A Walk Through a New Day

Right—time to take a walk through the new day. Or rather, The New Day, since that’s what the premiere and maybe at this point only newspaper on the island is called: El Nuevo Día. So what kind of day are we having?

Rotten, if the Day is to be believed. We start off grimly enough with the news that many of us, living in violence-prone communities, now have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder—the same PTSD that soldiers coming back from Iraq are experiencing. So what percentage of the population suffers from PTSD in these communities? Forty percent.

I know all of this because I saw the headline online—The Day, however, has taken to not publishing its main story online: you have to buy the paper in paper, or buy the paper in eInk (at last! A red squiggle I like—I’m totally with you, computer….) So I went to the drug store, where I bought the paper—approximately the size of the New York City telephone book, or at least the one twenty years ago, before people had smart phones….

“It’s Like Living a Civil War,” says the lead story, which goes on to point out that in the last six years, we’ve had 5,637 murders on the island versus 2,291 deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan. Granted, at its peak the US presence in Afghanistan was only 140,000 soldiers, versus a population of 3.7 million people on the island. But still—what to make of the fact that New York City, with 8 million people or so, has considerably fewer murders than Puerto Rico? 

Particularly worrisome is how are kids are doing: 40,000 have major depression and 53,000 are said to have suicidal ideation. Say what? Almost by definition, wouldn’t you assume that anyone with suicidal ideation suffers from major depression? Seems screwy to me….

We are, in short, all cocked up. So what’s the solution? Well, the Day has the answer (or perhaps The Answer), and that is integration of programs that have proven effective in Puerto Rico. And the Day lists them; curiously, all but one of the nine programs is named in English.

Well, that’s good to know, and very much needed, because on turning the page we get to the story about the school principal who got gunned down on a highly transited road while driving at 7:30 in the evening. Oh, and there are no leads, though lieutenant Elexis Torres, who’s investigating the case, said there has to be someone who saw the car, or the color of the car, or even the license plate of the car. But guess what? No one’s talking….

OK—wrap my head around that, and doesn’t it seem logical that the next page is a long interview with our new chief of police, James Tuller, who was born in New York but lived on the island for much of his childhood and has “close ties” to the island. He has, however, 40 years experience of being a cop, all of it in New York City.

And he was around for the “broken window” program, more formally known as the Bratton Plan. You’ll remember the theory—go after the small stuff and the big stuff will take care of itself. So that meant cracking down on people who were jumping over the turnstiles in the subway, fixing broken windows, fining the guys out washing car windows and shaking down the motorists who hadn’t wanted the service.

Well, Tuller is going to have his hands full. Or rather, there are many opportunities here. We could start with the people who are selling parking on public streets, and promising to offer “protection” for your car. Who knows what might happen? You wouldn’t want to come back and find your windshield broken—would you? Just a few bucks and everything will be all right. Worth it, really, for the peace of mind….

Right, skip gently over the news that DTOP—that’s the Department of Transportation and Public Works—is offering a 35% amnesty on traffic tickets. Oh, and we’re getting a new president of the University of Puerto Rico, which, it turns out, gets a third of its funds from federal money.

Lastly, we come to an opinion piece by Benjamín Torres Gotay, who uses the sorry situation of the putative super port of Ponce as a metaphor for our society.

Ponce, you see, is our second largest city, and is incidentally one of the fifteen most crime-ridden cities from page 4. And twenty years ago, the mayor of Ponce hit on the idea: expand and dredge the harbor, get the big cranes in, and make a super port. Merchandise would come in from Asia or wherever in huge ships, and then get put into smaller ships to be shipped around the Caribbean and the Americas.

Great idea, right? Nor is it just an idea—since in the twenty years since the idea was proposed, some quarter of a billion dollars has been spent. And not without something to show for it.

I’ve seen them—the two cranes—and they are massive. I saw them on a voyage into the absurd that my friend Harry drove me through last year. First we passed a wind farm with some 50 or 60 massive turbines that were supposed to be spinning. They weren’t, so what was the problem? Well, the company that made them had announced that the blade was falling on some identical models somewhere else in the world. But that wasn’t the only problem, because if seemed that the valley had insufficient wind. In fact, there is nowhere on the island where there is enough wind to make this project profitable.

We then got to the Playa de Ponce , a community so poor that a nun—the sister of a former governor—had to start a community center for the people there. And what was there? Two enormous piles of junk metal.

“It’s the only thing we export,” said Harry gloomily. “Oh sure, some specialty coffee, and some specialty fruits—but nothing else. The only thing that the world wants or needs from Puerto Rico? Our trash—that’s all we produce….”

Then we went a bit further, and came to the massive cranes—erected who knows when and never used. What’s happened? Well, they’ve been the focus of political squabbles –the most recent of which is whether the project should be in the hands of the municipality of Ponce or of the central government.

Guys?

Twenty years, and you are arguing this? And Torres Gotay says it best: in the time that we have spent arguing whether the color should be yellow or orange, the Dominican Republic—as corrupt as it is—has managed to build a super port of its own. So guess what? We may as well skip the idea, wait until the salt air takes its toll and the cranes are in imminent danger of collapse.

And then what?

Well, there’s a nice pile of junk metal nearby….  

Back Home

Now then, this will be a short post, because in just an hour or so, I’ll have to take my non-ESA to the vet.

What? Surely you’ve heard of ESA?

OK, I’ll stop trying to shame you—I didn’t know about it either, until this morning, when I was awoken by the sound of a jackhammer below the balcony. This was both usual and unusual, since it is Saturday morning—a time normally devoted to getting rid of and over Friday night. So why were they working?

Well, in fact they have been working for months, now, and on Saturdays and even Sundays. And on the next block, they’ve even taken to working evenings, to lessen the number of days of annoyance as we speed along toward Christmas.

And what are they doing?

They are destroying and then restroying—well, seems logical to me, computer—the street outside. The street had been asphalt you see, unlike other streets in Old San Juan, which have wonderful blue adoquines. Here, see for yourself:

Well, most of the streets have these blue iridescent (especially when wet) cobblestones, and so somebody decided (somebody who lives in a gated community far, far away from the old city) to put in cobblestones everywhere. There was just one little problem: the charming old blue cobblestones are no longer made, and even if they were, they couldn’t be used. Why? Because the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture would never allow it.

It’s odd, though strangely logical—anything new in Old San Juan cannot look old. Instead, it has to look new. So therefore, the new cobblestones are not lovely iridescent blue but an ugly dull grey. Take a look….

Well, the new adoquines are made locally, so that’s a stimulus to the economy. And of course, it took about six months of labor to de-and-re-stroy the street. Oh, and the sidewalks? They used to be a very nice slate. Now they have to be a somewhat darker stone—could it be granite? Don’t think so….

Well, all of this doesn’t come cheap: one source said that repaving a four or five block street had cost more than four million bucks. And the street—Tetuán—is right behind a street that has various good and expensive restaurants. Since the kitchens are all in the back, and since the kitchens’ vents are churning fumes out during hours of operation, Tetuán has become a virtual back alley. There’s nothing there, and the smell—to me—is atrocious.

But it got done, and it got opened, and the photographers came and the media as well and the mayor at the time—Jorge Santini—was happy. That lasted about a week, until he noticed—the restaurants were throwing their greasy trash out on the sidewalk, and the adoquines looked awful. Here’s a lively account of the matter:

Tanta fue la rabia que le dio a Santini que, en la misma Tetuán, advirtió que aumentaría las multas por tirar basura y desperdicios en la calle. Fue incluso más lejos y dijo que, para comer a expensas de tirar manteca, mejor era cerrar. Poco le faltó para añadir que mejor era no comer.

“Es un crimen ambiental lanzar grasa de esa manera”, dijo en un arranque de peritaje en asuntos ecológicos y aceitosos.

Dejó claro, además, que la capital tiene que estar “a la altura” del millón de cruceristas que recibe cada año. Pudo haber dicho también a la altura de los residentes, pero ni modo.  

A rough translation:

Such was the rage that it gave Santini that, in the very same street, he warned that he would increase the fines for throwing trash and wastes in the street. He went further and said that, to eat at the expense of throwing grease, better it would be to close. He only missed adding that better it would be not to eat.

“It’s an environmental crime to throw grease in this manner,” he said, breaking down into an expert in ecological and greasy affairs.

He made it clear, as well, that the capital has to be “at its highest” for the million of cruise ship visitors which it receives every year. He could have mentioned it being at its highest for the residents, but no matter.

Ah yes, the residents, of which I am one. Or rather, the prisoners, since it was impossible, for the last six months, to be in or especially work in my apartment. Whatever noise the three jackhammers and two generators the narrow street reverberated with was deemed insufficient was augmented by the happy shouts of a horde of workers, all of whom separated from each other when attempting to communicate, all the better to strengthen their vocal chords. What am I trying to say? It was ferociously loud.

And hot, as August and September are, in the gropics (meant tropics, but shouldn’t there be a word “gropics?” Like it, somehow…), hot like hell itself. Oh, and did I mention that Luis, the sculptor, came back—and resumed his creative endeavors, which apparently involve banging violently the floor above me with various blunt (I hope) objects?

Well, guess what? The street, at long last, is done. So why, I asked, was there someone with a jackhammer out there at 8AM on a Saturday morning? Easy enough to see: it was the water company, and what are they doing? What they do, which is to break up the sidewalk, shattering all the lovely granite that was so costily (well, we have “expensively,” don’t we, computer?) and arduously and most especially noisily installed.

Mr. Fernández can be easily persuaded to launch into a jeremiad about this, a jeremiad in which the British will be held up as behaving in a civilized—OK, civilised in the honor …err, honour—manner by carefully removing the slate on the sidewalk, placing it neatly to the side, going about their subterranean business, and then neatly replacing it, so that passerby never knew that anything had occurred.

Unfortunately, I observed this on my first trip to London.

Which means that they don’t do what the boys did below—leave a pile of shattered granite shards around a gaping hole, over which a wooden saw board has been placed. Nor do they do what the gas company did down on Tetuán Street, which was to take the jackhammer to several hundred of the 164,700 new adoquines, breaking them up, piling them on the sidewalk, and leaving a crater several feet in diameter in the street, which is now impassable. Oh, wrong—passable if you drive on the sidewalk, which is no problem.

See?

“It’s the quietest building in New York,” said John, and it’s true. How true? I tested it the next morning, and spent a lovely five minutes hearing the clock tick. And now?

Back home!  

(Update on this highly important post—the little granite shards surrounding the water meter are not there. Instead, they have been whisked away? But why? Why go through all that trouble? Then I remembered—in the last craft fair—seeing someone selling little granite paperweights, the stone appearing identical to the sidewalk stone. But that wasn’t the point. On the stone had been painted the flag of Puerto Rico, and it has to be said: so lusty is our love of our island, that you can sell anything as long as it has the flag of Puerto Rico. Wow—so that lady walked away with a purse-load of twenties! See? There’s a purpose for everything….)

Bad Policy

It was a day when nothing much got done. Yes, I wrote a longish post in the morning, and then it was time to go, time to take the train to 42d street, examine the map, and decide that the A train to Far Rockaway was the ticket out of the city. Time to leave, time to go home.

And what had I seen in New York? Oddly, everything was as normal, except that there seemed to be a new breed of poverty and homelessness. There had always been street people, but they had seemed different—maybe drunks, maybe drugs, maybe just crazy. The point was that they couldn’t fit in—that’s why they were on the streets.

There was the woman sitting halfway down the stairs to the 42nd Street subway. She was sitting on cardboard on the landing; the air was a mix of the 40 degrees outside and the 60 degrees inside. Still, it was cold enough that she was bundled up and yet still shivering. And her sign was clever: Donate What You Can to Polish Your Karma.

Nor was she the only one—there were many more people like her. “One in five of our neighbors can’t put food on their tables,” stated the public service ad on the subway. Is it true? What would a Google search reveal?

Well, as usual, the picture isn’t clear. Yes, the rate of poverty in New York City inched up to 21.2%; it had been 20.9 the year before. But Bloomberg came out blazing—he stated that of the 20 largest cities in the country, New York was the only one whose level of poverty had not risen since 2000. It was 21.2% then, it’s 21.2% now. In other words, it’s gotten worse for every other city except New York.

It’s also true that I was in Manhattan all of the time I was there, unless you count passing through Brooklyn to get to the airport. And The New York Times has this to say about Manhattan:

Manhattan retained the dubious distinction of having the biggest income gap of any big county in the country. The mean income of the lowest fifth was $9,635, compared with $389,007 for the top fifth and $799,969 for the top 5 percent — more than an eightyfold difference between bottom and top.

All of this is based on new data from the Census Bureau, which leads me to wonder—how do you count homeless people? And in fact, looking it up, it appears that the Census Bureau itself has come out and said that its count of the homeless for 2010 was off by three million. Not surprising, really, since many state and city ordinances prohibit sleeping, loitering, or camping in public. So there are a lot of people who go uncounted.

The train to the airport had the usual buskers—in this case a really bad mariachi duo (a singer and an accordion) and a good trio singing songs from the 40s. But nobody except for the out-of-towners—maybe Minnesota nice?—seemed to be giving anything. Oh, and there were the people selling candy for a dollar—often their signs proclaimed them homeless or out of work.

It was a study in contrasts. The city has unimaginable wealth, both now and in the past. And I had been staying with my brother and sister in law, who live on Riverside Drive. Their apartment is hardly palatial, neither is it small; but that’s not the point.

And that is? John and Jeanne are living a bit better than their parents did. They had had good public school educations, they had gone to graduate programs, they were now taking vacations and spending in ways that their parents wouldn’t have dreamed of. And that’s good—that’s the way it should be. The American Dream, right?

Assuming a level playing field, yes. But I sat next to a young black woman and her daughter; mother had clearly picked up the five-year old from school. And her first action, on entering the train? Take out and power up a small tablet and hand it to the girl.

Two days earlier, I had been in a bus in Manhattan watching a white mother talking to her son of roughly the same age. No tablet, instead it was questions to the child—what had he learned at school, was his teacher happy with the class, was everybody there? By the end of ten blocks, the mother had gotten the boy to remember the material presented in school, had reinforced it, and had added to it.

Nor is it a white / black thing. There were black guys in very good three-piece suits who were getting on and off the subway in midtown New York. But I would wager any money that their parents had done the same thing that the woman on the bus in Manhattan was doing.

“I am a girl, and I am beautiful just the way I am,” the child with the tablet on the subway began to recite. She was reading a poster on the train. And as kids at that age will do, she started to repeat it endlessly.

I know what the lady on the bus would have done. She would have agreed, she would have probed—what were the best things about you, she would have asked. What things are most important to you? What kind of person do you like and what kind of person do you want to be?

The mother on the train shushed her child up.

Which was a shame, really, because the child was obviously very intelligent. There’s something about the eyes, you know, and the quickness of response to stimuli—you could tell this kid could go places.

“It was my librarian,” said Jeanne, when I asked who had made the difference in her life. Her parents had never read, never even completed high school—but the librarian had hooked Jeanne on books, and gave her the message: you’re sharp, you’ll go far.

Will there be anyone there for the little girl, who is beautiful just the way she is? Or will our cuts in education, arts programs, and Head Start mean that only the rich have a shot at a better life? I wish we could see that neglecting people, and especially kids, has another dimension than morality or equality.

It’s also disastrous economic policy.

The Anonymous Rich

Well, it was a different age, but was it any better? Because consider, Pondering Readers, that I have spent two days in two rich men’s houses, which were designed to impress, edify, educate the likes of me: the art / culture seeking public.

The first was J. P. Morgan and his library, which fittingly is in midtown—on 36^th street. He was, after all, the older man, and his instruction to the architect Charles McKim was simple and direct—“build me a gem.” Right, so McKim got down to work and did just that, and the result is a truly grand space, housing a magnificent collection. It also is a space that seems truly personal; on his desk was an ornamented box that I was convinced had held cigars, and perhaps still did. It was the only thing I longed to touch, but the steely eyes of the guard seemed always upon me. But I read in Wikipedia today that in fact he smoked dozens of large Havanas every day. Was any trace of the smoke lingering in the room? Probably not, but the imagination easily supplied it….

And Morgan, of course, died a rich man—as he had been born. Here’s Wikipedia:

At the time of his death, he only held 19% of his own net worth, an estate worth $68.3 million ($1.39 billion in today's dollars based on CPI, or $25.2 billion based on 'relative share of GDP'), of which about $30 million represented his share in the New York and Philadelphia banks. The value of his art collection was estimated at $50 million.

Upon his death, the majority of Morgan’s art collection went either to the Metropolitan Museum of Art—which curiously had just happened to make him president in the years before his death—or was sold to pay estate taxes. OK—so who bought it? Enter the second rich guy….

Henry Clay Frick, unlike Morgan, was born with only a pewter spoon in his mouth. From a Mennonite background growing up near Pittsburgh, he had a good head for numbers. He also had a vision, and managed to team up with a good friend, Andrew W. Mellon, to buy some beehive ovens to turn coal into coke. And that was useful because the country needed coke to power the steel industry, which was booming. And so, on his honeymoon, Frick took a little time off—business is business, after all—to meet a guy named Andrew Carnegie. Yes, that Carnegie. In one of the interesting glimpses of how Wikipedia works or doesn’t work, here’s its description of their relationship:

This meeting resulted in a partnership between H. C. Frick & Company and Carnegie Steel Company, and was the predecessor to United States Steel. This partnership ensured that Carnegie's steel mills had adequate supplies of coke. Frick became chairman of the company. Carnegie made multiple attempts to force Frick out of the company they had created by making it appear that the company had nowhere left to go and that it was time for Frick to retire. Despite the contributions Frick had made towards Andrew Carnegie's fortune, Carnegie disregarded him in many executive decisions including finances.[7] Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie developed a relationship when working together.

Am I the only one thinking that “Frick and Carnegie developed a relationship when working together” is somewhat at war with the earlier statement “Carnegie made multiple attempts to force Frick out of the company they had created?” At any rate, I was curious enough to run over to the Frick collection history page to hear a more biased / less sanitized chronicle of the affair. And here it is:

Frick grew disenchanted with Carnegie and became honorary chairman of the board in December 1894. Five years later, Carnegie abolished Frick's position as chairman of the H. C. Frick Coke Company and the two went to court over the value of Frick's interest. In March 1900 a settlement was reached in which Frick received $30 million in securities. In 1901, having moved from Pittsburgh to New York, Frick became one of the directors of J. P. Morgan's newly incorporated United States Steel Corporation; his official biographer noted that he was the largest individual railway stockholder in the world.

OK; here’s the time to say it. Henry Clay Frick was a true son of a bitch. Nor am I the only one to say it: portfolio.com ranked him as number 11 of the worst CEOs in American history. And what did he do that was so objectionable?

Well, we can start out with the Johnstown Flood of 1889. Johnstown, Pennsylvania, sits at the bottom of a wedge of mountains, which at one time had a river run through it. So sometime in the early part of the 19^th century, The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had built a dam above the city; the resulting reservoir, the land around it, and the dam itself was then sold to a group of rich guys—some connected to Carnegie Steel—who made a lovely little resort up there, overlooking the town. What didn’t they do? Well, the engineer of the steel mill in the town kept telling them—do some work on that dam. But things got a little busy, and there was heavy rain and a big snow melt off, and guess what happened? Right—one of the largest natural disasters in US history: here’s you-know-who on the subject:

The total death toll was 2,209, making the disaster the largest loss of civilian life in the United States at the time. It was later surpassed by fatalities in the 1900 Galveston hurricane and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Some historians believe the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane and 1906 San Francisco earthquake killed more people in the U.S. than did the Johnstown Flood, but the official death toll was lower.

Right, and an earlier sentence from the same Wikipedia article has the chilling information:

Henry Clay Frick led a group of speculators, including Benjamin Ruff, from Pittsburgh to purchase the abandoned reservoir, modify it, and convert it into a private resort lake for their wealthy associates.

OK—so what to do? Frick and his friends organized a little group to throw some money at the victims. Here’s Wikipedia again:

When word of the dam's failure was telegraphed to Pittsburgh, Frick and other members of the club gathered to form the Pittsburgh Relief Committee for assistance to the flood victims, as well as determining never to speak publicly about the club or the flood. This strategy was a success, and Knox and Reed were able to fend off all lawsuits that would have placed blame upon the club’s members.

Oh yes, and Carnegie built the town a library….

Things were even uglier in the Homestead Strike of 1892, when Frick sent 300 Pinkerton agents up the river to crash through the pickets and stop the strike. What happened? At least nine people were killed, a riot ensued, and the state militia had to send 8000 guys to break up the affair. Understandably, people felt that this was all a bit excessive, and Frick became known as the most hated man in America. No surprise that Emma Goldman’s lover tried unsuccessfully to kill the guy in July of that year. And so it’s not for nothing has “frick you” become a substitute for a harder, though one-letter-shorter, epithet.

And one feels it, walking into the museum. There’s a chilliness that no heat can burn off—the granite or limestone or whatever-it-is seems to exude cold. But what is there, in that museum, is meant to impress.

Well, it’s Art History 101—so anyone who wants to skip the Met but still see the great Masters in a couple of hours now has that alternative. True, some rooms make me want to run screaming out of them—why is it that Fragonard always stimulates the gag reflex. And there is an especially large and gauzy Renoir that has to live in a hallway (along with a Degas and assorted other masters). But consider—I went to visit a show that had one Vermeer: The Girl with the Pearl Earring. But the museum? It has three Vermeers, and if memory serves, there are only about 70 works of the master left on the planet.

For all his bastardry, I can’t help thinking that Frick had an edge over the modern equivalent, the hedge fund mogul. Because what greeted me this morning, over the print edition of The New York Times? Here it is:

Grisly Warhol Painting Fetches $104.5 Million, Auction High for Artist

It is, Astonished Reader, a silkscreen diptych of a car crash. And also this week, a Francis Bacon triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold for over 140 million bucks. And to whom? Here’s what Roberta Smith, in another article in The Times, had to say:

Auctions have become the leading indicator of ultra-conspicuous consumption, pieces of public, male-dominated theater in which collectors, art dealers and auction houses flex their monetary clout, mostly for one another. The spectacle of watching these privileged few (mostly hedge fund managers and investment-hungry consortiums, it seems) tossing around huge amounts of money has become a rarefied spectator sport. These events are painful to watch yet impossible to ignore and deeply alienating if you actually love art for its own sake. 

Emblematic, isn’t it? Frick was at least a real life, fire-breathing, sulfurous-stenching bastard. But a hedge fund manager?

Please….

Death of a Composer

He was one of those lapses—one of those guys I was supposed to listen to one day, one of the composers I was going to get around to hearing. Because for much of the last two or three decades, there wasn’t much time for music, and when there was, it was generally after a dinner with Raf. Not the time you want to be experimenting with music you may or may not like; time instead for music you know will go with the second bottle of wine and the cigar.

So I managed only recently to hear another composer, Henryk Gorécki, whose third symphony everyone—including those normally chilly to classical music—loves. And yes, I had heard Arvo Pärt, especially his Passio; in fact, so mesmerizing or so narcotic is the music that, after a performance, rushing to get to a night shift, I missed the subway train I had taken for years and ended up not at Rush Presbyterian but on the South Side of Chicago.

OK—I’ll toy with you no more: the guy I’m talking about in those first two paragraphs is John Tavener, often lumped with the Estonian Arvo Pärt and the Polish Henryk Gorécki. Why? Because their music has this slow, ethereal, spiritual side that makes you long to be in a student apartment with cheap wine and a joint in your hand. And Tavener fit the bill, since the Beatles featured him on an album. Here’s what The Guardian had to say:

The music Tavener was famous for in the 60s was tumultuous, chaotic, modernist, and radical – another world from the Orthodox-inspired spirituality of his later works. His wacky cantata The Whale was the piece that inaugurated the new-music firebrands of the London Sinfonietta in 1968, and it was also his first release on Apple a couple of years later, with its mix of electronics, football rattles, serialism, crunching dissonance, and even a whip.

It may be the whip, but the description alone had me running for Mozart. And then Tavener got religion, this time in the form of the Russian Orthodox Church. So then the music changed; here, from The New York Times, is his account of what happened:

“I stopped composing,” he said, “and I listened to Indian music, Persian music, all music from the Middle East. I listened to American Indian music. I listened to any music that was based on traditional ideas. That’s when I started to question what on earth happened to this Western civilization and why the sacred seems to have been pushed out gradually by the domination of the ego.”

In fact, Tavener’s disinclination for this music dominated by the ego extended to Johann Sebastian Bach for a time, though by 2007 he was back to playing Bach. And he had had popular success—composing The Protecting Veil in 1988, when cellist Stephen Isserlis performed it at the Proms. Then there was the Song for Athene, sung in 1997 for the funeral of Princess Diana.

And as usual, the more that the general population embraced him, the more the critics sniffed. Here’s Mark Swed, chief music critic of the LA Times, in a generally favorable tribute that still manages to get the headline John Tavener: Composer, Showman, and Spiritual Guide (disclaimer—in the old days, the journalist didn’t write headlines, and so Swed would be off the hook. Now? Who knows?)

That is Tavener's 1987 cello concerto in which the solo part seems to hang in the air, going nowhere and in no hurry for 50 minutes or more, depending on how much the cellist cares to milk the ethereal mystery.

OK—I’m listening to the concerto, called The Protecting Veil, and yeah, I see what Swed means. It’s disjointed loveliness, and that may be the point; Swed says it himself, the essence of Tavener’s work is “seduction.”

And there is something of a showman in a composer who can write and or stage an all night affair called the Veil of the Temple, performed overnight at the Temple Church in London—yes, the same one that figures in The da Vinci Code. Here’s what Swed has to say:

Beginning with a "Mystical Love Song of the Sufis," Tavener made room in "Veil of the Temple" not only for the traditional Christian Trinity but also Mary Theotokos, St. Isaac the Syrian and the Upanishads. Besides vocal soloists and the Temple's large choir, the instruments included the church organ, an Indian harmonium, a duduk (an ancient Armenian flute), Tibetan temple bells, a deep-honking Tibetan horn and a Western brass band.

It was a magnificent night, ending with the dawn illuminating the church's stained-glass windows. The audience roamed the church, found a pew to snuggle in and sleep on or went outside for coffee. Tavener seemed to be enjoying himself greatly, chatting with people, hanging out. It wasn't a party, but it wasn't an overly solemn occasion, either. One went to be amazed, not preached to. It was — again, that word that I thinks fits Tavener's music better than any other — seductive.

Well, Tavener was felled by Marfan syndrome, which I knew about because at one time Abraham Lincoln was thought to have suffered it. And it seemed likely—Marfan sufferers are unusually tall, with long limbs and bony fingers. And they’re prone to at least thirty generally horrible conditions, among which is that you may have sudden cardiac arrest at any time. In short, you’re a time bomb, which does have some psychological consequences; here’s what he told the Times:

“It attacks the main valve to the heart, it attacks the eyes, it attacks the mind — there isn’t much it doesn’t attack,” he told a Times interviewer during one of his rare visits to the United States. “And the big danger of Marfan is that you can suffer a rupture at any time, and you go quickly. So I suppose I live with the thought of death very much in front of me, and this may well have a bearing on the way I think generally.”

Right—I can see that. And now the life is over, and the critics are wondering: where shall we put him? Top drawer? Showman? Hack? Celebrated for the wrong reasons? Mystic minimalist?

Where does he go?

Nor is it the case that history will judge, since history has a way of being rewritten, revised, reworked. Bach was forgotten until Mendelssohn came along. Vivaldi soared in the 70s and has fallen since. And some worthy composers are routinely neglected.

But the conundrum to me is that old one: the separation of popular and serious. Is it always the case that music that is accessible to the masses and loved by them is necessarily inferior? Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Copland’s Appalachian Spring—can anyone deny their musical worth? Yet even these masterpieces have just a little tarnish on them—the serious listener should be listening to Barber’s Essay for Orchestra, or Copland’s Third Symphony. What if Tavener’s music was great and popular?

Or what, perhaps, would happen if we stopped worrying about great? A man of the cloth in a Davies novel defends “bad” religious art—the sweet, androgynous Jesus with his bleeding heart exposed. Right, it’s not a Tintoretto, but if all the Marías and Josefas and Pilars love him and come to Christ through him…well? Isn’t there a place in the world for bad art, of which there is a lot more than good art? Shouldn’t we leave our snobbery at the door, as we welcome the common folk in? Tavener’s music appealed to people. Punto. So get over it….

I once saw a TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, which made a gazillion dollars and was a major motion picture starring Julia Roberts and was translated into every language included Bushman Click and three languages invented just for the purpose. Oh, and NASA shot copies of the book into all corners of the universe, so amazing and so successful it was. I exaggerate, but that’s how it must have felt to her. And then what was she supposed to do? How do you top that? I imagine her sitting down to write her next book, and starting out with the first word, “the….” Instantly a chorus of disapproval swells up: “a disappointment,” “not on the same level as…,” “after her first book….”

So Tavener’s music will live or die, and that’s as much as he or any of us will know about what we spend our lives doing. We go on for a time, Gentle Reader, and then?

That’s it….

Forget the Gutemberg….

It was a thing to see, and somehow I had missed it. So I circled back, after reading somewhere on one of the walls of the J. P. Morgan Library that an edition of the Gutenberg Bible was always on display in the East Room of the original library. And yes—there it was, and why had I missed it? Not because of its size, which is as large as you would imagine (think coffee table book). No, a docent had been in front of it, along with 20 other people. And so blown away was I by the room itself, that I had somehow missed the Gutenberg. Here’s what I was standing in….

Not bad, hunh? And by the way, the little display case by the door holds the Gutenberg Bible.

Which was a bit…well, ordinary. Which come to think of it may be the point—it was the first book printed in moveable type. And that means that it was designed to be mass-produced, it was meant to be available to many more people than the rich patrons who commissioned hand-copied books. And so there are decorative elements, yes, but nowhere near the elaborate ornamentation of illuminated manuscripts. Here’s a juicy manuscript:

And here’s the more sober Gutenberg….

Right—and that’s the first page—the rest is much simpler.

Well, Pierpont—as he liked to be called, so happy to oblige!—had the dough to do what he wanted, and what he wanted was to collect. He had been left 12 million plus by Pop, named Junius—very classy name, though the computer is red-squiggling it—in 1890, when Pierpont was in his early fifties. And from then on, Pierpont combined finance with collecting on a major scale. Actually, two major scales—since among other things J. P. Morgan was the only man in the country that could step in, in the financial Panic of 1907, and save the American economy from collapsing. How did he do it? He got all the big boys together, knocked their heads together, and put together a deal for how to save the day. Then he went back to collecting.

And Pierpont, educated with a degree in Art History from a German university, certainly knew what he was doing. Here, from the Morgan’s website, is a description of his habit:

During the last two decades of his life—from the 1890s until 1913—Morgan spent some $60 million on art (about $900 million today). From the beginning, it was clear that Morgan's collecting tastes could only be described as encyclopedic—what he amassed in such a short period encompassed virtually the full range of artistic and human achievement in Western civilization, from antiquity to modern times. 

He acquired art objects numbering in the thousands, in a wide range of media—from bronzes, porcelains, watches, ivories, and paintings to furniture, tapestries, armor, and ancient Egyptian artifacts as well as the rare books, manuscripts, drawings, prints, and ancient artifacts that are the core of the Morgan.

For years, the bulk of Morgan’s collection was in London, and to accommodate it all, he had to buy the house next door to the one he inherited and knock through the walls. Why? Because at the time, there was a 20% import fee for art coming in to the United States. So he and Isabella Stewart Gardner and some others got together and scotched, and then he began to move it all over to the States. (One ship he had intended to use was the Titanic—fortunately, the collection couldn’t be appraised in time to make the voyage….)

And the bulk of his art went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of which he was the trustee and then president from 1904 until his death in 1913. But the manuscripts? They stayed in the library—which his son Jack opened to the public in 1924.

And so, today I saw a document signed by Elizabeth I, a Mozart manuscript, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with marginalia in the composer’s hand, and a ravishing drawing of da Vinci. But what fascinated me the most?

This:

Cuneiform—from a couple millennia before Christ. It was the world’s first written language, and was etched by reeds into clay and then hardened. And it is, as you can see, exquisitely small, and virtually illegible. And how had anyone possibly deciphered it, given that the language had died out some centuries after Christ?

As it turns out—the same way that someone deciphered the Rosetta Stone. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

Meanwhile, in 1835 Henry Rawlinson, a British East India Company army officer, visited the Behistun Inscriptions in Persia. Carved in the reign of King Darius of Persia (522–486 BC), they consisted of identical texts in the three official languages of the empire: Old Persian, Mesopotamian Aramaic, and Elamite. The Behistun inscription was to the decipherment of cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone was to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

I stared for some ten minutes, went away, and came back again. And though the exhibit stated that the language had been invented for mercantile purposes, none of the texts quoted had anything to do with commerce. Instead, they were of love, birth, eagles, fertility. A whisper of immortality chiseled in a lump of clay, hurled through millennia…. 

Monday Evening Uplift

Having a hard time of it, this Monday? Tired already, and it’s still just the first day of the week? In need of a little inspiration?

You might consider a Chicago doctor, Donald R. Hopkins, who’s had a long distinguished career in tropical medicine. How distinguished? Well, he was one of the team that eradicated smallpox, which left people looking like this….

Nor was that the worst of it: smallpox also killed about a third of its victims. It also was a cause of blindness, and left victims scarred for life. And the disease, which is thought to have started in humans in 10,000BC, was eradicated in the late seventies.

Hopkins has an interesting history—he grew up in a community of Bahamians in Coconut Grove in Miami. Education was important in his family, and he scored a scholarship to study at Moreland in Atlanta. Then it was off to the University of Chicago, where he was the only black student in his class in medical school. And then, partly to avoid the Vietnam War, he joined the Public Health Service.

And he was interested in tropical diseases, because he had seen trachoma in Egypt; the parasitical disease spread by flies that leads to blindness. In 1967, his boss asked him to go to Sierra Leone, to spearhead a new approach to fighting smallpox: instead of vaccinating the mass population, teams would attack individual outbreaks, starting at the center and working outward. Would it work? Yes.

Hopkins went back to the C.D.C., and rose through the ranks, finally retiring as acting director in 1987. But he didn’t stop working, and he joined up with former president Carter to tackle still another problem: the guinea worm.

Gentle Reader, you may want to skip this paragraph, and for the truly squeamish, you definitely don’t want to see the video below, which features—at 2:00—a guinea worm being extracted from a human leg. Because that’s what happens: villagers drink water infested with microscopic worms, which grow for a year or so and then emerge, from any part of the body, though usually it’s the legs or arms.

And unlike smallpox, the disease doesn’t kill—it just incapacitates. And as you might imagine, it’s very painful, since the worm secretes an acid which breaks down connective tissue and allows it to escape. No wonder that the disease is called dracunculiasis, or “afflicted with little dragons.” Also no wonder that the first reaction of anybody who has had the worm extracted is to put their injured leg in water. It might be a good idea for the victim, but it’s definitely a bummer for the rest of the village, because the moment the wound is immersed, millions of larvae are released. So the cycle starts all over.

The worldwide program to eradicate the disease began in 1980 with the C.D.C.; in 1986, The Carter Center stepped in; according to Wikipedia, “at that time India, Pakistan, Yemen and 17 countries in Africa were endemic for this disease and reported a total of 3.5 million cases per year.”

Interestingly, the solution to the problem isn’t a medicine: it’s a simple change of behavior and education. Merely filtering drinking water through cloth will rid the water of the worms. But as Hopkins says, working with the local leaders and respecting and understanding village traditions and customs is crucial. Which is why he credits his experience of segregation and prejudice in the South as a young man: it’s given him the sensitivity to work with others.

An example might be the obstacle that was preventing the Sudanese civil war; again, here’s Wikipedia:

One of the most significant challenges facing Guinea worm eradication has been the civil war in southern Sudan, which was largely inaccessible to health workers due to violence.[6][56] To address some of the humanitarian needs in southern Sudan, in 1995, the longest ceasefire in the history of the war was achieved through negotiations by Jimmy Carter.[6][56] Commonly called the "Guinea worm cease-fire," both warring parties agreed to halt hostilities for nearly six months to allow public health officials to begin Guinea worm eradication programming, among other interventions.

And guess what? It seems to be working, and we are down to less than 600 infections a year. In 1986, the number was 3.5 million. So there is every chance that Carter, currently age 89, will see the eradication of the guinea worm before he dies.

Well, Gentle Reader, it’s still Monday but…

…feeling better?