Good Friday on Grace Street

It should be clear to anyone who comes here that this is most certainly not a news site. Anyone here looking for up-to-the-minute opinions on the issues of the day would be deeply disappointed, and judging from my statistics, this conjecture is well grounded in the evidence before me!

However, occasionally, I manage to submit stories that aren't completely stale.

Grace Street comes by its name easily, perhaps too easily. It begins at Dundas Street, with this church on its corner, across the street from St. John the Baptist, a Spanish language congregation.

And halfway up the street, before on has encountered another set of lights, comes this church, St. Francis of Assisi, our parade patrons. But before St. Francis, there's a French language school, named after a very Catholic Prime Minister.

Just to make things more confusing, the original St. Francis was what is now St. Agnes!

So we have not even gone a city block, and our space has already been delimited by the history of the people who have lived here. And there is no fuller expression of this history than the Good Friday procession which begins and ends here on Grace Street.

So let us now see these people, our people, by virtue of our (new) location as well as the beautiful flexibility of Canadian identity.



You see the flags. Right from the start, the procession informs its observers that this will be an example of the Word in the world. The flags of Canada and Ontario alongside the flags of Portugal and...any ideas? I am not sure to whom the flags with the bird belongs! [update, courtesy of a commenter: It's the Azores!]

But before anyone begins to move, one hears something, the first of our three bands, and they will remind us that this is not a parade, as the word slips so easily from the tongue, but a procession.



So let the procession begin. I will let these images speak for themselves, from that sunny, yet strangely bleak Good Friday. If you want an explanation of the event, just go here.














Now who said this wasn't a parade? There's cotton candy to be had! There were also vendors selling roasted chestnuts and popcorn, and I do not know where they are the rest of the year, because this is the only time I ever see them!



















Here is one of our numerous live-action Jesuses. A tough job, especially given this year the crowd seemed to be significantly larger than last year. Hard to keep serious and solemn when small children are yelling at you to GO! because the procession has ground to a halt for some reason, perhaps because someone up ahead has lost their shoe...





Yes, right below you is the head of John the Baptist...not sure why Herod would be carrying it around, but...



Here comes the big show:



This is the one that makes all the papers - it's the scene where the soldiers beat Jesus up. When I came last year, this was the hardest one to take a decent picture of, mainly because there was a swarm of camera and video crews, capturing every blow and throaty scream of the soldier.

I suppose the media likes this because it "reminds us of His sacrifice", but I suspect we all know better! Mel Gibson anyone?



I actually tried to catch them smiling - an sneeze from the crowd had brought laughter to the beaten Jesus and the soldiers, but I was too slow off the draw!













And here we have a copy of the Image of Edessa, or the Turin Shroud, or...







From here on in, no more live Jesus - I suppose its just too graphic, so instead we're confronted with statues, pulled along by men in uniforms. (Again, I would love to find out what uniforms they're wearing!)



Another band - an Intermezzo:





Throughout all this, there are women singing, speaking the Ave Maria...





Those soldiers again:













And here are our local politicians, doing their duty for the greater good - reelection! No, I shouldn't be so cynical...





And here are our Friars! I wish I had managed to get some good pictures of their chausubles, as they were magnificent!





The Sorrowful Mother with her children.



This outfit, to me, symbolizes more than anything else the gulf between Catholicism and Protestantism...



The final band.









And now, you may join. The faithful walk behind the procession until it arrives back at the church. These people have joined right from the start!



However, and just as at the beginning, the State bookmarks the procession...this is the real end of the show.



Walking away...



Walking away.



Happy Easter. I'm heading off now to celebrate a traditionally, with a solemn viewing of Norman Jewison's Jesus Christ Superstar.

Rather Amazing

Minus the "rather". This is a miniaturized version of the Karlheinz Stockhausen's Helicopter String Quartet.

A friend of mine, whose tastes tended towards the eccentric, went out of his way to get a copy of the Adritti Quartet recording. This version, adapted by Virgil Moorefield, is quite spectacular, especially as a video.

Enjoy! (thanks to Sequenza21 for pointing it out)

A Good Day

I have finally managed to cajole a group of scholars to allow me to sup at the Graduate Table. In exchange for what, you might ask? Just cold hard cash - no souls here, we're modern.

This has been a bit of an odyssey for me, but I'm in, and I hope this will mean only good things for this page. The Doderer posts must begin again, as they foreshadow what has become, and some more work on W.F. Bach over the summer.

In other words, this page will remain as uninteresting to everyone as it has for the two years I've been at this!

Juan Muñoz, The Gambler

Chris Miller over at Mountshang has a post on the sculptor Juan Muñoz. It turns out he hated him, although, ever charitable, gives us an example of something he really liked.

I have another suggestion for Chris regarding Muñoz - Gavin Bryars' Man in a Room Gambling. It was a collaboration between Muñoz and Bryars, and it's excellent.

As the linked piece notes, the pieces are 5 minute lessons on card cheating - turns out Muñoz was an amateur magician. This work influenced me greatly - it rekindled my childhood interest in magic, although I must admit that my recently purchased copy of Erdnase's Expert at the Card Table remains relatively unperused...hmmm...perhaps that's a nice summer project, learning to cheat at cards.

With the rise of poker, and my deep hatred of state-run gambling (I'm quite serious, I don't know if there's any other state action outside of sanctioned violence more immoral than state-run gambling), learning to cheat at cards seems like something that could move one up in the world these days, indeed, someone could see cheating at cards to bring down state-run gambling as a kind of noble duty, an act of civil disobedience. Not I, of course...

Back to the music. There is great beauty in the deception presented here. Bryars and Muñoz trick one into thinking they are listening to broadcast segment, and Bryars music seduces the ears away from Muñoz's instruction - I have found it virtually impossible to concentrate - aural misdirection.

I know of no more pleasant way to learn the card sharper's noble art than through this work. In addition to Erdnase and Muñoz, I would also suggest a green felt cloth, and a copy of this Rembrandt to keep you ever in the mood.

And dogs playing baccarat. No poker here at the Transcontinental.

Gargantua and Memory

A quick note - has anyone ever considered the possibility that Rabelais' Gargantua and of Pantagruel is the Ars memoriae made explicit? That the work is just a massive unfolding of his interior mnemonic system?

Just a question, although it would go a long way towards explaining the work...I'm not trying to reduce the work, this is merely something that occured to me while reading it alongside Yates' The Art of Memory.

Adam De La Halle and French Comic Opera

A request for caution on making causal connections. The example seems petty, but its egregiousness sharpens the point.

Just because a 13th Century trouvère happened to write a play that included music does not make his work a forerunner of 19th Century French comic opera. He is not an Offenbach avant la lettre.

Now I understand the impulse to make the connection. Adam spent some of his life on what is now French soil, and happened to write something about Robin and Marion in a language that eventually became part of the Langue Française.

In a related tangent, that Robin isn't the Robin you're thinking about, but there's a chance that the Marion is.

This is the tricky thing about causality. Kripke's moment of baptism plays a role here, and as far as anyone can tell, the earliest composers of French opera derived their ideas not from dear old Adam, but the turn of the 17th Century Italians who invented opera, who, as far as anyone can tell, did not get their ideas from a local troupe doing a revival of Robin and Marion, but skipped all the way back to the Greeks (and it turns out they got it wrong - uh, God bless conceptual confusion).

So although it is nice to say that he was a forerunner to French comic opera, he was no more a forerunner of French Comic Opera than his Le jeu de la feuillee was a forerunner of Waiting for Godot.

These causal chains are very important, and we musicians and musicologists tend to make them ather casually. We shouldn't, in the same way that we shouldn't really assume that the French play French music better than any German would, because to do so is part of a mass forgetting of the sheer cosmopolitanism of western music over the past 900 years.

Does French comic opera really need this kind of pedigree? I'm not so sure, but it does beg the question - why is there this kind of free association in musical circle between the redisovered music of the past and music of the more recent present?

Why do we often look at Adam de la Halle, or Gesualdo, or Matteo de Perugia as heralds of the future, instead of orphans of the past? What does this say about how we talk about music?

And then bigger questions loom, ones that take us out of musicology and into aesthetics - what ensures a style's continuity, and what causes a style to be orphaned?

I think buried these questions is an aesthetics that is nominalist in inclination, but realist in practice. The case of Adam de la Halle is a negative example, which is why it can be taken care of in a blog post, but this, I hope, is only the beginning.

On the Varieties

In the publish and perish world of blogging, it is clear that I am an twitching corpse. To wit, I have been slowly writing a paean to Conrad's deciding to walk away from the magnificent edifice that is the Varieties of Unreligious Experience.

And then the bugger comments on his own blog that he will be returning! So please take the following in the spirit that it was intended, and despite its irrelevance...

I was not surprised to see Conrad go in January. One could feel it in the mood of the blog. We often find ourselves discussing the coldness of online communication, and yet there was something in the air, a stench, that made it clear that the staff had been broken above the head of what is, perhaps, what James Joyce's blog would look like if had turned out to be a patriarch and thus 780 years away from the ground.

In looking over his body of work, especially the older stuff, the first few months, it is amazing to see, in hindsight, just how bloggy Conrad's writings were. Or weren't. He somehow had managed to transcend the constraints of the blogosphere and create what is perhaps the only standing work of art on the net.

An audacious claim? Absolutely. Yes, there are sites devoted to the exploration of electronic media, and yet their self-consciousness somehow distances them from the medium itself - in absorbing their McLuhan, they have missed the whole point. Conrad, in stark contrast, is the message, he is not the hope of promise of blogging, or what people strive for in the online world, rather, his work is the sublimation of the medium itself.

For this reason, I hold Conrad largely responsible for both keeping me in blogging, and keeping me out. I was thinking I would do something on plain language - he's been there. More recently, I was going to talk about Mabuse, and was disheartened to see...he's been there too. His voice seemed to have been everywhere, and this was after 4 months!

I feel bad for not commenting on his blog much, however, what does one do when Conrad so deftly drains his subjects of the very possibility of challenge, or perhaps discussion? Yes, the pedants could nitpick, and I suspect this is part of what he wanted, but comments on his blog often felt like scribbling notes into an illuminated manuscript. And perhaps this is why his earlier post invited more discussion, things were more open, or interspersed with fare that allowed people to discuss. I suppose my biggest problem with him, in this respect,was that I agreed with him virtually all the time, we shared a very similar philosophical outlook, and there was not much more for me to contribute beyond what he was already doing so well.

Tout court, I miss the Varieties. I find myself sifting through its archives, blown away by the sheer volume of it, especially in the first year. And his writing wears well - try looking at some 2 year old conversations on my blog and see how they've aged like an opened bottle of cheap wine compared to his work. Ah well...

I suppose part of my problem is that I have yet find my voice - I am still in my Lehrjahre, it seems. And with Gawain's sporadic posting, things feel rather sparse around here. Hard to explain why. We'll see.

Pudelfrage

This sentence from Faust leaps out to me as something which should be the subject of a painting:

Faust mit dem Pudel hereintretend

Any takers? Or, better yet, has anyone painted Faust with a dog?

Goethe's Faust

I am trying to read it.

In German.

There are some strong reasons for this, some of which will emerge around here in the near future, barring unforeseen circumstances. However, letting you, that guy in Pennsylvania who keeps looking for more Doderer entries, know about that little bit of information will only serve to highlight the absurdity of my current predicament, which is:

Taking into account my current comprehension of the German language, I have roughly calculated (linearly, as I do not know the curve at which my learning German through reading Faust will quicken my reading of Faust) that it will take me 77 hours to read the entire first part of Faust.

So there.

Right now, I’m into the Prolog im Himmel, in other words, barely on my way to hell and back again. And in order to get back to the Demons, I must make a trip with Mephistopheles!