Monday 30 October 2017

November sun

November sun
Why do you leave me so to die
When needs you most
To question our sky

Thought of you at noon today

Tomorrow.




Must the winter come so soon?

Oper Frankfurt



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* Any resemblances to life on earth living or dead on this website is totally co-incidental.
(C- The Warning Brothers)




Sunday 29 October 2017

A monster calls....

You know what is my problem and frustration right now! That I created out of what really were cherished but im-mouldable ashes of my family life and created a garden for myself elsewhere. Independently. As always I did. Never having to ask for help (kinda always knowing none would be given). A Monster Calls in a parallel universe. What I didn’t realize was that there was an American pie in the sky Commander who ultimately had a key to the garden gate and who could switch off the oxygen anytime. No individual malice, simply an architecture still standing gone woefully wrong for those 'outside the box'. Foundations always flawed that no-one was ever brave enough to question. Not that I chose the wrong place for my garden of neuron and nature just the financial structure bears no relationship to the organic. Tick all the boxes and that key is harder to grab. But you need to know the boxes to tick. Equally, ticking them authorizes access to that key. People either assume that you know or they care not that you don't.

Tbc….perhaps...

Wizard of Lies

You are not going to like this NYC but what the heck do I care any more...my 'friend' keeps tellin' me to write. So that is what I shall try to do....stay tuned.

Initially I was angry at Richard Brody's review of Detroit in The New Yorker. Re-reading realized that it was all very well argued. What it lacked was something that has been a quandary of cinema all my life. The fact that all cinema is a representation of life. The first audiences of Lumiere's 1895 train ran for the exits in Paris in Étonnement . The fiction was absolutely real to them. They weren't idiots: it would be as if an amazing hologram of an alien invasion was somehow projected onto Times Square New York akin Orson Welles.

Even the greatest documentary film makers inevitably can't get it 'right' or indeed 'wrong'. Life will always get them. Fred Wiseman opts for no manipulative music and as much footage as possible. Yet always it will be an edit of reality. I (and YOU) could have had Google glasses from the age of whatever. Recording everything. But what about the other dimensions? The Rashomon angles? There is only a 'relative' truth.

I once compared Jean Luc Godard's efforts to Quantum physics. Wasn't crazy! As soon as you try to pin something down it no longer is to be. The more documentary festivals the better in my opinion. And yet: 'tis the same trouble I have with photo journalism in exotic war torn or not zones. With no disrespect but you can go and suffer a little and shoot your camera and you will inevitably return with something that everyone over their lattes says wow! Salgado is an amazing photographer more than most. I was very angry when someone who clearly cared about photography said to me at a major photo opening that S had 'sold out'. Well: the guy needs to make a living. What is fascinating about Salgado (see the doc- no 'sold out' comments- see reality impinges;) is that he not only photographed, he created reality by creating a forest of trees where once there was only barren land. THAT is nothing short of amazing. Antonioni painted grass but Salgado grew trees!

Back to my dialectic with Brody. I agree. And I agree that the power and manipulation of the cinema image is problematic. Isn't it akin to music? I mean you can rant and bang the instrument of choose. It has a dramatic effect. But you can compose/play something that isn't the reality yet becomes one through sheer force of talent and audience reception. Many great compositions went the wayside in their day that being said. I believe Detroit is an example of that displacement. It is a manipulative use of cinema. Would a documentary have the same effect? !

Joshua Oppenheimer totally nailed the quandary in The Act of Killing. Almost. When he asked the perpetrators of unspeakable acts to 'don' costume and re-enact the parts they played in the atrocity's of his childhood. Not sure that I could hug as he did, however. Real for Oppenheimer though. Life is a constant manipulation and wizardry of lies. New York is simply unbelievable. It is a cinema screen of lies. I am sure it is the same in Moscow, London (I know) etc. But everything is magnified in NYC let alone America.

I feel deep sympathy and sorry for Bernie Madoff's sons and wife. Everyone assumed they must have known. America is totally based on assumptions. That will be the country's ultimate narcissism and dare I say it: ultimate downfall. There's a scene in Gone Girl where Amy's husband is accosted by a stranger at the donut/coffee 'help find her' center. He agrees to a 'selfie' photo (very reluctantly). He quickly asks the said gal to erase. She is the bitch from hell thereafter for 5 sec. Next thing: the photo is all over the media claiming what an uncaring, arsehole husband is he. THAT is America.

I know/we know- De Niro is Madoff. You see the follicles of his nose and clever perspective reflection of son's death news in his glasses- yawn-hey I used that trick decades ago:)  It works, though. Like actors upon a stage that you know isn't real something starts to happen inside our heads. Godard knows that and quick as a flash moves on. Most movies don't. They are (in Brody's argument) totally manipulative. Hate to quote an artist cliche but Picasso's art is a lie that makes us realize the truth is ever so true nowadays. Or should be so. You tell the truth (mostly dead or wounded) in the NY Post or whatever and people read and they move on. Few ever really listen. React. Object. Question. Camus' certitude of the daily round.

The lives of New York (nay America) are build upon and around that certitude of breakfast TV's assertion of life. Credit score and the credit card is all.  Pay off your card every month but we know that you won't so that you will inevitably make us loads of money. Madoff was a crook/confidence trickster but no more so than many many many other Americans and the most cherished financial institutions of America. I mean how many Craigs List 'send a cheque' scams can one put up with. The police aren't interested. Murders happening everywhere. I could go on with the wholesale money laundering operations of one major American bank in South America over deacdes and few say boo to a goose. Not sure how to end all this....well I don't have to it isn't The New Yorker after all...;) Does fictional cinema manipulate us in a way that real life doesn't? I would argue yes. In a good way, depending on the product, a subliminal dialectic is born and we as humans may exit a cinema or a home screen and maybe question our life that little bit more.

I need to pee…'tis midnight and a monster calls...maybe I'll be alive to finish tbc

What makes Godard one of the most innovative movie directors of all time is that he saturates and interrogates the fictional moving image with cinema language to such an extent it neither becomes fiction nor reality. The habitat of a third dimension. You (and Godard sneakily) wants to immerse in Georges Delerue's Camille theme in Le Mépris (Contempt) then tossing you back upon the sea you are in a documentary. And then not. It's akin to art. Is Picasso's Guernica one of the greatest paintings? I would argue not. It has an enormous power but that power derives not from a multitude of rippling consent and dissent but from a singular tragedy, albeit abstracted. Visconti's use of music in Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) is not Godard. But Tancredi's theme never resolves abstracting rather than immersing and manipulating you into the screen image. Can documentary be art? Sometimes though rarely. Is Nikolaus Geyrhalter's Our Daily Bread akin to sitting in front of a Rothko or Strindberg's painting Inferno. No. Or Kevin Jerome Everson's films? Some would argue yes.

Poetry is a little the same. Some immerse and we are totally transformed. Others detach us and we weep. And sometimes the strangest most banal things in life totally crumple us. The crooked thrift shop flower frame in Dallas Buyers Club. The framed pressed flowers that Frank gives to Marla and is later reprised in Rules Don't Apply. Is that manipulation or dislocation?
....we could go on but the blue sky beckons.






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                                                   who knew that a dog called Rex and Bruno could crumple me.........




Posted on August 21, 2017 .

Once upon a time in our sky...

An amazing BBC Proms concert today (Aug 27) by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (its Proms debut). (you can listen for 30 days online) I've never been to Cincinnati or any of those Ohio cities. What a bigger wondrous world it must be outside New York;) !  Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony is so familiar it now oft gets overlooked. What an orchestrator. And what soloists in that orchestra bringing new life to what is an enormous dance. To be both grounded and airborne is not so easy. The final movement is Spielberg and composer John Williams before their time. I had a vision of 100s of thousands of orphans rising into the air creating the most awesome typhoon ever. But they danced not destroyed. The concert topped and tailed by Bernstein (with a little Copland something in-between).
The encore: Candide of course. Any questions? !

Know what was interesting about that Tchaik 5 was that they fashioned it more in the style of Brahms and Berlioz than Shostakovich. The finale movement is always played that way by Bernstein, Karajan and most others. Louis Langrée's interpretation doesn't have that monumental movement effect. What it strives for I think is beauty. Tchaikovsky wasn't Shostakovich. But I am sure the latter heavily borrowed from the former. Most conductors morph Tchaik into Shostakovich. That's not such a crime. Just: Tchaikovsky wanted to dance. It is no coincidence that some of the world's greatest ballet scores are by Mr Tchaik. I have always thought of Tchaik's compositions as more French than Russian. There is a finesse, a fleet footardness. You may all disagree, that's Ok.
bit of a sketched argument but hey…it's my sketch….

[as a P.S. Aug 29: The Times (London) critic Geoff Brown wrote Blots on the blue horizon? Well, I’ve always found the Fifth’s finale “rather horrible” (it’s Tchaikovsky’s own phrase), and the orchestra’s finesse did not alter that. 

Well we agreed about the orchestra just not Tchaik:) What Geoff Brown doesn't know about music.....!

And you know, I listened to Gergiev again and Langrée is very much in Gergiev's style. They both get the Finale's  molto meno mosso and the maestoso. I stick to my guns that some of the greatest conductors are not stately nor solemn. Nor indeed meno. Langrée's maestoso arcs through to the very end of the finale. There is no expressive marking suggesting Tchaik wished for that. But methinks he did. It isn’t just a parade of life it’s also a parade of death’s scary beauty. Solemnity not triumphant. Resolute not defiant.





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Posted on August 26, 2017 .

voice of the hidden waterfall

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of evidence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement—
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.


T.S. Eliot 

Voyager 1 (September 5, 1977-  )
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?
Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?
John Ashbery- At North Farm













                                                                                     


                                                                           I would have traveled thousands...





                                                              Happy 10th 'Gigi' Voyager 1;)  (save me some spacec§ke) !














Posted on September 5, 2017 .

what kind of fool am I .....

Know what TRUST is: when 'my' lame deer limps past with her two children only 15ft away. Unperturbed. She eat the green ground-level leaves of the plant that almost died and rebirthed this summer. Ahhh...! She may well outlive me. I remembered Haitink conducting the Mahler 4th a year or 2 ago at the Proms. My comment about all the animals gathering upon the cliff face for the funeral of their friend.

Apropos nothing at all....


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Not sure that Dvořák’s Violin Concerto in A minor is a great concerto but every second Anne‐Sophie Mutter convinces all that it is! (27 days to listen).

There's a very very beautiful performance of Mahler's 1st Symphony by the Pittsburgh Sym.  The First can so easily be played in hindsight as if a later work. Conductor Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh sculpt the magic of youth (guess that 28 isn't that young anymore- was it ever;) Sonorities ever so delicate. And an ever slow build to what is confidence not bombastic arrogance in the finale. All the flowers almost open at one point but can't quite commit (Fig 18/19-zurückhaltend). They were right. There was a higher calling. Finally: a cry from our soul.




Sad that Thomas Campbell 'left' the Met.

What could I possibly say but courage!
One of the very few honest individuals in New York! Mr Campbell single handedly (his vision) navigated that enormous vessel into the future. Our future. That is not nor ever will be an achievement to be scoffed at!

Who thought tapestry could,,,,

apologis for the color .....somtimes...
bastards everywhere Tom. Everywhere !!!


Context is one thing….but a song has wings of its own…..



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Posted on September 6, 2017 .

IRMA la douce

Earthlings: what have you done to your beautiful planet! WATCH THIS and you may learn something not available on your Americana LiveForever Fact Sheet.

Floridians: get out of the WAY! Irma will kill you! She doesn’t mean to but that alas is her destiny.

My lame deer appeared again at lunchtime. I dosed off and there she was even closer- 12ft. Is that a sign? I pointed the escape and she did indeed go left. Albeit 40ft beyond. Yet she and her children had 'nosed' straight ahead the other day against flimsy deer netting.  She didn't even attempt that route. Co-incidence? The truth will always ever be stranger than fiction.


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What is umm..a thing : is that unless you are a rich NYorker or a desperate on the make artist or a desperate gallerist;) most will never have seen Miami let alone anywhere else in Florida. I wrote about the Cincinnati Sym Orch and all the wondrous worlds I had never encountered. Well: Miami I know VERY well. And there are so so so many artists lesser and minor and major institutions who have fought long and hard for their place in an ever NY centric world. And a lot of very wondrous old/aging people who were absolutley major players and who are never cajoled into strutting song in NY. And Miami as a morphing city is an amazing story. Hello: Susan Sontag's son David Rieff in his book. And there are good property developers and evil property developers. Miami has and will have seen them all. And any developer who escapes building code regs and sent something into that sky without withstanding Cat 5 winds should be sent to prison. It is a crime. There is no excuse. No plea. Zilch! Man can't re-create nature. But algorithms are so so advanced now. I hope the late Zaha Hadid never let anyone down in that regard. I would find that unbelievable and if asked to, she would walk from the project.

You wanna build into the air: respect your opponent. They may forgive you.
There but for the grace go ...NPR's From The Top was recorded in Miami Dade on Tuesday this week.

I'd love to meet Juliet's snake- gives a great twist to The Magic Flute;)! Segue kill 2 story one stone...Stephen and the Chopin F mi Ballade... I danced in the award winning Graham Vick Royal Opera House Mitridate, re di Ponto (Mozart) and they had to fire the eagle. So if your constrictor gets firedJuliet don't be too....And Stephen re your comment from the teacher on not being mature enough for the F mi B, Mozart was 14 when he scribed Mitridate. Some of that music is just ungewöhnlich. Or is that unheimlich!

So: 3 years to go 'matey' before you write your symphony:) !

Young Mozart and a constrictor...hmmm..that should interest my Brooklyn apt's sale price...:)

My very best wishes....

                       Don't know how to keep IRMA happy...would she like to meet a lonely leopard seal..?

                                                          Venice is drowning also.....no hurricanes there...

                               Rome has its own probs (eh IRMA) - there is no greater or less performance.

                                                           It will always be the thing itself.


                                           my guilty pleasure...I sing this well but not tonight Josephine.
                                                                              George:...what do you see........

and: may I not resist this my guilty pleasure.....u know it already but as Aristotle wasn't the greatest singers (he's jealous as hell for those Frogs..) what the F.! he literally dissected them when in exile (having fled Trumpets...


one little day most beautiful cruel no fault nor manufacture of its own.
Yet the very same hours
Something unwanted. Unbelieved.
New.
Something still.




                                                                              George:...what will you see........

                              so too many guilty pleasures before sunrise.....shouln'tv be tryin' save the world.....

                                                                                                                    You Don't Have To Say...








Posted on September 9, 2017 .

Gaia

So beautiful
So cruel
Hawk dallying upon the blue
No cloud
No autumn leaf cajoled
Such was that day too
Heart taken 'afore noon
Resting silently in your lap
No shadow
Drowning in a kindness
Few were bestowed.
(© andrew-    Hudson Valley Sept 10, 2017)

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Posted on September 10, 2017 .

November sun

November sun Why do you leave me so to die When needs you most To question our sky Thought of you at noon today Tomorrow. Must t...