September 15, 2022 : Issue #25
WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse
WELCOME
Some further thoughts on how my composer grandfather’s legacy still reverberates in me, my scandalous amusicality notwithstanding. But first part one (of two) on the unlikely still-unfurling career of Federico Solmi, an astonishing Italian video artist (now based in New York), on the occasion of the opening of a major museum retrospective in New Jersey. And finally, how a classic Japanese ad brought out the tumbling forest brook long latent in Bach.
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The Main Event
During the summer of 2017, I happened into the Soho gallery of the eminent Ronald Feldman (legendary dealer to the likes of Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Komar & Melamid, Hannah Wilke, Ida Appelborg, and Leon Golub) and was not the least bit surprised to see that he was already managing to stage a group show of artists’ responses to the still-nascent Donald Trump administration—many of them quite funny, others thoroughly scathing, and some both at once. Among which, the most striking, perhaps, was a zanily looping video piece (mounted within a faux-draped color-saturated hand-fashioned acrylic frame) which parceled out an animated fever dream of the preening new president’s carnivalesque inaugural parade, right through its sumptuously over-the-top evening ball. Amidst the prancing horses, the whooping crowds, and the chimping cameramen, the new president seemed to be flanked by all manner of historical personages, famous and infamous (Egyptian princesses, Aztec monarchs, Marie Antoinette, Napoleon, Theodosa, George Washington, Sitting Bull, and the like), all striding forth in giddy procession, like one of those mesmerizing nightmares from which it seems impossible to awaken. As you can see from the little video I myself prized on my iphone, I did manage momentarily to tear myself away from the frothing spectacle to register the name of the artist on the placard off to the side, but I was quickly drawn back into the vertiginous gyre.
So, I asked Feldman, the sly old impresario, a bit later, “Who the hell is this Federico Solmi character, anyway?” Feldman’s eyes widened as he broke into one of his wide gleaming smiles. “Someone,” he pronounced, delphically, “well worth looking into.” I’d learned to take such recommendations, coming from such a source, seriously, and so I did indeed begin delving. From the apparent core of Solmi’s obsessions (for this was hardly the first of the videos, as things turned out, that he’d devoted to many of these same personages), I initially took him to be yet another of the recent crop of extraordinarily talented young Latino artists, so many of them likewise plumbing the dark legacies of colonialist conquest and depredation for their source material.
But such proved not to be the case, as I came to understand in the ensuing months and years of my ripening acquaintance with the young artist in question, and in fact the story of the origins of the fellow’s artistic vocation were considerably more surprisingly unexpected, as I was subsequently able to demonstrate when I was invited to contribute a biographical essay for the monograph accompanying Joie de Vivre, his brimming mid-career retrospective that, as a matter of fact, is opening today at the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey (through February 19, just an hour out of Penn Station on the Morris & Essex Line of the NJT). An essay, the director’s cut of which herein follows, in two parts.
Federico Solmi, The Butcher’s Son
(PART ONE, of two)
Artists have been focusing their attention on bulls and cows and sides of beef since time immemorial—literally back to the days of the cave painters at Lascaux. Rembrandt’s rendition of an outstretched beef carcass seemed to tap back into the iconography of Christ’s passion,
while Soutine’s (based in part on Rembrandt) uncannily presaged the coming Holocaust, and Francis Bacon’s (likewise sourced) evoked the howling existentialist temper that characterized the years thereafter. Picasso channeled Titian’s bull of Europa in bending toward the erotic,
while more recently Mark Tansey harkened back to Paulus Potter’s “Young Bull” in order to parody pseudoscientific stabs at positivist aesthetics in his Innocent Eye Test.
And those are but a few of the instances from the Western Tradition: other traditions have been no less taurid.
But as far as I know there have been few instances of actual butchers laying down their blades in order to take up the painter’s brush, that is until just recently, and even in that case—the instance here at hand—it took several decades before the remarkable character in question was willing to own up to his butcher roots. (As recently as last year in an interview with the Brooklyn Rail, the fellow had been mincingly citing “entanglements in the family business” in accounting for the delay in his getting launched into his artistic vocation.)
“I was just too embarrassed,” Federico Solmi confided to me the other day during yet another of the conversations we’ve been having in his Bushwick/Brooklyn studio over the past few years. “I certainly wasn’t proud of the fact: if anything, I was almost ashamed. I already had so much going against me, I was afraid I might not be taken seriously.”
When I’d first begun burrowing deeper and deeper into Solmi’s biography and work, especially a series of wrenching animated videos limning the Spanish conquistadors’ initial encounters with and subsequent subjugations of the native American populations, and other such colonialist depradations, I had assumed he was yet another of that striding new generation of Latino artists engaging such themes—and hence, when first meeting him, I’d been surprised to learn that he in fact hailed from Bologna, Italy. Though here, too, it soon became apparent that, as with his origins in the meat market, those specifically European roots were likewise of the essence in his unique formation.
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Federico Solmi was born in 1973, the second of five children of a Bologna butcher and his wife. The butcher, Vittorio Solmi, had in turn been the son of a steelworker, and the family consisted in hard-working laborers all the way back, with no high cultural pretensions or inclinations to speak of, notwithstanding the fact that Vittorio’s butcher’s shop was situated downtown, right by the oldest continuously active university in all Europe (or for that matter the entire world, founded 1088!), in the middle of one of the very epicenters of the Italian Renaissance and the hometown more recently of the legendary Giorgio Morandi. Indeed, Federico himself would prove the first in his family’s line ever to graduate from high school (his brother Alessandro, fourteen months his senior, had for his own part had to abandon his education right after middle school in order to assist their father) and though, graduating, the second son had yearned to be able to go on to university (right there, right down the street!), that was not to be.
After more than three decades of grueling work founding and managing his butcher shop, the father Vittorio’s health was rapidly giving out, and so Federico had had to summarily abandon any such aspirations, on an emergency basis, in order to join his older brother in running the family business and providing for their ailing father (who would in any case die just a few years later, at age 51), their distraught mother, and their three younger siblings. Owing to Vittorio’s artisanal reputation (“Though he was entirely uneducated,” Federico recounted, “my father was a master craftsman with the blade, a perfectionist at both sharpening and deploying the various knives, a true draftsman with his hands—and my brother, if anything was even more”), the shop was a thriving business, indeed so much so that within a year of his own arrival, at age fifteen, Allesandro had split off to found a second branch just around the corner. Federico was no mean blade himself, having been apprenticing summers in the shop ever since he was eleven. The twin shops were of the sort that each should have employed three or four assistants, but the brothers, the better to support the family home (in which, incidentally, the two continued to share a narrow bedroom well across the ensuing years) were hiring no helpers whatsoever: it was all on them.
“And the work was completely brutal, extremely physical,” Federico recalled. “My father had been Old School, taking in entire carcasses of beef, lamb, pork, and chicken and carving them all up right there on the premises, down in the basement—and we continued in that tradition, dragging the carcasses downstairs, lugging the cut sections back up. Christmas and Easter, for example, we would take in 200 whole lambs, and twenty halved cows at a time all through the year, with all of them having to be carved to precision, often to order. To this day I know every single muscle, every sinew, every vein of each of those creatures. There was blood everywhere, everything red, red, red (my mother back home would launder our white aprons overnight), we were always having to mop. We were having to get up at four or earlier six mornings a week (our public hours were 6:00 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Mondays Tuesdays Wednesdays and Fridays, and 5:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Thursdays and Saturdays), and I was constantly exhausted. It was almost too much, but I had promised Allesandro and the family that I would stay on at least until our youngest sibling, our baby sister, turned eighteen, which is to say seven years altogether, and I was true to my word. I will say this, however: without that education, for the shop was its own sort of education, without the tireless discipline and the intense devotion it enforced, I would never have been capable to become an artist in later years, I have no doubt about that.”
And surprisingly it was in the very midst of those excruciating labors that Federico’s artistic tendencies first began to take root. “The things I would see, out on my deliveries (for our clientele included some of the city’s most prosperous citizens): the art on the walls, the frescoes, the ceilings—I was constantly finding myself pausing, gawking, dumbfounded. One day early on I made a delivery to an architect, and we got to talking, and he showed me how quickly he could put together a gouache on white panel, and I was blown away. I went out and bought some paints and panels of my own and took them home and, evenings after work, I started trying myself.
“And word began to spread among the artists in town that there was this butcher kid over at Vittorio’s shop who was dying to talk about art and painting, and they would come by, I would make sure to save the choicest cuts for them, and they would hang around discussing the town’s history, and the legacy of the Renaissance, and so forth, for hours at a time as I kept getting interrupted by other customers, but I’d always return.” One particularly distinguished elderly lady, a well-known eighty-five-year-old painter named Maria Serra, took him under her wing, and Thursday or Sunday afternoons, they would mount his Vespa and ride up into the surrounding hills to visit chapels so as to study the paintings and frescoes and sculptures, and she would give him assignments and tutor him in painterly technique. (At one point he grew anxious at the sheer flood of antecedents and began to fret over what could possibly be left for a young would-be artist like him to do: “Federico, Federico,” she would endeavor to reassure him, “stay calm, stay calm. There will be things, don’t you worry.”)
He would take field trips to nearby Ferrara and Firenze (Allesandro would endeavor to spell him the stray hour here and there). Gradually the artists of the Quattrocento, the fifteenth century, became his passion. “Masaccio, Piero Della Francesca, Uccello,”
he keened for me one day, “how you could just watch them actively figuring out the fundaments of perspective right there before your eyes. Massacio with Christ palpably hanging on the Cross peering down on the church-goers there in Florence, Uccello with that wireframe vase drawing anticipating those amazing subsequent horsey battle paintings. And their theatricality, the way they avoided any attempts at straight realism but instead, painstakingly, created stage sets, as it were, into which to then insert their dramas. You would see that again years and years later with de Chirico during the teens and early twenties of the last century
—in his case, sometimes, he would portray the stage set all by itself, suggesting a sense of impending drama, or maybe its immediate aftermath.
“In all such cases, I was drawn to artists who were coming at the end of one epoch and forging their way into the next. As was certainly the case with one of my favorite local masters, Annibale Carracci, who during the late 16th century drew on trends both to the north and the south to help found what would become an incredibly dynamic and direct Baroque style. I couldn’t believe it when I found out how, early on, he himself had portrayed two butcher brothers surrounded by their flanks of meat in that incredible canvas of his now at the Kimball in Ft. Worth.
He was considered one of the supreme masters of his time, his ceilings in Rome’s Palazzo Farnese constantly being likened to the Sistine Chapel, though ever since Mussolini deeded the building to the French for their embassy, it’s much more difficult to see them. And then of course our own Morandi, who strikes me as having achieved the perfect example of a steady painterly career across an entire life, and whose etchings in particular, with their marvelous cross-hatchings, I regularly took to studying and attempting to mimic.”
Customers would lend Federico books. One bohemian dandy in particular, a stylish boulevardier named Giorgi Cherri, made a project of guiding Federico’s wider reading (Nietzsche, Plato, Lampedusa, Rilke, Bernhard) and growing immersion in cinema (the German expressionist silent films, Gance’s Napoleon, Fellini, Visconti, Antonioni).
Voraciously, omnivorously, it was as if Federico were cobbling together an autodidact university education after all, all while simultaneously putting in his ten- and eleven-hour days at the butcher shop. How on earth, I asked him, did he fit it all in? “I didn’t sleep,” Federico replied. “Certainly not enough. But it didn’t matter: I was young and eager.”
In addition to supporting the family, Federico had been salting away money for his own future needs and toward the end, he parked those savings by way of the purchase of a spacious, high-ceilinged sideroom studio apartment with frescoes and a mezzanine in the palazzo of a decadent nobleman who had been squandering his inheritance at the casinos. Evenings, home from work, he would attempt his first largescale paintings—of carcasses, naturally, channeling Rembrandt and Soutine and Bacon and Carracci. Unsatisfied with the result, he threw the canvasses out. He wishes he hadn’t, he wishes he could see them today. He continued working on Maria Serra’s exercise assignments—a painting, say, of a Roman copy of Greek bust, or a sequence of Morandiesque cross-hatchings. He spent time with another artist customer who tutored him in the ways of the international art scene and in the practicalities of what it would mean to actually try to breach its ramparts. Systematically, he prepared his coming campaign.
In February of 1999, as his baby sister turned eighteen (and he himself twenty-five), Federico launched out on an initial reconnaissance mission, first to Paris, where he found the scene pretty much dead, and then to New York, where he stayed at the New Yorker Hotel (“Where Nikola Tesla died!”) and where, by contrast, he found everything he had been looking for. “I realized how if one was ever to have an impact, one would need to be where everything was converging, and that was obviously New York. If I had settled in Milano, for example, I would have been wasting my time, and I didn’t have any more time to waste.” He returned to Bologna (“I couldn’t even sleep, I was so excited”), sold his studio (to his flaneur friend Cherri), and, figuring he had enough funds to last him at least an initial several months, he headed right back to New York.
Based now in a tiny one-room apartment at 10th Avenue and 34th that he was sharing with one of the Dominican guys working for the taxi dispatch center downstairs, he began frequenting museums and galleries and, for student visa purposes, classes at the Art Students League, where the benign tutelage of a sculpture professor who happened to be the son of Ben Shahn proved particularly heartening. Still, a complete outsider, albeit a strange one (one steeped, that, is in the entire tradition of the High European Renaissance, none of which seemed to hold any particular sway or purchase in the frantic hothouse atmosphere into which he’d suddenly alighted)—how was he, an uncredentialed butcher’s son and a longtime butcher himself, newly arrived in a town, as he quickly noted, where all his same-age competitors seemed to have just emerged from the likes of Yale’s graduate MFA program—how was he, with no connections, no entrée, no letters of reference, and an at-best rudimentary grasp of the language, ever going to breach the scrupulously defended ramparts of the established art world? All he had was his discipline, his ambition, his evident eagerness, and his sheer—how does one say chutzpah in Italian?—his sfrontatezza, his audacio, his baldanza, his ardimento. That audacious ardor of his.
NEXT ISSUE: Part Two: Solmi makes his big breakthrough, piggy-backing on the Grand Theft Auto video game.
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Postscript to the Toch piece from last issue
Some readers of my introduction to the profile of my composer grandfather Ernst Toch in the previous issue of this Cabinet continue to be perplexed (as was, as I indicated, Oliver Sacks, and, frankly, as so am I) by my claim of an abiding amusicality on my own part, this notwithstanding my rich genetic inheritance (the fact that not only was my mother’s father this prodigious Weimar modernist composer, but my father’s mother was up till the Anschluss the head of the New Vienna Conservatory’s piano department and herself a celebrated symphonic soloist, as well as the fact that her son, my father, was a first-rate amateur jazz pianist).
To be a little clearer: it’s not that I am completely amusical. I can’t play any instrument or read music, but I do love to dance, I think I have a pretty good sense of rhythm (I like to finger-drum to pop-music radio {speaking of which, see the latest bulletin in line with our ongoing consideration of the Theory of Mind, this one from the Chimpanzee desk at the BBC}, or, if I am alone in the house, to extravagantly fantasy-conduct the occasional Mahler LP).
And I have a good musical memory: I can hum for you the entirety of the Canon my grandfather wrote for me when I was about eight years old (bum-bum, Pum-Pum, bum-bum, PAH), the piece, following the private command performance of which that both my younger brother Robert and I were required to stage for him (after months of practicing), that apparently led to his saying to my grandmother,“With the younger one, maybe, but with the older one, it’s completely hopeless” (a pronouncement which quickly registered in my own life with the sudden cessation of everyone’s efforts to get me to practice more rigorously than I seemed to want to, which was not at all. Thank god).
The thing is that though I can still hum that piece for you, if you put me in front of a piano, I can plunk out the first two middle C’s, but after that I have no idea whether the next two notes go up or down, I just can’t hear the difference, I am tone-deaf in that sense (the way someone else might be color blind), I have perfectly useless pitch. Which in turn radically undercuts my ability to hear the sorts of chromatic and tactile subtleties that I imagine must make concert-going so fulfilling for other people. (Such excursions often simply put me to sleep.) All of which, as I was the first to acknowledge in that profile, alas make me singularly ill-suited to be my grandfather’s musical executor (on top of which, as a not untypical second generation Austrian-Jewish American, I don’t speak German): Poor guy.
But it’s even more curious than that. For whenever I write or else review my own or other people’s writings (or for that matter radio pieces or cinematic efforts), almost all of my judgments about the process tend to get framed in terms of musical metaphors: questions of pacing, modulation, tone, harmonics, counterpoint. I’ll sense that a given passage is out of key, or could use a little more syncopation, or needs to shift from the dominant to the subdominant—and I don’t even know exactly what any of those terms mean, technically speaking. Still, I have a profound sense that I am engaged in a compositional enterprise, involving the sequential deployment of material across time in a formful manner, which is to say within a transparent architectonic structure (one of my grandfather’s favorite words, by which, precisely, he was invoking the sense of architecture across time rather than space).
Back in the days when I was teaching my writing classes, I often spoke of the musicality of narrative. It seems to me that a story (and hence story-telling) is different from, say, a painting (the experience of considering a completed painting, that is, not that of painting the thing, which is something else altogether). Which is to say that both a narrative and a piece of music are steeped in time: the passage of time (and the marvelously confounding and convoluting ways in which time can be made to seem to pass) is of their essence.
In this context, I often assigned my grandfather’s summary treatise The Shaping Forces in Music, and though I can’t fathom a single one of its nearly four hundred musical examples, I understand exactly what he’s talking about on every page, and subscribe to virtually all of it, feeling I couldn’t have parsed the matter better myself. (“Architectonic,” he keeps intoning, but then he invokes another metaphor almost as frequently, the notion of the organic, the way a composition must grow and grow organically, like a tree, instead of being patched and patched, unorganically. Think, in this context, I suppose, of a tree as itself an instance of the organic architectonic.)
Stranger still, when I’m alone, typing at my keyboard, I often hear music in my head—especially when I am just setting out, or else as my pieces approach their climaxes. And almost invariably the music in question (when I subsequently stop—“What is that?”—to think about it) turns out to be my grandfather’s. In fact, in retrospect, there are passages of my own prose that turn out, in pacing and modulation and formfulness, to be virtual transcriptions of passages from his quartets or symphonies. As I say, it can get to be a bit disconcerting.
Some years back, when I made this claim during a six-week digital residency on the Transom.org website, some of the correspondents challenged me to provide some examples of that last. As it happened, I’d just before that published in The Atlantic my account of the premiere, at long last, of my grandfather’s final opera, The Last Tale, by a first-rate provincial company in the till-just-recently former East Germany. And so I invited folks, for starters, to take a look at the extended prolog to that piece, the overture as it were, with its evocation of the Scheherazade story.
Scheherazade had had enough—or so the story goes. She’d told a thousand tales and had no more to tell. Her sister tried to rally the poor girl: didn’t she realize that unless she took up the skein once again that night, not only would the Sultan order her killed on the spot but he’d resume the homicidal binge her tales had so tenuously forestalled, killing yet another maiden each and every night thereafter? Scheherazade, utterly drained, couldn’t bring herself to care. For a thousand nights she’d been unspooling her improvisational yarns, anxiously awaiting the promised return of her young lover, Alcazar, who a thousand days earlier had retreated into the backcountry to organize a revolution and her liberation. But by now it was surely clear that he wasn’t coming—and, hopeless, she was all told out.
At that very moment Alcazar came bounding over the balcony ledge and rushed to enfold his lover in a passionate embrace. Just one more night, he urged her: if she could keep the Sultan distracted for just one more night, he and his men would launch their insurrection that very eve. But couldn’t he see? Couldn’t he understand? she pleaded in reply. She simply had no more tales to tell. Think of something! he called as he vaulted back over the balcony ledge. And he was gone.
Disconsolate, Scheherazade lapsed into a deep late-afternoon drowse. All her tales seemed to rise up about her, as if in a pell-mell debauch: Aladdin and Sinbad, Ali Baba and the forty thieves, greedy caliphs and crafty viziers, flying carpets and slicing daggers, soaring falcons and chess-playing apes…
And already it was nightfall. With a boisterous fanfare the Sultan and his courtiers came barging into Scheherazade’s quarters, avid for tales, and yanked the maiden from her storm-tossed dreams. Why, the Sultan boasted, his girl’s stories were so enthralling that time and again he’d imagined himself right there—in the very thick of the action, shoulder to shoulder with her myriad protagonists. So, Scheherazade, what was it going to be tonight?
For the longest time it seemed that the answer would be nothing. Shaking, silent, Scheherazade strained for inspiration. None came. The Sultan’s concern gave way to anger and presently to scalding rage. Still nothing.
Finally, at the end of her tether, Scheherazade burst forth into narrative—her own: the tale of a young girl, hopelessly ensnared, desperately longing for deliverance by a long-lost love. In the distance explosions could be heard, and flames licked the horizon, but seamlessly Scheherazade wove even those into her tale. Messengers came charging into the palace, urgent with bulletins. The Sultan, transfixed, brushed them away: nothing short of miraculous, the way this girl could spin such lifelike tales!
On and on Scheherazade unfurled the story of her own liberation. So rapt had the Sultan become that even as Alcazar and his troops stormed into the royal chambers, even as they clamped the despot in heavy iron coils and dragged him away, delirious, he still seemed to half-believe that he was in the midst of an indescribably marvelous tale.
Alcazar rushed forward to embrace his consort once again, in triumph but in calamity as well. For Scheherazade, having given her all, had indeed told one tale too many: utterly spent, she collapsed, pale and depleted, into his arms, and—opera being opera—proceeded to die.
Note how the narrative rises up ex nihilo, out of nowhere, propelled by not much else than its sheer motive power. The reader in a certain sense has no idea why he or she is reading this, what sort of thing it is, but they are pulled along by the sheer narrative drive itself, willing (or so I hope) to suspend judgment for the time being (Okay, what sort of thing is this, and where is it going? And what does it have to do with anything?). And then, suddenly, there at the very end (“—opera being opera—”) there’s a jarring, clanging, vertiginous seizure of clarification (ah, that’s what this has all been about!). There’s a change of register: the bottom drops out of the story, and we realize that, ah, this is going to be a different sort of narrative than we’d been being led to believe—and now the game is definitely afoot. And indeed the story that now takes up in earnest with the opening of the next section is in effect going to recapitulate all the themes first advanced there in the Scheherazade story (tyranny and exile, creativity and blockage, grace and release and death) but in much richer and more layered form, not as a fairy tale but as a life.
Anyway, that narrative strategy turned out to be a straight rip-off of the first few minutes of my grandfather’s First Piano Concerto, as performed here on a recent recording by Todd Crow with Hamburg’s NDR Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Leon Botstein.
See what I mean? That chess-knight’s leap at the very end of the piano solo, a sudden clanging broken tonality at which point the entire orchestra leaps in and then recapitulates the whole progression, until it too reaches that same crisis, and the piano returns, their interpenetrations growing more and more complex from there on out.
Interestingly, now that I look back on things, the entire rest of my Atlantic piece then played out neo-symphonically, in four separate movements, as it were. The first movement laid out the history of my vexed relationship with my grandfather and the loaded legacy he left me, culminating in my getting the letter from that provincial German opera company announcing their imminent intention of premiering my grandfather’s final opera. The middle two movements were then given over to his life story (pretty much the sort of things covered in the piece I shared with you last issue), and then the fourth movement picked up where the first movement had ended, with my response to that letter, my journey to Germany for the premiere, my disconcerting discoveries about the place where it was taking place (site of one of the Nazi regime’s most terrible political prisons, and after that, in turn, the Stasi’s), my initial allergic reaction to being in an audience of local folks seemingly oblivious to the political pertinence of many of the themes being explored in the opera, but then my change of register the next night, culminating in the piece’s last paragraph:
…The next night, though, for some reason things did seem simpler. Maybe I was just being lifted higher by the music itself, as I grew more familiar with it. The vexing political context seemed to fall away, and as Scheherazade struggled through her block and into the transporting narrative, I experienced an overwhelming sense that my grandfather had drawn together all the disparate themes of his own life in one transcendant summary exaltation. Things that had seemed chopped and broken and scattered—the shards of both his life and his music—were retrospectively realigning and resolving themselves. As Scheherazade’s last aria reached its lyrical climax, I found myself remembering a letter Toch had written to a young would-be composer not long after his own heart attack—and on the verge of his astonishing regeneration —in 1949. "A composition must grow organically, like a tree," he had urged the young man to understand. "There must be no seams, no gaps, no foreign matter. The sap of the tree must pass through the whole body of it, reach every branch and twig and leaf of it. It must grow, grow, grow, instead of [like a mismatched suit] being patched, patched, patched." I could see that Toch had been talking not only about the composition of a piece of music but also about the composition of a life—and, for that matter, of a family line. And as the audience now rose in ovation, showering particular kudos on their beloved conductor Poch, who stood there drained and pale, trembling in his triumph (for, as none of us realized at the time, he was already riddled with a cancer that would claim his life within a few months—this would be almost his last tale too), I found myself realizing how for Ernst the spiritual challenge was the same in both instances. I suddenly recalled some lines from one of the last notes he ever wrote to Lilly—the one with which, Scheherazadelike, she had chosen to conclude her oral history before herself going on to die. It consisted of a poem in which he acknowledged all the sacrifices she had made on his behalf over the almost fifty years of their life together, assuring her that he was aware of the suffering such sacrifices had often entailed—an awareness that was his despair. Yet he begged her forgiveness: it couldn’t be helped, for, as he, and she, and now I concluded by way of explanation,
Ich treibe nicht — ich werde getrieben
Ich schreibe nicht, ich werde geschrieben!I do not press, I am pressed —
I do not write, I am written!
See how all the themes (those same themes) are being drawn together, as if multiple strands were being pulled and pulled and pulled (arm over arm, Volga-boatman-like), gathered up into a single transcendent unity (“for, as he, and she, and now I concluded, by way of explanation…”) which in turn opens out onto that great spangly exhalation there at the very end, which in turn subsides to silence.
Well, that’s a straight rip-off of the ending of my grandfather’s very last symphony, his Seventh, from just a few months before his death, as peformed below on another recent CD, by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, as conducted by Alun Francis (start at 07:20 of this third and final movement).
See? Maybe it’s just me, but I hear the cadences of the one in the other, and I swear that without even being aware of the overlap as such as I was drafting those passages, I was hearing them in my head even then. Like I say: weird, unsettling. But welcome to my roiling life.
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INDEX SPLENDORUM
All that talk about trees and the architectonic organic put me in mind of Bach, and more specifically, of that sumptuous three-minute Japanese television ad, from several years back (I suspect several of you will have seen it over the internet at the time and will immediately recall it) by the Japanese Drill Inc agency and their creative director Morihori Harano, on behalf of the limited release of Touch Wood, a special cedarwood encased SH 08C mobile phone from Docomo: the concluding chorale (“Jesus bleibet meine Freude”) from Bach’s Cantata 147, as conveyed by a single wooden ball tumbling down a meticulously constructed meters-long wooden xylophone sloping through the Kyushu woods at the far southwestern tip of Japan. (Just as the word “Freude” in German means “joy” or “delight” in English, so “Bach” in German means “brook” or “stream,” and you will seldom find a better proof of both than in this brimming Japanese confection.)
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ANIMAL MITCHELL
Cartoons by David Stanford.
The Animal Mitchell Archive.
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Breaking (heart) news: Jean-Luc Godard RIP
Speaking of music that just will not stop tolling away, news just in as we were wrapping up this issue of the passing (by assisted suicide, it appears) earlier this week of Jean-Luc Godard. Strange for me how my own first associations ran to the same haunting and haunted short with which Maholi Dargis concluded her Godard appreciation in the New York Times, as it happens not one by him (though thoroughly saturated with his aesthetic) but rather about him:
Robert Luxemburg’s appropriation of a chance sighting of Godard and his third wife and frequent collaborator Anne-Marie Miéville out walking near their home in the Swiss town of Roule as apparently captured by a passing Google Street View van, set in turn to the very same music (George Delarue’s from Godard’s film Contempt), I now realize, that also featured so achingly in our friend Alejandro Iñárritu’s short film about the blind moviegoer—Anna—that we featured in Issue #22 of this Cabinet. I like how someone, shortly after the announcement of Godard’s passing, tagged the Luxemburg short with Godard’s own immortal tagline from the bracing early days of his career, “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.”
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AND FINALLY: THE Q’s Q
Meanwhile, and again just as we go to press, my daughter just sent me a Twitter thread that she described as her single favorite on the subject of the Queen’s recent passing, the sublime musings of one @curiousiguana on the sheer marvel of the current “Lying-in-state Queue,” to wit:
@curiousiguana
5:11 PM · Sep 14, 2022·Twitter Web AppRight, everyone. I need to be serious for a moment. Because the greatest thing that ever happened is happening right now. I don't particularly care either way about the Queen. But the queue? The Queue is a triumph of Britishness. It's incredible.
Just to be clear: I don't mean the purpose of the queue. I don't mean the outpouring of emotion or collective grief or the event at the end and around the queue or the people in the queue. I mean, literally, the queue. The queue itself. It's like something from Douglas Adams.
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It is the motherlode of queues. It is art. It is poetry. It is the queue to end all queues. It opened earlier today and is already 2.2 miles long. They will close it if it gets to FIVE MILES. That's a queue that would take TWO HOURS TO WALK at a brisk pace.
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It is a queue that goes right through the entirety of London. It has toilets and water points and websites just for The Queue. You cannot leave The Queue. You cannot get into The Queue further down. You cannot hold places in The Queue. There are wristbands for The Queue.
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Once you join The Queue you can expect to be there for days. But you cannot have a chair and a sleeping bag. There is no sleeping in The Queue, for The Queue moves constantly and steadily, day and night. You will be shuffling along at 0.1 miles per hour for days
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There is a YouTube channel, Twitter feed and Instagram page, each giving frequent updates about The Queue. Because the back of The Queue, naturally, keeps moving. To join The Queue requires up to the minute knowledge of where The Queue is now.
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The BBC has live coverage of The Queue on BBC One, and a Red Button service showing the front bit of The Queue. NO ONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD JOIN THE QUEUE AND YET STILL THEY COME. "Oh, it'll only be until 6am on Thursday, we can take soup.”
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And the end of the queue is a box. You will walk past the box, slowly, but for no more than a minute. Then you will exit into the London drizzle and make your way home.
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Tell me this isn't the greatest bit of British performance art that has ever happened? I'm giddy with joy. It's fantastic. We are a deeply, deeply mad people with an absolutely unshakeable need to join a queue. It's utterly glorious.
To which one Ben Rathe responded by noting, “Queue is such a great word. The actual important letter, and then four more silently waiting behind it in line.” Indeed.
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NEXT ISSUE
Part Two of our look at the life and week of Federico Solmi, with a veritable plethora of video samplings—just you wait and see. And more…
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