The Southernization of America

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en route Amsterdam-Apeldoorn, January 16, 2013—

The Southernization of American life was an expression of the great turn away from the centralized liberalism that had governed the country from the Presidencies of F.D.R. to Nixon.
—George Packer, The New Yorker, Jan. 21, 2013.

For years I've railed about The Marlboro Man, whom I have always found emblematic of what Packer calls The Southernization of America:

…the Southern way of life began to be embraced around the country until, in a sense, it came to stand for the “real America”: country music and Lynyrd Skynyrd, barbecue and NASCAR, political conservatism, God and guns, the code of masculinity, militarization, hostility to unions, and suspicion of government authority, especially in Washington, D.C. (despite its largesse).

Packer writes about this in a concise piece meant mainly as a comment on — a contextualization of — the current obstructionist deep-red mentality which threatens any Congressional social legislation. On gun laws, for example, or debt-limit debate, today's example: but, further, on virtually anything approaching the kind of social engineering a dense, complex, and vulnerable society must rely on for its survival.

For a century after losing the Civil War, the South was America’s own colonial backwater—“not quite a nation within a nation, but the next thing to it,” W. J. Cash wrote in his classic 1941 study, “The Mind of the South.” From Tyler, Texas, to Roanoke, Virginia, Southern places felt unlike the rest of the country. The region was an American underbelly in the semi-tropical heat; the manners were softer, the violence swifter, the commerce slower, the thinking narrower, the past closer. It was called the Solid South, and it partly made up for economic weakness with the political strength that came from having a lock on the Democratic Party, which was led by shrewd septuagenarian committee chairmen.

I increasingly believe there is a synergy between the cultural values Packer refers to as "the Southern way of life" and an edgy, seemingly resentful attitude I can only think of as antisocial. We're living in a crack between two social orders, I think: the one that saw us through industrialization, urbanization, away from slave-labor, through a hundred years of social progress; and whatever is going to follow, if we can't moderate the two big present threats against intellilgently planned and maintained social structures: either despotic global technological, commercial and economic forces, or a new Dark Ages.

I know perfectly well there are many Southern traditions and values worth praising; I have Southern friends who embody them, with grace and sympathy and taste and patient courtesy. But younger generations seem to have lost connection to the gentility, the comity that characterizes this Southern civility.

Packer's piece closes rather ominously:

…At the end of “The Mind of the South,” Cash has this description of “the South at its best”: “proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal.” These remain qualities that the rest of the country needs and often calls on. The South’s vices—“violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas”—grow particularly acute during periods when it is marginalized and left behind. An estrangement between the South and the rest of the country would bring out the worst in both—dangerous insularity in the first, smug self-deception in the second.

Southern political passions have always been rooted in sometimes extreme ideas of morality, which has meant, in recent years, abortion and school prayer. But there is a largely forgotten Southern history, beyond the well-known heroics of the civil-rights movement, of struggle against poverty and injustice, led by writers, preachers, farmers, rabble-rousers, and even politicians, speaking a rich language of indignation. The region is not entirely defined by Jim DeMint, Sam Walton, and the Tide’s A J McCarron. It would be better for America as well as for the South if Southerners rediscovered their hidden past and took up the painful task of refashioning an identity that no longer inspires their countrymen.

Beware resentment, which can turn vicious, even at its own cost.


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Dutch painting from the golden age

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Via Gaetano Sacchi, January 22, 2013—THE MOST MEMORABLE paintings, it seems to me, are like voicemail messages left by dear distant friends, full of substance, some conveyed literally, more by expression and association: the familiar voice, the shared experiences. Even the implied though mute acceptance of a momentarily awkward situation: you can receive the message, but you're not allowed to return the communication. Your response is for yourself alone.

Unless, of course, you're looking at the paintings with a friend intimate enough to share your enthusiasm, your unspoken responses.

Paintings can have one big advantage over voicemail: in an intelligent installation they can seem to have their own conversations, among themselves, repeating and adding to one another. The right paintings emerge from the confines of their frames, step away from the walls on which they hang, expand into the added dimensions of time and awareness. And having seen this occur, having participated in this gavotte of calm, methodical, deep, and graceful presences, one continues to profit long after leaving the exhibition. The most ordinary wall glows with unfamiliar luminosity; mundane corners become geometrical truths; colors usually overlooked glow with secret vitality.

The most recent exhibition to trigger these thoughts was Vermeer. Il secolo d’oro dell’arte olandese, which we saw Sunday at the Scuderie Quirinale here, on the last day of its run. (It had suggested an earlier flight here than otherwise planned, losing two days from our stay in Netherlands — regretted, but worth it.) We were afraid the show would be crowded, but it wasn't so bad: with very few exceptions we were able to have our own private minutes in front of every painting. (All but one: the "theme painting," Girl with the red hat, reproduced on the exhibition poster: a painting so energetic yet mute, so striking and memorable though small, that it hardly needed close inspection.)

In truth there were not as many Vermeers as one would like, and not all of them were really splendid examples of this (to me) greatest of easel painters. That girl in her red hat, and the equally celebrated The little street, were the two indisputable masterpieces: others paintings seemed too early or too late, too over-cleaned or left too unfinished, to quite hold their own with them.

But the company! Rarely does an installation so expertly and so enterprisingly assemble a collection of painterly semblables, paintings whose shared technique, palette, subject matter, and human insight greatly informs and expands your understanding of the issues involved, sometimes through similarities, at other times through contrasts.

At the beginning, for example, The little street hung in a small room with Jan van der Heyden's monumental The Amsterdam town hall with the dam, a striking study in forced angular perspective, suggesting that the Stadhuis, for all its imposing size, is justified by the great expanse of the city-state surrounding it. Vermeer's view of a quiet corner in Delft is about entirely different matters: the propriety of small spaces as they sit within public space; the sobriety of daily-life activities, the silence of occupation and contemplation.

If The little street contrasts with the nearby Amsterdam town hall, it speaks across several galleries to Pieter de Hooch's The bedroom, whose interior spaces are distributed in so similar a manner, with recession to a more distant background on the left, into a closer but reserved interior on the right. And again it's contrast of masonry, flat surfaces, oddly tilted planes, near shadow and distant light that suggests this invisible affinity.




Always the first things to hit me, in Vermeer's most impressive work, are the light and the geometry. Here, the empty rectangle of the upper left, where the white grey clouds somehow keep their place in the background, perhaps pushed back by the whiter whites of the masonry. In Vermeer the painting so often seems to mirror the apparent subject of the painting; the act of painting, slow, thoughtful, methodical, mirrors the contemplation of the subject, the wringing-out of the cloth in an alley sink, the embroidery being done in a doorway, even the manufacture, conveyance, and patient assembly of the thousands of bricks — by invisible bricklayers, and by the invisible Vermeer.

It's his invisibility draws me to Vermeer, makes him a more engaging, therefor more persuasive artist than, for example, van der Heyden or Rembrandt; just as I prefer Fitzgerald to Hemingway, Mozart to Beethoven, Austen to Dickens, Webern to Berg. Vermeer is not the only "invisible" painter of his time and place to haunt me: at their best, de Hooch, Metsu, ter Borch, and van Mieris almost keep abreast of him in their mastery of form, color, light, and human insight.




This conversation among invisible painters, through the expressive voices of their paintings, extends across galleries. Look for example at the affinity with The little street of Pieter de Hooch's The bedroom: the recession into deep distance on the left, nearer yet more obscure distance on the right; the curiously frozen poses of the figures, arrested in simple daily motion; the contrast of light at the back and from the side with dark seen from in front; the division of the picture into rectangles whose unseen centers seem to lie on a smooth invisible spiral.

You begin to feel you know some of the figures in these pictures.




The woman in the fur-trimmed red jacket, feeding her parrot, in Frans van Mieris's marvelously meticulous painting, shows up later wearing the same jacket, perhaps pregnant, perhaps lovesick, perhaps both, in his The doctor's visit. She is the same woman, but having seen the second painting, her portrait in the other is more revealing. You look more deeply into her profiled face; you read more significance (likely too much more) into her carefully positioned left arm.




So you begin to look more closely at everything. The family in de Hooch's Portrait of a family in a Delft courtyard, for example: the preening couple at the left; the stolid younger sons at and on the staircase; the mother of the family, looking with some concern at her aging husband seated at the right—a man who has seen more than he cares, at this point, to express, I think. The exhibition booklet helpfully informs us that the steeple of the Nieuwe Kerk, center background, is there to reveal the piety and law-abiding sobriety of this family: but I wonder if the odd placement of the group of figures higher in the picture plane that one might expect — with a greater expanse of brick in the foreground than absolutely necessary — doesn't suggest otherwise.

There's an X across this picture plane, the sky and two diagonals of foliage above reflected as bricks and two diagonals of figures below. Ultimately the painting, even this painting, on first sight so "about" its figures, is in fact about light and space and the gradation of permanence within light and space: foliage, flesh, carpentry, and brick describe an arc of vulnerability to a Time only apparently stopped for the moment. You can hardly help lingering over these paintings, and when you reluctantly move on to the next, the one you've been gazing at — observing; contemplating — seems somehow to have changed, almost visibly changed.

Fakirs

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Via Gaetano Sacchi, Rome; January 28, 2013—
HERE IN THIS not very clear photo you see a pair of street performers just off the Via Corso. We're used to seeing Living Statues by now, folks dressed as the Statue of Liberty or some other recognizable statue, standing absolutely motionless for long minutes at a time, waiting for passersby to photograph them, or better yet drop a coin or two into a box or a hat.

Last night, though, during the passaggiata, we saw this double living statue: identical twins, perhaps, in Buddhist-priest orange robes — saffron? — sitting motionless, one on the pavement, the other on a post held by his friend. Only rarely did one or the other twitch, betraying that yes, they do seem to be alive.

"Seem to," because on first glance, and even after a minute or so of watching them, the upper figure must surely not be real. He couldn't possibly balance motionless on that stick. Besides, he'd be far too heavy for the lower figure to sustain, absolutely still, on the top of a post held in his outstretched arm.

Furthermore, both figures had absolutely identical and featureless complexions. Are they plastic, or latex, or something? Then are the occasional twitches the result of some ingenious hidden mechanism?
We watched them for quite a while, among a number of other fascinated viewers. I thought about street theater. I don't think it existed in my childhood, at least not in the United States I knew. Break dancers came along in the 1980s, I think, but chiefly in the big cities: I met them only through television reports.

Picasso painted a number of Saltimbanques in his Rose Period: circus acrobats, I always thought. The word came into French from Italian: salta in banco, leap from (on) a bench (bank): and I imagine these saltimbancchi lept first from places set up not in circus tents but on the street.

But these saffron-robed fellows didn't seem to be acrobats. Far from leaping, they are motionless. At length a couple of assistants threw a black cloth over them and for a number of minutes they were hidden. Clearly, now, they are both real living people; we watched their heads and arms moving around under the cloth. What are they doing? Changing places, probably. Finally the cloth was removed, revealing them in exactly the attitude they'd been in before.

Real or fake? How does the fellow on top balance; how does the other hold up his weight? Lindsey figured it out, and I'm sure she's right: but I'm not about to tell you and spoil your fun.

They are not acrobats, but fakirs, I think, using that now-dangerous word somewhere between its original and its vulgar senses. Faqr: a poor holy man; faker: a hoaxer. These fellows are not what they first appear to be. And yet they are holy, in a sense, occupied with a completely impractical dedication whose only social utility is to awe, fascinate, ultimately entertain. We probably need more of them.

Street theater

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via Gaetano Sacchi Rome, January 28, 2013—
A FEW MORE WORDS on street theater, if you don't mind. Rome is nothing if not theatrical.

I just told you about the (apparently) twin fakirs occupying a piazza last night off the Via Corso. Here's the scene on the Corso itself, the Sunday evening passeggiata, pedestrians (and that one rebellious cyclist) cheek by jowl ambulating the length of what was once a racecourse (hence the name) and is now a shopping street. Not a bar or cafe to be seen on this street, but plenty of bling and blue jeans.

I've been reading Robert Hughes's history Rome, a satisfying introduction to the history of the great city. He writes of the entertainments and indulgences of Imperial Rome, describing the sculpture, the gladitorial combats, the poetry and the (legitimate) theater; the baths, the jewelry, the feasting. But he does not write about street theater, and there must have been plenty. Dancers, acrobats, perhaps even living statues imitating the many hundreds of real ones — they must have come from every corner of the empire, as they do today.

I like to walk along streets like this holding my iPhone at my hip, recording random video. Some day perhaps I'll stitch some excerpts together. The random faces passing by are often bright with expression, too often at other times merely focussed on an unseen mobile telephone, listening to an unheard voice, then suddenly and volubly answering in a torrent of syllables that may be Italian, Turkish, Arabic, or who knows what language or dialect.

When we landed at Amsterdam two or three weeks ago the first thing we did was walk the crowded Harlemsestraat, and the first thing to catch my eye was a fellow piloting his Dutch-style very upright black bicycle through the crowd, a twelve-year-old girl standing just as upright on the carrier behind his saddle, her hands lightly resting on his shoulders. They went by too quick to catch in a photo, but the image is still vivid in my mind's eye.

The other day we saw a show of paintings by various Breughels, many of them of course street scenes. Except for the technology not much seems to have changed over the centuries. People are still fascinating; people are still fascinated by people. I think that at bottom the fascination lies in mystery, enigma, unanswered questions. What are these cell-phone conversations about? How does that guy sit on that pole? How do these break-dancers spin on their heads? Why does that girl not fall off her father's bicycle?

I think, too, about my late friend George's Filipino physicist friend, the student of turbulence, who held that everything derives from turbulence, turbulence and the desire of the turbulent for rest, and the desire of those at rest, what few there are, to be turbulent. Nothing expresses this better than the passeggiata. And no one realized it more abruptly, I think, or with more persuasive results, than the wife of an acquaintance of mine.

He had taken a job running an American organization here in Rome, against his wife's wishes. She hated Rome. She liked New York, London, Paris; she had some irrational distaste for Italy, Italians, above all Rome. She said she found Rome chaotic and disorderly and unpredictable. She fretted continuously about being posted to Rome, and could hardly wait for the expiration of his term. But, he pointed out, he'd signed a contract for a number of years. Very well, she said; he could stay here if he liked; as for her, she hadn't signed anything — perhaps they hadn't married conventionally; I don't know; I never though to ask.

After six months in Rome the container arrived with all their household possessions, and their car. I'm going out for a drive, she said. He cautioned her about driving in Italy, particularly in Rome, but she insisted. She was gone a few hours, and he feared the worst: she'd driven to the airport and caught a plane home, or to Paris, or London, or New York.

But she was back by dinner time, full of enthusiasm. I love it here, she announced; now I finally understand it. There's all this apparent disorder, but everyone knows exactly what they're doing. You just go forward. You don't have to follow lines, or lights, or think about the people behind you; you don't even really have to worry about the ones to the left and right. Everything flows. When there's something in the way the flow parts and continues around it, then comes back together. Now I understand Roman life, Italian life, she said.

It's a little different when it rains, of course, as it is doing just now. You do have to look out for the umbrellas, whose spokes really ought to be festooned with eyeballs, the way the menacing things approach you on a crowded street. But even there, somehow, umbrellas tilt to the side, or rise or descend, missing your own, and sparing your faces. Turbulence, flow, crowds, cats, motorcycles, doorways, cobblestones; sidewalks and the frequent lack of sidewalks. Roman street theater.

HOC

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Via Gaetano Sacchi, Roma, January 29, 2013—
THAT TITLE IS NOT Latin for "this" (or "that"), it is Russian for "nose." The three letters floated frequently in front of the stage tonight, at Rome Opera's production of Dmitri Shostakovich's first opera, performed here as Il Naso. Shostakovich composed it in 1927 and 1928, to a libretto based pretty straightforwardly on the Nicolai Gogol story
(1835) about a man whose nose leaves him — or perhaps a nose who leaves a man. Gogol's story is pure fantasy, and reminds me of fables by E.T.A. Hoffmann; the librettists of the opera have pushed the fantasy further in the direction of political satire.

Shostakovich's score is said to be influenced by Alban Berg's Wozzeck (1925), and I could hear that tonight in the writing for male chorus, in the contrapuntal devices, and occasionally in solo vocal writing. But the music is strident and busy, the orchestra almost wilfully eccentric. The large percussion section rarely lets up; xylophone, piccolo, and brass frequently assault the ear; and the orchestration goes everywhere — this must be the only opera whose orchestra includes two balalaikas and a flexotone.

Peter Stein's production leans heavily on clichés of Modernist slapstick, often suggesting silent cinema: a man descends from the flies in an elaborate useless machine composed of gears and tread-wheel, and you think of Charlie Chaplin and Modern Times; Keystone Kops chase hapless fugitives and one another; two men in a horse suit show up once or twice more often than really necessary. But the result is fun, if silly, and fills the time — better, in my opinion, than does Shostakovich's score, which too often seems to be turning the crank.

The cast was huge and I lack a program; I'll only mention the lead, who has an enormous role: Paulo Szot put it across very well indeed. Alejo Pérez conducted with all the energy needed, and managed a Russian style in the broader, more lyrical sections, welcome when they arrive. The chorus and comprimarii were effective, and the supporting cast: as you see in the photo, of the final curtain call, this was an enormous cast, easily sixty or seventy people often crowding the stage, and all directed very well.

The question remains, though, whether the opera's worth doing. It's a sad point to raise: Shostakovich is a central composer of his century, and all his music should be known by anyone interested in serious music. To my mind his work is flawed, like Aaron Copland's and Benjamin Britten's, by his felt need to be both modern and nationalistic; stylistics too often seem to be applied to his work, rather than his work evolving a persuasive individual style. But his is a special case, and familiarity with his work must involve awareness of the tragic ironies of his life, time, and place — and not many of his scores so directly confront, even define, these ironies as The Nose.

So, expensive though the tickets were; difficult as it was to balance the Russian text with the Italian supertitles (and particularly from a box far to the side of the house); strident as I found the score; I'm glad to have heard this performance. Particularly, I might add, a couple of weeks after seeing Einstein on the Beach again, for, odd as it may seem, the two events have certain things in common. I much prefer Einstein, partly because it's a more serious work of art. But art, like all of life, profits from slapstick and sarcasm as well as from seriousness. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and Hoc is never dull.

Other People's Money

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JUST A QUICK COMMENT on the play seen last night, Other People's Money, a comic oleo, I think you could call it, on a very topical subject, by Jerry Sterner, about whom I know only what Wikipedia tells me, which is little beyond the epitaph on his headstone: "Finally, a plot."

The play is equally sardonic. You may know it from its 1991 film version, which starred Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck, and Piper Laurie — strange, how long ago that all seems now! I haven't seen the film, but last night's performance makes me curious to.

Not that the production we saw was deficient, crying out for Hollywood's more lavish resources. This was community theater, though one member of the cast is Equity; but the casting was good, the acting persuasive, the production resourceful given the small house and crowded stage facility.

The play's about a villainous New York corporate raider who's after a midsized Rhode Island factory, publicly held but tightly controlled by the family that founded it many years before. The company's small-town owner, whose father had founded the factory, yields to his second wife's pleas to let her daughter, at the beginning of her law career — his stepdaughter — to try to prevent the takeover.

Further complications involve the family dynamics and various interferences by employees, but the main action is in the emerging duel between the smart and idealistic young lawyer, Kate, and the villain, Lawrence Garfinkle. (Interestingly, his surname was changed in the film to "Garfield.") They are played here by Laura Lowry and Keith Baker, and I thought both were superb.

We went to the play at the suggestion of a couple of friends, with whom we often see theater; they'd heard this was very funny, and after the previous night's presidential debate a funny play was in order. Well, of course, corporate raiders are very much in play these days, and it was perhaps too bad that the one in this production is as funny, as darkly attractive, as he is. Oily, rancid, yes; you can almost see him twisting a Simon Legree mustache as he eyes the sweet young daughter. But his frankness, as he discusses the nasty business he goes about, is refreshing, particularly after the less "transparent" explanations Mr. Romney gave the other night.

• Other People's Money, a comedy by Jerry Sterner. With Larry Williams, John Craven, Joan Hawley, Keith Baker, and Laura Lowry, directed by Elizabeth Craven. Main Stage West, Sebastopol, through October 6.

Other People's Money

To contact us Click HERE
JUST A QUICK COMMENT on the play seen last night, Other People's Money, a comic oleo, I think you could call it, on a very topical subject, by Jerry Sterner, about whom I know only what Wikipedia tells me, which is little beyond the epitaph on his headstone: "Finally, a plot."

The play is equally sardonic. You may know it from its 1991 film version, which starred Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck, and Piper Laurie — strange, how long ago that all seems now! I haven't seen the film, but last night's performance makes me curious to.

Not that the production we saw was deficient, crying out for Hollywood's more lavish resources. This was community theater, though one member of the cast is Equity; but the casting was good, the acting persuasive, the production resourceful given the small house and crowded stage facility.

The play's about a villainous New York corporate raider who's after a midsized Rhode Island factory, publicly held but tightly controlled by the family that founded it many years before. The company's small-town owner, whose father had founded the factory, yields to his second wife's pleas to let her daughter, at the beginning of her law career — his stepdaughter — to try to prevent the takeover.

Further complications involve the family dynamics and various interferences by employees, but the main action is in the emerging duel between the smart and idealistic young lawyer, Kate, and the villain, Lawrence Garfinkle. (Interestingly, his surname was changed in the film to "Garfield.") They are played here by Laura Lowry and Keith Baker, and I thought both were superb.

We went to the play at the suggestion of a couple of friends, with whom we often see theater; they'd heard this was very funny, and after the previous night's presidential debate a funny play was in order. Well, of course, corporate raiders are very much in play these days, and it was perhaps too bad that the one in this production is as funny, as darkly attractive, as he is. Oily, rancid, yes; you can almost see him twisting a Simon Legree mustache as he eyes the sweet young daughter. But his frankness, as he discusses the nasty business he goes about, is refreshing, particularly after the less "transparent" explanations Mr. Romney gave the other night.

• Other People's Money, a comedy by Jerry Sterner. With Larry Williams, John Craven, Joan Hawley, Keith Baker, and Laura Lowry, directed by Elizabeth Craven. Main Stage West, Sebastopol, through October 6.