Friday, February 09, 2007
8:16 PM
Today I stayed at home and forced myself to work on this "Lost and Found" poem series I promised my supervisor tomorrow. I'm stumped, after four semi-complete pieces and two fragments and still no coherent direction or vision. I reread a couple of poems written 3-4 years ago that would've fit thematically into this sequence but that make me cringe now -- such closed all-knowingness and privilege! such appropriation of other people's pain to pound a metaphysical insight onto the reader! I wish I had a piano to pound on right now while I think. I wish Papa were around in one of his lugubrious (HIS word!) moods, playing one of his "putangina" pieces. So thanks to Limewire I'm now listening to mp3s of: Lizst's "Hungarian Rhapsody," Beethoven's "Sonata Pathetique," Rachmaninoff's "Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini," and Chopin's "Minute Waltz," "Funeral March," and "Heroic Polonaise" -- music I used to hear as a child on wet Sunday nights, when I'd hear him over the curtain of rain, and I'd go down the stairs of our old house for a glass of water and see him at the piano, beads of sweat on his brow, torso leaning forward, harmonic thunderstorms bursting from his wrists. That was the picture of the artist I grew up with, that dedication, that erratic fumbling and practicing for a perfection that was elusive, for a phrasing that was his own, and was unapplauded, except in the mind of an admiring daughter.
(The painting is Salvador Dali's "Necrophilic Fountain Flowing From a Grand Piano," 1933.)* * *
Here's an inspiring (if pompous-looking) 84-year old Vladimir Horowitz playing the Polonaise in A-flat major, also called the "Heroic Polonaise." My father's favorite section, I could tell, was that marchy movement beginning at 3:15 with that gong-like chord repeated six times, and later with the left hand moving in a downward four-key wheel. My favorite is that lyrical respite right after, starting at 4:35 and lasting more than a minute -- such a contrast and complement to the majestic torrents of tones earlier. Let the purists disagree, but I prefer Horowitz's imperfect pathos to Arthur Rubinstein's technical elegance in this 1968 recording (the same lyrical passage happens at 4:25 with Rubinstein).
I've also just learned that this was the last piece of music broadcast over Warsaw radio before the city surrendered to the Nazis, almost a hundred years after Chopin composed it in 1842. Wow. Can you listen to it now and put yourself in the shoes of those about to be herded off to face that unspeakable silencing? It's unfathomable.
Labels: creativity, family, music
Sunday, January 21, 2007
2:56 PM
on mozarello and other artists
So at 3 a.m. the other day, as I was being lulled to sleep by Pound's Cantos (we had to read cantos I-LI for one class, roughly 207 pages of dense, fragmented, highly allusive stuff), one fragment jumped out at me -- about the inelegant death of Mozarello, a 16th century Mantuan poet who was murdered by villagers: "...Mozarello
Takes the Calabrian roadway, and for ending
Is smothered beneath a mule, a poet's ending,
Down a stale well-hole, oh a poet's ending."
If only there were more moments of levity in the Cantos, between the sections of heavy-handed preaching and historicizing that sometimes feels like an extended exercise in alienating the reader. We had a good discussion in our Limits of Attention class, though -- about why many political poets are accused of being anti-lyrical; about our era's obsession with internal moods as opposed to passions that have a stronger capacity to effect ethical change; about the quality of difficulty in poetry; about how Pound compels attention by accumulating details and trusting the reader to make connections between stories and Cantos. Ah ewan. Basta I'm not a fan of Pound; and can now say I've actually read him. On to the Pisan Cantos next week...
* * *
Despite the antisocial tendencies, I'm starting to enjoy talking to strangers who turn out to be interesting, creative people. Last night, at Laura's birthday party, I met Hamutal, who's taking her Ph.D in Philosophy and has the saddest eyes I've ever seen on a woman, and her childhood friend Arieh, a photographer and blogger. Here's his shot of a typical Toronto subway car with red seats, empty as Morpheus' dream train.
* * *
The other night, I watched Lars von Trier's Five Obstructions with Richard, and was both amused and blown away. The premise is simple, if a bit sadistic (yes, coming from the director who made Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, and Dogville -- probably the most disturbing and "thoughtfully disgusting" film I've ever seen): von Trier asks his film idol and teacher, Jorgen Leth, to remake a short film, Perfect Human, Leth made in 1967. The catch is that he has to remake it five times using restrictions von Trier formulates (ex. remake it as a cartoon, or using just 12 frames per edit, or set in "the most wretched place on Earth" -- which, to Leth, is the red light district in Bombay, shown here in the picture behind a transparent screen). It's a wonderful film about creativity blossoming under restrictions, about amorphous mentor-student relations, about an artist's need to risk failure. The fifth "remake," written by von Trier from Leth's point of view and spoken by Leth but making fun of von Trier, is a deliciously layered exercise in perspective, and a moving reflection on art. At the end, I found myself wishing someone would push and impose those sort of restrictions on me, to jolt me out of this complacency.
* * *
Great late night music: Yo La Tengo's The Sounds of the Sounds of Science, -- eight tracks the band composed to accompany underwater documentaries by Jean Painleve. Dreamy, textured, ambient layers of music with such titles as "How Some Jellyfish are Born" and "The Love Life of the Octopus" make me want to dive under the duvet and sink deeper into the calm ocean of sleep.
Labels: books, movies, music, photographs, school
