The Tiny Homes of Wisconsin

“Did you hear,” said Lady, “Roberto is dead….”

“Who’s Roberto?” I said.

“You know, the flower pot guy….”

It was typically Lady, to assume that I would know the name of the guy who had spent seemingly all his life resting his upper torso in one large planter holding a miniature palm tree, while resting his feet in another potter—but in fact I did. We all knew Roberto, and since we passed him several times a day, he was fixture in the landscape.

“So what did he die of,” I asked.

“Who knows, but he died….”

So I had seen Roberto, but had I ever helped him? Given him food or money? No, since I have a regular band to which I do give money, though come to think of it, I hadn’t seen the most persistent of the group, who used to come into the café and cadge funds. I would give him a dollar or two, and he would protest: he wanted five dollars to eat at Burger King. That stumped me, raising as it did the question of whether the guy had the obligation to take what I gave him and be grateful, or whether, in fact, it wasn’t quite reasonable. But why did I begin to dislike him, and start to feel like an automatic money machine? And that led, of course, to wondering whether the fact that I disliked him was reason enough to stop giving him money: his needs were unchanged, and wasn‘t that the main thing?

“So whatever happened to the old guy who stood outside the supermarket and begged for money, and would push your grocery cart home?” I asked Lady.

“Oh, he got in trouble with the police, since he was also being used by the mob to move drugs around,” said Lady. “So he’s somewhere, either with the police, or with the mob, or in jail. Anyway, not around….”

Well, it made sense, in a way. If you were homeless, why not take what money you can get and move some drugs?

To live in Old San Juan is to live in constant contact with the homeless. This morning, taking the bus? The woman who wears tight short and a tight tank top—you know, the one who sits in front of the old Western Bank—asked me for a quarter. Coming back from the beach, a homeless man was taking a shower at the place where the surfers rinse their boards off. And at some point today, I’ll pass the profoundly disturbing sight of a ragged, filthy man, who will look at me blankly as he has for several years and ask, “do you have one change?” I will smile, shake my head no, and go on, though I have considered, as an English teacher, pointing out the difference between “one” and “any.”

There are times I wonder about our attitudes about homelessness: when I was a kid, there was no such thing, there was only vagrancy, which carried quite a kick. What did it mean? That you were shirking your duty to get on with your life, to exert yourself, to take pride and get a job and put a roof over your head. What? You’re in a park drinking a bottle of cheap wine in the middle of the afternoon? Of course the police should go after you!

It’s now 2014, and I get it now. I’ve had, after all, that Friday morning meeting, in which I went from jobful to jobless in 20 minutes—never have I seen Human Resources work so efficiently! And I have faced too many bottles of wine not to know that some day, I could wake up and want to reach for one. This is called, I’m told, the “morning bottle,” and it’s not a good sign.

So the double edge sword of addiction and joblessness has at times swung quite close to my side, and may one day fell me. I ponder it, at times: would I sleep at the beach? Trust myself to a doorway? Or would I, as I see so many homeless people do, sleep during the day, all the better to be awake and vigilant during the night?

Of course, I won’t have to worry about the most terrifying thing of all: cold. But consider the fate of the homeless in Madison, Wisconsin: according to Huffington Post, there are 3370 homeless people in the city of 250,000. And given that it’s my hometown, I can tell you about cold. Why am I still sweating, walking the streets of San Juan?

Because here, the idea is to stroll, to amble, to move leisurely, all the while wearing a coat or sweater. But I’m still back on those frigid streets of Wisconsin, where the idea is to charge, stride, trot—all the better to get the hell home and sit next to the radiator. OK, so what would I do if I were homeless in Wisconsin? Well, I’d better hope for this:

Cute, hunh? It’s one of nine 99-square feet houses built in Madison and inaugurated recently. They cost 5,000 dollars each, and are heated with propane and solar panels. Here’s a picture of the inside:

Madison is one of a half dozen cities to start this project, which came about after the Occupy Madison movement had folded—or rather, been busted up. So the organizers had an epiphany: they had to comply with every last national, state, and local regulation if they wanted to build these houses. Here’s what one source said:

Local organizers also state “Our approach to working within the system came only after we realized that without dotting every “i”, and crossing every “t”, the city and the county would never let us operate– they used every opportunity to enforce ordinances, regulations, and seemingly arbitrary whims against us. This paralleled precisely the persecution of everyday, unaffiliated, homeless individuals. When you are homeless, “the system” is rife with obstacles designed to prevent creative innovation or adaptation– we at Occupy Madison experienced the same headaches.

Occupy Madison, by the way, has this to say:

“Now is a critical time for us financially– if we can’t raise enough funds to pay for making the site as wonderful as it is, there’s a real risk our whole project could go under.” Donations can be sent to PayPal account http://bit.ly/1uSYGew Fundraisers in the past have been matched on a dollar per dollar basis and none of current progress would be possible without a 100% volunteer effort.

Is it worth it? Well, even if you subscribe to the “vagrant” theory, you might consider this:

A study recent study followed the progress of the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC) in Seattle, WA. All the residents at this Housing First-styled residence had severe alcohol problems and varying medical and mental health conditions. When taking into account all costs – including housing costs – the participants in the 1811 Eastlake program cost $2,449 less per person per month than those who were in conventional city shelters, as described in the article from the Journal of American Medical Association.

Homeless people get ill a lot, and often wait until their condition is extreme—and then where do they go? Emergency rooms. And who picks up the tab? Or consider that homeless people also go to prisons and jails—another cost to society.

If we can’t be charitable, at least can’t we be sensible?

                                                                                                                                      

      

The Soft Dust of Time

I had read the book, Joys and Sorrows, a biography of Pau Casals, and every cellist has seen the pictures: the aged cellist walking arm in arm with his young wife, Martita, on the beach. Then I moved to Puerto Rico, and went to the museum in his honor in Old San Juan; there, I peered at the memorabilia, watched a few tapes of the old Casals Festivals, and especially, peered through the Plexiglas case at his cello.

Well, one of his cellos, since Wikipedia has confirmed what I remembered: Casals played at least two Gofrillers throughout the course of his career. The instrument I remember was a Vuillaume: not quite a Gofriller, but still a very distinguished French luthier of the 19^th century.

“What were those evenings like,” I would ask Mr. Fernández decades ago—what cellist wouldn’t want to know what the early Casals Festivals had been like? Back when it was a festival, instead of what it has now become, which is a two-week concert series of orchestras, chamber groups, and the obligatory cellist brought in. Yes, the concerts can be excellent, but…

“…in the old days, all the great musicians would come, stay, spend several weeks, give master classes. Best of all, you could go to the rehearsals—that’s when I heard my first Messiah. Beverly Sills, Alicia de Larrocha, Alexander Schneider—they all came. And since it was held at UPR Theater, I could walk through town and attend the rehearsals. It was magical….”

Nor was he alone; it was what everyone said who remembered those days. And the festival was hardly the most important thing that Casals did for music in Puerto Rico—he also founded or helped found the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra and the Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico.

Casals died in 1973, in the year of the deaths of the three great Pablos: Casals, Picasso, and Neruda. And what had happened since then?

Let me tell you a melancholy fact, dear Reader: however great you were in life, in death you take your chances. Or, rather, the dust of the passing years settles softly on all your accomplishments and fame. Casals will always be revered as a cellist, a composer, and especially as a man. But the politicians? The people who direct public policy? The bureaucrats who assign the funds? Many of them were not yet born on that day when Casals died.

I tell you that because I have just walked the two blocks to where the Casals Museum once was and should be. And what did I see? An abandoned building, as I knew I would. Because I had bumped into the directors of the museum a couple of years ago; we had chatted, and they had told me that the instrument—the presumed Vuillaume—of the Museum had been restored by my friend Rodrigo Correa, who had laid down the law: that instrument was never going back to that site. Where is it, instead? Apparently, for reasons I’ve now forgotten, somewhere in Texas.

And the rest of the collection? Scattered, since, well, here’s the official explanation, from El Nuevo Día of August on 2013:

“El Museo Pablo Casals nunca ha cerrado sus puertas al público, lo que pasa es que el deterioro del antiguo edificio en la Calle San José (el Viejo San Juan) afectaba. La casa parecía una casa fantasma y nosotros no podíamos hacer nada, porque el edificio es del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña”, puntualizó

(“The Pablo Casals Museum has never closed its doors to the public, what happens is (sic) the deterioration of the old building in Old San Juan on San José Street was affecting it. The house seemed like a ghost house and we could not do anything, since the building belongs to the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture.”)

Yeah?

To a bureaucratic mind, this may make sense, but to the rest of us? And what did Casals’ wife think? Because after I had watched a documentary of Casals on YouTube, I had become interested in Martita Casals Istomin; for one thing, she was obviously a very talented cellist who had stopped playing—at least publically—and devoted herself to Casals. She later married the pianist Eugene Istomin, and had been at various times the Artistic Director of Kennedy Center and the president of the Manhattan School of Music. And as you can see in the clip below, the years have faded neither her beauty nor her charm.

Well, in the course of the clip, the name of Casals’ good friend Emanuel Moór was mentioned—and I wondered: could it be? Because I had grown up hearing about Moór, but not as a composer, but as the inventor of the double keyboard piano—of which my mentor, Gunnar Johansen, had had two. One—was it the Bösendorfer?—had lived upstairs, the other had been in the basement studio. The sound of those pianos still rings in my ears.

So it was time to check out Moór, of whom Casals had thought highly. The cellist Steven Isserlis apparently didn’t think much of him, and no one will ever say that the composer is played ad nauseum. But is there anything there? YouTube, of course, held the answer.

It came in the form of a double cello concerto, written for Casals and his first wife, the Portuguese cellist Guilhermina Suggia. And it’s so rare that the first movement has had only 531 hits. Oh, and the “orchestra” is in fact a piano reduction, though the soloists are excellent.

Two dead cellists; two old friends; a widow twice over; a closed museum; a cello in exile, in Texas….

Is that why this music sounds so evocative?

The Strange Case of the Singing Nun

The things, Dear Readers, I do for you! For nothing, ordinarily, would get me to re-listen to the Italian nun, Sister Christina, who has quite the voice, matched by none of the taste. Why else would she sing, “Like a Virgin,” which was a hit by someone named—although apparently not a nun—Madonna.

Well, it seemed like the thing to do, so I sat through it, and quite a slick affair it is: beautiful shots of Italy, incredible architecture, and then, of course, the rapturous Sister Christina herself: the rapture being conveyed by the three hand movements God has given her. But no matter, because she has over three million hits in the video I watched, and that, by the way, was uploaded less than a month ago. Am I placing the YouTube clip at the bottom of the post? Or even hyperlinking it? No way, since Sister Christina needs no help from me. So you’re on your own, guys.

Ah, how one longs for dear Pope Benedict, now reverently retiring under the nose and presumed eye of the new pope, who, according to The New York Times, is confusing his cardinals, archbishops, and bishops. Here’s what the Times has to say, in an article entitled “Bishops Struggle to Follow Lead of Francis.”

Change is rattling the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, as the American bishops hold their annual fall meeting here this week. The vast majority of them were appointed by Francis’ two more conservative predecessors, and some say they do not yet understand what kind of change Pope Francis envisions and whether it is anything more than a change in tone.

Well, the bishops may be struggling, but the rest of us? It’s pretty clear: enough already with all the talk about same-sex marriage and traditional values and let’s focus on the poor, about which Jesus spent a bit more time than he did preaching traditional moral values. At least, that’s my reading of the whole thing.

So now we have a singing nun, and guess what! She’s even appeared with our own Ricky Martin—soo all the world is seeing an Ursuline nun appearing with a gay parent of surrogate children. All this in presumably hyper-Catholic Italy; no wonder the bishops are confused.

Well, the BBC reports on all of this, since Christina has just released her first and undoubtedly-already hit recording called—no self-aggrandizing, here—“Sister Christina!“ Will I be excommunicated if I express the hope that all you out there pirate the music from YouTube?

The BBC, however, takes a bit of the stench away by offering up some really first rate nuns, whom the term “rebel.” That would seem to apply to the older of the two nuns, Hildegard von Bingen, whom I’ve always shied away from, since all the New Age types were listening to her. But really, what a remarkable woman she was: writing her theological texts, as well as…wait, Wikipedia to the rescue….

Saint Hildegard of Bingen, O.S.B. (German: Hildegard von Bingen; Latin: Hildegardis Bingensis) (1098 – 17 September 1179), also known as Saint Hildegard, and Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, Benedictine abbess, visionary, and polymath.^[1] Elected a magistra by her fellow nuns in 1136, she founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. One of her works as a composer, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of liturgical drama and arguably the oldest surviving morality play.^[2]

She wrote theological, botanical and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, and poems, while supervising miniature illuminations in the Rupertsberg manuscript of her first work, Scivias.^[3]

Wikipedia goes on to say that Hildegard—who isn’t formally a saint, but a lot of people, including popes, refer to her as one—wasn’t afraid to buck the system, including going over the head of her abbot to the archbishop, all to get permission to move her nuns to simpler lodgings in Rupertsberg.

Interestingly, she took the time to invent a language—wow, the stuff you can get up to if you don’t have a man around the house!—which she called lingua ignota, and which may have been used to, according to Wikipedia, “increase solidarity among the nuns.” Is it just me, or does anyone else sense there might be another motive involved?

Though she professed to be an “unlearned woman, completely of Biblical exegesis,” she acquired fame in Europe, and corresponded with many notable people, including two popes.  

Then there are the famous visions, which prompted a lot  of writing, after initial resistance. But wait, were they really visions, or were they, as no less than Oliver Sacks diagnosed, or were they migraine? Again, here’s Wikipedia:

Oliver Sacks, in his book Migraine, called her visions "indisputably migrainous,"^[26] but stated that this does not invalidate her visions, because it is what one does with a psychological condition that is important.

Look—this is screwy to me: if I take LSD and experience the vision of God as Chippendale models playing celestial cellos, does that count? And isn’t a migraine a physiological condition, not a psychological one?

Lastly, back to the BBC, which claimed that Hildegard served up the first description of the female orgasm, and even provided the link, which of course I had to look up. So am I any smarter on the subject? Not really, though I did stumble across this:

From tasting evil, the blood of the sons of Adam was turned into the poison of semen, out of which the sons of man are begotten.

OK so we don’t always agree. But look…

…at least she’s not singing “What a Feeling” from Flashdance on YouTube!