Is there a God

Yesterday in my first visit to the MET, I experienced for the first time, the works of El Greco. In his painting View of Toledo I found more truth about the nature of the universe than a scientific photograph of that city could give me. The gallery label read: “it seeks to portray the essence of the city rather than to document its actual appearance. In Aristotelean terms, it substitutes poetic for historic truth.”

What’s the endgame of the truth you seek? What are your principles and do you strive to wear them or embody them? Mrs. Goldstein trusts her own rapture when it comes to Love because the endgame of her marriage has turned out well. Helen Keller was religious and her endgame was to change countless lives. Bill gates is an atheist and his endgame has been to change countless lives.

It’s like the Beatles song says, “Whatever gets you through the night.” Whatever it takes to get you through that darkness, just be ready for the Rosy-fingered Dawn of Homer – and of the good.

So that is the proposition I bring to the betting parlor of Pascal. I will strive to live up to dawn of my principles, and if it turns out – even though I passed on worshiping the big guy – there is a man upstairs, my wager is he will nice enough to let me duck under the velvet rope.

http://www.radioopensource.org/erica-hirshlers-biography-of-a-masterpiece/

I see the burgeoning independence of femininity in the face of futility…just as I see here:

http://www.allpaintings.org/d/54618-1/Edgar+Degas+-+The+Duchess+di+Montajesi+with+Her+Daughters.jpg

I also notice that the vases are much bigger than the girls…I sense those vases taking precedence in this household…these ornaments so priceless are give license to say more than the adolescents in the room, I suspect.

And the dresses of these prim and proper white girls all match a whiteness that bonds them in blandness. Ironically the head of this household could surely go on for hours about the vibrant colors of their rug, but the style of their offsping will most assuredly stay beneath the rug…emotions in this painting are kept as close to the vest as the motionless hands of the girls.

Now that I’ve looked at the painting, I will listen to the interview and post later on. Thank you, Christopher Lydon, as always. Lots of Love. We especially need the arts as an antidote of beauty during this oppression of carnage.

Pops

“Mayann told me that the night I was born there was a great big shooting scrape in the Alley and the two guys killed each other. It was the Fourth of July, a big holiday in New Orleans, when almost anything can happen.”

Personally, I see Mr. Monk through the prism of race relations, and I see Mr. Armstrong through the prism of The Big Easy…New Orleans.

Of course Louis had his own genius but it was the meshing of his with the genius of that adolescent city by the bayou that forged his icon. In the same way the genius of Helen Keller needed the genius of Anne Sullivan to create an alchemy of transcendence.

In Jamaica I made a nine mile pilgrimage up a mountain to view the vista from Bob Marley’s birthplace, then to his home in the mercurial streets of Kingston, and finally I stood in the waveless serene shores of the island’s sea…only then did I sense the roots of the Mr. Marley’s genius.

Satchmo’s genius percolated in the Petri dish of Storyville, a red-light district whose motto was “Order of the Garter: Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense (Shame to Him Who Evil Thinks.)”

“There were all kinds of thrills for me in Storyville. On every corner I could hear music. And such good music! The music I wanted to hear. It was worth my salary – the little I did get [delivering hard coal] – just to go into Storyville. It seemed as though the bands were shooting at each other with those riffs.”

Besides Storyville from what I can tell, there are at least two other important influences in his life, one is the Second Line, and the other is strong women. The Second Line developed his chops, the women his empathy and fortitude.

After one particular Second Line funeral: “They patted us on the back and just wouldn’t let us alone. They hired us several times afterward. After all, we proved to them that any learned musician can read music, but they can’t all swing.”

The strong women were his wife, sister, grandmother, greatgrandmother, and his mother Mayann: “She was glad to say hello to everybody and she always held her head up. She never envied anybody. I guess I must have inherited this trait from Mayann.”

You mentioned in this hour that Armstrong’s mother was a prostitute. I don’t think that can be understated. And for a time, Louie was a reluctant pimp. Louis was from such a poor part of town, Liberty and Perdido, that he was looked down on at the Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys. Later on when he was sent as a boy – to be the man – and take care of his sick mother, he rode his first bus and found out he had to sit in the back because he was black. Only years later when he arrived in Chicago did he know that as a musician he had finally arrived…and that’s only because King Oliver told him he would have a room with “a private bath.”

This is the man who took nothing for granted in life, not a meal, not a bath, not a breath…It’s all a blessing to Pops. And that makes Pops a blessing to all of us. The lesson of Louie Armstrong that I take with me through life is to take nothing for granted, not even joy.

A response to A Woman

“A woman”…I have a memory I cherish of a waterfall in Jamaica. It’s not a waterfall someone busses you in to look at, it’s one that zig zags flat down the mountain, enough so that you can walk the whole way through the water. It takes a few hours.

My cousin and my best friend and I began our decent at the top of this mountain in Negril…a wild sanctuary of green lush grass and welcoming trees. In the middle lies a wooden makeshift bar with a whole lotta rum at the ready. Mostly I recall the sound of perpetual thunder… which was actually the forever roaring water flowing down the mountain right close. The contrast of that rumble of rapids with the moneyless serenity of wild green vegetation at the summit was spiritual I tell you!

At the top is where we met our guide, a dreadlocked soulful Rasta named…I can’t remember his damn name but he was soulful. On the way down the falls, another random Rasta pops out to offer some ganja which you smoke thank you, and thus the decent becomes uplifting…the glare of the river-froth dances with darting sun rays that hover and bounce off edges of rocks on all sides. Thousands of tons of water gush down and rage alive in your ear. Shared knowing smiles from your loved ones and new ones – the Rasta – steal the show. To boot we’re talking cold crisp invigorating rapids lapping at your hips, up your bare skin…egging you on and holding you down. I honestly don’t have any memories of us reaching the bottom of this mountain.

“A woman,” I tell you my story to get to that line – your passion eggs you on and holds you down. That journey for us down that waterfall was of course not about getting to the bottom. The only moments I remember my heart racing in those rapids were with shared stares from afar…connections amidst the chaos.

I hear your story and I sense you and the object of your affection pushing on, the way we all must. But I also feel your heat as you report to us the gushing water around your hips and the hot rays wetting your eyes.

So please don’t fret about where your going. In time you will only recall the rapids. Of course, I do understand you have to get to the bottom of the mountain before nightfall…which looms. Yet it is not dark yet.

Orhan Pamuk and his Museum

I dated a woman recently whose job it was to design museums, which of course struck me as a very cool job. Along with her exquisite taste (helps with the job) she was witty, insightful, and attractive, and my only thought was – how am I not gonna screw this up.

After a few dates though, I was looking for a way out, my romantic notions were deflated – of both her and her vocation. First of all, it turns out that not every museum is like the MET, there is a huge mass of niche museums large and small that are put together for reasons other than the greater good; reasons such as propaganda, politics, and conceit, much of it put together by people in expensive suits with a price in mind throughout.

Then there was her exquisite taste I spoke of earlier, it had quickly become oppressive. She was sending every glass of wine back if it didn’t meet her standards, and she would have major dialogues with the waiter about the particular ingredients of a dish – yet she was pleasant with the server mind you. Food, music, theater, all of it had to pass muster with the curating in her mind’s museum.

I realized this woman was my Gilbert Osmond, from “A Portrait of a Lady,” who is described in the book as “thinking that life was a matter of connoisseurship.”

Speaking to Madame Merle about the collection of art in his home: “I don’t object to showing my things – when people are not idiots.” Merle responds: “you do it delightfully. As cicerone [tour guide] of your museum you appear to particular advantage.”

Isabel stayed enchanted with her cicerone longer than I…she married hers. Only later does she realize her error: “Osmonds’ beautiful mind indeed seemed to peep down from a small high window and mock at her.” “Under all his culture, his cleverness, his amenity, under his good-nature, his facility, his knowledge of life, his egotism lay hidden like a serpent in the bank of flowers.”

Yes, novels can be like a museum, but what kind of museum and what is the ultimate ideal that drives it’s content and curation? Are they Osmond museums and novels or are they Isabel?

“He had his ideal, just as she had tried to have hers; only it was strange that people should seek for justice in such different quarters.” ———– “Her notion of the aristocratic life was simply the union of great knowledge with great liberty; the knowledge would give one a sense of duty and the liberty a sense of enjoyment. But for Osmond it was altogether a thing of forms, a conscious, calculated attitude.”

Monk and Jazz

“So a lot of critics didn’t like me back then—still don’t today—because they saw me as an arrogant little nigger. Maybe I was, I don’t know, but I do know that I wasn’t going to have to write about them. Anyway, Max and Monk felt like that, and J.J. and Bud Powell, too. So that’s what brought us close together, this attitude about ourselves and our music.” – Miles

When I think of my favorite Jazz – and especially when I think of Monk – it’s through the prism of race relations. Emasculating bigotry and the consequential “double consciousness,” permeated both the playing of, and listening to, this American art.

For Monk, there was even a third consciousness, that of a man possessed. “he was a great put-on artist, too, and that’s the way he kept people off him, by acting crazy like he did.” – Miles

“Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.”

Monk takes Emerson’s words to heart. So much so that he refuses to conform to even his African American contemporaries. One can imagine Monk quoting Shakespeare:

“I am too high-born to be propertied,
To be a secondary at control
Or useful serving-man and instrument”

Miles gushes over Monk in his autobiography, but he also recounts the legendary controversy over his asking Monk to lay out and not play behind him on the album they did together. Because “Monk never did know how to play behind a horn player.”

What I read into the controversy is that Monk did not want to be secondary to Miles…nor should he be…nor will he be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBP9tYncw8E

Great interview, and I love the insight about Monk influencing the sounds of the album “Money Jungle.”

Heart vs. Head

I’ve seen the following quote attributed to Abigail Adams:

“I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.”

If she indeed said it, I’m sure it was inspired by her husband’s rival/friend, Thomas Jefferson.

Maybe the best critique of Jefferson’s contradictory nature came from Thomas Jefferson himself, in his “Head vs. Heart” love letter to Maria Cosway.

http://www.pbs.org/jefferson/archives/documents/frame_ih198172.htm

At one point his heart tells his head:

“When nature assigned us the same habitation, she gave us over it a divided empire. To you she allotted the field of science; to me that of morals. When the circle is to be squared, or the orbit of a comet to be traced; when the arch of greatest strength, or the solid of least resistance is to be investigated, take up the problem; it is yours; nature has given me no cognizance of it. In like manner, in denying to you the feelings of sympathy, of benevolence, of gratitude, of justice, of love, of friendship, she has excluded you from their controul. To these she has adapted the mechanism of the heart. Morals were too essential to the happiness of man to be risked on the incertain combinations of the head. She laid their foundation therefore in sentiment, not in science.”

Could it be that in the cohabitation of our new country, Hamilton was the head and Jefferson the heart? And could it be that Jefferson’s rationalization for keeping slaves came from his head, and writing the words, “all men are created equal,” came from his heart?

And could it be that 2009 will go down as the year the world waited out a Battle Royale between the Head and Heart in the “divided empire” of Barack Obama’s mind?

head