Filed under: photography
August 22, 2014 • 4:58 am 1
Seattle Mayor’s Arts Awards 2014: Stephen Stubbs
Stephen Stubbs
My profile of Stephen Stubbs, one of this year’s recipients of the Mayor’s Arts Awards in Seattle, is now live on City Arts:
When he was coming of age in his native Seattle in the 1960s, Stephen Stubbs experienced a sea change in popular music that glorified the image of the troubadour. Countless musicians picked up a guitar, accompanying themselves to songs intended to be authentic, from the heart.
Stubbs was among them—only the instrument he was plucking was a lute. At Nathan Hale High School, Stubbs had belonged to a madrigal choir, which stoked his curiosity about Renaissance music.
Filed under: culture news, early music, profile
August 21, 2014 • 4:56 pm Comments Off on Aeneas and the White Sow
Aeneas and the White Sow
Aeneas, his son Ascanius, and the prophecy of the white sow (British Museum)
cum tibi sollicito secreti ad fluminis undam
litoreis ingens inventa sub ilicibus sus
triginta capitum fetus enixa iacebit,
alba solo recubans, albi circum ubera nati,
is locus urbis erit, requies ea certa laborum.
Virgil, Aeneid, Book III, 389-393
August 19, 2014 • 1:34 am Comments Off on Prom 40: Haitink and the LSO Trace a Mahlerian Journey through Childhood Innocence
Prom 40: Haitink and the LSO Trace a Mahlerian Journey through Childhood Innocence
Here’s my review for Bachtrack of Bernard Haitink’s Saturday concert with the London Symphony Orchestra (Prom 40):
Having celebrated his 85th birthday this past March, Bernard Haitink continues to demonstrate that he profits from the advantages of age whilst commanding the deftness of a conductor decades his junior. His programme at the Proms on Saturday evening with the London Symphony Orchestra offered musical perspectives on youthfulness and memory by way of Schubert and Mahler, culminating in the songs of innocence and experience of which the latter’s Symphony no. 4 in G major is woven.
Filed under: conductors, Mahler, review, Schubert
August 17, 2014 • 10:28 pm 3
World War One Installation at The Tower
Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, Paul Cummins
The ongoing installation/memorial in honor of the 888,246 soldiers (from the UK and its colonies) who were slaughtered in the Great War is spreading across the Tower of London’s long-dry moat. The installation is the work of ceramic artist Paul Cummins and stage designer Tom Piper (associate designer with the Royal Shakespeare Company).
Why The Tower of London? According to the installation’s website:
During the First World War, the Tower’s moat was used to swear in over 1,600 men who had enlisted by the end of August 1914 at the recruitment station in the City to form the 10th Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers — the so called “stock brokers battalion” who fought for the duration of the war.
The source of the installation’s title:
“The Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red”
by Anonymous (Unknown Soldier)The blood swept lands and seas of red,
Where angels dare to tread.
As I put my hand to reach,
As God cried a tear of pain as the angels fell,
Again and again.As the tears of mine fell to the ground
To sleep with the flowers of red
As any be deadMy children see and work through fields of my
Own with corn and wheat,
Blessed by love so far from pain of my resting
Fields so far from my love.It be time to put my hand up and end this pain
Of living hell, to see the people around me
Fall someone angel as the mist falls around
And the rain so thick with black thunder I hear
Over the clouds, to sleep forever and kiss
The flower of my people gone before time
To sleep and cry no moreI put my hand up and see the land of red,
This is my time to go over,
I may not come back
So sleep, kiss the boys for me.
The famous poppy poem from WWI:
“In Flanders Fields”
by John McCraeIn Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.Filed under: art exhibition, poetry
August 16, 2014 • 1:12 am Comments Off on All Joy of the Worm
All Joy of the Worm
Cleopatra Bitten by the Asp, Guido Reni
“I wish you all joy of the worm,” says the Clown bearing a fatal asp just before the final climax of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. What a strange scene – a clown, with all his Shakespearean-fool punnery, malapropisms, and word games.
And there’s no equivalent of the Bard’s source, Plutarch. What to make of the tone, the odd insistence on the image of the “worm”?
Richard F. Whalen deciphers evidence for the theory that Shakespeare was really the Earl of Oxford: “‘worm’ in French is ‘ver’ — and, of course, the Earl of Oxford’s family name was de Vere.”
Others perceive Masonic symbolism.
In her biography of a few years ago, Stacy Shiff reminds us of Cleopatra’s own identification with an asp:
Cleopatra unsettles more as sage than as seductress; it is less threatening to believe her fatally attractive than fatally intelligent. (Menander’s fourth-century adage — ‘A man who teaches a woman to write should recognize that he is providing poison to an asp’ — was still copied out by schoolchildren hundreds of years after her death.
But what of the Clown’s phallic punning?
From the ending of Ted Hughes’s poem Cleopatra to the Asp:
Drink me, now, whole, with coiled Egypt’s past
Then from my delta swim
Like a fish toward Rome.
Filed under: Shakespeare
August 13, 2014 • 2:59 pm Comments Off on Uplifting
Uplifting
Reviewing cultural historian Andreas Bernard’s Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator, David Trotter singles out the role of individualized control:
The clue to the elevator’s significance lies in the buttons that adorn its interior and exterior. Its automation, at the beginning of the 20th century, created a system of electronic signalling which brought the entire operation under the control of the individual user. In no other mode of transport could a vehicle be hailed, directed and dismissed entirely without assistance, and by a touch so slight it barely amounts to an expenditure of energy. The machine appears to work by information alone. Elevators, Bernard says, reprogrammed the high-rise building. It might be truer to say that they reprogrammed the people who made use of them, in buildings of any kind.
There were, as Trotter points out, many revolutionary consequences: making the skyscraper possible, the “recodification of verticality” (Bernard) — meaning the migration of the “top” class hotel rooms from the bottom literally to the top — the influence on urban planning, etc.
But for all these more or less obvious transformations, Trotter also refers to the elevator’s uncanny symbolic significance in modern life:
Safety first was not so much a motto as a premise. No wonder that the closest high-end TV drama has come to Sartrean nausea is the moment in “Mad Men” when a pair of elevator doors mysteriously parts in front of troubled genius Don Draper, who is left peering in astonishment down into a mechanical abyss. The cables coiling and uncoiling in the shaft stand in for the root of Roquentin’s chestnut tree.
Filed under: book recs, cultural criticism, urban planning
