CULTURE BOOK – Page 2 – Don't Gel Too Soon

Back to the Future: Futurism at the Tate and 1968

In the early 20th Century there was a band of wild men who created an entire new way of thinking about “Art.” They were called Futurists and for those of you who took Art 11 and already know about them, I understand that I didn’t discover them – this being particularly true since they are currently appearing in a retrospective at the Tate Modern here in London. AND for my penultimate (I think) post here I want to tell you about them because they were a real kick.

This painting, by Luigi Russolo, is called “The Revolt.” On the right you can see “the people” pushing up against the hard line of the establishment. It’s the same thing the Futurists themselves were doing. Here’s their major “Manifesto.”

These are our final conclusions:

With our enthusiastic adherence to Futurism, we will:

Destroy the cult of the past, the obsession with the ancients, pedantry and academic formalism.
Totally invalidate all kinds of imitation.
Elevate all attempts at originality, however daring, however violent.
Bear bravely and proudly the smear of “madness” with which they try to gag all innovators.
Regard art critics as useless and dangerous.
Rebel against the tyranny of words: “Harmony” and “good taste” and other loose expressions which can be used to destroy the works of Rembrandt, Goya, Rodin…
Sweep the whole field of art clean of all themes and subjects which have been used in the past.
Support and glory in our day-to-day world, a world which is going to be continually and splendidly transformed by victorious Science.

The dead shall be buried in the earth’s deepest bowels! The threshold of the future will be swept free of mummies! Make room for youth, for violence, for daring!

As I wandered through, alone and more available for being by myself, (this one is Carra’s The Funeral of an Anarchist) I felt that I knew these guys. Yes they denigrated women (more on that in a second) but their rebellion, their anger, their passion, their desire to change everything – that was familiar. Of course I never wanted to destroy; none of us did. But the feelings of anger, of disappointment in the ways of the world, the desire to find new ways to say things, those were familiar — and swept me back to the determined, impassioned girl I was then. I can only describe my reaction as delight.

You’re going to tell me that this is the kind of blind passion is just what was wrong with the 60’s. And for those who transformed these feelings not into art but into primitive acts of violence – they were wrong then and they’re wrong now. That’s what is so amazing about art. You can act, and express, through representation instead of concrete acts of violence and hatred. That’s what these enraged men did. Meanwhile, the women artists were pretty angry, as you can imagine. One of them, Valentine de Saint-Point, although she agreed with their ideas, had some of her own to go along with them. Like this:

“Women
are Furies, Amazons, Semiramis, Joans of Arc, Jeanne Hachettes, Judith
and Charlotte Cordays, Cleopatras, and Messalinas: combative women who
fight more ferociously than males, lovers who arouse, destroyers who break down
the weakest and help select through pride or despair, “despair through
which the heart yields its fullest return.”

I wish I knew more because there’s so much more to this; the impact of Cubism on all
of it, the way it affected artists in nation after nation, and, most of all, the sheer energy of
art that, instead of freezing a moment, seems to set it free and follow it.

One of the Many Reasons to Love Christopher Wren: St. Paul’s Cathedral

It’s late and I’m tired from a probably too-long walk and probably too much work. So I’ll leave you with this picture of the wonderful St. Paul’s Cathedral, taken from the very center of the Millenium Pedestrian Bridge that crosses the river from the Tate Modern to this old masterpiece and the bustling legal community close by.

Brick Lane in the Real World – Things Have Changed in London

You can see it there – the street name in English and, I think, Bengali – the street brought to life in Monica Ali’s wonderful book. Brick Lane was a sensation, well reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, as well it should have been. Reading it, a reader not only felt the feelings, but also heard the voices and smelled the cooking smells of a crowded immigrant neighborhood in London’s East End.Well we went there today, expecting to see the veiled women, street food and crowded food markets that orient us in a neighborhood like the one we lived in as we read Brick Lane. But the book was published six years ago. And Nazneen, her sad husband, lover and daughters have surely moved on.

Gentrification has arrived – as surely as this old shop will soon be transformed into a web-connected, foam and half-caf coffee joint. As we walked the streets today, they were full of cool people in multiple earrings, tight skits, hip tee shirts and modern demeanor, and with the goods to satisfy them. Revealing, low cut short skirted dresses, funky feathered jewelry, pork pie hats and weird purses hung from stalls in side markets and on the Lane itself. Music was bluegrass and Hendrix and newer than that — nothing remotely ethnic. There are lots of curry and other ethnic restaurants but they have wine lists and chic fonts for their menus. And there are liquor stores.

I’m not sure precisely why I’m telling you this except to remind us to be grateful for gifts like this wonderful novel. Things have surely changed here on Brick Lane, but thanks to Monica Ali, her ear, her eyes and, especially, her heart and empathy and imagination, we have a lovely document of life as it was here just a decade ago. This immigrant literature, whether it’s Ali, or Lahiri or Henry Roth or Saul Bellow or Amy Tan or Betty Smith, provides historical scrapbooks as communities shift, or are displaced. So it’s nothing new; it’s just so dramatic to arrive on the Tube at a place so recently real to me and to see it, already, well past the point it lives in in my mind.

AN ARTISTS’ COLONY, THE ORIGINAL HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL, THE CRAZY JERUSALEM MARKET AND 7 MILES ON MY PEDOMETER

This was a remarkable day. In the first place, according to my pedometer we’ve walked seven miles! Even more importantly, of course, was where we walked. Our first stop was an accident – wandering toward the Old City from our apartment we ended up in the lovely old neighborhood of Yemen Moshe. Symbolized by the windmill at the top of the hill upon which this old neighborhood is built, it has long been highly desirable and glamorous place to live – full of artists and intellectuals. Now there are also dozens of galleries and shops – but we just strolled around en route to the oldest parts of the city.
From there, we went into Old Jerusalem through the Zion Gate – a way we’d never been before, and explored the area around an old Armenian church, when suddenly we came upon this sign

At first we weren’t even sure it was for real — we’d certainly never heard of it and both of us are pretty well-schooled in Holocaust lore. As we drew closer, we were shocked to find a small entrance to an equally small courtyard offering the gateway to “The Chamber of the Holocaust” and this sign:

From there we moved into a small, cave-like room whose walls were covered with stone tablets, much like grave stones, dedicated to lost towns in the countries of the Shoah. Three rooms and an outdoor courtyard were covered with the “headstones” and all the rest of the exhibits were, old, faded, primitive and clearly created with love, outrage and very little money. Somehow, the very “scotch tape and cutouts” quality of the exhibits magnified the grief and determination of those who had created them. It was a remarkable moment in our day. Here are a couple more photos:

The “cave” with the headstones to lost cities and towns.

One of several walls of photo- graphs of lost souls. There are more, but this is enough. Lots of other things happened today but this is where I want to leave things. I’ll try one more post before Shabbat but if I don’t make it, I’ll catch us up on Saturday night.

Here’s just one preview though – of Jerusalem’s favorite market – Machene Yehuda. Good night for now.

The 50s, TV, The Company and The Hungarian Uprising

I was ten in 1956, when the people of Hungary rose up to end the Russian occupation. It was a rout – and they remained under Communist domination until the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s difficult to explain now just how scary it was to hear of these heroic people crushed in the streets, and, for a child, difficult to place. Could it happen to me? To my family? How did the Russians get there? Why did they care what people did in Hungary?

A couple of years later a local church group sponsored a Hungarian family’s move to the US and their son, our age and pretty good at speaking English, came to dinner at the home of my friend Lois and spoke to a group of us – maybe it was our Girl Scout troop; maybe just a bunch of girlfriends – I’m not sure. He was dramatic and dignified and so happy to be there. Listening to him and the stories of those he’d left behind was a haunting experience – especially in the mind of a romantic politicized 13 year old mad for JFK.

I hadn’t thought about any of this in years, but this summer TNT brings us The Company – a history of the CIA — and of the Hungarian tragedy of 1956. From the perspective of 50 years it’s still so sad, even through the gauze of TV melodrama – and the freedom and prosperity of Hungary today doesn’t mitigate much.

I’ve kept my eye on what happened in the East since then. We took our kids through Czechoslovakia and East Germany while they were still behind the Iron Curtain. We couldn’t get the boys dry socks after a heavy rain because, as the storekeeper told us “we don’t have socks today.” We gave all our Bruce Springsteen tapes to our guide; each one would have cost him a month’s pay on the black market.

I’ve even been to Pottsdam. That photo on the left is the bridge where spies were exchanged during the days of the Cold War. So it’s not like I don’t know what happened historically. Once in a while though the recreation of reality, even with Hollywood gloss, slams me back where I was for a little while.

That’s all – I’ve been sitting here trying to think of a real ending for this – and I can’t — no massive summary available. Good night.

DEEP IN A DREAM: THE RED TENT

While I was in Jerusalem I went several times to Pardes Institute, a remarkable school to study the Bible, Talmud and commentaries. My husband and I love to study while we’re visiting places; it all seems so much more real – and sinks in more, too. We were there during the week that the story of the rape of Dinah is read on Shabbat. It’s pretty profound and provocative and a wonderful teacher named Rabbi Reuven Grodner taught the class. We were transfixed: the story of the vengeful brothers and their far from vengeful father Jacob is troubling to anyone – but particularly to women.

I remembered that The Red Tent was written in Dinah’s voice, so I decided to read it. I had tried once before but it seemed too overwrought and almost overwritten then. Now though, I find myself more interested in the stories in the Torah — the universality of Bible stories and all they represent — so I stuck it in my suitcase — and once we’d studied the Genesis story of Dinah I pulled it out.

It’s really quite an experience — almost a fever, like The Virgin Suicides. The sisterhood and love among women, the pain of childbirth, the rivalry and particularly the remarkable power author Anita Diamant provides to each of the main characters — is thrilling.

There’s a kind of Biblical interpretation called a Midrash and those that I, as a beginner, have read, are all pretty male-oriented. This book is one big women’s perspective/Midrash full of love, passion, pain, loss, love, birth, death, misery, joy and poetry. Much of it does NOT appear in the Bible but that’s true of the old Midrashim as well. I can’t stop thinking about the women of this book, their lives and stories. I came to love them and their stories — so very very different from the ones the conventional Bible stories tell.

ART AND POLITICS

Just to the left is a famous mosaic of Tel Aviv scenes that’s stood in the middle of town since the early 70s. We went with our friends Joel and Nurith to the Nahum Gutman Museum and saw photos of the work, which I loved. Naturally, Joel immediately decided that we had to go see it. And we did. It’s a dear. lovely, loving and evocative work of the three columns you see here, surrounded by a ring of more scenes that serves as a kind of frame — really lovely.

The museum currently features a retrospective of the work of Duda Geva, an Israeli cartoonist who died recently, quite young. His work was kind of disconcerting; much of it joking about the absence of God. He appeared prominently in Israeli newspapers — and the tiny museum was jammed. It’s so fascinating, in a Jewish country, that this very secular man had such a wide following. Typical of the enigmatic nature of Israel in the 21st century – battling between the disproportionately powerful 15% who are super-orthodox and the rest of the country and of the frightful battle for the soul of the country between militant, militaristic right and the progressives. There is such pain and despair — on both sides. I’m going to try to write about it some here in future posts — after two years in progressive and highly secular Tel Aviv we go to Jerusalem tomorrow where religion and more conservative politics rule.