Archive - December, 2011

Pick of the Week: Matthew Northridge’s Pictures by Wire and Wireless

December 31, 2011 in Images, News with 2 Comments

 

Matthew Northridge, "Welcome Back to the Nuclear Age," 2011. Collage on paper. 23" x 27 1/2". Black lines culled from books and pieced together into a continuous tangled loop. (On View at KANSAS through 1.7.12)

 

If you haven’t seen Matthew Northridge’s solo show Pictures by Wire and Wireless at KANSAS, the newest gallery on Tribeca’s up-and-coming gallery row, you’re in luck. The show has just been extended until Saturday, January 7th. Art Forum magazine has placed Pictures by Wire and Wireless on their “Critic’s Pick” list. I had the pleasure of seeing the show in New York this November and can assure you that the distinction is well deserved.

Northridge is one of the few contemporary artists I can think of pushing the boundaries of collage as an art form. Equally playful and orderly, his obsessive, detailed work, composed of cultural ephemera, is never marred by irksome cleverness or a hollow cataloging impulse. This is art that improves upon closer examination–art that reveals itself slowly without ever relinquishing all of its mysteries.

“Welcome Back to the Nuclear Age” is a good case in point. This colorful, tangled loop immediately grabbed my attention when I saw it in the gallery. But only when I approached the piece did I realize that it was a collage composed of hundreds of carefully arranged black lines from various found magazines, ads, books, and maps. (You can click on the “detail” image below to get a closer look).

 

Matthew Northridge, "Welcome Back to the Nuclear Age," Detail, 2011. Collage on paper. 23" x 27 1/2". Black lines culled from books and pieced together into a continuous tangled loop.

 

Northridge’s art work sings in KANSAS’s spacious galleries. While it’s easy to become overly focused on the intricate construction of these pieces, landscape is really the central theme that ties all of the work in Pictures by Wire and Wireless together. Viewing the show as a whole allowed me to better appreciate the artist’s talent for creating highly original, imaginary scenes.

Whether looking at a rolled map of Washington D.C. encased in steel bars, the haunting skies on raffle tickets in “How to Know (and Predict) the Weather,” the layered collages of found nature images, or the miniature structures in “Barns and Other Outbuildings,” Northridge’s invented landscapes always have a humorous, otherworldly quality. His marvelous piece, Northeast, reminds me simultaneously of an aerial view of a city, children’s blocks, windows in a skyscraper, and colorful beds from a dollhouse.

 

Matthew Northridge, "The Northeast," 2011. Wood, paper, and printed material, 12" x 12" x 4". (On View at KANSAS through 1.7.12)

 

 

Matthew Northridge, "The Northeast," Detail, 2011. Wood, paper, and printed material, 12" x 12" x 4". (On View at KANSAS through 1.7.12)

 

 

Matthew Northridge, "Map of Washington D.C.", Detail, 2010. Wood, steel rods, & map, 37" x 2 1/2" diameter. Suspended from ceiling. (On view at KANSAS through 1.7.12)

 

 

Artist Matthew Northridge and his piece "Barns and Other Outbuildings" on view at KANSAS Gallery in Tribeca through 1.7.11 (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

 

 

Detail view of Matthew Northridge's "Barns and Other Outbuildings," 2009. Wood & chipboard. 15" diameter. Projecting from wall (On view at KANSAS through 1.7.12))

 

 

An installation view of Matthew Northridge's "Barns and Other Outbuildings," 2009. Wood & chipboard. 15" diameter. Projecting from wall (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

 

 

Matthew Northridge. "How to Know (and Predict) the Weather," 2006. Found printed material & raffle tickets. 26" high x 47" wide (On View at KANSAS through 1.7.12)

 

 

Matthew Northridge. "How to Know (and Predict) the Weather," Detail, 2006. Found printed material & raffle tickets. 26" high x 47" wide (On View at KANSAS through 1.7.12)

 

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The Sunday Poem: Iain Haley Pollock

December 30, 2011 in Sunday Poem, Words with 1 Comment

 

 

 

 

Child of the Sun

 

Great Great Aunt Aida
trained her lapdog
to attack dark-skinned men.
A shake of her high-yaller head
and a suck on her ivory teeth,
and the Scottish terrier slipped
through the fence pickets
to nip at a tar baby’s ankles.

Somewhere in her heaven,
Aunt Aida fusses today:
the lightest Haley yet,
naked to the waist
in a plastic lawn chair,
I’m a line cook browning
limbs in a skillet’s thick oil,
a tanner of calf hide
curing skin in the sun.

Aida dreamed the family
would fade into a whiteness
of table manners and book learning,
and with me she came close.
But Mom must have eaten
a pig’s foot when she was pregnant,
or dialed up the volume on those
Aretha records. Or I took it too hard,
that time in the grocery store

when a woman confused Mom
for my nanny–I bronze in the yard
all afternoon, hoping to blind
my eyes with scales and molt
like a sidewinder, to leave behind
a trail of skin, brittle, flaking, and white,
cracking and split in the sun.

 

 

 

 

 

About Iain Haley Pollock

(Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths)

Iain Haley Pollock’s first collection of poems, Spit Back a Boy, won the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Springside Chesnut Hill Academy, where he is the Cyrus H. Nathan ’30 Distinguished Faculty Chair for English.

 
In the January/February 2012 issue of Poet’s and Writers, Pollock says that he finds inspiration for his work from “Stories of family, friends, and neighbors; the high murder rate in Philadelphia; the early Chicago electric blues; the Catholic Mass; the endurance of slavery; autumn; the jazz of Miles Davis and Charles Mingus; Jewish mourning rituals; the painter Barkley Hendricks; the trees on the Schuylkill River walk and at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy; Philadelphians’ eccentricities; lake-effect snow; and, of course, the beautiful woman with whom I live.”

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“Child of the Sun” © Iain Haley Pollock. The poem appears in Pollock’s debut collection Spit Back a Boy and was reprinted with permission from the author.

 

Gwarlingo Tours the High Line, New York’s Park in the Sky

December 26, 2011 in Design, Images, Spaces with 1 Comment

The end of The High Line as seen from street level (Photo Courtesy Wired NY)

 

If you’re fed up with partisan bickering and political dysfunction in Washington, the gratifying, lavishly-illustrated book High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky, just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, might temper your burgeoning cynicism. The book is a lesson in what can be accomplished in the face of overwhelming skepticism and bureaucracy.

The new High Line park in New York City deserves to be celebrated not only for its innovative design, but also for the grass-roots collaboration that made the improbable idea of converting a derelict elevated railway on Manhattan’s West Side into a beautiful green space a reality.

 

(Photo Courtesy Urban Design Review)

 

The High Line is one of the most important public projects in New York City in decades, and the ultimate example of how fruitful a cross-pollination among various disciplines can be. The book’s authors, Robert Hammond and Joshua David, had no prior experience in planning and development (one journalist referred to them as “a pair of nobodies”), but this didn’t stop them from collaborating with artists, elected officials, neighbors, local business owners, horticulturists, and landscape architects to realize their vision.

This is a story about two ordinary guys taking on a behemoth bureaucracy and actually winning.”I didn’t understand the complexity of what we were getting into,” Hammond says in the book. “We would need to become versed in urban planning, architecture, and City politics, raise millions of dollars, and give years of our lives to the High Line.”

 

Phase 2 of the High Line in 2011 (Photo by Iwan Baan Courtesy Friends of the High Line)

 

This industrial structure has a fascinating history. The first street-level railroad tracks were built on Manhattan’s West Side in 1847. So many accidents occurred between freight trains and street traffic that 10th Avenue became known as Death Avenue. In an effort to improve safety, men on horses, called West Side Cowboys, rode in front of trains waving red flags.

After years of public debate about the hazard, the High Line was built in the 1930s as part of a massive public-private infrastructure project called the West Side Improvement. The elevated railway lifted freight traffic 30 feet in the air, removing dangerous trains from the streets of Manhattan’s largest industrial district.

The new High Line connected directly to warehouses and factories on its route, allowing the trains to deliver milk, meat, produce, and other goods right inside buildings. This innovative design also reduced theft for the Bell Laboratories Building (now the Westbeth Artists Community), and the Nabisco plant, (now Chelsea Market). The entire project was 13 miles long, eliminated 105 street-level railroad crossings, added 32 acres to Riverside Park, and cost over $150 million in 1930 dollars—more than $2 billion today.

 

Before the High Line was built, trains ran at street level. Conditions along 10th Avenue were so bad that it was nicknamed "Death Avenue." (Photo Courtesy Friends of the High Line)

 

 

For safety, the railroads hired men – the "West Side Cowboys" – to ride horses and wave flags in front of the trains. (Photo Courtesy Friends of the High Line)

 

 

The city’s solution was to build a 22-block long elevated railway, or High Line. (Photo Courtesy Friends of the High Line)

 

 

An archival photo showing construction of the original High Line (Photo Courtesy Friends of the High Line)

 

 

Construction of the Elevated Railway on Gansevoort Street Looking North (Photo Courtesy the NY Historical Society)

 

 

The elevated railroad on the West Side of Manhattan is it appeared in 1934 (Photographer unknown)

 

By the 1950s, the popularity of interstate trucking reduced rail traffic nationwide. The southern section of the High Line was demolished in the 60s. In 1980 the last train ran on the High Line pulling three carloads of frozen turkeys.

In the mid-1980s, a group of property owners with land under the line lobbied for the demolition of the entire structure. Peter Obletz, a Chelsea resident, activist, and railroad enthusiast, challenged the demolition efforts in court and tried to re-establish rail service on the Line.

As the line sat unused, it became known to a few urban explorers and local residents for the tough, drought-tolerant wild grasses, shrubs, and trees that had sprung up in the gravel along the abandoned railway. The photographer Joel Sternfeld shot some striking photographs of the High Line during this period. His book, Joel Sternfeld: Walking the High Line, is a transporting glimpse at this rusty, derelict structure before it was reclaimed.

 

Peter Obletz, a Chelsea resident, activist, and railroad enthusiast, challenged the demolition efforts in court and tried to re-establish rail service on the Line. This photo shows Obletz outside his home in 1983. (Photo by Peter Richards Courtesy Friends of the High Line)

 

 

As the line sat unused, it became known to a few urban explorers and local residents for the tough, drought-tolerant wild grasses, shrubs, and trees that had sprung up in the gravel along the abandoned railway. The photographer Joel Sternfeld shot some striking photographs of the High Line during this period. (Photo © Joel Sternfeld Courtesy Friends of the High Line)

 

 

(Photo © Joel Sternfeld Courtesy Friends of the High Line)

 

 

(Photo © Joel Sternfeld Courtesy Friends of the High Line)

 

 

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Snow: A Holiday Gift from Gwarlingo

December 23, 2011 in Images with 2 Comments

 

(Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

 
Last night the snow finally arrived in New Hampshire. Having grown up in Georgia, a white Christmas is still a welcome novelty for me. Back home in Atlanta, businesses and schools close the moment the “S” word is mentioned. There are few snow plows or sand trucks there, and an all-wheel-drive Subaru is as rare as a nun in a bikini.

But here in New Hampshire, the Land of Subarus, we’re used to the white stuff. We pull on our snow boots and hats, and brave the elements.

I always enjoy those first few snowfalls when the landscape is miraculously transformed. Once the snow is on the ground, I can track every animal who has skirted past my house at night—the deer, the squirrels, the mice, and ermine. And few scenes are as arresting as deep blue shadows stretching over fresh snow on a crisp, clear afternoon. It never ceases to amaze me that I can stand in the middle of the woods on a winter afternoon and actually hear the sound of snow falling.

 

(Photo by Michelle Aldredge)


 
 

Squirrel tracks in the snow (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

 

This holiday I’m grateful not only for the well-timed snowfall, but also for all of the readers like you who have made the first seven months of Gwarlingo such a success. I appreciate your positive feedback, comments, store purchases, and emails of support. 

I hope you have some time to relax and connect with friends or family this holiday. Today, my Christmas gift to you is this short sand animation called Snow by filmmaker Corrie Francis Parks.

 

A still from Corrie Francis Parks' sand animation "Snow." Watch the full film below.

 

 

Corrie Francis Parks at work on a sand animation (Photo courtesy Corrie Francis Parks)

 

Corrie works with sand, paint on glass, cut-outs and hand-drawn mediums. This particular film uses a highly specialized technique called sand animation. Corrie has found new ways to incorporate color into her sand films—a medium that has traditionally been in black and white.

Using sand as a material is challenging and difficult to master. Corrie is one of the few filmmakers who is pushing this medium in new directions. You can learn more about Corrie’s work on her website or follow her on Twitter.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Enjoy the film and best wishes for 2012.

(If you’re reading this in an email, click here to watch the video.)

 

 

Snow from corrie francis parks on Vimeo.

 

 

The Sunday Poem: Matthew Zapruder

December 18, 2011 in Sunday Poem, Words with 1 Comment

 

 

 

 

Poem Without Intimacy

 

the other day I was shopping

in one of those giant incredibly brightly lit stores

you can apparently see from space

wheeling a massive empty cart

thinking this is a lot like thinking

why do I go to sleep

not having brushed my teeth and dream

of the giant failure

known as high school again

on the loudspeaker was a familiar song

by Quicksilver Messenger Service

there were no lyrics but I remember

it says we are all skyscrapers

under one blue rectangle that never chose us

to be these sentinels

who imperceptibly sway

and watch people far below

like tiny devices no one controls

enter our various sunlit glass conversations

the world is old

and full as it will always be

of commerce and its hopeful non profit mitigations

future products from the Amazon

will cure ailments we have

and also ones not yet invented

looking down I saw my cart was full

of a few boxes of some cereal I do not recognize

four flashlights and a pink plastic water bottle

made of some kind of vegetable

that will eventually like me into the earth

harmlessly decompose

and then I passed an entire row of plastic flowers

and wanted to be the sort of person

who bought them all

but really I am a runway covered in grass

and all I truly love is sleep

 

–for Juan Felipe Herrera

 


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Grace Paley: “Write What Will Stop Your Breath If You Don’t Write”

December 11, 2011 in Process, Words with 2 Comments

Hallie Zens, age 9, writes a message on the blackboard at the Thetford Community Center during a letter writing session held in memory of writer Grace Paley on her birthday. Paley lived in Thetford, Vermont, and in New York City. She died in 2007 at age 84 at her home in Thetford. (Photo by Jason Johns courtesy the Valley News)

Today is the birthday of writer Grace Paley.

Although Paley’s writing output was modest during her 84 years — some four dozen stories in three volumes: The Little Disturbances of Man (Doubleday, 1959); Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974); and Later the Same Day (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985)–she was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and continues to have a devoted following today.

In a 1992 interview with The Paris Review, the magazine made this observation about her brevity in both her fiction and in her conversation:

Occasionally she will admit that, though it is “not nice” of her to say so, she believes that she can accomplish as much in a few stories as her longer-winded colleagues do in a novel. And she points out that she has had many other important things to do with her time, such as raising children and participating in politics. “Art,” she explains, “is too long, and life is too short.” Paley is noticeably unaffected by the pressures of mortality which drive most writers to publish…

The oft-noted Paley paradox is the contrast between her grandmotherly appearance and her no-schmaltz personality. Paley says only what is necessary. Ask her a yes-or-no question, and she will answer yes or no. Ask her a foolish question, and she will kindly but clearly convey her impatience. Talking with her, one develops the impression that she listens and speaks in two different, sometimes conflicting capacities. As a person she is tolerant and easygoing, as a user of words, merciless.

Grace Goodside grew up speaking Russian and Yiddish at her home in the Bronx–her parents immigrated to New York 17 years before she was born. Writing was only one of Paley’s jobs. As The Paris Review observes, she spent a lot of time in playgrounds when her children were young, was very active in the feminist and peace movements, and taught courses at City College, Columbia University, Syracuse University, and Sarah Lawrence College. She was also a co-founder of the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York in 1967.

Grace Paley (Photo Courtesy Dorothy Marder)

“Our idea,” Paley said at 1996 symposium on Educating the Imagination, ”was that children—by writing, by putting down words, by reading, by beginning to love literature, by the inventiveness of listening to one another—could begin to understand the world better and to make a better world for themselves. That always seemed to me such a natural idea that I’ve never understood why it took so much aggressiveness and so much time to get it started!”

Paley’s writing, which appeared in the latter-half of the timorous 50s, was radical for its time. As the New York Times noted in Paley’s obituary, “Ms. Paley was among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women — mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers — in all their dailiness. She focused especially on single mothers, whose days were an exquisite mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue. In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind.”
 
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The Sunday Poem: Jen Bervin

December 10, 2011 in Images, Sunday Poem, Words with 2 Comments

 

 

 

 

From The Desert

 

 

Excerpt from The Desert, Poetry


 

 

 

About Jen Bervin

Jen Bervin’s work brings together text and textile in a practice that encompasses poetry, archival research, artist books, and large-scale art works.

The Desert is a poem Bervin wrote by sewing row by row, line by line, across 130 pages of John Van Dyke’s, The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances (1901). She used atmospheric fields of pale blue zigzag stitching to construct a poem “narrated by the air”— “so clear that one can see the breaks.”

Each quietly monumental book in the edition of 40 was machine-sewn with over five thousand yards of pale blue thread. Thinking of the artist James Turrell, for whom the poem was first composed for a reading at Roden Crater, Bervin wrote: “The great get on with the least possible and suggest everything by light.”

"The Desert" by Jen Bervin, Granary Books 2008

 

"The Desert" by Jen Bervin, Granary Books 2008, open view.

 

 

Bervin’s books include The Dickinson Composites (2010) and The Desert (2008) from Granary Books, and The Silver Book (2010), A Non- Breaking Space (2005), and Nets (2004, fifth printing 2010) from Ugly Duckling Presse. Her next book is forthcoming from Granary Books in February 2012.

Her work has been published in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Northwestern University Press 2011), La Familia Americana (Spain: Antonio Machado Libros, 2010), The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (UK: Reality Street Editions, 2008), and is forthcoming in a German anthology on appropriation literature (Luxbooks), I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues Press), READ (1913 Press), and Figuring Color (ICA Boston/ Hatje Cantz).

Recent exhibitions include: “Jen Bervin: Weaving” at Gridspace in Brooklyn; “The Wildest Word We Consign to Language” at Poets House in New York; and the group show “Telefone Sem Fio: Word-Things of Augusto de Campos Revisited” at EFA Project Space in New York.

Jen Bervin (Photo by Khashayar Naderehvandi)

 

In "Nets" Bervin stripped Shakespeare's sonnets bare to the "nets" to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible—a divergent elsewhere. "When we write poems," says Bervin, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when we read or write poems, we do it with or against this palimpsest."

 

"Nets" by Jen Bervin, (2004, fifth printing 2010), Ugly Duckling Presse, cover view

Bervin has received fellowships in art and writing from The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, The New York Foundation for the Arts, Centrum, The MacDowell Colony, Visual Studies Workshop, The Center for Book Arts, and The Camargo Foundation.

Her work is in more than thirty collections including The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Walker Art Center, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, Stanford University, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and the British Library.

She curated the New York exhibition, “Emily Dickinson at Poets House: Manuscripts from the Donald and Patricia Oresman Collection”—a rare selection of the poet Emily Dickinson’s original manuscripts.

Bervin teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She’ll be the Von Hess Visiting Artist at the Borowsky Center for Publication Arts at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 2012. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

To learn more about Jen Bervin and to explore her poetry, artist books, and visual art, please visit her website.

If you enjoyed this post, please spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, etc. You can read the entire Sunday Poem series here.

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Text and images from The Desert and Nets © Jen Bervin and were reprinted with permission from the author.

 

The Sunday Poem: Christopher Robinson

December 3, 2011 in Sunday Poem, Words with Comments Off

 

 

 

Hotdog

 

They salvaged only what was vital, leaving
behind their most precious belongings,
including Aunt Beale’s watercolors,
which were lost, and the thousand
paper cranes Dad had folded
to win Mom over, placing them
on her usual routes, at the post office,
in the library bathroom, that after
the wedding they’d hung
from the dining room ceiling—lost.
They lost several leisure suits,
Star Wars T-shirts, baseball cards
and G.I. Joes and several vases
of fresh daisies. And in the smolder
of blackened house, once the firemen’s
hoses had gone limp, they found
the family schnauzer, dead and gleaming:
what had happened was, the dog
had hidden in the cabinet below
the family silver, which had melted,
casting the poor mut entire.
It radiated waves of heat.
But how could they not reach out
to pet that shiny silver schnauzer,
one by one, saying ‘there boy,’
as they burned their soft pink hands?

 

 

 

About Christopher Robinson

Christopher Robinson is a writer, teacher and translator currently living in the wind. He earned his MA in poetry from Boston University and his MFA from Hunter College. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Alaska Quarterly Review, Night Train, Kenyon Review, Nimrod, Chiron Review, Umbrella Factory, FlatmanCrooked, McSweeney’s Online, Mare Nostrum, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, the Sante Fe Art Institute, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He has been a Ruth Lilly Fellowship finalist for the last two years.

 

 

If you like Christopher Robinson’s poem “Hotdog,” please spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, etc. You can read the entire Sunday Poem series here.

Would you like the Sunday Poem delivered to your email box each week? Subscribe to Gwarlingo by email. You can also follow Gwarlingo on Twitter or Facebook.

“Hotdog” © Christopher Robinson and was published with permission from the author.

 

Peter Wyer’s New Opera Dramatizes One Tibetan Woman’s Journey to Freedom

December 2, 2011 in News, Sounds with Comments Off

Jessica Miller-Rauch, Erica Moon, and Michael Krzankowski perform a scene from Peter Wyer's new opera in progress, "Numinous City" (Photo by Michael Palma courtesy of The Rubin Museum)

“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”

This line from Victor Hugo came to mind the first time I heard the incredible story of Tibetan nun Ngawang Sangdrol.

At age 14 Sangdrol was jailed at the notorious Draphchi Prison for peacefully protesting against China’s invasion of Tibet. The prison has an estimated population of 1000 of which some 600 are thought to be political prisoners ranging in age from 18 to 85, many of which are captured monks and nuns.

While in captivity, Sangdrol was beaten with iron rods and rubber pipes, subjected to electric cattle prods on the tongue and six months in complete darkness in solitary confinement. She was also forced to spin and knit until her fingers were raw and blistered.

Ngawang Sangdrol (Photo courtesy American Opera Projects)

She told the BBC that the mental torture was even worse than the physical torture. ”We had to denounce his Holiness the Dalai Lama and were not allowed to engage in religious practice.”

In 1993, while inside Drapchi prison, Sangdrol and 13 other nuns clandestinely recorded songs in tribute to their homeland and the Dalai Lama using a smuggled cassette player. This courageous group of women, who became known as the “singing nuns” of Drapchi, suffered extended prison sentences and harsh treatment as a result of their actions.
 


Watch Ngawang Sangdrol sing “Undying Cry for Freedom”
 
Fortunately, the nuns’ recording made it out of Tibet and the fame of these protest songs ultimately led to intercession by the government and to Sangdrol’s release. While her early release was officially on grounds of good behavior, her liberation was politically well-timed, happening only a few days before then-Chinese President Jiang Zemin visited George Bush’s Texas ranch. Sangdrol ultimately served 11 years of her full 23-year sentence.

“We recorded the songs because we wanted our families to know that we were still alive,” said Sangdrol, “and we wanted Tibetan people to know about our situation and our love for our country. We hoped it would reach our families, but we didn’t know for sure. I had no idea until I arrived in America that people all over the world heard those songs while we were still in prison. Now, it makes me feel so sad to listen to the recording, because I remember our friends in prison who died.”

The Tibetan Shrine Room from the Alice Kandell Collection was one of the places we visited at The Rubin Museum during our tour with Ngawang Sangdrol (Photo courtesy The Rubin Museum of Art)

“The Chinese have taken Tibet, our home,” read the lyrics to one song. “Tibetans are locked away in prison/Oh, fellow Tibetans, please come here/Buddhism’s holy land will be free soon.”

Despite years of inhumane treatment, torture and “patriotic education,” Sangdrol’s spirit remained strong.”Even when I first went to prison I knew this sort of torture was taking place,” she told the BBC, but “I was even angrier that an invader would come to our country and persecute our people.”

I had a rare chance to meet Ngawang Sangdrol at The Rubin Museum in New York City two weeks ago. During a tour of the collection, Sangdrol explained the cultural significance of some of the pieces in the museum, including the Tibetan Shrine Room and The Lukhang Murals.

Numinous City-The Rubin Museum

Richard Gere at the performance of Peter Wyer's "Numinous City." Because of his pro-Tibet activities, Gere is permanently banned from entering China. (Photo by Michael Palma Courtesy The Rubin Museum)

Actor Richard Gere, who is an active supporter of the Tibetan Independence Movement and the Dalai Lama, also joined us for the tour and shared some of his own knowledge of Tibet. Gere is the co-founder of Tibet House, Chairman of the Board for the International Campaign for Tibet, and creator of The Gere Foundation, which awards grants to groups dedicated to the cultural preservation of Tibet and the Tibetan people. Because of his pro-Tibet activities, Gere is permanently banned from entering China.

While Sangdrol’s public appearance was an event not to be missed, it was the showcase performance of Peter Wyer’s new opera, Numinous City, inspired by the former nun’s story, that was the impetus for Sangdrol, Gere, myself, and a large crowd of enthusiastic music lovers to gather at the Rubin that evening.

Ngawang Sangdrol and Composer Peter Wyer at The Rubin Museum (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

Wyer says that the title of his opera, Numinous City, reflects how our lives are constantly shaped by unseen political, spiritual, and emotional forces. It is a reference to what becomes of us after trauma, when the ghosts of the past do not so easily depart.

Although the opera is still a work in progress, Wyer’s score and libretto are off to a stunning start. The narrative moves between the main character’s earlier experiences in prison and her current life working as a nanny for a couple in Brooklyn. (Sangdrol, like the opera’s main character, Tsering, also worked as a nanny in Brooklyn when she first moved to America).

Wyer’s comedic touches were a pleasant surprise in an opera about faith, trauma, and political oppression. The comic story line of the Brooklyn couple, marvelously sung by Jessica Miller-Rauch and Michael Krzankowski, offered some relief from the emotional intensity of the Tibetan scenes, which movingly dramatize Tsering’s walk to Lhasa in order to protest the Chinese occupation of Tibet and her subsequent imprisonment and torture.

During one comic scene, John, who has hired Tsering to work as a nanny is his household, performs a lengthy rant about the state of American politics. (Photo by Michael Palma Courtesy The Rubin Museum)

The most comic scene is set in Brooklyn on election night in November of 2004. John and Leila, the couple Tsering works for, are holding a party. When the television announces the re-election of George W. Bush, John belts out the longest, loudest F-bomb in opera history–a brilliant, extended F note that sets the scene for John’s political rant.

References to Guantanamo and Abu Graib add a layer of complexity to the narrative. We see that Tsering is living in America and is free from her prison cell, and yet she is still haunted by the torture she endured in prison, just as America is haunted by its own violent actions.

Wyer has interwoven Tibetan mantras brilliantly into his score, and some of the most exciting moments musically occur during the choruses. His inventive mixture of Western music with traditional Tibetan sounds and techniques result in compelling textures.

numinous city

Composer Peter Wyer during his recent visit to Kathmandu, Nepal

In a recent interview with American Opera Projects, Wyer discussed the blending of Eastern and Western musical traditions in Numinous City:
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The Sunday Poem: U.A. Fanthorpe

December 1, 2011 in Sunday Poem, Words with Comments Off

 

 

 

Reindeer Report

 

Chimneys: colder.
Flightpaths: busier.
Driver: Christmas (F)
Still baffled by postcodes.
Children: more
And stay up later.
Presents: heavier.
Pay: frozen.
Mission in spite
Of all this
Accomplished –
MERRY CHRISTMAS!

 

 

 

What the Donkey Saw

 

No room in the inn, of course,
And not that much in the stable
What with the shepherds, Magi, Mary,
Joseph, the heavenly host –
Not to mention the baby
Using our manger as a cot.
You couldn’t have squeezed another cherub in
For love or money.

Still, in spite of the overcrowding,
I did my best to make them feel wanted.
I could see the baby and I
Would be going places together.

 

 

 

 

Not the Millennium

 

Wise Men are busy being computer literate.
There should be a law against confusing
Religion with mathematics.
There was a baby. Born where?
And when? The sources mention
Massacres, prophecies, stars;
They tell a good story, but they don’t agree.
So we celebrate at the wrong midnight.
Does it matter? Only (dull) science expects
An accurate audit. The economy of heaven
Looks for fiestas and fireworks every day,
Every day.
Be realistic, says heaven:
Expect a miracle.

 

 

 

About U.A. Fanthorpe

U. A. Fanthorpe was that rarest of writers: a poet who was hugely popular with the general public and at the same time very seriously regarded by fellow poets and literary critics for her originality, subversiveness, wit and humanity.

Fanthorpe’s book Christmas Poems, where these three pieces originally appeared, has an intriguing history. Each year between 1974 and 2009, Fanthorpe and her partner Rosie Bailey created and mailed handmade Christmas cards to friends. Fanthorpe would write a brand new poem on the theme of Christmas for the card, while Bailey created the design using a small press with moveable type. In this BBC story, Bailey explains how a shortage of letters on the press created trouble in the early days. At times, Fanthorpe “would write an ambitious poem with too many ‘E’s and have to write another,” says Bailey. Brief poems like “Reindeer Report” resolved the letter shortage.

Ursula Askham Fanthorpe was born in Kent in 1929 and read English at St Anne’s College, Oxford, then trained as a teacher. She was Head of English at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and worked as a receptionist in a neurological hospital, before becoming “a middle-aged drop-out in order to write.” She published her first collection, Side Effects, in 1978 at the age of 49. Her eight volumes of poetry were all published by Peterloo, and her Selected Poems was published by Penguin in 1986. Christmas Poems and From Me to You are available from Enitharmon Press.

A practicing Quaker, Fanthorpe was the first woman to be nominated for the post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford. She was awarded the CBE in 2001 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2003, when her Collected Poems were published. In 2010 Enitharmon published her definitive volume New and Collected Poems, which features a preface by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy.

To learn more about Fanthorpe, you can read her obituary in the Guardian or visit her publisher’s website.

 


 

“Reindeer Report,” “What the Donkey Saw,” and “Not the Millennium” © U.A Fanthorpe courtesy Enitharmon Press. These poems appear in Fanthorpe’s 2003 collection Christmas Poems.

 

Can Christmas Music Ever Be Cool? The Real Reason Dylan Made the Critics Squirm

December 1, 2011 in Sounds with 4 Comments

It’s time to discuss a topic more divisive than religion, more inflammatory than right versus left or the 99% versus the 1%. A topic that will either make your eyes twinkle or your blood boil.

Christmas music.

There are two distinct camps when it comes to this subject: the lovers and the haters, and never the twain shall meet. The hipsters and aficionados who love to hate Christmas music deride its sentimentality, kitschiness, and commercialism. And the Christmas music lovers (the ones who put the first Christmas carol on the stereo before the Thanksgiving leftovers have been safely secured in the fridge) accuse the haters of being scrooges–no fun and too sophisticated for their own good.

The case of Bob Dylan wonderfully exemplifies this musical rift. In 2009 when Dylan announced that he would be releasing a Christmas album with the alarming title Christmas in the Heart, nervous critics panicked and attempted to cover for their hero’s lack of judgment by explaining that Dylan’s holiday album was “ironic.”

But Dylan didn’t cooperate. He disputed the claim, saying although he is Jewish, the songs were part of his Minnesota childhood. “These songs are part of my life, just like folk songs,” he told Bill Flanagan. “You have to play them straight…Critics like that are on the outside looking in. They are definitely not fans or the audience that I play to. They would have no gut level understanding of me and my work, what I can and can’t do — the scope of it all. Even at this point in time they still don’t know what to make of me.”

Dylan simply brushed off the musical establishment’s bafflement and proceeded to donate all of the profits from his best-selling album to charity.

Bob Dylan understood something that many of his critics didn’t. He understood that all music is nostalgic. Whenever we hear a song, it is forever tied to a specific time and place in our lives. From that point forward, whenever we hear that song again, we evoke that past experience, while simultaneously adding another layer of association.

Music always contains these layers of memory. For Dylan, Christmas music was closely linked to his Minnesota childhood. Instead of ignoring or dismissing this part of his past, he chose to embrace it instead. In many ways, Dylan’s sincerity for this project was a radical act. It was unexpected and, for some critics, not in keeping with his image as a cutting-edge, creative artist.

Music’s close connection with memory is one of the reasons it is so tied to personal taste. This is true of Christmas music in particular. Songs like Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song” or Perry Como’s “There’s No Place Like Home (For the Holidays)” are steeped in memories of Christmases past, both good and bad.

Is it any wonder the holidays are stressful? While we might dream of sitting around the fire with our loved ones, dressed in our hand-knit Christmas sweaters and sipping eggnog, this isn’t reality. Comparing our lives to a Christmas song or a dreamy album cover is a sure-fire way to make yourself miserable.

Musical taste taps into some of our deepest ideas about personal identity, about where we come from, and where we want to go. It can be a badge of belonging or exclusion, or even a way of gaining prestige. As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues, taste is never disinterested. Our judgments are a form of social currency that place us within a certain social class or community.

Dance parties and holiday gatherings are ripe environments for these musical divisions to play out in dramatic fashion. As long as Aretha Franklin or The Talking Heads are playing, most people are happy, but the minute you break out the ABBA, Madonna, Gene Autry, or any other artist with a high campiness factor, the grumbles will begin. You can actually feel the wave of condescension as the hardcore hipsters and tastemakers migrate to the edges of the room in protest.

But is it really the music we’re arguing over, or is it our own ideas about who we are (or who we were as our younger selves) and who others should be? There are many reasons to like or disdain a certain piece of music, and few of them have to do with quality. Our own personal baggage drives the bus of taste more than we’d like to admit.

Personally, I don’t mind a few cornball standards at the holidays. I could live without the 24/7 Christmas music barrage when I’m shopping for toilet paper at the local CVS. And those songs about grandmother getting run over by a reindeer and the Christmas donkey? Do I even have to say it?

Here are a few of my own personal holiday music favorites. Granted, not all of these albums are strictly “Christmas” music. I only know that listening to these records reminds me of decorating the Christmas tree, baking cookies with my mother, and my grandfather’s annual Christmas ritual–grinding the family’s only knife down to a nub on the electric knife sharpener in preparation for the big turkey carving.
 
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