The Perlman Music Program

In this the winter of our discontent  has come merriment and cheer for hearts heavy laden by the troubles of our fair American republic.  I speak of the wonderful Perlman Music Foundation's heartwarming winter musical program for young musicians, a two week course of training culminating in an evening where the students first sing as a chorus, boys and girls who are not training to be singers perform as a chorus followed by their assembling into the seats of their instrument divisions to play partly chamber music that has been brilliantly enlarged for a much larger ensemble of stringed instruments.  The novelty of their playing these longer more intricate instrumental pieces is that they change places at the end of each movement thereby assuring the chance to play first violin second viola or what variation the music arranger has done, for instance, for an original string trio or quartet.  I am not a musician so that aspect of the evening in its finer aspects passes right over me; however, the shining youth of the group is deeply inspiring.  They are in their late teens for the most part, from all parts of the world, persons who have been studying their instrument from childhood, digging deeper and deeper in to a repertoire that will lead them to our leading conservatories and on to chairs in our major orchestras.  They are brilliant and ebullient--hey, they're just kids!--but from an early age they have accepted the discipline of practicing their scales, and then their scores.  They are committed, and in an age of teenagers who are unmoored from any family or school or group ethos or discipline, they come across as startlingly mature in the way they move, look to each other, submit to the conductor, and yet all the time preserve the innocence of the young.  You have a feeling that they just don't know or cannot care what a sordid deal is being cut in Washington.  Partly of course that is true because many of them are not Americans and probably don't give a rat's ass what the administration is concocting (which also leads one to thinking of the immense sums that must be donated annually to get this thing going summer and winter--I mean the airfares alone!).  Their conductor is the famed Itzhak Perlman, a gifted concert violinist as well as being a conductor.  He and his wife, the violinst Toby Perlman, who have a raft children of their own, are psychologically constituted to be teachers and parents to this horde of kids, all summer in a camp in Long Island, and for the two week winter warm up here in Sarasota.  We in Sarasota are blessed with a great number of symphonic and chamber music concerts during the winter season, but nothing can stir the heart, especially if you yourself have raised children, more than their shining eyes, innocent faces, their sincerity, their great gift and dedication to playing.  Oh, God, I am so sentimental.  But just looking at their faces!  These string musicians are formed into a chorus and they sing.  Scanning the faces of all these nationalities and races eagerly and earnestly and expertly lifting their voices in song is thrilling, especially when you come across the sight of a young man coming into the last lines like "dona eis pacem," and wiping the tears from his eyes.  Just the evening performance of so many gifted, innocent young people, shining in their youth and enthusiasm brought tears to my eyes.

Pollock And DeKooning

Sebastian Smee's description of artists in their rivalry ends with that of Jackson Pollock and William DeKooning which is the beginning of abstract expressionism and the American dominance of Western art.  Tedious is all I have to say.  Both men were even more than usually for artists egomaniacs, Pollock a tragically compromised alcoholic whose behavior while drunk and he was seldom sober, exhibited a level of brutality that is breath taking, and I wonder why those around him tolerated it.  I know, I know, genius and all that.  But I cannot take unfettered and wanton brutality as a comrade's modus vivendi.  I find non objective painting fine enough for wall decoration.  Mark Rothko once accepted a commission for paintings that were to go on the walls of the Seagrams Building and then had a temper tantrum at the thought of his "deep, meaningful" stuff being considered "decor."  Fine, that's just what I think it is. Abstract art is anything you want to see in it Smee says DeKooning's mother was so brutal that it was only reasonable that he would grow up to paint one after another woman with ugly menacing faces.  Fine, but I do not have to look at them.  Nor am I taken with his endless black strokes. It is too much of an effort to ward off the brutal strokes as they descend upon me the viewer.  Nor can I take Pollock's drip paintings, yes, one in awhile but they are monotonous.  I do not have to suffer the stern injunctions of Clement Greenberg who told everyone in that period what they were to look at and think.  He is not the high priest of my aesthetics.  Nor Harold Rosenberg, both of them fascists of art criticism, determining what a painting should mean, sometimes telling artists what they were to paint.  What a bankrupt age!  Art fell into the hands of dealers and collectors far more intent on profit and prestige than anything before, and it has never recovered, although as long as there is a class of nouveaux riches there will be art, art criticism, and art auctions.  That is why one loves Agnes Martin for separating herself from the scene.  Everything about her oeuvre spells sanity.  One of the great days of my life was a visit to a show of her stuff at the Pace Gallery and upon leaving I dropped down to another gallery showing an artist I had never heard of-- Jean-Michel Basquiat.  The sight of his canvases on the gallery's walls after the serenity, control, and under statement made into over statement which was Agnes Martin, Basquiat's color, shapes, and violence were like a fabulous and much needed orgasm.  I will never forget that day.

Reflections On Monet's Views Of The Grand Canal

In my researches for the ideas in Sebastian Smee's book I have been consulting art exhibition catalogues, most recently some displaying Monet's Mediterranean scenes.  I lingered over his paintings of the Grand Canal in Venice painted at different hours of the day and thus showing various hues, the canal, the adjacent palazzi and churches, all manner of Venetian city scenes, and quite unconsciously I was able to place myself quite exactly into the locale.  The same was true at Antibes, and Juan des Pins, and all sorts of places he painted. And it came to me how lucky I was in this and in many other ways: that I knew intimately and instinctively my way around some of the most beautiful cities in the world.  True of Venice, true of Rome, of course, of Paris, and London, I could go on and on.  These are places that I have traced into my memory forever, or so I believe.  When I was young and Europe was being bombarded into oblivion, my mother, who carried on a daily breakfast conversation with us children about the progress of the war, was forever lamenting over the eventual disappearance of everything beautiful in this world (she did not include natural wonders like the Grand Tetons or the Grand Canyon, nor indeed any city in the Western Hemisphere).  Impressionable child that I was I grieved along with her.  When the war ended, and I became an adult, my obligations first as a student, then a husband, then a father kept me on these shores, but with clenched teeth I mimicked Scarlett's memorable scene of resolve when she cries out "As God is my witness, I shall never go hungry again!" Only I was resolving come what may I would get to Europe.  And I did and with an intensity and persistence that brought me back so many times, sometimes for the summer, sometimes on sabbatical for year or more.  I traveled and bore into my surroundings, made them mine, drank deeply, smelled the atmosphere.  Perhaps I have no idea of how to get from Point A to Point B in San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or Chicago or New York, or where really I should be going to find something attractive.  But the great European cities, ah, yes, they are mine, now in my memory, I doubt that I shall see them again otherwise.

My Friend The Artist

Readmg Sebaastian Smee's excellent book about artistic rivalries reminded me of the career of a friend.  He joined our high school jumior class as a newcomer  He was not at all the kind of person I was attracted to; neither his looks guaranteed my interest nor his intellect.  He was bright enough but not overly so.  A big tall blond guy with too large a nose, eyes that tended to stare at you rather than embracing you or flirting with you.  He was direct and obvious, not my kind of guy, but he was decent and friendly.  And he was tall, and reasonably athletic, and he was a very good tennis player.  Unllike other overly normal masculine teen males, he chose to be a friend of an overt gay boy, mainly because I was thrilled when he proclaimed he was meant to be an artist.He stays in my mind all these years because he did become an artist, and I acquired four of his paintings over the years.  Two of them have been with me for decades.  One I have had since we were maybe twenty or twenty one.  He painted it when he was nineteen in his parents' basement. I saw it and I bought it -- a stunnner--  oil on canvas depicting a collection of bottle shaped objects, each defined with space between, projected against a black horizontal bar.  It is very much a Morandi-like piece, these bottles, except that the one on the far left of the line is a bottle with another behind, and the two of them when viewed without too much effort of imagination show a well endowed penis with very large testicles.  I know my predilections make such identifications tediously obvious and I never mentioned them to the artist who as I can well imagine would have blushed, a dark red flush lingering on his face, his mouth quivering in confusion.  He was a sweet kid.  Years went by and we met again when both of us were teaching at Stanford University, me classics, he art.  By now he had a gallery in the area. My wife and I acquired a strange somewhat cubist hilltop scene done while he was traveling in Italy.  The hills in outline, the buildings in the town on the hill bathed in an orange glow suggesting sunset were all of them, like so many cubes.  It did not work really.  Never a favorite.  My wife claimed it in the divorce and I don't know what happened to it.  At much the same time I bought from him as a present for my wife a large graphite sketch of the three seated figures of  Giorgione's (now attributed to Titian) Fete Champetre which some see as an inspiration for Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe.  My friend drew superbly and this is a breathtaking example of his skill.  My wife, for whatever reason, declined it in the divorce settlement, and so I took it willingly and it has been something I look at every day, for the constant of the human male's need for clothing and the woman's nudity demanded by male artists.  The painting, perhaps it is a watercolor, that my wife took in exchange, demanded is rather the word, is another marvelous piece painted from a photo I believe of an elderly Italian couple standing before a table, and the tones and accents of their depiction are elided, the slippage of form and color is one of the delightful aspects of the piece.  My daughter now has it beautifully set out on the wall of her living room.  The artist had a wife, three daughters, played lots of tennis, and I thought of him as quite boring if a dear man over all.  My wife was more on his wave length, and I always hoped that they had an affair.  I can imagine him up in Heaven blushing at the idea.  He took up chevrons in paintings when that became all the rage; he became less original, and he lost out in the competition of the art world.  You can mention his name and sometimes people nod in recognition or fake it. But he will always be wonderful, his paintings that I have, at least to me

Life Begins

So it is Tuesday of the first month of the new year 2017.   I no longer marvel at this momentous movement of the calendar as I did when I was young; just too many years have gone by to get excited.  I have been reading in Sebastian Smee's book about the rivalry between Matisse and Picaso, and noting that it was most part entirely civil, never ill mannered.  Much is made of the patronage of the San Francisco Stein family, two branches, equipped with vast sums for buying art, and the Russian moguls who before the Revolution bought widely in Paris, and ironically enough because of state confiscations filled their countries' galleries with contemporary art, the very best.  I have never liked Cubism particularly; I don't respond to it, which is more or less how I judge art.  I am thrilled by Picasso's draftmanship, love those stolid prehistoric ladies, but I guess it is the colors of Matisse that win me.  At the time it seemed to be a popularity contest which is detestable, just as the Times describing contemporary art by what it brings at auction.  But enough of art, must think about my impending class, starting next Thursday week.  This Thursday we have an introductory meeting with all the faculty--coffee and cookies--and I will get to take a glimpse of my classroom.  I am too unstable to stand without support, so I hope there is a lecturn or something similar I can lean against.  One and one half hours.  I hate to sit to teach.  I have gone over the material, a text which I have lectured about certainly upwards of fifty times, not to mention which forms the subject of several books and articles I have written.  It's like all those script readings, rehearsals, blocking, tech, and then it is the day you perform.  More immediately I must go grocery shopping.  The cupboard is bare, so to speak.  If I were to go now--it's just a little after eight, the traffic would perhaps be minimal, my husband is not awake to put in his two cents.  We are planning to cook lasagna for our student and his girl friend on Sunday, actually I was, but my husband has decided he should cook it because I am old and burdened with teaching.  But then there is the recipe.  I found on on the web I really like.  He is however a fuddy duddy; he will have this recipe that he used thirty or forty years ago.  We are so much more sophisticated about Italian herbs, etc.  All this will have passed him by, or eluded him.  I see that I have made my bed, and so I can just up and leave.

Art And Life

My perusal of art exhibition catalogues continues apace.  Delacroix joins the scene but I must say that I do not like his stuff as much as Manet, Degas, and Ingres.  But I am a naif, and need the outline of the figure to feel secure whereas Delacroix, it seems, builds his images solidly from the color out.  I see that Monet does this to perfection and somehow I never noticed that his en plein air painting achieves solids by the juxtaposition of lights and shadow.  I have learned something in this journey through my art catalogues.  Manet's painting of the two clothed males sitting in the grass with a naked model whose clothes she has removed lie nearby while another female nude in the background bathes in a pool, the so-called Dejeuner sur l'herbe, is fascinating for being so modern in its disregard of the outdoors in which it is supposedly lodged, rather featuring a group of people entirely artificially grouped in a fake outdoors--it is entirely real in a completely unreal way.  It clearly looks ahead to our own times.  For some reason it struck me more forcibly this time around the fundamental incongruity of the juxtaposition of clothed men and naked women, sort of a muslim scene in reverse where women are wrapped up and not to be seen and men's corporal outline is available to the eye.  And I thought of the whole of western art, and the ancient Greek attitude toward male nudity, and frontal nudity at that, particularly in their statuary, and the emergence of female nudity in statuary later on, and Christianity's devaluing the male nude, and then the glory of Michelangelo's David, the assertive penis of that great statue, and in these catalogues I have been viewing how much more frequently a male nude is captured from the buttocks. The female breast is everywhere, the male's rear end is the complement.  Fast forward to our sojourns in the spa in Wiesbaden where males and females use the locker rooms and pools equally and nudity is unashamed.  It is great to see males proud of their apparatus of manhood.  One day a group of teenagers had arrived in the pool we were in and immersed themselves in a group laughing and chatting as they soaked boys and girls, and later they rose from the water to leave, the girls with their high tight breasts bobbing along, the boys with their penis and testicles forefront and waving.  Glorious sexual freedom!

Looking Back Over The Years

We watched "Philadelphia" last night, the film where the Tom Hanks character, a rising young lawyer, is infected with AIDS, fired by his prestigious law firm, sues, is defended in court by the Denzel Washington character, an obscure young lawyer willing to take the case with all its unpopular connotations who wins the case through making the jury work through their prejudice to the moral truth.  It took both me and my husband back to another era; he lived in New York then, a young gay male, watching his circle diminished by the disease while the government did nothing, and the public at large displayed their indifference along with their contempt; I, on the other hand, was a married man with four children whose sexual life in those days was pretty much confined to a series of males who would be considered very safe partners, because they were straight males trying something different in another kind of relationship.  Prior to the AIDS epidemic gays were more or  less hidden; the irony of the epidemic was that it opened up for inspection the gay world, when sons came back to Podunk City from New York or San Francisco to die in their childhood beds.  If they were lucky, that is, and their parents took them in.  So AIDS ironically made gay males acceptable, through the always sympathetic spectacle of young men dying.  "Philadelphia" is a real tear-jerker, a feel good movie that skirts the undying hatred of many families, the inherent suspicion of gays by straights, the unyielding hatred of so many Christian churches, all this is pretty much left to the side.  But in real life we two know so many gay males who were lucky or careful enough to survive who are now in their later years so damaged by a lifetime of repression, victims of the national hatred of gays, and the church.  We know so many men whose emotional lives are limited to furtive encounters that can never be revealed, of men shunned by their families, not invited to the family gatherings, men who cannot step out of the shadows and try for normal relationships because of the fear and instinctive repression that a life in the closet has given them, denatured, emotionally crippled, often successful professionals, but barren and empty old queens underneath it all.  Looming over it all are so many branches of the Christian Church not to mention the Jews and the Muslims (why my heart sinks at the thought of Muslim refugees!) who work their insidious damage before a youngster has even thought of sex, and as the Jesuits always say "get them young and you have them for life."  Since the most ardent of our religious public seem also to be devoted to the presidency of Donald Trump we will be interested to see how they reconcile narrow faith, strong prejudice, intolerance toward gays, with a First Lady who in her earlier modeling days walked the runways naked except for high heels.  I can't quite see Eleanor Roosevelt in that guise.