WhirledView

Weekend Project: Ta Lendab Mesipuu Poole

by CKR

I saw "The Singing Revolution" twice this past week, might see it again. It reminded me of something I've understood quite imperfectly from the last Laulupidu in 2004. This video will give you some of the feeling, I think, although I suspect you had to be there.

I was practically crying with the emotion of the crowd. The memory almost makes me cry now. And the applause insisted on a second singing, which evoked even more emotion.

"Ta lendab mesipuu poole" means "It flies toward the honey tree," obviously referring to a bee. My Estonian isn't good enough to get all the words as they're sung, so I have pondered that title. In the film, there is a reference to the Soviet Union reaching west toward Estonia like a bear toward a honey tree, and just a tiny bit from the song.

So I've found the words:

Ta lendab lillest lillesse,
ja lendab mesipuu poole;
ja tõuseb kõuepilv ülesse -
ta lendab mesipuu poole.

Ja langevad teele tuhanded;
veel koju jõuavad tuhanded
ja viivad vaeva ja hoole
ja lendavad mesipuu poole!

Nii hing, oh hing, sa raskel a'al -
kuis õhkad sa isamaa poole;
kas kodu sa, kas võõral maal -
kuis ihkad sa isamaa poole!

Ja puhugu vastu sull' surmatuul
ja lennaku vastu sull' surmakuul:
sa unustad surma ja hoole
ning tõttad isamaa poole!

I can't quite read it all, but I'm starting to see. Like the bee flies to the honey tree, so my spirit flies toward my homeland. That's not exact; I need to look up some of the words.

And maybe PHK or I will write a review of the film. Quick version: It's a very good film. See it if you can. You don't need to understand Estonian.

Update: The review is here.

Forty Years Ago

by CKR

Martin Luther King's death was a turning point, from the principled civil rights demonstrations of the early sixties to the insanities that came later. Those insanities, unfortunately, mark too much of what we label "The Sixties." David Brooks recognizes this today.

E. J. Dionne details the political turning. As I read this article, I wondered how our present would have been shaped by a narrative that focused on the white racist sniper and his fading ideology rather than the one we we received about blacks and youth being out of control.

And Edward W. Brooke, one of the two surviving members of the Kerner Commission that looked into the causes of the riots that followed King's death in cities across the country, reminds us that the problems that report detailed continue today. The other surviving member, Fred Harris, was a guest on Bill Moyers's program last Friday.

As I'm thinking of alternative history, it occurs to me that a world in which Martin Luther King was not killed in this way would be worth thinking out. Or even the world of that alternative narrative.

There were riots in the cities over the war; whites and blacks, under King's leadership, were able to come together on that. The nation was shocked to recognize the conditions described in the Kerner Report and moved to rebuild the cities in a massive works project that prevented the inflation and oil shock of the seventies. That made a firmer platform for the internet boom to take off from, and although it bubbled, it didn't collapse so violently. Our foreign policy was able to be more alert and responsive, on the basis of that prosperity. The Soviet Union collapsed in pretty much the same way, but we offered the fifteen former Soviet Republics a Marshall Plan that rebuilt Russia and allowed Gorbachev (who, because the transition was smoother, remained in office) and the American president to destroy all their nuclear weapons while pressing the other nuclear powers to do the same. In the course of those negotiations, India, Pakistan and Russia found it was to their advantage to support the rebuilding of Afghanistan, which undercut the machinations of the salafi extremists to build their base there. 9/11 never happened. Russia joined the EU. A much better treaty than Kyoto was developed with worldwide support to address global warming.

That's probably the most optimistic scenario. It doesn't include any unexpected events and violates my usual precepts on alternative history in a number of ways, not least by not providing reasonable causal links.

We can't go back, but we could look at this alternative history for some clues as to what we might do now.

Shades of green . . . and brown: The Santa Fe Opera, 2007

By PHK
Photo credits © 2007 Ken Howard. Photos courtesy of the Santa Fe Opera 2007

In Richard Strauss’ Daphne, the Greek god Apollo concludes the opera by turning the nymph Daphne into a bay-laurel tree in accordance with her wishes to be with the trees and the flowers. Jean-Philippe Rimeau’s Platée is all about Roman gods playing tricks on earthly creatures. It features a warts-and-all-frog named Platée who the gods induce to fall in love with the Roman god Jupiter and vice versa.

The American premier of the opera Tea: A Mirror of Soul by the Chinese composer Tan Dun of “Crouching Tigers, Hidden Dragons” fame is bathed in elegant tea green – as one might expect - although
the opera’s press photos missed the dominant green entirely and it’s verboten to take photographs in the opera house – even before the performance begins – so I can’t show you what I mean. Even in Mozart’s old standby Così fan Tutte – which I did not see this time but friends did – women dressed in green
are in the opera’s opening scenes.

Bohème in earthtones

Only La Bohème features various shades of earth tone browns – but even in this beloved Puccini opera, Act II is set in the Parisian café Momus, a haunt of poor intellectuals. The café is named after Momus, the Roman god of literature and satire, who assumes a much more significant role in the comic opera Platée in which Momus has a great time playing himself.

If you haven’t seen a break-dancing frog, may I suggest you run, not walk to Platéee’s final
performance on August 22 at the Santa Fe Opera. The froggy break-dancer is worth the price of admission alone – and the whole production is a stitch – although without such creative directors, choreographers and costume designers who set this mid-18th century, melodic play-within-a-play in modern dress, it could have easily been a deadly two and one-half hour bore.

My friends thought Tea was fantastic – and we did agree on the creativeness of the costumes, stage design and percussive effects – particularly the inventive use of water as percussion and the inspired play of lights on the trio of on-stage musicians and their novel instruments. I, however, was less than enthralled with the plot and not entranced by most of the singing. The issue was not quality of voices or performers - it’s that I find listening to music that slides between notes, includes quarter tones and other elements derived from the Chinese musical genre grating after a while. And contrary to one of the reviews I read about the inherent musicality of the score, I found nothing even to contemplate whistling after departing the hall.

In contrast, I was pleasantly surprised by Daphne – but conversely a friend was not. I’m not generally a Strauss devoté and I usually prefer the modern Greeks to the classical experience. I’ll take composers Hadjidakis, Theodorakis, even Skolkotas on the musical front and novelist Nikos Kazanztakis or poet George Seferis to the legends and antics of the Olympians.

But never mind, Strauss’s minimalist Daphne held a certain attraction. And for the most part the score was melodic setting it on the verge, as Strauss is, between the 19th and 20th centuries. I think I detected even a passing refrain found in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess – an orchestral version I had just heard the week before at a Santa Fe Symphony concert downtown. Meanwhile back at the opera, Daphne’s haunting theme was performed by the oboe. This, after all, is only fitting for a nymph who turns into a tree since the word for oboe in French is hautbois, or high wood.

I’ve been attending performances of the Santa Fe Opera for the past several years – almost since I moved to New Mexico nine years ago and the opera began performing in a much improved, completely redesigned house.

Last year, the dominant color was red from the Magic Flute t-shirts worn by performers and on sale at the Opera Shop to the production of Carmen in which a sultry Sophie Van Mutter starred. This year the earth tones captured sales counter and stage.

Cross-cutting themes

This season, however, was also the first where I noticed cross-cutting thematic ideas that linked several operas to each other if only tenuously. Maybe such thematic relationships were there in the past – and I missed them. Or maybe I was so struck by the wearing of the greens this year that I started looking for other less visually striking cross-cutting connections – like Greek and Roman mythology that form the underpinning of Daphne and Platée – as well as provide a nice touch to La Bohème. These connections were pointed out in the voluminous program which also included abbreviated descriptions of the gods.

La Bohème was distinctly realistic as the program notes promised. Out with the traditionally, swelte, glamourous Mimí dying a thousand deaths of consumption center stage on a heavily upholstered period piece chaise lounge. In with a larger, frumpy Mimí dressed in nondescript brown collapsing in a ratty garden chair sans foot rest. I’m not sure that Jennifer Black, who starred as Mimí in July would have played the role along the lines Serena Farnocchia did in August but Farnocchia did not match the projection or voice of her stage partner Dmitri Pittas. In retrospect, I would have liked to have heard Black perform in Santa Fe in July but I would not have wanted to miss tenor Pittas who played the starving poet Rodolfo and Mimí’s unrequited love. The August night I saw him, he stole the show both dramatically and vocally.

Classical music for everyone

For a second year in a row, one opera – in this case La Bohème - was simulcast on huge screen at a park in Santa Fe where people came with picnic dinners and sat on blankets to enjoy the free show. Funding was made available too this year for another simulcast in downtown Albuquerque. Both telecasts - I'm told - were very well attended: that’s all to the good.

Maybe this just goes to show that classical music is far from dead despite the dearth of music education in American public schools – it just needs to be affordable, available and listenable. I’ll bet Porgy and Bess too would have attracted music in the park crowds. Another time?

Poking Holes in Comfortable History

By PLS
Excavation is a dirty business in more ways than one. It turns up stuff that can change the history that underpins a power structure. When shards speak, historians listen and politicians tremble. For instance, worries over the potential for validating Israeli claims to Jerusalem were no doubt revived last month when excavations outside the Temple Mount provoked stone- and angry word-throwing by Muslims who don’t like the underpinnings of the Al Aqsa mosque to be tampered with.

Let’s come closer to (my) home in Santa Fe. What you see here is a big auger that’s been drilling long skinny holes for pilings that shore up the walls of a huge hole that will be the parking garage under a new convention center in the middle of the city (a strong contender for America’s oldest). Digging this largely accomplished hole has taken more than a year because every bit of dirt had to be sifted for archaeological traces of previous occupation–Native American, Spanish or territorial American. What’s found in any dig tells us something about history—and around here, as in many places, history is hotly contested because the living are fighting for control of the land they hope their ancestors were buried in or at least left identifiable debris in. Brass buttons. Pottery shards. Arrowheads. Seeds. Anything helps to build an argument.

The worst fear of excavators in Santa Fe is finding Indian bones. The uncovering of skeletal remains can delay a project while methods of disposal are debated. It can even bring a project to a halt. The haggling can take months—or more. People aren’t junk, so human remains should be treated with respect, however difficult it may be to agree on what “respect” entails. But must old bones stay where they are, or can they be respectfully interred elsewhere? Imagine an absurd worst case scenario: were it determined that the whole of Santa Fe is built on an excavation-certified old village and/or graveyard, to what extent can the existence of the city itself be justified? Which should go? The city or the bones?

The Kennewick Man Conundrum

A dramatic instance of the fear of what bones may reveal began on a flooded river bank in Washington state in 1996. Initial examination of the remains that had been washed up not only suggested that the skeleton was amazingly ancient (5000-9500 years ancient it’s now thought) but that this extraordinary individual might not be mongoloid. He was perhaps caucasoid. Like—oh no!—white people. So maybe native Americans wouldn't be able to say this land was always all theirs. Wow!

Naturally scientists wanted to apply every possible genetic test to any DNA that could be extracted from these remains, but local tribes strongly resisted. Many of their arguments were spiritual and cultural, but one can imagine that some of the forboding had nothing to do with honoring the old ones or fearing retribution by ancestral spirits. If a Caucasian was indeed resident in the so-called New World as early as this (or even just traveling through), the pre-history of the western hemisphere gets considerably more complex.

Perhaps the Indian position would have prevailed in the courts had there been unity among local tribal leaders, but five northwestern tribes claimed the remains, and in the end these poor bones were indeed tested to death (so to speak). The results were intriguing and anything but simple. Some of the findings were consistent with Polynesian or Ainu origins, which at least muted the white man/red man aspect of the initial battle of the bones.

KAMASUTRA: A VALENTINE FOR ADULTS ONLY

By PLS*

Once upon a time, around 1700 years ago, there was a very smart guy in India named Vatsyayana. He wrote, in Sanskrit, about sex or pleasure or desire or love, depending on how you want to translate kama. More to the point, he tells how to seduce, swooningly please and keep a lover. Sexual anxiety has been around for a long time. Sexual fantasies, too.

Like Kinsey and Freud and other Westerners who wrote about sometimes yummy, sometimes scummy sex, Vatsyayana used an academic facade like a condom to protect himself from criticism on the grounds of prurience and pornography. He was writing a sutra aka treatise, and he studded it with references and deferences to this scholar and that commentator. If footnotes are lacking, it's only because they hadn't been invented yet. (A terrific introduction to a recent translation by Western scholars makes up for that.)

Or maybe we should imagine Vatsyayana as the Hugh Hefner of his time, hiding behind the hottest scholarship to help wealthy idle playboys gratify their itches. Borrowing, in a way, from religion, too. Go to any museum of Asian art and take a look at ancient and medieval Indian sculpture. Better yet, go to the temples of Khajuraho or Konarak. Nymphs with bustlines even Dolly Parton would envy. Erections to put a mere ruler to shame. Nipple pinching. Creative groping. Group sex. And most sculpted, officially, to depict the sphere of the gods and goddesses and their passionate devotees. And don't forget to check out the paintings and palm leaf manuscripts. As often as not, you can have your frissons and be spiritual, too. In your imagination anyway, which is good enough, most of the time, for most of us.

Actually ancient India had more than its share of intellectuals like Vatsyayana. One of the earliest mathematical treatises came from India, along with the invention of the zero, which I'll take the liberty of calling a yoni, or a female symbol, for present purposes. (Guess what the 1 becomes then?) So it's hardly surprising that, for Vatsyayana, sex is like a logical or mathematical game, an exhaustive matrix of possibilities and combinations to keep the beloved from becoming jaded, bored, unresponsive, ready for a change of face and phallus.

At one point Vatsyayana speaks of 84 varieties of sex. Later he speaks of permutations of nine. The two don't quite match, it seems to me, but the habit of mind is clear and culturally persistent, it seems. Have you ever wondered why modern Indians are so good at math and science and software design? But I digress. Here are some more numbers.

Easy Rider

by CKR

I'm reading the second volume of John Fowles's diaries. From the entry for the period 3-11 October 1969, after seeing the film Easy Rider:

I think this is the trap the younger generation today are falling into: they have rejected culture, book culture especially, and they embrace direct experience, doing your thing, finding your own scene and all the rest of the cant phrases--which is good, it may be, which does give them a sharper experiencing of now, a Zen-like piercing of the overlay of reason and culture. What worries me is what happens when they grow up and find they can't live the direct-experience life any more. It'll be too late for the books, the culture, then.

Also tonight, I found the much-linked "Stalingrad on the Tigris" by Pat Lang. (H/T to parvati_roma and ZenPundit, among others.)

The file Lang provides is not the first place I've heard resonances of Richard Wagner. The response to defeat is greater striving. Will alone will carry us forward.

But it carries us forward to the death of the gods.

Wagner took some meaty German stories (two from my favorite Wolfram) and engorged them with his personal psychodramas into bloated morality, or perhaps amorality, plays. His music soars and inspires, perhaps too glibly. He's made it almost impossible for us to see the stories themselves any more, which were different from his operas.

So does Bush infuse his personal psychodrama into the already-engorged war fantasies of the right wing. We must will ourselves into--what? Does this have something to do with internal emptinesses left over from the sixties?

Even Wagner noted that constant motion distracts from Parzival's spiritual journey, however badly he mucked up Wolfram's story. The horror comes when a president manifests that demonic motion in war.

The sense of things gone Wagnerianly wrong has made its way into a bumper sticker:

Frodo failed. Bush has the ring.

I know that's not directly Wagnerian, but he stole the idea first.

Old Man Gloom

by CKR

I’ve been thinking that this is a post I can’t write, but, with Phila’s encouragement, here goes.

The Santa Fe Fiesta begins tonight with the burning of Zozobra, also known as Old Man Gloom. Gloom is to be banished for the celebration of Fiesta. Fiesta is the anniversary of the reconquest of Santa Fe by the Spanish in 1692, so it hasn’t always been a happy event for everyone.

The burning of Zozobra is a more recent tradition, although I can’t help suspecting that it contains elements of wicker man ceremonies, in which humans were burned alive while entrapped in wicker effigies. We haven’t yet had a complaint from our local militant Protestants, and the Catholic Church hasn’t said anything about this (one way or another) pagan addition to a festival in which it figures prominently.

It seems salutary, however, to burn the gloom in one’s life once a year. A woman in New Orleans, today’s New Mexican tells us, has sent her wedding dress and an album full of pictures to wipe clean her slate of a dreadful divorce. Others have sent unhappy but flammable dregs from their lives to be stuffed into Zozobra for tonight’s burning.

Burn him! Burn him! the crowd chants. I haven’t ever participated. When I lived outside Santa Fe, the parking problem dissuaded me, and I live close enough that it’s too loud here, let alone at Magers Field. (BTW, it’s cloudy and getting cloudier, gloom settling in.)

War Talk

by CKR

The Bush administration proclaimed its “War on Terror” shortly after September 11, 2001. That phrase has morphed through a number of revisions.

More recently, a coterie of pundits, desirous of more war, are trying to decide whether we are in World War III, IV, or V this week. Keeping score, as it were.

I hate to repeat myself or others, but I suppose it’s a natural outcome of the intersection of blogging and politics. But the rhetoric of war is important, it seems to me, so let’s look at this concatenation of wars.

Which is Your Tribe?

by CKR

Here's one of those internet questionnaires that tells you how you stand relative to the rest of the population. It seems to be connected with a book promotion, and it's Canadian.

Both of those connections make it a bit dicey for Americans, but I thought that my tribe fitted me pretty well, or perhaps vice versa.

Via Kevin Drum, whose tribe is here.

Just Wondering

by CKR

Why don’t we see something like these in the US instead of those flat Jersey barriers?

Bears in Jõhvi

Doves in Tallinn

More things I don't understand below the jump.