Checking out Alban Berg

Driving back and forth between Vallvidrera and the Eixample, I listen to Alban Berg. Berg's lyricism, his anguished expressionism, put him squarely in the great German classical tradition, reinvented by the Viennese school. But this music does not renew this tradition. Rather it brings it to an end.  It is, literally, a dead end. There is no enjoyment here. There is beauty but no life. There is craft but no wit. The great master was Stravinsky, not Schoenberg.

Bauhaus in Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv, a city which never valued beauty, is revamping itself. Between Bograshov and Allenby, alongside Rothschild Blv, down in Neve Tzedek, the leafy boulevards, with pared down Bauhaus arquitecture, are regaining some of their old flavour. Gleaming white houses, small discreet cafés, little trendy shops amidst fragrant trees and  cool youngsters riding old fashioned bycicles create a relaxed mood which belies the atmosphere of tense expectation and brash invective normally associated with Israel. 

Roberto Bolaño

I bought "Los Detectives Salvages" more out of a feeling of dutifulness than of real interest. Bolaño is being touted as a canonical writer for my generation, especially in the USA, so it is only normal he should be approached with as much curiosity as apprehension and distrust. After letting the book rest for a few weeks, I opened it with diffidence. The first surprise was: Bolaño was... well, he was just plain fun. There was a feeling of recognition, too. I knew, without knowing, what he was talking about and I could touch feel and hear the world he was describing. This novel, set in 1975 Mexico, about a literary movement, called visceral realism, describes a "zeitgeist" that I recognize as my own. It reminds me of the atmosphere in Portugal, when the revolution was raging, both out on the street and inside our marijuana fuelled heads... But wait, this is fun, but it can also be moving. And, as it goes on and on, ever deeper into this aimless, random, intense world of obscure poets, it becomes ever more intriguing. What is going on here, one asks... What does this mean, in literary terms? Can the critics please decipher this and explain why it is great? It is a shimmering text, full of echoes and voices, rough and ready, tender and beautiful. So, one keeps reading, and reading...  

Philip Roth's last novel

Philip Roth's last novel, Indignation, is, as usual, seamless, fluid, perfectly accomplished. The setting is familiar and so are the themes - sexual transgression, individual freedom set against social constraints, coming of age, the emancipation of american jews in the 1950's -  but Roth manages nevertheless to captivate and hold the reader's attention with his perfect technique and his continuing capacity for ferocity. 

French cuisine on the skids

A recent weekend in Paris with my son David confirmed certain dismal impressions that previous visits to France had produced. Paris still looks great, the museums and the shops are wonderful but gone are the days when one went to France to eat well and shop for books. Unless you go to the very posh restaurants, the food now in Paris is tired and expensive fare, poorly done and poorly presented. Nothing is new or exciting: everywhere you find the same old recipes indifferently done. Forget the bookshops, too. I spent two nights carefully combing "l´Écume des Pages" and "la Hune" in the Boulevard St-Germain, two fashionable bookstores next to Café de Flore and Deux Magots, that are open until midnight. Quite apart from the tiresome presentation of french books, which has not changed in several generations - white and only white covers - nothing seems to catch one's eye or arouse one's interest. Foucault, Barthes, Lévy Strauss, to name just some my favorites, are gone and no one seems to have taken their place. Not to speak, of course, of the newspapers: flimsy Libération, dour Le Figaro, and of course, Le Monde, easily the most boring newspaper in the world.

Body of Lies

Body of Lies, the new film by Riddley Scott, a spy thriller set in the Middle East, is aptly titled: it does not contain a grain of truth. It rings false at every turn, except when it shows the smart new technology that allows the CIA to peep down from the skies into the dingiest holes. There are no thrills and no emotions in this movie. Everything seems packaged for an american audience and the politically correct lessons conveyed are obvious and trite. It's expensive, it's slick, it's shot in great locations, but it's eminently forgettable. 

GF Ballard

I took a break from the financial crisis to read JG Ballard's autobiography, "Miracles of Life", a recommendation from my friend Victor Pimstein. Who is JG Ballard? American, so I thought, or British, as it turned out? Young or old? What else had he written? I approached the book with a blank mind and proceeded to race through it, totally caught up in his story, which starts in Shangai in 1930, proceeds to England in the grim afterwar years and ends now, in the hospital ward. With deft touches and sly humour, in a wonderfully direct and unaffected style, Ballard brings to life cosmopolitan Shangai before the war ("a city 90% chinese and 100% americanized"), the internment camp where he spent part of his adolescence, where he was close to his parents as never before and  yet drifted away from them, his return to England, where "everything was rationed", including "hope itself", his career as a writer, which he approached from a slightly weird angle which brought him eventual success.  Writing of the 1950's, he says: "already I sensed that a new kind of popular culture was emerging that played on the latent psychopathy of its audiences, and in fact needed to elicit that strain of psychopathy if it was to work". Hence Crash, the Atrocity Exhibition, the Drowned World, some of the books that made his reputation. At 77, saner than any of us, Ballard tells his story as he prepares to die. It's moving, it's enthralling, it's great. 

Siegfried at São Carlos

Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, Lisbon's wonderful XVIIIth century opera house, is staging a great new production of the Ring cycle by Graham Vick. This year it was Siegfried's turn. Graham Vick presents the Ring in a kind of comic book style which, at its best, is witty instead of silly something  seldom achieved by the numerous attempts to transfer to our day and age classic opera plots. (Peter Sellar's great D.Giovanni, set in the Bronx, is another exception). Personally, I found Siegfried himself, that curious mixture of adolescent bully and idealistic hero, not entirely convincing. But this is no more than a detail, albeit an important one, in what can be considered on the whole a triumph. A sure sign of success: the hours passed effortlessly and at the end the feeling was of anticipation for Gottardamerung.

Clive James' culture bath

"Il n'y a pas de genres, il n'y a que des talents". This quote by Jean François Revel is one of the many trufles to be found in "Cultural Amnesia", the great partial summation of a lifetime of reading and pontificating by Clive James, the Australian critic and TV personality. The quote and the book, which I spent a feverish summer day fevereshly reading in bed, make an implicit case for great journalism which I entirely subscribe and add to by arguing that newspaper and magazine writing provide a much better literary training than is to be found in academia. Endlessly entertaining and generally wise, even if occasionally corny, "Cultural Amnesia",a collection of "over a hundred essays", as the backpage helpfully points out, about cultural figures mainly from the XXth century, rescues from oblivion dozens of worthy writers. I found the book particularly illuminating on such topics as Vienese café society before the Anchluss, French collaborationists and the German intellectual scene after WWII. 

John Richardson's Picasso

Chatty, mischievious perceptive and thorough, John Richardson's biography of Picasso is a compulsive read. Richardson offers us not only the life of Picasso but also of its social setting. It makes for fascinating cultural history. But will it ever be finished? The third volume came out in 2007 and it only takes us to 1932. There are still another 40 years of life to be covered and Richardson is already 83 years old. It gives you a great urge to look and look again at the great mass of work left by Picasso. He covered and seemingly exhausted an enormous field. His presence in the history of art is daunting. Very few artists today seem to be grappling with his legacy. Hockney is an obvious exception. Check out Richardson's loft in lower Manhattan and his art collection in You Tube: At home with Charlie Rose: John Richardson

The diaries of Harold Nicolson and Duff Cooper

Harold Nicolson and Duff Cooper were two scions of the British bourgeoisie who led parallel lives and who, by their wits, looks and charm, gained entry into the highest circles of British politics and society. One, Nicolson, was gay, the other, Cooper, a notorious womanizer. Both had succesful marriages, the former to Vita Sackville West, the writer and landscape gardener who was one Virginia Wolf's best friends, the latter to Lady Diana Cooper, a notorious beauty, the youngest daughter of the 8th Duke of Rutland, a social celebrity in her day who acted in Hollywood. Both joined the Foreign Office and left it to pursue a career in politics. They ended serving together under Churchill in his first government as PM in 1940, Nicolson junior minister to Cooper at the Trade Board. They were not especially friendly. Their diaries are a fascinating record of life in London in the first half of the XXth century, but they could not be more different. Duff Cooper gives us an intimate, blow by blow, account of his love life, his numerous infidelities, and his copious and rich eating, drinking and gambling - together with a few offhand, almost casual descriptions of his feats of arms in the First World War and of his break with Chamberlain after Munich. Nicholson is reserved, never mentions his homosexuality but is the more disciplined and fluid writer, with marvellous evocative descriptions of moods and personalities.

Sophisticated Palma

The olive and the palm tree, this is the sacred Mediterranean combination you will find in Palma de Maiorca, that most charming, sophisticated and cool island at the crossroads between Spain, Italy and France, with a sultry touch given by the hot African wind blowing in from the Sahara. Rich renaissance arquitecture, great "arroz negro", cool shopping, nice art galleries, everything comes together in a subtle whisper ringing in your ears: "stay..."

Aragón

On the high speed train from Zaragoza to Barcelona, Aragón can feel like America. A wide expense of desert with the odd patch of green and a mountain in the background. A tiny cluster of houses fleeting by. A solitary herd of cattle. Few people and much land.

Fitzgerald revisited

"Tender is the Night" has many flashes of brilliance and can be supremely evocative, but I cannot agree with Pietro Citati that it is Fitzgerald's masterpiece. Gatsby is perfect and feels effortless whereas this more ambitious book seems at time belabored. As Citati says it is a book about charm and I would add about the evanescent quality of time - the fleeting moment, the revealing gesture, the odd lapse, the exact second when life's plot turns. It is also a novel about decadence, wasting one's talent, coming short, the things that Fitzgerald thought about himself and that thicker writers like Hemingway said about him. But Hemingway, often thought the greater of the two has not lasted as well. His macho poses are embarassing and terribly dated ("such a lady", as Robert Hughes said). On the contrary, Fitzgerald remains true. Even if "Tender is the Night" is not his masterpiece, it still is a moving, modern novel.

Proustian Nabokov

"Speak, Memory", Nabokov's delicious memoir of his cosseted childhood in pre-revolutionary Russia, is often strongly reminiscent of Proust: the voluptuous style, the tender evocation of minute details, the precise, tactile and sensuous descriptions, even some episodes - for example, his train of thought as he waits for his mother's good night kiss. And how this sophisticated, refined world collapsed almost overnight... There are always barbarians at the gate.

A cuban memoir

Reinaldo Arenas' memoir "Antes que anochezca" is a harrowing tale of sexual frenzy, political repression and literary courage set in Cuba in the 60's and 70's. In the cuban hothouse, a petty, implacable communist tyranny corrupts, suffocates or crushes all opposition and dissent. Writers and homosexuals are a particular target. Somehow, amidst terrible difficulties, Arenas manages to smuggle first his manuscripts and them himself out of the island and finally taste a little freedom in the US before succumbing to the Aids epidemic. It is important to read such testimonies every once in a while to be reminded of the value of political freedom and material comfort such as we enjoy  in the West. 

Wagner: an acquired taste

What seemed forbidding is now bewitching; dull and ponderous it sounded, now it appears deliciously lyrical, dramatic and moving. For hours the attention never flags; the attention is rapturously held by the unfolding drama. Yesterday, at the Liceo,  "The Walkyries" cast their spell. The audience held its breath; nothing moved except on stage. At the end a storm of applause as I had never heard in this city. 

Grotesque Dali

Up in Figueres, the Dali museum, one of the biggest tourist attractions of the region, is by turns nauseating, funny and grotesque. An explosion of kitsch which  not even its very excess redeems. Down in Pubol, the Gala chateau, with its sweet dead roses smell, the piped in Wagner, the collection of haute couture dresses and other assorted mementos of the high life faux surrealist style stands as another  monument to the cult of personality gone silly. 

It's only rock'n roll

Old for those of us who were young in the 80's, washed up in the 90's, decrepit in the new century, the Rolling Stones are still in there, making faces, making moves, playing their old repertoire as if it was new. Look at Shine a Light: altogether a disastrous movie...even the sound is bad...at the beginning Jagger & Co look like a pastiche of themselves. But as the concert moves along, the power of the music gradually takes over. Those old songs still have the capacity to move you ...and to move them. Gradually a trance like atmosphere is established. The Stones rock. They still do. 

Anachromism

What are Sylvère Lotringer and Antonio Negri, these two post marxist, neo structuralist anachronisms doing in the pages of Art Forum? Still talking about revolution, after all these years? Being nostalgic about May 68? You bet. Negri thinks "it was the beginning of an era, not an ending". "The emancipation of the masses would occur through the shift from paid work to the liberation of work". This is, according to him, "what we need to talk about when we speak of '68". It seems Negri, like the Bourbons, learned nothing and forgot nothing. Still spewing forth the old nonsense, still holding fast to old fashioned obscure social theorizing to justify all the horrid mistakes of his political past. Does Art Forum think it is being modern by opening its pages to these two? Or does it feel that a little overwrought French speculation passing as serious thought is needed to compensate for the ads which fill 90% of its pages and feed the feverish capitalist speculation swirling around the art world?

Meanwhile...

Early in the morning and late at night, I kept on reading the World Crisis, Winston Churchill's account of the First World War, easily the most vivid, eloquent, moving  and penetrating history of that great conflict which I ever read. Much less known than "The Second World War, which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature, it is by far a better book. Whereas the former is (except the first volume, "The Gathering Storm") largely the product of staff work, overloaded with documents and often dull, this is a rolling, majestic, impassioned book, its tone by turns acerbic and heroic, which illuminates and brings to life episodes, characters and moods often described to no effect by plodding academic pens. A devastating indictment of the trench warfare waged on the Western Front, with its mindless offensives costing hundreds of thousands of lives, a spirited defense of the Dardanelles operation which nearly cost him his career, an account of how he invented the tank (he did) and so much more. Long out of print, it has now been republished by Penguin.

The Emporda

The Emporda is the playground of the Catalan bourgeoisie. A pristine landscape, with the Pyrennees in the background and manicured fields with lots of picturesque little villages, each with its own  romanesque church from the XII century. The capital of the Emporda, Girona, is at the crossroads of France and Spain. It is here, back in the XIIIth century that a quite small group of Jewish scholars and wisemen invented the Kaballah. Now Girona is the richest district in Spain, where Catalan nationalism is strongest and the only one where the PP has zero representation.

About this blog

Driving from the Emporda to Barcelona, Cyberiticus decided to share his boring thoughts, experiences, images, musings, reflections and general ill temper with you all, adrift in the cybersphere, who spend idle hours searching the internet. Please feel free to share with him your indignation, boredom, incomprehension or, God forbid, wholehearted agreement with his postings.