The Royal Ontario Museum I

I was at the ROM for a short visit on the weekend, and took a few shots. The ROM is distinctly unfriendly to photographers - no flash, no tripod, everything's behind glass and for the most part, dimly lit.

However, the ROM has the largest collection of Asian art (Asian being the continent, not the cultures) and as it's the only section open right now, it's going to have to do. I also happen to know that a full third of the blogs who link to me are deeply interested in the art of the Orient...

To them all I can say is: There will be many more shots - eventually! And I will make it to the recently renovated and expanded Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Arts one day soon.

And I do have some essays in the works, the problem being that as I dive further into the subject matter, I find myself getting lost in a sea of journal articles and books. But it's a pleasure anyway, and I hope they'll be as pleasure to you once I'm done. But without further ado, here are some pictures. I leave it up to my readers to tell me what these are.

First, of course, the tableware. This was my second favourite piece - my favourite piece didn't photograph so well.
















I just really like the simply, modern feel to this 19th Century chinese tea set. I'll get more info next time I'm there. I know I keep apologizing, but another reason why these shots didn't work out was because I was chasing my son around, trying to keep him from toppling statues of inestimable value.
















From a better angle - you see the point:
















Now some plates - these weren't the best there, but they're the best of what turned out:
















I quite liked this one:

















The detail in the illustration on this bowl is quite remarkable:

















And a beautiful little teapot:





















How about some statues? The current exhibition in the asian collections concerns heaven and hell- the guy up top and this fellow both have quite a bit of character in this regard, although I wish I understood the significance of the body language:





















A buddha - it is the Chinese collection, after all:




















Some more:
















The final pieces here are actually two enormous wall paintings- I will get details! Perhaps a post on these alone would be nice. Focus the mind, linger over details...yes, yes!




























Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this brief look at our local hoard. Dear readers, feel free to tell me what it is I've shown you - I profess total and utter ignorance.

But I look forward to the knowing.

Richter at the Transcontinental - Finale

For those of you who couldn't spend a mere three hours watching the documentary I've featured here, here's all you need to see:

Idling

What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whaever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.

Kenko, you speak to my condition.

Theatre of Life

Listen.

FIRST, EXALTATION. Let us speak of that. The change that occurs when we are lifted out of the tight little cages of our daily realities. To be hurled beyond our limits into the cosmos of magnificent forces, to fly into the beams of these forces and if we blink, to have our eyes and ears and senses tripped open against the mind's will to the sensational and miraculous. To feel these forces explode in our faces, against our bodies, breaking all encrustations and releasing us with a wild fluttering of freedom. Let us first speak of that. How everything becomes new. And if we return to our daily routines, they are no longer routines, but scintillate and have become magnificent by our sensing them with fresh eyes and noses and minds and bodies. Let us speak of this exaltation which has driven us out of ourselves to experience the life we have missed or only vaguely sensed, even resisted.

This must be the first purpose of art.

-R. Murray Schafer, The Theatre of Confluence II, Patria: The Complete Cycle.

There was a Christmas in the air today. The air was crisp, and the street was quiet, except for the third part of Steve Reich's Drumming, turned on at just the right moment, the moment that took music and my senses and transformed it into theatre.

I imagine the bells, the sleigh bells, the glockenspiels in the middle of the park, where the trash can is. And then I consider the banality of the image and I realise that I don't need to imagine a situation, an artifice, because this music, in this place, at this moment, has turned the world into a stage without actors, yet here runs the show.

That feeling remains with me until I arrive at work.

***

I am not a fatalist. I used to be, and the traces of that desperate state linger into my thoughts when I pick a book off the shelf which weaves what some disparate thoughts into a kind of unity.

R. Murray Schafer is, they say, Canada's greatest living composer. He is also a phenomenal writer, as his book about his Patria cycle demonstrates. This is a man who should have an opinion column, or a pulpit where people can hear him. He speaks as though he knows something. He speaks like Wagner, a man I suspect he dislikes because he understands him too well. He is a musician, and a writer, and I will leave things at that.

His book, which sat on my shelf, untouched, was picked up again when I discovered that I will be very near Haliburton when he stages the Princess of the Stars at the end of August. I will attend the performance, which is on a par with Der Ring, or Stockhausen's Licht, except that as a Canadian composer, no one in Canada cares about what he's doing, and certainly not, as he describes in harrowing detail in his book, the Canadian Opera Company.

But what I am interested in now, right now, is how moments of theatre, like the moment I descibe above, happen. Music plays a large role in these experience, not as a kind of movie soundtrack, but as something greater, something that beings about a fullness of experience, ritualizing and theatricalizing our space.

More importantly, how and where do we bring them about? How do we reengage a bored, ritual-hating society?

What in the nexus between perception, concsiousness and ritual makes for art, and what makes a moment a dramatic one as opposed to a mere duration of unmarked time?

But! There is much work to be done, and Reich's American gamelan calls me to sleep.

The Statues of Queen's Park: Edward VII

With this post, I surpass the total number of posts on Le Voir Dit. The Transcontinental presses on, full steam ahead. As Chris Miller commented in my initial, this must be the right place.

Evoking Mr. Miller however, is merely a segway to the first of a series of posts (Yes, I like series, they keep me grounded. The question is whether or not I finish any of them!) on statues of Queen's Park here in Toronto. I know nothing about sculpture, but I hope to learn more via the reactions of my readers.

So without further ado...




















I probably could have edited the above, but what's a photo essay without a bit of bad photography?















Here's the statue itself. The low number of photos are mainly due to the fact that my batteries died after snapping the final shot.















There's a lightness to this work, isn't there? I especially like the horse in the show below.




















Really, this sculpture is about the horse, and not the rider, isn't it? Well, we'll have to wait for the ice to melt for me to get close enough to the Edward VII.

My favourite view:

Night Thoughts on Techne

I am a big fan of the Weekend Financial Times. Last week, I had a rare opportunity to read nearly the entire paper at one siting, while in the waiting room of a hospital.

One of the most enjoyable pieces last week was the headline article in the FT Weekend section by the first violinist of the Takács String Quartet, Edward Dusinberre. Yes, you read that right - a full two pages of a major newspaper devoted to a violinist writing about the arrival and integration of their newest member, Geraldine 'Geri' Walther. There's hope for humanity yet, right?

Well, perusing the Letters section of this weekend's FT, I discovered a letter from a certain Felix A.H. Allender of Switzerland, who took rather large exception to Dusinberre's piece. He writes,

With a few exceptions (Richard Wagner comes to mind) musicians (and painters), no matter how excellent, should not write or certainly not be published, whatever rubbish they write. Let them stick to the art in which they excel.

Well then. Although it seems the main source of his umbrage was the fact that the article fails to mention the founder of the quartet, Gabor Takács-Nagy, who also happens to live in Switzerland, his categorical salvo urging musicians to stay in the kitchen, where they belong, struck me to the quick, for you see...

I am a musician.

So what now? Is Felix an old coot, or is he onto something? Does God hand out artistic gifts by the category? Why on earth would he single out Wagner as both a great musician and a great writer?

I cannot draw, and so it's doubtful that my stick figure Der Ring Des Nibelungen will ever find its way to a publisher, but I am a writer by trade and a musician by training, so despite the facility in which his comment could be summarily dismissed, it stuck.

Why? Well, to be more charitable to Mr.Allender, I wonder if his point is this: An artist is there to create art. When he (or she, but let's just assume I talking about myself in the 3rd person) is in public, and isn't creating art, he should remain perfectly silent.

Furthermore, by publishing a piece of journalism, he's doing a disservice to his art, and so, for everyone's benefit, he should refrain from doing anything public not related to his art, like writing articles, recommending stock purchases to friends and participating in politics.

Seen this way, his view begins to resemble some far more commonplace views about the role of the artist in society, that the artist simply should avoid these things, that it is not their place. I am not saying this is a bad view, merely that it's one that has a certain resonance.

I wonder what Mr. Allender would think of say, an engineer or banker penning a column for the FT? Would he have been so indignant, and if not, why? What makes our crafts so special as to make it dangerous for us to do things outside of them?

To be honest, I think he's got a point here, but I struggle to articulate what it is. Can you help?

Richter At The Transcontinental II

Friday's isn't really a night for essays long or short, so let's watch a movie together instead - Part II of Sviatoslav Richter: The Enigma.

van Karajanstein reads von Doderer II - Overture

Overture is von Doderer's name for the opening chapter of The Demons. Wait, let me back up a bit.

There's an inscription under the title, a line of Tacitus, from his Histories, I, i:

Malvolence wears the false face of honesty.

You could almost miss it, tucked down there on a page most of us flip past without thinking. Indeed, I had just read the Overture when I remembered it was there. But perhaps we're better off forgetting about it right now.

The translators, Richard and Clara Winston, provide a helpful note for our journey. They indicate that many regard the book before us as the most important Austrian novel of the twentieth century. And if that isn't enough for you, there's a promotional page at the back which tells us that Alfred Knopf himself addressed the American public in a letter extolling the virtues of The Demons. The Americans didn't bite.

So, unlike, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, and Faulkner, von Doderer remains a mystery to we English speakers. You won't find him on all those academic literary blogs, or the blogs that talk about being in academic literary studies. But at least we have a translation of him, unlike poor Teodor Parnicki, who sits there, untranslated, into the world's second language.

So we are alone with von Doderer, here, and only here.

***

For a good long while now I have been living in what used to be Schlaggenberg's room.

Our narrator is called Georg von Geyrenhoff. He is a retired civil servant. He was clever enough to get some money into American stocks so that when the Great War came and went, while the great and glorious Austro-Hungarian Empire vanished from the face of the earth, and along with it everyone's money, he managed to hang onto a tidy sum, and is, according to himself, now retired from the civil service for an excellent reason - moral shame.

As things were, I preferred not to stay on in a post which offered little in the way of meaningful work and contribution to society, and merely provided a dull livelihood, for I was beginning to feel in an increasingly oppressive fashion that this livelihood was won at the expense of my toiling fellow-citizens.

Amen, von Geyrenhoff. From the depths of my soul, amen.

He tells us that he is writing the chronicle of his "crowd". We know nothing yet of this crowd, but we encounter one member, perhaps, a Financial Counselor Levielle. He is French, easily angered, and quite patronizing toward von Geyrenhoff. I suspect he is the other side of the coin of resentment von Geyrenhoff speaks of. Leveille toils as well, and yet clearly feels none of the shame our narrator does. Our narrator is a likeable man.

And yet - in fact you need only draw a single thread at any point you choose out of the fabric of life and the run will make a pathway across the whole, and down that wider pathway each of the other threads will become successively visible, one by one. For the whole is contained in the smallest segment of anyone's life-story...

There we have in a tight analogy a good chunk of the Monadology of Leibniz.

The Overture is von Geyrenhoff on narration. He tells us how he writes things, how he fixes dates, how he is not involved in the events of the book, and yet he is intimately involved with the crowd. He's interested in trivial details, details that have much more meaning to him than the big story.

But really, the Overture is about von Geyrenhoff's view. From his studio, to the Romanesque church. And perhaps a bit further.

And this hand points for me beyond the ridiculous boundaries of an individual life, and above all these husks and boundaries, points like the outstretched hand of a gigantic clock whose extension in space is like a shot and rolls like the boom of a cannon through all my chambers.

Tacetus.

Shostakovich Redeemed (In my mind)

I attended the COC's production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk last Thursday. The performance was excellent, although the low brass were too loud. And I say that as a tuba player! I know the parts are awesome, but no one could hear anything but you!

The tuba is the orchestra's brassiere - there to support, but never to get in the way! But this is a minor complaint, nay, or if you prefer, an act of heresy.

So if you live in or around Toronto, go see it, because it seems to be some of his finest music in the service of some excellent dramatic material. Indeed, between this and his piano quintet, I'm beginning to be convinced that Shostakovich deserves at least some of the accolades he received last year on the occasion of his centenary. Or at least I feel safe to say that he is not, as Boulez said (via some folks at Sequenza21), a fourth pressing of Mahler.

But I don't really want to review Lady Macbeth. I'm much more interested in how important boredom was in the opera as a dramatic device, and how the audience reaction to the operas more raunchy moments spoke volumes about the conceptual space we inhabit when it comes to sex. But that essay's still in the shop, so you'll have to settle for this. And yes, I am going to get to my Doderer posts, beginning tomorrow.

The Irrelevance of Ritual in the Daily Life of The People of Toronto

While waiting for a bus on the corner of Dundas and Ossington, I was witness to a horrible moment. Indeed, I was perhaps the only witness.

As I stood there, a funeral procession turned north onto Ossington from Dundas, snaking its way north up Ossington to wherever this funeral procession was going. So the funerary limousine turned, followed by the hearse, the casket within in a dark reddish wood, brushed metal along the sides.

I remember the casket well because I knew someone lay there.

***

I have been reading, and enjoying, the three-volume history of the Byzantine Empire by John Julius Norwich. Like the eminent Mr. Roth, I do not much enjoy the act of reading. However, and perhaps it's the fact-loving little boy in me, I can down a 500-page history with ease and delight while my copy of Watt sits there, unopened and unthought.

Now for those of you unschooled in the history of Eastern Roman Empire, it is as blood-soaked as any. The richness of humanity's capacity for unbridled butchery is well represented in these chronicles.

However, the sweetness of the 2nd Viscount Norwich's prose makes even the tale of Krum the Bulgar turning Nikephoros I's skull into a drinking cup an altogether charming thing to do.

Shining through the gore is this wonderfully complex sense the Byzantians had that they were civilized. Indeed, they were civilization.

And this fact is part of our (you know what I mean here) common mythology about the past - when darkness set upon the Western Roman Empire, it was Byzantium who held up the cause of western civilization by just being there, waiting for the Italians to take it back 1000 years later.

***

So there I stood, in this most civilized city, almost unbearably civilized, Peter Ustinov's accursed scrap weighing heavily on nearly every utterance by our city fathers, when around five cars into the funeral procession comes a taxicab.

Unlike most major centres, Toronto still has a vibrant streetcar system throughout our downtown core. A streetcar stood there, motionless, and, having just let its passengers off, closed its doors. Sensing an opportunity in the way cabbies do, one of Toronto's many delightfully horrible cab drivers decided he simply could not wait any longer and slipped around the streetcar, and in front of the procession.

The light to cross Ossington now red, the funeral procession, who would in other circumstances be allowed to turn unimpeded (oh you poor deceased - where was your police detail?), are now stuck behind the cab stuck at a red light.

Green light. The cab barrels straight through, continuing on Dundas. Then, and this, my friends, is the point of the story, so does the first car of the funeral procession. So does the next one, each car crossing the threshold of the intersection, looking north up Ossington and quite obviously thinking to themselves "I think the cemetery's up that way".

I am watching all of this, and I am utterly powerless to stop it. I wave to some of them, attempting to get them to turn, but they look at me, waving to them in downtown Toronto, and they think I'm some nut waving to a death train like the circus is in town.

So I stop, and I think about the dead man and woman for whom this is all for, whose funeral procession has been ruined by a cab driver before my very eyes, and I wonder what has happened.

Is this blind necessity, or is it a manifestation of the civilized world of which I am a part, a world where people's lives are valued, but people's rituals are not? And then I realise that rituals often mean more to me than people, and I wonder for a moment if my spirit might not have been better off in Byzantium than here.