mine the moment I first saw it somewhere else on line. Some time after that I actually saw the Hartley in real space, at the Brooklyn Museum, which also happens to shelter the MacIver painting. The latter however is not currently on public display, except in an online image.

Marsden Hartley Evening Storm, Schoodic, Maine No. 2 1942 oil on fabricated board 30" x 40.5"

Vilaykorn Sayaphet Ninety-One 2014 oil on board 18" x 18"

Vilaykorn Sayaphet's show of new paintings, "Latmanikham & Thongsy", at English Kills Art Gallery is a treasure. These are 'pictures' in both the most elemental and the most profound workings of a totally inadequate word. The three images I happen to have taken while at the gallery are probably of paintings more abstract than some of the others, but they all suggest representation, and yet largely elude interpretation.

I think they are all described as oil on board, but most of the works incorporate collaged elements, and in some cases they display physical interruptions/mutilations of the (mostly found) panels themselves, as is the case with "18 Hours Straight", below. Sometimes they move a bit beyond the panels' perimeters, and occasionally they directly engage the artist's rough framing.

Vilaykorn Sayaphet 18 Hours Straight 2014 oil on board 20" x 18"

They're all very beautiful, and I'm pretty sure unlike anything I've seen before.

Barry and I had intended to be at the opening reception late last month, but major travel plans, later aborted, kept us away. We weren't able to see it until this past weekend, and now it appears we're not the only ones excited about Sayaphet's Bushwick show. I expect his work will inspire another opening before very long, and we're not gong to want miss it.

Ben La Rocco has written a review for Hyperallergic which I discovered after I had decided to write this post; it's so good that I won't try to add to it, other than to suggest that people find their way to the gallery before "Latmanikham & Thongsy" closes on Sunday.

Vilaykorn Sayaphet Van Gogh's Blue oil on board 14" x 14"

It was conceived as an important visual document, accessible to the public and to institutions, which would describe the faces of a community and a moment whose memory is already fading from our consciousness.

The Kickstarter for the project needs a real boost as it winds down now, with less than three days to go. If the book doesn't get published, I think it will be a genuine loss for activism today.

Of course if it does get published, it won't mean a cure for AIDS. Also, to be sure, "The AIDS activist project: A new book of portraits of AIDS activists from around the globe" is not a vanity project for the artist, Bill Bytsura, or for those members of the historical ACT UP whose beautiful portraits will be a part of it.

Its importance is greater than the authors of the project or the subjects included in the book.

Pictures are important for understanding a past and inspiring a future, but pictures assembled in a context are still more important, and take on a life of their own. ACT UP was a movement which exploded in the late 80s, and burgeoned through half of the next decade, responding creatively, and often heroically, to a life and death crisis which was being ignored by an establishment which appeared to be unmovable.

Its people and the community they formed, along with the AIDS crisis which galvanized them, may be ancient history to a generation struggling today worldwide with an indifference among the powerful arguably even broader in scale - if, perhaps, less deadly. There is much to be gained today from looking at the devices employed, their successes - along with their failures, by a movement which flourished twenty and more years back. There's also the courage and nobility of so many of its members, and the anger and the love which was always a part of the movement.

Bytsura's book would give a face to an entire generation of activists (although in fact people of all ages were included in its membership), and it could serve an entire new generation as both muster to resistance, and powerful inspiration for effective resistance. Please help to breathe life into it, and consider contributing to its publication.

Full disclosure: Billy has been a friend since the days of ACT UP at it peak, and Barry and I have several of his beautiful non-activist photographs in our collection. There is also this portrait of a very young me, at 50, in 1990.

Leo Borchard (b. March 31, 1899, Moscow - d. August 23, 1945, Berlin)

On this day in 1945 the conductor Leo Borchard was killed by an American sentry in occupied Berlin while the musician was being driven home after conducting a concert of the Berlin Philharmonic. His British driver had misinterpreted the sentry's hand signal to stop.*

Three months earlier the artist had been appointed to replace the somewhat-compromised, and now-exiled Wilhelm Fürtwangler as musical director of the orchestra. At the time of Borchard's death he had conducted 22 hugely-welcome and greatly-acclaimed concerts, wining the affections of the traumatized population of the shattered city.

Born in Moscow to an ethnic German family in 1899, Borchard grew up in St. Petersburg, studying there before moving to Berlin, after the Russian Revolution, in 1920. In the German capital he was enjoying an increasingly important conducting career, which included promoting the music of young composers, when he was declared undesirable by the Nazi regime in 1935, for protecting Jewish musicians and for being "politically unreliable".

He remained in the city, hiding his identity, and gave music lessons in his apartment. He also became a member of the German resistance, and, along with his stunningly-beautiful partner, the author Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, formed the humanitarian resistance group, Onkel Emil ("Onkel Emil" was their warning signal), a secret network which committed sabotage, destroyed Nazi propaganda materials and broadcast their own leaflets - and those of the tragic "White Rose". They expertly created fake medical certificates which would enable the bearer to avoid military service. They rescued war resisters, political enemies of the regime and, above all, Jews, finding hiding places, procuring food, supplying false identity cards, and supporting families which would otherwise be without resources or protection..

I first heard about Borchard years ago while reading the memoirs of various members of the Widerstand, some of whom referred to him, always with love and admiration - for both the man and his art. At the time I could find very little information about either. Although even now very little has turned up, there are a precious few recordings, and at least one video.

I've also learned about the two memoirs** written by Andreas-Friedrich, one about her experience during the war, the other about Berlin in the years immediately following. I expect to read them both.

*
Borchard wasn't the only victim of American security forces in Europe that year: Anton Webern was killed three weeks later in Mittersill, near Salzburg, on September 15th. The composer had gone there from Vienna to be safe, but that night, just before the military curfew, when he stepped outside his house in order to smoke a cigar, he was shot by an American Army soldier, in circumstances which are not really clear to this day..

**
"Berlin Underground, 1938-1945", and "Battleground Berlin: Diaries 1945-1948"

[image from Discogs]

detail of Stampflehmbauweise (rammed-earth process) wall

Berlin's Kapelle der Versöhnung (chapel of the reconciliation) was built on the exact site of the Versöhnungskirche, which had survived the Anglo-American bombings of Berlin but not the pathology of the GDR. The 1895 church was destroyed in 1985 in order to improve the security of the wall standing adjacent to it. The history is a little complex, making the story of the new chapel, and its construction, even richer than it might be otherwise.

Today the Kapelle is a part of the Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Strasse.

The image at the top shows pieces of various materials (which here or elsewhere include stone, tile glass) which came from the rubble of the original church.

This is a view of the entire chapel, the rammed-earth wall can be detected behind the vertical square-section raw wood slats:

large detail of the seating in the anatomical theater

It was an immense privilege to visit the newly-restored 1789/90 Tieranatomische Theater in Berlin's Humboldt University today. The building, designed by Carl Gotthard Langhans, using Palladio's Villa Rotonda as a model, was commissioned by King Frederick William II to serve as a research centre to control and combat animal and equine diseases.

Barry and I, along with our friend Daniel, were almost alone today while we explored the outer rooms, the staircases, the vault, and especially the remarkable steeply-tiered auditorium where veterinary students learned their profession.

Horses and other large animals were dissected by their teachers on a large round platform which could neatly be raised above and lowered below the floor in the center by the wooden machinery designed by the architect. The didactic which accompanied a working model in the undercroft explained the rational for the device: The route chosen for introducing and removing the bodies to and from the elegant space was intended to minimize both the smell and the mess.

As history and architecture buffs, our own experience in the former royal veterinary faculty was less critical to world betterment, but possibly more exhilarating. And incidentally, the museum attendants could not have been more gracious.

The university will be using the building, restored between 2005 and 2012, for exhibitions and events. The artist Jodie Carey's site-specific piece, "Shroud", was installed in the auditorium in July. I wish we had seen it.

There are more pictures here.

David Greenspan, Ugo Chukwu, Rachel Claire, Amir Darvish, Meg MacCary, & Susan Hyon ("Yiddish Theater for today's players and audience" - from the program notes)

Resembling Edith Sitwell's enormous rings, the colorful bosses were attached at the very top of raw wooden sticks tethered to each other at the ends of the outer seating sections inside the Abrons Art Center. The only thing clear was that the audience was not supposed to take those seats.

So what were those gorgeous, jewel-like ornaments all about?

I never found the answer. When the lights went up after Target Margin Theater's presentation of Peretz Hirschbein's "The ( * ) Inn", Barry and I were so affected by what we had just seen on the stage that neither of us thought to investigate. By the time we had engaged some of the production team in conversation moments later I had forgotten to ask for any enlightenment.

Thinking about it now, I may also have decided, unconsciously or not, to just go along with - can I say it? - the company's accustomed, and famously challenging obstruseness. Also, it's not impossible to imagine TMT's founder and the production's director, David Herskovits, merely wanting to keep the audience's experience intimate, by limiting its size.

The play (in English, although with some Yiddish elements), and the production, were both a revelation, but I also left the theater with a lot of questions, all of them, I think, far more interesting than why the paste jewelry?

Some of my questions relate to my passion for history and for Jewish culture, and some of them are more about how that history and culture relates to that of the ammei ha'aretzot.

I grew up in the Midwest, ignorant of Jewish anything.

I also grew up loving "The Goldbergs", first on radio, and then on TV, but I regret that I had little or no idea of the rich context of the drama of which Gertrude Berg was a part until decades later. I moved to New York in the mid-80's, but it was too late for the classic Yiddish theater scene on Second Avenue. Over the years, I sometimes overhear fragments of the little bit of Yiddish that survived the Holocaust, but it always makes me melancholy, and it made me still sadder that, even with a knowledge of German, I couldn't understand more.

Hirschbein's play was written over 100 years ago, but there are big surprises. Both in the original (as I understand from the program notes) and as adapted & directed by Herskovits for performance on the Lower East Side today it's a remarkable document of the almost-forgotten creativity of experimental Yiddish theater. The company's notes describe their collaboration:

The shtetl turns uncanny in Hirschbein's classic of Yiddish life. You might be expecting the farm life, the chicken-plucking and the arranged marriage, but not the S&M lust and the body-snatching wedding guests. The ( * ) Inn was an early touchstone for experimental theater in Yiddish, a sensation in Vilna, in London and in a 1917 New York production. This play is a perfect example of why we at TMT believe Yiddish drama is as innovative and challenging as any in the world. It's Tevye on drugs. Watch out.

"The ( * ) Inn" is a great treat as theater, as an eyeopener, and - almost uniquely - as pre-WWI expressionist drama which can be experienced live today. I can't say I know all of what Hirschbein and Herskovits mean. As with all good theater, I believe, they leave the audience wanting to know more.

And I still don't know what the ornaments strung along the aisle mean; I'll just imagine those jewels as "runway lights" for the gem being mounted on the boards off Grand Street this month, TMT's tribute to Yiddish theater and to "the Yiddish Maeterlinck".

[image is by Erik Carter, for Target Margin Theater]