Monday, May 30, 2011

Memorial Day (New York)

Now I know what the composer Charles Ives meant when he said he loved the clashing sounds of passing Memorial Day bands. At this year's Memorial Day service at the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Monument, the New York Pipe Band had just passed us playing 'It's a Grand Old Flag', when the New Orleans Marine Band struck up with the same tune about a third of the pace faster. It was a fantastic effect with the drawling bagpipes disappearing below the acoustic threshold as the marines pumped out their crisper, edgier version back up on the rotunda.


Mayor Bloomberg was at this service apparently, but we only got there in time for the acknowledgement of a guy who was present, the last surviving veteran of Iwo Jima. I also enjoyed the performance of Taps by an African-American musician in a large red T-shirt. Was he a jazz trumpeter? He played it slow and sad and straight.


Earlier in the morning we had wandered up to Grant's Tomb. An impromptu a capella group just ahead of us in the colonnade gave a spontaneous rendition of 'The Star-Spangled Banner'. Who were these people? Four white people and an African-American wearing a Glass-Steagall T-shirt.


I was struck by by the grandeur of Grant's resting place. He and his wife, Julia, lie inside, inside two giant sarcophagi. Grant himself had been so humble. He received Lee's surrender in a  private's uniform. What would he have made of this form of commemoration? It's probably a pure reflection of the public acclaim. He didn't ask for it, but it's what's given.

As we stood inside the colonnade listening to the choir, a middle-aged man came to the foot of the steps outside. He didn't move forward. He seemingly hadn't been intending to come into the monument; but came over from the street and stopped where he was, took off his suncap and held it over his heart - through all three verses.

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

'...so conceived and so dedicated...'

The living closeness of its history is one of the great things about the United States. It is almost as if the nation has a living constitution peopled by the great characters of its history.

On Monday night we came across the following buildings all within a couple of blocks of each other:


1. the building where George and Ira Gershwin lived, 1925-1931, and:


2. the Morris-Jumel Mansion from where Washington conducted his defence of New York in 1776.

But there is more to it than that.

Over on Staten Island yesterday, I came across a street named after General Schuyler.



and, this block of 1960s(?) flats, named after Schuyler's son-in-law, the first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who was, of course, another of those great geniuses with whose presence the USA was blessed at the time of its founding.


It is so constituted.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Views of and from 'Manhattan'

Crossing the Pulaski Bridge the other day, I glanced over to Manhattan and thought, "Oh no, I'm back in Melbourne. This is a spring day?"


It's true. All those years in Sydney, I seem to have forgotten about weather like this. But then, I had a more serious thought. Perhaps the reason why cities like New York and (in Australia) Melbourne, are such centres of art is because one of the great impulses behind art is the search for sun and colour, whether stained glass windows, chromaticism, or paens. Such art can still provide an observer a glimpse of something 'we have not experienced quite that way before' (to quote Pauline Kael).What changes is the 20th obsession with art which rips holes in the viewer in order to let in the cold blast of 'cutting edge' innovation.

More experiences along Manhattan Ave:

An old Polish man pointed out to us two helicopters circling above Greenpoint. "Boom, boom," he said, and indicated someone injecting into their arm, from which we construed that he was telling us there had been a shootout in relation to a 'narcotics bust'.

There are people here, including young people, who speak Polish in preference to English. I understand that in America if you want to take up citizenship, you need to renounce, repudiate, abjure all other princes, potentates and other heads of state, but it seems you may keep as much of your benign original culture as you like.

Yesterday, in a 99c store, we met a very speedy guy who had been a marine. "You went to Vietnam?" asked Kate. "Yes ma'am - three tours." We told him we'd been there - it is a beautiful country. "But we f#$%%$ it up," he said. Then he said, "If I may venture my own opinion. We have a saying in the marines 'To the victor belongs the spoils'. But what are we getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan?" I said, "We're supposed to be getting democracy." As I said this he was already nearly out the door. But he turned, pounded his fist over his heart and opened his hand in a point towards me (a gesture Kate later told me means 'sympatico'). "I'll leave you now," he said as he raced off.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Big in so many ways (Brooklyn and Upper and Lower Manhattan)

Not only can you buy Mexican kosher ice-cream in Reseda, or donuts and Chinese food in Oakland (we saw such a place), you can buy empanadas at the laundromat in Brooklyn.


Of course, you used to be able eat at a Swiss-Indian restaurant in Alice Springs. Is it still there?

Today was another of those days when you stumble over the unexpected revelation. After going up to Columbia where Kate met the team she'll be doing research with, we decided to go up to the top of Manhattan. This is the place that room advertisements on 'airbnb' say tourists don't know about. In fact, many tourist maps of Manhattan stop short of here. But this is where I fully got a sense of how big Manhattan really is. Pounding up the streets, I could see how Alexander Hamilton and his contemporaries could have had country homes up here, on the same island.

We decided to walk in off Broadway and there found a park which marked the highest natural spot on the island.


Not only that, but the paving told us that this was where the colonists tried to fend off a British attack in October 1776. You look back to your right (south), and imagine the defeated colonists fleeing up the island, having rowed across from the Brooklyn side. Here they will try to hold their ground, but retreat across to the Bronx and back around the top of the British. You get a sense of the brilliant cut-and-run campaign Washington waged.

...And a sense of the 18th century. Up at Inwood Park at the very tip, we enjoyed the original topography and flora remaining on the island.


Didn't see any middens (as we would call them) of the Wiechquaesgeck Indians, but emerging from this onto shabby Broadway was quite a shock.

Back in Williamsburg we took shelter from a sudden storm in a cafe. The proprietor asked us if we were 'out-of-towners'. Kate told her how we'd been over to Columbia, to the Department of Psychiatry. Within five exchanges she asked if Kate was a psychologist., I was astonished - "How?" But Kate said it might have been her use of the word 'engagement'. This cafe owner turned out to have been an academic counsellor at Long Island University. I asked her where she had come from. Turkey. Is there a nationality (or flavour) not represented in New York?

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Barely contained (Manhattan, Sunday 15th)

Had another of those experiences of Americans who round out conversations today. We got lost looking for the Lorimar Street L, the train into the city, and finally I asked for help from a minister (preacher), who peered at our map trying to find the Queens Expressway. He eventually realised that what we had was a transport map and it didn't show the Expressway, but nevertheless, there was something wrong with the connection we were trying to make.

He then asked, "Where are you from?" When we told him Sydney, he told us it was one of his favourite places in the world. As an engineer he built three power plants out there in the early 1970s. The Opera House hadn't been built then.

I mentioned that Utzon, the Opera House's architect, had been contacted before he died to provide his design principles, all these decades after the New South Wales had sacked him and replaced him with an architectural committee. The preacher, who was holding our map, and had been an engineer, said that the problem with the Opera House was that the design was for something that engineering hadn't caught up with. "As I was going to say with this," he said, tapping our paper, "You can't get there from here."

We did, though, get into Manhattan, and later to a recital of the complete Duparc songs, with some excellent young singers and accompanists. The venue was the Renee Weiler concert hall in Barrow Street in Greenwich Village, a lovely hall in an old brownstone, backed by picture windows of a green American garden. It was great to hear song this close, where you can feel the physicality of the singing, and find yourself leaning forward on a harmonic suspension (as you're probably supposed to) and really notice the perfection of each number. The program booklet provided English-only versions of the songs and what really struck me was that all languages must have certain words that work better in their language than in another. "Rest, o Phidyle!" said the translation, but 'reposez' was a better word for 'rest' at that moment.

This was the second songwriting experience of the week. Last Tuesday we went to a venue in the East Village where folksingers perform. A Scottish singer, Fraser Anderson, made great use of the room and variety in his guitar, but the song that struck me was one by a Florida duo called The Winterlings. 'Jenny Hodges' was the story of a woman who disguised herself as a man and joined the Army of the Tennessee. She remained a man all her life, getting to vote before other women, and asked to be buried in her 'union blues' (the Army of the Tennessee being a union army). But what was so great about the song? Simple words, repeating phrases (both text-wise and musically; the technical term would be isorhythm) and concrete concepts. Great, simple, disciplined storytelling. I once read that concrete imagery and the definiteness of metre was what made Goethe attractive to all those 19th century German composers. It's something I still think about.

Down at Cortlandt Street, we had one of those great experiences you have when you wander around a city, and stumble over something you didn't know was there. We knew the World Trade Center site was down there.


But what we didn't know was that across the road is the oldest continually operating building in New York City, St. Paul's Chapel.


This was where George Washington attended a prayer service after his inauguration in 1789 and continued to go to Sunday service until the capital moved to Philadelphia. His pew is still there. Across the other side, is the pew Governor George Clinton had built there when he became the first republican governor of New York and wanted to sit separate from the congregation but still be seen.

It's a peaceful place. But photographs in the cemetary show Sep 11, 2001, with computers and filing paper, printouts and other debris bestrewing the grounds. Inside the church is a fireman's coat and boots resting on a pew as if one of the relief workers has just come in for a well-earned break. I didn't find it hard to imagine that day. The church must have been cast in shadow by the buildings not much later than midday most days, so close must they have been. Then suddenly, no more. There is a sad quiet here now, but what must the noise have been like then, as two huge jets smashed into the towers and people who had had nothing more on their mind at 9am than wishing perhaps that they didn't have a dental appointment this afternoon, found themselves ending the day at 9.30 by leaping to their deaths?

If I were a Goethe I could probably say this effectively, more simply. But there are so many things to say here. I'll have to see what happens if I do my best to aim, like most Americans, to rounding stories off.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Moments to sing about (Brooklyn)

We love Brooklyn, that wonderfully varied borough, where one block might be Polish and you wonder what a ksiegarnia literacka is, and the next Hassidic. You talk French to your flatmate.Then you feel sure you will get to practise Spanish somewhere a couple of blocks over. We heard Wolof (a Senegalese language) the other day.

We caught the bus to downtown the other night, past the playing fields where girls were playing softball against the backdrop of a Russian Orthodox Church.


As 'lost' Australians we sat up front, and everyone included us in the lively conversation. An Italian-looking guy got on with a bottle of wine in a brown paper bag and asked the driver a question, and as she answered, tapped her affectionately on the shoulder as he went up to take his seat. I asked Kate if she saw that and she had.

The woman opposite us told us she liked Australians. She had some over to her congregation and they were very polite. I told her I thought Americans were polite and the conversation up front became even more appreciative. An older crankier lady got on and complained when someone stood on her feet.

The woman opposite us told her, "Yo' sitting in the hot seat. I got my foot trodden on there, so I moved." The old lady, crankier, said, "Well yo' feet is ve' impo'tant to you." To which our friend opposite agreed, "Aint nobody standing on them bu' choo."

The Italian-looking guy with the wine in a paper bag came up front to get off and said he would've brought glasses if he'd known there was going to be a party upfront. He affectionately tapped the bus driver on the shoulder again. Then it was our time to get off. I saw that we were meant to leave by the back exit, but the driver said, "Oh, come this way; I want to say goodbye to you." When we got off, our friend opposite said she'd show us where to go, but then when we said we wanted to go to Fulton Mall, she said, "Oh you got off at the wrong Fulton Mall. I'll show you where to go. My daughter lives up there." She came with us to South Oxford Street, pointing out the Brooklyn Academy of Music and other sights, then pointed us in the right direction. We introduced ourselves and Kate kissed her. We're experiencing such immediate rapports with people here.

We spent the evening at American Opera Projects and I was intrigued by some remarks made by Daniel Felsenfeld, the composer of a monodrama: Nora in the Great Outdoors. This work, with a libretto by Will Eno, is based on the moments after Nora has left Torvald's 'doll's house'. The composer said he loved how Ibsen could save revelations until the very last moment - the last line even, but that he, Felsenfeld, was always intrigued by what happened after. I thought there was something really key in this which I'll partially put into my own words; perhaps opera pushes drama past the classic Greek stages of crisis-climax-resolution to another step: reflection. This, said Felsenfeld, is the moment where characters sing.

It was late when we came out of the performance, so we couldn't catch the bus back. But I was amused crossing Java Street back down in Greenpoint, when a car turned behind us, with Chita Rivera singing loudly, "I like the island Manhattan/Smoke on your pipe and put that in..."

Monday, May 9, 2011

Times ten (en route to New York)

I had set up a number of expectations with this blog. I recently undertook to learn something of the Native American languages relevant to each of the places we visited along the way. I had also thought to call this blog Walking with Americans. Well firstly, "Kuwiingu-neewul. Tha ktulamalsi kway kiishkwihk?" which in the Munsee Delaware that was once widely spoken in southern New York (and is obviously still known), translates, I understand, to: I'm glad to see you. How are you today?

We're now in New York. Now, parts of Arizona and New Mexico (and California) may remind me of Oz, but it never gets this green in Australia, no matter how far east we go.



Gun-metal greys, sheep-fleece yellows and admittedly penetrating blues; but that's the green extent of the character-forming spectrum in Oz.

As for 'walking with Americans', we sat with quite a cross-section during the three days and nights on the train from Los Angeles. We met a former naval captain who told us about his grandfather who served as a fighter pilot in China in the 30s, resisting the Japanese before anyone knew the US would enter the Second World War, and about an aunt who had gone over to China to serve; met a woman from Santa Fe who worked as a set dresser on films. I must have drunk too much coffee because I realised at one point that I was almost interviewing her: "Do you cringe when you see something on the shelves behind a character that couldn't have existed at the time of the film?"; "Do you ever work with the actors on the sorts of furnishings their character would have chosen for themselves?"; "Do you ever have situations where the actor, improvising, picks up a piece of crockery or furnishing that was meant to be left untouched, and it suddenly becomes the domain of the prop-master?". (She told us, for example, that she might have to point out to a director or production supervisor that you cannot have particular bottles on the shelves because "the train didn't get that far in 1885"  and the bottles had only just been patented.) On the leg from Chicago we met a Washington lawyer who had known Barack Obama at Law School, said he was very smart, and not only that: a good basketballer! This guy was interested when I told him about Governor-General Kerr (the Queen's delegate appointed on the recommendation of the prime minister) sacking the prime minister (Gough Whitlam) and his government in 1975 and exercising powers in our country that the Queen herself  no longer possesses either in Australia or the UK. He asked us what the latest issues were in Australia, and we couldn't tell him. I mean, we're glad we remembered to vote in the NSW state elections.

It was interesting, though, explaining to him why we'd come to the US at this time. Some Americans are bemused: the economy is so 'bad'. But, as I explained to him, the scope is still so much larger than in Australia; we have 30 million people in a space the size of the lower 48, they have 300 million. I mean, the kerbs at crosswalks are shod in iron, presumably to protect against the eroding effects of millions of feet. Even an America tightening its belt is a bigger pool than Oz.



Yesterday we went into town (Manhattan). For starters, I love even the least noticeable public art (this, from the subway):



But I was floored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A single masterpiece is one thing, but whole walls and rooms of them! And to be honest, I was stopped in my tracks before I'd entered a single gallery when I saw the names of the original benefactors: Joseph Pulitzer, Pierpont-Morgan, Juilliard, John Jacob Astor...the level of activity and contribution is continental in scope.



Friday, May 6, 2011

Sequences

We have left LA now. I couldn’t find any Gabrieleno/Tongva words on the net, and the few Serrano words I found are not quite appropriate. Maybe I’ll do better further on.



But we had a farewell party the other night. The first guy I met was a truck driver named Ben. We talked a bit about the hard economic times and so on, but we didn’t talk about it too much. I figured that if had, we would probably have gone on to the high gas prices which people raise here quite often, and drilling and so on. Ben said he'd been in Sydney for a week many years ago and loved it. I wondered why only a week; how old he might be.

Sal, who turned up next, hasn't been to Australia, even though he had had an opportunity to spend some time there after ‘Nam in 1969. I said, 'You're not old enough to have been in Vietnam, surely?' and he said, with one of those great New York accents: 'I like this guy.' Later, a woman called Eleanor turned up and he sang, 'Eleanor Rigby...' I said: 'Oh yes, you are,' and we laughed.

At mealtime I sat at a table outside with a bunch of people who became really, really vehement about the Tea Party and ‘the Republicans' etc... how the Supreme Court has just passed a couple of doozies and they sound pretty bad (including: a convicted person can't apply to have DNA testing of evidence once s/he's convicted - well, can you imagine the Pandora's Box??) but I wondered about how loud they were talking and the people next door and in the neighborhood and how these forthright opinions might be going down.

I got up to go to the kitchen and as I walked past the group sitting around the lounge suite inside, they were all leaning forward. Sal was talking – holding them intent - and I caught phrases like: 'had nine days left to serve' and 'they asked me to' and 'had to go out against this Gatling Gun up in the hills which had been going on continuously for a couple of days'. He mentioned guys he’d served with who’d died with only days left to serve.

When I went back outside, the other table were now saying how disgustingly the government treats veterans, not just the Gulf veterans, but the way the Vietnam veterans were treated, etc... I wondered if we should move inside.
---

We were just now on the train travelling through seven states on the way to Chicago.

I looked out the window past Gallup and saw a sign farewelling travellers from a roadside stop. 'Ahéhee' (thank you) it said, in Navajo.

Woke up this morning to my first glimpse of Kansas. Somewhere in Missouri, I went and got a coffee. 



The guy in the Snack Bar had a copy behind the counter of 1865 by Jay Winik who contends that the US was saved at the end of the Civil War by the leadership of four guys – Lincoln, Grant, Lee and Johnstone. I said to the snack-bar guy, “You had some great leaders then.” He said, “I know – thank God.’ In Illinois we stopped for a few moments at Galesburg, the site of one of the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates. On the way into Chicago I noted the change in nature of Native American words – Somonauk, Sannouk. More consonants? 

Sunday, May 1, 2011

A couple of snapshots (Malibu and the Valley)

I loved the Adopt-a-Highway sign down on the coast the other day, sponsored by Malibu Hair Extensions.

And here is a picture that further illustrates the whimsical smorgasbord of culture that is available in Los Angeles.

A royal rejoinder (thoughts on music and the republic)

Perhaps the most memorable image for me, watching the Royal Wedding over here on CBS, was the number of people in London streets able to sing 'Jerusalem'. I also thought how lucky the British are to have had composers like Parry, Walton and Elgar who could write music to match imperial occasions or any occasion: living in an age when composers wrote for something bigger and more important to them than their own selves - the occasion, the subject, the patron or the audience. The other composers on this occasion were also able to write suitable music too - Rutter, Mealor and the fanfares by Wing Commander Stubbs. But the other striking feature of the music by Walton and Parry is it achieves this sense of occasion without losing any of its own - what Stravinsky would have called - 'physiognomy'. It's still instantly recognisable as those composers' music. Nothing is lost by serving the occasion.

The other 'heresy' that struck me while watching people in the street sing 'Jerusalem' was: "The Monarchy is not going away any time soon." Even in Australia, the republic is, say, 138 behind maybe 137 other more pressing issues. And perhaps, heresy number 3: it deserves to be.

The most substantial objection to a continuation of the monarchy in Australia would probably be the reserve powers of the governor-general, who can, and has (in 1975), sacked the democratically-elected parliament and closed down the parliament that immediately voted to restore that government. But even in a republic, someone will probably have that power. I would hope that it would be someone more qualified than a Logie winner or Olympic gold-medallist. But we don't know. Where is the detail? Where is the argument? "We should"; "it's time"; "the country around Alhyekelyelhe is nothing like the Cotswalds" (actually that's my argument). But think about what happened here - over two decades of argument from John Dickinson's Letters from a Farmer to the Bill of Rights, 85 articles of roughly 2,000 words' length trying to convince just the New York legislature to ratify the Constitution (that is, The Federalist Papers). The American colonists wanted a republic so badly the guys at Philadelphia pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honour to the cause. I suspect Australians would always prefer to go to the beach before it gets to that.

PS. I also loved the trees (English field maples and hornbeams) down the nave. It was good enough to be a transformation scene from Parsifal. But this was the truly modern touch for me.