There is a mirror that has seen us for the last time

St. Louis is home to one of the world's great small museums, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, which hangs a show for a long time, then constantly cycles community programs through its doors. This method has a way of bleeding Pulitzer shows into St. Louis' bloodstream. The current show is Dreamscapes, and today I noticed St. Louis had taken on the quality of a dream.

My friend Ray is being evicted. It happens. I have sympathy for the transient, been there for years, and I'd do anything for Ray. We go back to the rock band road trips of my transient youth. So I borrowed a truck from our friend Michael and helped to evict Ray tonight.

Driving into Ray's Carondolet neighborhood in Michael's hot-wired Sonoma, I was also driving into my dead friend Paul's neighborhood. Paul was shot dead in his backyard on Idaho back in May. Ray lives right around the corner from where Paul lived and died. Ray dropped everything and helped me clean out Paul's garage and basement. He even mowed the dead man's yard before the bank took it back.

So there we were again, Ray and me, cleaning out another South City garage. This time it was Ray's stuff we had to pack up and move out. Not a dead man this time, only bounced a man, homeless between couches until something else works out.

I kept picking up stuff and asking Ray if I should pack it. Ray never had a ready answer. He wasn't really ready to leave this house on Alaska Street. It was as if part of him hadn't accepted that he had to move all of his stuff out of there.

I picked up a nice leather artist's portfolio. "Should I pack this?"

"That's hers," Ray said. A girlfriend had moved out abruptly, and that was one reason why Ray couldn't afford to stay here anymore.

"She was an artist?"

"That's what she said. Then she left and left that behind. So I looked at her portfolio. It's all empty pages."

When I needed something to protect Ray's mirror I was packing in the truckbed, Ray handed me a bedspread that had once been Paul's. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges had strong feelings about mirrors and the dead. There is a mirror that has seen me for the last time.

Paul's bedspread protected Ray's mirror as I drove it down Grand to Meramec, up Meramec to Morganford, across Morganford to Juniata, and then around the block to Hartford and the house where Ray would be storing his stuff for awhile.

We were helped by Doug Golden and Andee. Andee was driving one of those minivans that look like every other minivan. We lugged Ray's stuff out of our trucks and Andee's minivan into another man's big, cool, bungalowy house and basement.
"I felt so good in that house," Andee said between trips in and out of the house. "It feels like a big bungalow. I feel at peace in that house."

When I went to back Michael's hotwired truck up into the driveway, it stalled; and once it had stalled, its hotwire was no longer hot. Michael had showed me to start his truck by grasping a knob from the guts of the ignition with a pair of plyers and pulling it toward me. This trick was no longer working. The dead truck was now blocking Hartford. We endeavored to unload it in a hurry while no traffic was coming down the one-way street.

Ray called to me as I was coming back down from the big, cool, comfortable house. We had to move the truck out of the street, he said; he would push, if I would steer. I got behind the wheel. Then the man whose way we had been blocking on the street got out of his minivan, I would have thought to holler at us and complain. Instead, he put a shoulder to the truck and helped Ray push Michael's truck as I steered it to the curb.

"Oh, hi, Riley," Ray said to the guy who left the minivan to help us push Michael's truck out of his way.

Riley looked as if he had stepped out of a comic strip, or a dream. His arms were floridly tattooed. Both ears had rings. He had this cute little hat tilted on his head. He had the cleanest shave I have ever seen and his nostrils appeared to have been tended to, immaculately. He had a hole in the ass pocket of his Levis almost exactly the shape and size of his wallet, yet his wallet was not falling out through it.

Riley was Ray's friend. He lived down the street. He wanted to help. Ray told Riley we were done for the night and he needed a whiskey. Riley said he needed a whiskey too. Riley said he lived a block away and would help tomorrow, so let's go get a whiskey tonight. Riley and Doug Golden disappeared into the night, bound for a tavern named Riley's.

Or, no. They had piled into Andee's minivan, which looks like every other minivan. Riley and Doug Golden sheepishly stepped back out of Andee's minivan, shuffled over to Riley's minivan, and disappeared into the night, bound for Riley's tavern.

The it was just Ray, Andee and me. The streetlights had come on in South City. Ray and I make movies together. The yellow light of the streetlight on Ray made him look like an actor in a movie, or a dreamer in a dream.

He wanted to tell Andee about an ex he had called tonight and who had been nice to him. I really didn't want to hear this right now. It was an evil ex Ray had fallen for again who was responsible for his eviction.

Andee suddenly doubled over as Ray started the story. "I swallowed a gnat!" she gasped.

"You don't want to hear it, I know," Ray said.

"No, I swallowed a gnat!" Andee gasped.

Andee was my ride back to Michael's house, where I had left my car when I had picked up his truck. We talked about transience along the way. We had both been transients. We talked about dislocation, sickness and death. There were a lot of dislocated and sick people in our lives, a lot of death in our lives.

That reminded me. My friend Amy was waiting at a different tavern that was sort of on our way to Michael's house. She had with her at the tavern the work of art she had bought for me as my proxy bidder at the silent art auction benefit for Bunny. Bunny was sick.

We picked up the art from Amy and put it in the minivan. It was a really nice piece. Andee vaguely remembered the benefit, though she didn't know Bunny. "There have been a lot of benefits lately," Andee said.

There really had. The last time I had borrowed Michael's truck, in fact, was to move the art collection of my dead friend, Paul. We auctioned off his art as a benefit and gave the money to his son. I told Andee about that and how Ray had helped with the benefits for Paul.

While helping me with a benefit for a dead man with one 20-year-old son, I told Andee, Ray quietly dropped a reference to a benefit he was doing for a friend of his with three small children who was dying of testicular cancer.

Ray is a funny man. I thought he was trying to be funny. I told Ray that was funny, as if he were joking about how worse it could be. Ray said there was nothing funny about it. He really did have a friend who was dying of testicular cancer and would leave three small children behind.

"When is that benefit?" Andee asked. I said it already had passed, about a month ago. They keep coming and going.

We drove through South City. Andee is this really neat, slim, quiet, sincere, thoughtful, attractive woman. She said, "I grew up right around here." I had never met anyone who grew up around South Grand. I was curious about that. I tried to imagine her childhood on these streets familiar to me only as an adult artist type. I asked about her parents.

She said her mother was a secretary and her second father was a city cop. Just then we saw a city cop we both know, another Michael. I like this guy. He was walking his tough guy little dog. I called his name, and Michael came over.

"What do you have against the Brentwood firemen?" he asked me.

I took a break from work this afternoon to deliver a DVD of our movie Blind Cat Black to Susan Story in Brentwood. I never go to Brentwood. I took the opportunity of being on strange streets to drive local roads back to work. I passed a Sno Cone stand. I saw two Brentwood Fire Department fire trucks parked there. The Brentwood city manager was just busted for embezzling. So I posted in social media a wisecrack about the idle Brentwood firemen and maybe not all the bums being off the Brentwood city payroll.

"They do 24-hour shifts," Michael said. "What are you going to do for 24 hours?"

Maybe you'd go to the Sno Cone stand for a few hours. "I'll delete that," I said.

We got going again and passed a house where Andee had lived as a child. "No wonder," she said. "No wonder I felt so good in that house on Hartford, where we dropped off all of Ray's stuff. It felt like a bungalow. That house I grew up in was a little bungalow."

Andee had said "second father". I asked her about that. She explained it to me. Her reproductive father had not played a parental role in her life. She didn't sound at all bitter about that, though. It sounded like the man her father married next had been good for her.

She told me how her mother had met him. Her mother was a secretary in a business downtown. A disgruntled former employee came in one day with a gun. The person he took hostage while acting out with the gun happened to be her mother. The city cops were called in. One cop shot dead the disgruntled gunman holding Andee's mom hostage. One thing led to another after that, between her mom and the cop.

"How old were you at the time?" I wanted to know.

"I was seven," Andee said, "but I only learned about it much later. My mom is a quiet woman."

By now, we were at Michael's house. I pointed out my car on the street. "Oh, that little car," Andee said, pulling up beside it. She said, "I was born on this street." It was a dead end street.

*

Image is The Village of the Mermaids by Paul Delvaux (1942), presently hanging at The Pulitzer in St. Louis as part of Dreamscapes.

Blinded by brilliant colors carefully wrought: New Paintings from Michael Hoffman

Michael Hoffman is a consistent and consistently brilliant presence on the St. Louis visual art scene. His consistency and brilliance definitely affect the way one relates to his work. In the many shows I have visited or curated that included work by Michael, I knew his pieces instantly and instantly knew what to expect: consummate artistry that is both uncanny (how does he DO that?) and totally pleasing to the senses. As a matter of fact, it would look nice next to your couch, or table, or desk, or executive corridor.

As a result, over the years, I have probably spent less time deeply absorbed in Michael's work than I do with work that is less accomplished but more demanding-of-attention. Michael's art is exactly like the prettiest person in the room: Well, there is THAT. Okay. Now, let's go contend with something more our slower speed. This situation is amped up a little by the fact that Michael himself is personally always one of the most attractive and pleasant people in any room he is in. Last night I looked closely at his one-man show at Hoffman LaChance while Sunyatta Marshall also was in the gallery, and I reflected that there wasn't a small room anywhere in the world that had the bases of male and female physical beauty covered any better.

So I wanted to look at Michael's new one-man show, New Paintings from Michael Hoffman (June 10th - July 2, 2011 at Hoffman LaChance, 2713 Sutton in Maplewood) because I wanted to encounter his paintings when I couldn't take the easy out and spend all my time on work that is less brilliant and pleasing to the senses. As I result, I spent an hour or so circling a small square room, pleased and illuminated.

I think there are 17 numbered pieces, and a few others hanging unnumbered in passage spaces (it is, after all, Michael's gallery). I started by jotting the numbers of the pieces I thought I had the most to think about, and then going back and thinking about them.

The 5th numbered piece uses a motif I have seen Michael use before. It reads like a brilliantly colorful concentric target (or shield, an icon he shares with his buddy Jon Cournoyer). Like so much of Michael's work, this piece has that amazingly composed surface that is the main thing that makes people shake their heads and wonder how he does that: how do you make a highly wrought object that looks like God just smoothed it out by hand?

This highly wrought but seamless circular figure is then engrained with another Michael Hoffman obsession, the 3-D grid of a globe. That's another gift he has: he makes paintings that take on some characteristics of sculpture without breaking the plane. He has taken that work all the way out to a logical extension in paintings that almost become ceramics sculptures without ever ceasing to be a painting.

Next to this new take on old favorites in the show are two pieces (numbered 6 and 7) in a Michael mode I have not seen. This is where I would have been spending my money, if I had any money to spend and wall space for art. They are vertical pieces that look like Jasper Johns flags reimagined as envelopes, though with patriotism to nothing but color, shape and design.

These pieces relate to the design idea that dominates the postcard Hoffman LaChance made for the show: thin, bright lines running tightly parallel with no other ornamentation. When Michael paints (or hangs) pieces in this mode vertically (13), it strikes me as an homage to a certain style of candy-striped shirt or necktie. Painted or presented vertically (11, 17), it suggests a visual pun. The pattern evokes window blinds, so it's as if you are being blinded by brilliant colors carefully wrought, which takes us right back to the core phenomenon of Michael Hoffman: being blinded by brilliant colors carefully wrought.

Speaking of core Michael, the show concludes (except for the bookend of the second brilliant blinds painting) with a trology of Michael Hoffman horizons. It is really interesting to see three of these horizon paintings on a wall next to each other. It gives you a chance to pay more attention to variation and its tonal effects. He makes small variations in landscape (all drawn, Cournoyer reports, from beloved islands near Seattle) and more sweeping changes in color to tell quite different stories (a rare appearance of the narrative element suggested in his work). Big dark reds in the sky and sea that dominate the landscape (14) tell of a blood red sunset with blood in the water. More blues and greens in the sea (15) whisper of a peaceful harbor at dusk. A stronger emphasis on the landscape elements and more control on the red pedal (16) warn of smoldering island volcanoes.

I picked up the one-sheet for the show, and learned something genuinely new about Michael: he has a gift for titles. Here are the titles for the pieces that caught my eye and notebook:

5) Catalan Spring
7) Playa Cadaques
11) Spanish Candy
13) Confluences
14) Rosario Strait
15) Way Out West
16) December Islands.

That just gave me some more things to think about, so I walked back through the show, then walked out onto the city street still thinking about it.

She guarded my donuts for me: Like Hale for Water Music, Part I

The lobby at Powell Hall was mobbed Friday morning. I remember talking to Fred Bronstein at dinner when he was the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra president-elect, and Fred saying what remains a theme: Powell should be a destination.

On this cold, wet morning, it was more like a way station. I mean, it was bad out there. Snow, sleet, hale. The ticket handed me by the box office person identified the concert as Water Music. I took that around as a witticism to my fellow concert-goers mobbed in the lobby. "Hale for Water Music," I would say. Wasn't getting the laughs. Tried adding, "Hale is a form of water." Realized people understood that part; the problem was, I was not funny.

I like these Friday morning shows, because I am more awake at 10:30 a.m. on a Friday morning than I am when the band strikes up at 8 p.m. on a Saturday night. I kept saying to the other people, "Weather like this would have kept us home on a Saturday night," and there was consensus on that point. Matter of fact, had I started a petition drive -- right then and there in the Powell lobby -- to move the Symphony's subscription series to Friday morning concerts with free coffee and donuts, then I think Fred would have been met with a major new programming challenge.

Krispy Kreme was the donut vendor. God bless those good people. I picked up as many glazed as I could carry on my thumbs and moved in for the java.

I'm going to go ahead and say the Symphony could use a feng shei consultant, or a traffic engineer, for how it dispenses free coffee and donuts in the same, fairly narrow space, cut in half by a bar, that connects the front door and the concert seats.

It was rush hour, Highway 40 in there, but with no pavement markings, no traffic cops, and (let me come right out and say it) almost only elderly drivers. I am not young and I drive like a little old man, so I include myself in the indicted group. We were not moving fast, not responding to traffic puzzles with speed or dexterity. We were clogging up the arteries of Powell like three glazed donuts.

Yes, three. I know I have only accounted for two, having carried one on each thumb, having only two thumbs. But I was hankering for a third glazed.

By now, I had navigated the badly snarled coffee pot gridlock and found the one single place remaining to stand with a place to perch your coffee cup. It was, of course, the corner of a bar. There was a nice-looking old lady (age, maybe, seventy) beside me at the bar. She seemed to be at the concert alone. She was all dolled up, looking sharp. There was straight away a neighborly vibe, the place being so packed, us smashed against the bar. We were kind of in this thing together.

I thought my wheels and reflexes for incoming traffic might be in better shape than hers, so I offered to spring for another donut.

"You mean you can do that?" she asked, in a really cool European accent. She'd been keeping to just one donut, observing some limit.

I walked over like I owned the place, dodging through the tangles of concert-goers and donut-eaters, and came back with two more glazed on my thumbs, one for her and one for me. This was when I realized I had picked the right ally. When I say she had the path blocked to my spot at the bar, I mean physically. This was like a seventy-year-old lady, but she had flung herself around my notebook and coffee cup and thrown out arms. If you were moving in on my space, you were going to have to break one of her arms to get there.

I reflected on something I think a lot, as a married parent. How much easier life is with somebody to hold up half of it, whatever it is.

My little old lady's coffee looked like it needed freshening. I came back with one Styrofoam cup of coffee that I split between us, to freshen up both. Again, she made a physical barricade of herself, in protection of my turf, until I got back. I loved this lady.

We got to talking over coffee and Krispy Kremes. Turns out she had driven over from the Illinois side, Bunker Hill. I grew up on the East Side and had a boyhood girlfriend whose folks had a place in Bunker Hill, kind of a country home for steel mill townies. I was taken back almost thirty years to an anguished boyhood crush (the girl with the country home in Bunker Hill was the kind of girl who really sticks to the ribs of the mind) when my new ally took her own flight into the past: to Vienna, where she grew up.

Holy shit. All I know about classical music is what I read in those slick, smart little program Symphony magazines. They always have a little box that says where the composer was born and died. I have noticed many of the great composers seem to croak in Vienna. People die where they live, where they work, where they want to be remembered. Vienna, clearly, was the top-shelf hang for this symphony orchestra thing.

When I gushed to my new buddy that I had never seen a better orchestra than the one in St. Louis, she said, with no boast to herself, nor insult to the house, that she had seen many better. That, in fact, was when she let drop with the Vienna name magic.

They started to ding those bells that send people to their seats. I have a lot of friends who work for the Symphony, and they don't get shook up like the rest of us do when the bells ding to start the show. From Symphony staffers, I have learned you have plenty of time to finish your wine, or donut. But the older folks move slower and don't want to hold anybody up, so my friend from Vienna was off as at the pop of a gun.

There was a moment there. I think we both felt like we had something new we wanted to hold onto. Maybe it was a form of ageism in not just asking for her number. I am going to go ahead and say it was. A man is just a lot more likely to collect a phone number from a pretty woman who is near him in age, at least within two decades, give or take.

But we did define that corner of the bar at Powells as ours, and agree to meet again. "Next coffee concert," the little old lady said, as we parted ways -- and she pointed to the turf she had so fearlessly defended.

To be continued ....

*

Donut shot from the Flickr site of Scott Ableman; it belongs to him, not me.

Bedhead and the beauty from around the corner of the bar

This is Part II of a report on the St. Louis Symphony's recent Bloggers Night. Make sure you starty with Part I, St. Louis 2011: An adventurous music urban odyssey.

Sex is the only thing that is better than music. And the love of a child is the only thing that is better than sex.

The blogger and his friend both knew the love of a child. But Paul’s son was grown, and the blogger’s daughter (herself a pint-sized blogger) was at home, watching bad TV with her mom. There was no prospecting for sex going on this Bloggers Night by these two guys, but one does enjoy the opportunity to observe other human beings moving about and how splendid so many of them look.

Men are doomed to discuss these observations, as we know. The blogger’s friend Paul – shorn hairless, in the vicinity of fifty years of age; a wiry, aging hipster and Navy veteran – remarked on the splendid appearance of the young woman who happened to be sitting around the corner of the oak bar. The blogger had come to the same conclusion. The woman around the corner of the bar had good color, with a mix of southern European or Mesoamerican. She was on a date with a young man that seemed to be going well. They were scrunched next to each other, thick as thieves. When her date stepped away from his barstool and left the room, presumably to pee, the blogger asked across the corner of the bar about the young woman’s wheat-colored beer, served in a tall, fluted glass. She said her boyfriend was teaching her all about beer, and she was enjoying the education. She and the blogger were still talking about beer when her date reappeared.

The thing to do, at that point, was to include the boyfriend in the conversation as quickly and completely as possible. One needed to dispel any hint of moving in on the other man’s date when he was away from the field of battle. The boyfriend was more than happy to talk about himself. He said he was living just around the corner in the downtown loft district, though he worked 20 miles away in North St. Louis County and grew up 20 miles the other way in South St. Louis County.

The blogger and his friend were veteran newspaper men. They were up to date on the developing trends and demographic shifts in their metropolitan area, which straddled the Mississippi River, two counties in Illinois, and several counties in Missouri, not to mention the city of St. Louis itself, a tiny political entity the shape of a scrawny porkchop, segregated from St. Louis County for political motives that stopped making sense half a century ago. The blogger and his friend blinked across the bar at this young new urbanite, with his thin brown hair cut into a bedhead, the bangs flipped up at their very ends. He was that very rare thing: a statistic made flesh.

“Millions and millions of dollars of public money have been spent to produce people exactly like you,” the blogger said to the young new urbanite with the bedhead haircut, who nodded along right away, he got the point instantly – he too followed the local news. “Millions and millions of dollars of public money have been spent precisely to produce the young white male from South County who works in the County but lives in the city downtown in a loft on Washington Avenue,” the blogger continued, and Bedhead kept nodding along. “Pretty much,” he agreed.

The blogger’s friend delivered newspapers for a living. He worked on the streets all over the metropolitan area and had unusually few illusions about St. Louis. He said to the young new urbanite from the suburbs, “How do you like living down here where people get shot sometimes?”

Bedhead admitted that he did not like that aspect of city living. He said he really couldn't blame anyone from a safe suburban neighborhood who chose not to move into the city – closer to the neighborhoods where the region's poverty and crime had been segregated for half a century. But he was making a go of it, and so was his new girlfriend – the beauty from around the corner of the bar, a part-Cherokee girl from central Missouri who worked in restaurant supply.

The boy and girl had met recently at the wedding of mutual friends, presumably been swept up in the festive atmosphere of love and alcohol, and would now be turning a long-distance love affair into a relationship shared at the extremely close distance of a cohabitated loft apartment. She was bubbly at the prospects of moving to the city. But then, she seemed to be of a positive disposition – probably she would have been bubbly about staying in Missouri’s largest university town, Columbia, which she described as “a young town, a liberal town.”

She had partnered up with a man who was young in every way, but not liberal. When the blogger’s friend told the young couple they worked for a newspaper, the young new urbanite knew enough to ask (in a fumbling, stumbling, incoherent fashion) about the paper’s political direction; and Paul said, bluntly, “Liberal.”

“Well,” the young new urbanite said, “I am conservative.” This, emphatically, did not come as a shock. South St. Louis County, where he grew up, had many of the County’s most conservative zip codes. This young man managed contracts for a major corporate employer that mostly made its money off the military. These were yet more ways in which this young new urbanite with the bedhead haircut and the iron-flipped bangs was a walking statistic.

There had been much media chatter in St. Louis about the young new conservative urbanites. This was a staggeringly sexy demographic for the big Republican money that propped up the nominally Democratic, but in practice entirely opportunistic, political leadership of the city. These guys were middle-aged conservative white men who had become experts at manipulating the city’s divided and demoralized electorate, at least on election day, and an influx of young, conservative, white men like Bedhead was nothing but good news to them.

Politics had been standing on its head lately, in St. Louis and Missouri and the rest of the country, so it was not difficult to see why this young conservative new urbanite represented a sexy demographic. Now, what the effortlessly beautiful Cherokee lass saw in this guy as a sexual partner was harder to figure. Her clock was probably starting to tick, two years out of college, living in a university town where everyone around her stayed frozen in youth as her girlfriends began to grow up and get married. Whatever the source of the urging, clearly it was there. She stayed clenched closely to her date throughout their conversation and was holding onto him pretty tight as they left the tavern and walked out into the city.

“You know what they are going to go do,” the blogger’s friend muttered into his dry-hopped ale.

“The only thing that is better than music,” the blogger muttered into his dry-hopped lager.

**

This is Part II of a report on the St. Louis Symphony's recent Bloggers Night. Make sure you start with Part I, St. Louis 2011: An adventurous music urban odyssey.

Image from Thom Fletcher's Flickr. It was the best I could do. I seem to know no one who takes pictures of guys like Bedhead.

St. Louis 2011: An adventurous music urban odyssey

Image borrowed from the Flickr of Matt Scutt; it belongs to him, not me.


It was a disappointing beer list. The blogger handed the menu back to the man behind the counter at the City Diner and said to his friend, “Let’s go.”

Walking back to Powell Hall, they passed a couple of familiar faces from the concert, walking the other way, toward the diner. “There go two of the other bloggers,” his friend said. “Are you sure you don’t want to go back and talk to everybody?”

“The beer list sucks. I’d just drink coffee and get all wired out and talk too much,” the blogger said. “I don’t really have anything to say about the music anyway. I can write music criticism if you pay me, and I’ll come up with a blog post, like I promised the guys at the Symphony, but all I really have to say about a concert like that is: Sex is the only thing better than music. And the love of a child is the only thing better than sex. And that show was as great as music can be. So only sex or the love of a child could be better than that.”

They passed a stout black woman in a police uniform, struggling herself into a rain slicker. It was a rainy night in St. Louis. The blogger loved a rainy night in St. Louis.

“And after music,” the blogger continued, with the felt need to complete a list, once he had started one, “comes booze – beer and wine – and after that, food. Those are the very greatest things.”

They turned the corner on Grand Boulevard at Powell Hall, where they had just sat rapt at the concert for Bloggers Night. They strode down Delmar, on the north boundary of the grand old movie theater turned concert hall. Concert-goers in St. Louis tended to fear parking to the north of events at night. North is perceived as the general direction of poverty and danger in St. Louis (explained by patterns of investment and neglect). The blogger noticed two empty police cruisers were now parked down Delmar where the less fearful concert-goers looked for parking. He and his friend agreed that was a good idea for discouraging street crime and boosting the comfort level of the nighttime concert-goers.

The talk of booze and food had put them back in the mood for those fine things, so the blogger’s friend drove them toward The Tap Room, a nearby brewpub on the outskirts of downtown St. Louis with a long list of delicious homemade beers.

“That was just about as great as music can be,” the blogger said again, repeating himself, as the white van moved through the dark, rain-slickened city streets. “Hearing that entire, gigantic orchestra – I have never seen that many pieces play in this orchestra! – break into that music from Space Odyssey, out of nowhere! My God!”

The concert program had concluded with Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss. Its swelling, dramatic, brassy opening theme is now famous from its prominent use in the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. (The blogger reflected that 2001, which had seemed a futuristic date to audiences when Kubrick premiered his film in 1968, was now a decade in the past. Strauss premiered his symphony in 1896, composed in response to Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical treatise written in the first half of the 1880s.)

This night, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra had managed to make some of the most familiar music in the symphonic canon new again by breaking into Also Sprach Zarathustra without a pause following the previous piece on the program, a modern tone poem by Gyorgy Ligeti titled Atmospheres. It was an unexpected and stunning move.

“I know,” the blogger’s friend, Paul, said. “I kept closing my eyes, because I wanted the full effect. I wanted nothing but the music. But then I kept having to open my eyes to figure out where the music was coming from.”

*

They were not the only people in town with the bright idea of finishing an evening of sublime music with delicious homemade beer and good food. Inside the Tap Room, there was a gaggle of people holding instrument cases, waiting to be seated at a table. The blogger and his friend moved past them to take seats at the old bar. One young, tall, frizzy-headed man holding a smaller instrument case (it held a trumpet) was standing there, waiting for his beer.

After establishing that the trumpet player had just performed with the Symphony, the blogger asked him the one thing he really wanted to know about that program – the one reason he regretted not joining the other bloggers and Symphony staffers at the diner: “So, whose idea was it to bust right into the Strauss, without a pause for applause and letting everyone get settled in again for the next piece?”

The trumpet player smiled brightly above his blonde beer. “I don’t know,” he said, in the tone of someone who appreciated a great idea without worrying too much where it came from.

“Was it David’s idea?” the blogger asked. David Robertson was the Symphony’s musical director, though the guest conductor that night had been Carlos Kalmar.

“It was probably David’s idea,” the trumpet player said, “but Carlos pulled it off!” Then he joined one of two large groups of musicians being led across the tavern to adjacent tables. The blogger liked that the two groups of musicians were being seated at adjacent tables. This was their work, and more than 40 musicians had been on stage to play just Also Sprach Zarathustra; it was nice to think they wanted to extend a group experience, rather than take a break from coworkers after many tiring hours of rehearsal and performance. He also liked the easy affirmation of, “But Carlos pulled it off!” – one musician sticking up for another.

The blogger had watched Carlos Kalmar with interest throughout the concert. Conductors are kind of a trip as a human category. Even the most sedate of them jump up and down and have a fit and make the most outlandish and individual gestures with their hands and faces. Carlos Kalmar did not disappoint in this regard, though he left no suggestion of a vapid showman. He just lived the music from the inside-out, like a conductor is supposed to do – he ripped the symphony out of himself and then distributed it around the orchestra, one section, one player at a time.

The blogger also had imagined that he and Carlos Kalmar – born in Uruguay, of Austrian descent – were together with the thoughts on one point. The program had opened with Franz Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1, which the orchestra ripped right through without so much as a glance at the conductor’s stand. It even seemed like the guest conductor was feeling and calling for slightly different beats and emphases than the orchestra was feeling and playing. On the Liszt, the guest conductor seemed (pleasantly) beside the point of the tightly rehearsed collective of musicians performing together from the page a sharply constructed piece of music. The blogger imagined that Carlos Kalmar recognized this himself, after the band stopped and the audience erupted into applause, when the conductor instantly whipped his hands around the orchestra and had all of the musicians take the first bow – all of them – as a collective.

The blogger was squarely in Carlos Kalmar’s corner just from reading the program notes, where we were told he “resides in Portland, Oregon, and Vienna.” How cooler could you possibly be? To direct a symphony orchestra in a town like Portland, Oregon, while keeping a foot on the Earth in the European city with more collective memory of symphonic music than any other.

Portland! The blogger’s globe-trotting friend Scott Intagliata, itinerant merchant of the temperature control systems of the future, once described Portland as “hipster fantasy camp.” Hipster fantasy camp! But they were in a gritty old river city, home to an orchestra that makes music as well as music can be made, and there is nothing better than that except sex or the love of a child. They were in a river city where it is remembered how to make very good beer. The blogger knew the barman, who poured them delicious homemade ales.

The barman had given some thought to the symphony’s program that night himself. He said, “Ligeti’s son is coming to St. Louis.” Ligeti was the composer of Atmospheres, the piece that had bled into Zarathustra in that night’s concert. Talk about hipster fantasy camp, or fantasy camp for serious enthusiasts of adventurous music, as St. Louis always is. The barman came back with scrap of paper, scrawled with, “Ligeti’s son, April 29th @ FoPoCoCo.” That’s Forest Park Community College. The barman tipped the blogger to consult his own blog for more information.

So it had turned into a Symphony Bloggers Night out, after all.

St. Louis is a magic city. Many people have felt this, and there is no need to defend the feeling against those who disbelieve in enchantment or disregard St. Louis (by comparison to Portland, or Vienna). St. Louis is a city where you can leave the brassy heights of Also Sprach Zarathustra and walk into a bar where you end up talking to one of the trumpet players (four, total, in this score!) who just scaled its heights. Then, turn from the beer-sipping Symphony trumpet player to a poetry-slinging bartender who just got done looking out a Southern-exposure window in St. Louis, listening to the Ligeti composition that bled into Zarathustra that night. And he has the drop on Ligeti’s son coming to town that spring.

The blogger turned to his friend and said, “Isn’t tonight something special with the moon? Isn’t the moon closer to Earth tonight than it’s been in, like, 18 years?”

“Yeah,” Paul said, “but, the clouds. You can’t see the moon.” And then he drove them home through the nighttime city in the rain.

His to begin with ... [Fiction Circus Translation Nexus submission]

His to begin with

By Chris King

It began in a river valley that was deliberately flooded by men. The boy’s grandmother was bought out by a regional authority, formed to acquire land and administer the new power gathered from the river. It was “more money than any of us ever thought we’d ever see in our lives,” as the boy’s father bitterly told the story in prison.

The grandmother took the money from the buyout and bought land in another river valley far away. This valley was getting built up, and one of the builders-up of the valley – remembered as Eldon the Cement Truck Driver – was the man who stole the money. He courted the wealthy widow, at bowling alleys and smoky taverns, and got her to marry him and his big belly like a bowling ball. Not long after that, the grandmother suddenly “crapped out,” as the little boy learned to tell the story, being purposefully disgusting; but, she did die on the crapper.

The big change came from the terrible efficiency with which Eldon made away with the money. Eldon the Cement Truck Driver was a slow man – he waddled when he walked and seemed to be stupid, mispronouncing familiar words and thoughtlessly belittling other people in petty ways. But before the old lady was a cold bump on the hill up the ridge, Eldon was gone from the valley and all the money went with him. He was never tracked or trailed. He stayed gone.

The perfection of his hustle was what ate away at the old lady’s son and what changed things so much for them. It began to gnaw at him, nights on the road. The son was a traveling salesman – had been since back before the buyout. He got up and out of that valley as fast as he could. He could tinker at things and make them run better. Fixing trucks, he took to carrying parts; and soon he was trading in what gets called “junk” by those who don’t share a sense of its value. Then, just as he got interested in selling parts by hauling parts around, by hauling around and selling parts he got interested in the act of hauling around and selling. So he took to running Bibles for a Christian outfit in town that was aiming to expand its distribution. It was good, clean money for a man who liked to drive, and this man, Larry Lane, loved to drive. Packing books all around him and driving up and down the country finding readers for them seemed like a dream come true. Because Larry Lane was a devilish reader.

His mom getting the big money from the buyout was no big deal to him. She just had more money she could keep to herself. When she moved unexpectedly far to the west, that was no big change for him. He just shifted his Bible route slightly thataway. Probably he would have just let his mother go, but there was some concern for his boy. His son had no mother, so the grandmother should have been important to him. There had been stories about all of that back in the old river valley, when “that runt Lane boy” came home with a baby of his own after one of his Bible runs. The story that would be taken as truth in that valley up until today, had the valley not been deliberately flooded and emptied of people, was that the Lane boy had taken a little problem off some perverted preacher’s hands and should not have been surprised when his own mother didn’t much care. So that is why the orphan boy grew up on the road alone with that strange man.

The facts of the matter are different, but to make it plain might confuse things. It might confuse just how amazing it was to Larry Lane that Eldon had put together such a perfect hustle. That he had tied up all that old lady’s money in places where he could get his hands on it the instant she died – a tragic fate of which Eldon must have had foreknowledge, which suggested the very worst evil. When Eldon had his mother killed and made away with the money, Larry Lane was already familiar with pimps and whores, because it was from their world that he had conjured a boy of his own. But he was not one of them, then.

His best friend in the city, Encyclopedic Bob Lovejoy, owner of No Dirty Books or Ephemera, was Larry’s connection. Larry told Bob he was looking for a woman who would stay put just long enough to have his baby, and then hand him the boy and leave him alone. Bob loved to listen to people’s problems, that’s why Larry was telling him his, and that is how Bob knew a man who knew a whore who wanted out and just might try this trick. She did try it, and a boy was born. Larry Lane brushed shoulders with some pretty rough people seeing her through the pregnancy, one visit a month along his Bible route, which had become a trade in rare books, as well. But drugs never touched them. That was a stipulation for the mother of his boy: no booze, no drugs, no smoking. Larry Lane fanatically hated drugs, then and always, even after he came to traffic in them.

Something snapped in Larry, when Eldon made off with the money. The boy was old enough by then to hold up his end of a conversation with his father. So the boy would be reading a book to his old man on the road, just like he always did, exactly as he had been raised up to do, but he’d notice, looking up for his dad’s reaction to a really good part, that the old man’s mind had wandered away from the story. That was not like him. So the boy would ask, “What’s eating at you, Daddy?” and out would come this anguished speculation about what Eldon had planned and when he had planned it, and where he had landed and who knew, and what he was doing now with all that money that wasn’t his to begin with.

At first, the boy tried to tell his dad his own stories back to him. He said things like, “But it wasn’t ever anybody’s money to begin with, Daddy. Who ever heard of flooding a river valley on purpose and making the people on the river trade in their land for paper money?” But the old man did not listen. He stayed trapped in speculation.

Encyclopedic Bob was the one to ask Larry what he aimed to do about it, other than mope around and get freaked out. The old man shot back, “I am glad you asked me that question, for I am putting together a hustle of my own that will put to shame Eldon the Cement Truck Driver.” Bob kept his bookstore on a sliver of crowded street in a big city along the sea. He traded in rare books with people like Larry Lane, on the high end, and in ephemera with guys like Gary McCorkle, on the low. It was Gary McCorkle who strayed deeper into the dark that sometimes crept into Bob’s shop. It was Gary McCorkle who once had said, when a scary man hailed him by name on the street, “Hey, scumbags know scumbags.” It was to Gary McCorkle that the old man went when he decided he had business to do with scumbags.

From that point on, the facts are mostly known. Court records will show that one Larry Lane was contracted to transport by vehicle various contraband articles that assorted interested parties wanted moved from one city by the sea to another, and felt they could not trust to a passenger on an airline. This business ended badly, as it always does. The perfect hustle for Larry Lane would have been to tie up all the money of his clients, described in aggregate in open court as The Jamaican Mob, and leave them only with a puzzle and a mess. But his collaboration with law enforcement officials came too little, too late, and there was nothing anybody could have done to get him off the hook for his one murder on the run, a blow to the head of a gas station  attendant, delivered with a hurled hand ax, vividly captured on a surveillance videotape. It would have been said the old man grew old in prison reading the Bible and a few rare books he remembered in the voice of his son, but there remained no one to ask for stories of him or to hear them. For the boy who loved him best went to sleep forever, long before the father, at the bottom of a flooded river valley, which, he said to himself, as he swam out in the night, was his to begin with.


*

This story is copyright 2011 by Chris King, who reserves all rights.

It has 1,500 words exactly, title included, and was written for Fiction Circus' Translation Nexus.

The photo is borrowed from the Flickr of Jacob Whittaker and belongs to him, or the river, not to me.


*

Looking for, and at, Grover

Last night many of my friends celebrated a Presidential Beard Party at The Royale. I stayed home, as a family man (sigh).

Part of the night, I piddled around in my archive. One item that passed before my eyes was an unfinished poem I had started writng about Grover Cleveland. Grover was not a notably bearded president, but it was close enough to the spirit of the event I was missing, so I spent some time shaping up the poem.

Then I got into the mood to sketch the dead president from the image of him that was printed on the $1,000 bill until it was taken out of circulation.

LOOKING FOR GROVER

By Chris King


In grimy Center City,
I passed porn shops, thrift
stores, hot dog stands, looking
for you, in part, jaw tumor in
a jar at the medical college.
The company you keep.
A tybia with syphillis
and the arm of good John
Gallagher, age sixteen,
a machinist whose tattooist
spit to mix his pigments
then smooth out his ink: good
John’s girl, and crucifix.
With that spit, syphilis seeped
into good John’s veins. Widow
Sunday with her ten inch human
horn. Forty five years of New
Jersey gall stones. Bust of Adam
Horn, heartless killer of two
wives, fragment of a minor
industry in murder mementos.

The tumor they cut from your jaw
that Silver summer of money
panic looks like tops of
chrysanthemums bedded
on angel white tripe now.
Your cancer kept secret twenty
years. You feared fodder
for your amibitous VP,
Adilai, a pro-Silver hopeful.
It’s no secret now, plain
as pickled eggs in a tavern
jar. Adjacent to collected
chunks of assassins: notch of
Wilkes-Booth neck, sliver of brain
of Guiteau who gunned Garfield
looking like a rag doll hugged
too long and hard in a jug.
You were the $1,000 dollar man
till you went out of circulation.
Now you’re doing time, Grover,
with the dime museum kind.

Most of what is left of you was
left in the ground in Princeton,
at Witherspoon and Wiggins,
where Wiggins turns into Paul
Robeson Place. I walked the graves
looking for you, and was surprised
by low-slung brick row shacks.
Your next-door neighbors
in the grave are Rosewag,
“a bonnie lassie, mother
and friend,” and Ruth, your baby
you buried, dead at thirteen,
and Francis, wife. There was a scrap
of candy paper by your monument,
a pepperment ingredient, so
no Baby Ruth. Your grave
is kept pretty clean, Grover.
They keep a small, cheap flag flying.
I’m not sure why I felt like crying.
A tumor, a stone, a president
of the veto, vetoed for good.

*

Since photographing and posting the sketch, I added some lines to suggest the part of his head Grover seemed to be missing.

A live celebrity competitive literary reality TV show ... from Canada!

I have never watched anyone voted off of an island. Never seen a whole season of contestants sing their hearts out under Simon Callow's withering smirk. Competitive chefs and wannabe fashion moguls, televised spouse and house swappers: I missed all that.

But for the past few days, my idle hours have been spent under the spell of a competitive reality TV show -- produced in Canada, of all places. In fact, it is all about Canada, and more particularly, Canada's novels. To be very precise, it was a competitive reality TV show to select "the most essential Canadian novel" published in the last decade. Welcome to Canada Reads.

This was not a show with random people voting each other off an exotic island; it was five of Canada's most recognizable celebrities voting each other's books off the table -- called a "shelf" on the show, which ran for an hour a day on three successive days, concluding yesterday.

These five very different celebrities -- a CNN anchor, an actor, a designer, a former NHL enforcer and an indie rock star -- did not vote for and against books they had written themselves. This is what starts to set this show far apart from the narcissistic, self-promotional cultural trend in which it has emerged.

For each of the five celebrities had chosen to represent a novel written by a fellow Canadian within the past ten years. The five novels were chosen from a list of forty that had evolved from a collective curatorial process that included public input and (apparently; this was before I came along) involved its own spats and controversies.

The CNN business anchor selected a political novel about an outsider who ends up serving in Parliament, almost by accident. The actor represented an introspective novel about an introspective novelist. The designer defended an historical novel about a midwife. The former NHL enforcer advocated for a jock novel about two Olympians training for the Summer Games. The indie rocker did her best to get the other panelists to admit that a graphic novel about life in rural Ontario was, in fact, a novel, and not a comic book.

The celebrities were as diverse as the books they chose, and in equally fascinating ways. The CNN anchor, Ali Velshi, is a Canadian of Indian descent who was born in Kenya. The actor, Lorne Cardinal, is Sucker Creek Cree, a First Nations (i.e., Native Canadian) people. The designer, Debbie Travis, is a ravishing blonde from the British Midlands. The former NHL enforcer, Georges Laraque, is a hulking vegan of Haitian descent. The indie rocker, Sara Quin, is a pixiesh young white woman with bangs in her eyes like a kid.

As their jockeying to get the other four books voted out of the competition played out over three days on live radio and streaming video, each of these five celebrities evolved as genuine, compelling and eloquent human beings. An especially magical touch was added by the fact that they were being passionate and eloquent about that least telegenic undertaking: the act of reading.

The Indian-Canadian CNN anchor -- practiced at making a case before the camera -- had even his fellow celebrity panelists wanting to run away and join a political campaign. The First Nations actor described his author's eloquence in pearls of language equal to the very best literary criticism. The ravishing blonde Brit designer made an unforgettable case for the kitchen table as the most important stage in history. The hulking black hockey jock casually described weeping while reading his book. The pixiesh indie rock chick delivered perhaps the most compelling and extended defense of the legitimacy of the graphic novel as a genre ever before presented in the mass media.

Yet there were dramas; even scandals.

Indie hipster Sara Quin could not get her older, more traditional colleagues -- not one single one of them -- to accept the graphic novel she supported, Essex County by Jeff Lemire, as an example of a novel, let alone an "essential" one.

Hulking enforcer Georges Laraque abruptly revealed that he and the designer had cut a mutual support deal that she had betrayed by voting against his novel, The Bone Cage by Angie Abdou, and that he was exacting revenge by throwing his support behind a rival novel.

The beautiful blonde designer, Debbie Travis, shocked everyone at the table and in the studio by admitting that she had not been able to finish one of the five books under consideration -- though this had not stopped her from twice keeping it on the table as she helped to vote out two other books she had been able to finish.

The Cree actor, Lorne Cardinal, in a roundtable discussion of the lack of diversity among the authors whose books made the final five, said plainly that they were all white, yes; but then confidently defended his choice of Unless by Carol Shields over a book by a First Nations writer on the long list by arguing that her prose and sense of form were better.

The CNN anchor, Ali Velshi, maintained a Machiavellian vibe throughout the competition and was the guy most obviously casting his votes in each round with political calculation, successfully building the coalition that eventually led his novel, The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis, to vanquish The Birth House by Ami McKay, defended by Debbie Travis.

The evolving political intrigues lent yet another mesmerizing dimension to this crazy and adorable show. Here you had famous people passionately defending the art of novels while cutting secret deals and rather openly playing tricks on each other. It was high-minded and low-minded, high-brow and low-brow, highfalutin and crassly pop -- and utterly, unforgettably absorbing.

Making the trains run on time and keeping all the contestants on their toes was host Jian Ghomeshi. A former rocker born in England of Iranian descent, he has quirky good looks, a razor wit, and as much star power as the most famous person sitting around his roundtable. It would be very difficult to imagine this bizarre conception of a live celebrity literary competition coming off quite right without him conducting it.

St. Louis Reads St. Louis?

Therein lies a major problem in trying to figure out how to adapt this concept to St. Louis, as I immediately wanted to do. If the host were slightly pompous or pretentious, overly deferential to the celebrities and/or anything other than funny, the whole thing would fall flat.

And then, there is the problem of finding a genre where a significant number of St. Louisians produced really good books every year. That becomes a lot easier if you broaden the category to include St. Louis-connected writers who no longer live in St. Louis, but that becomes too soupy for me. I instantly lose interest with the depressing image of Jonathan Franzen winning every year, or any year.

The project becomes instantly doable if you permit books of any genre written by a person living in St. Louis, rather than just novels, but for the obvious problem of comparing apples to oranges and pears -- poems to novels to plays and histories. The comparisons would become meaningless, though the show could still be fun if we could round up the right roster of celebrities who were not writers (very important, this idea of having people who are not primarily writers defending the books).

If I brainstorm about five St. Louis celebrities I would try to empanel for St. Louis Reads St. Louis, I come up with Loop developer Joe Edwards, burlesque star Lola Van Ella, maestro David Robertson, radio anchor Carol Daniel and an eloquent black or Hispanic athlete (I don't know our local star jocks). This list makes me want to cast an Asian (subarhar and sitar legend Imrat Khan?) and a Jew (Rabbi Susan Talve?).

More and more interesting local celebrities come to mind, now that I think of it: former state Senator Jeff Smith, Police Chief Daniel Isom, former Fire Chief Sherman George, the Rev. Larry Rice, state Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Supreme Court Justice Mike Wolff, indie rocker Jay Farrar, Mayor Francis G. Slay (not a personal favorite, but certainly a literate celebrity), activist Jamala Rogers ...

Who knows?

I'm not an artist, but I'll play one at the Art Benefit for the Moms Project

I'm not an artist, but I'm playing one at a fundraiser for Tim Meehan. Tim is raising money to pay an editor for his video installation project on moms. It's Art Benefit for the Moms Project 7:30-11 p.m. Friday, Feb. 11 at Schlafly Bottleworks, 7260 Southwest Ave.

The artists contributing to his benefit (so far) are Deb Douglas, Sara Hale, Karen Jones, Kelene Karetski, Kit Keith, William LaChance, Sandra Marchewa, Tim Meehan, Jeremy Rabus, Melissa Schmidt. Some great artists, the ones I know! Then I am also contributing.

I think it's a real good idea and Tim is a real good guy, and if he thinks he can make some coin selling something I have drawn -- even if it is a round of Schlafly or OFallon beer for the editor -- then bully for Timmy, he can call me an artist.

I thought I would post up three options for what I can contribute to Tim's show and see if one of them gets more attention than the others; maybe even an advance bid for the man's project? Here is what I came up with after ten minutes in the basement, interrupted by two mischievious girls who were then pressed into duty as models and human scale for the bigger drawing.

Here is the bigger drawing, about that much bigger than a little girl's hands holding it: "Your Republican Leadership Team Needs You" (portrait of John McCain and Sarah Palin) (2008). My daughter Leyla Fern, who is holding this up, gets a co-credit for the coloring job and the "scribble scrabble".

Here is the less big one, drawn on a page from one of the common sketchbooks you see: "Dad's mermaids were my first naked ladies" (after some ex-con from central Kentucky I met through my former brother-in-law; these are in fact copies of his jailbird doodles of imaginary tattoo flash) (ca. 1992).

And then, something altogether different. Rather than clutter for the imagined buyer's wall, this is performance art or a party favor. These fingerpuppets (modeled here by family friend Promise) all go onto the fingers of one of my hands for a solo performance of -- the title is ironic, given the nature of Tim's project -- Goodnight, Mother (selected scenes from Hamlet).

I would come to the buyer's house or party and perform the piece. It takes about twenty minutes or so. I get to keep the puppets.

*

Art Benefit for the Moms Project will be held 7:30-11 p.m. Friday, Feb. 11 at Schlafly Bottleworks, 7260 Southwest Ave. I take it Tim will screen video from the 42 moms interviews he has done.

The Middle East meets Spain half-way at Marc Thayer

Photo is borrowed from the Flickr of abudoma and belongs to him, not me.

Marc Thayer has been to all of these important and obscure places, absorbed their musical genius, and worked hard to spread it around, with no apparent aim other than enlarging his own sense of possibility and then sharing that with anyone willing to sit still for a minute and listen.

That's what makes it such a pleasure to be around Marc when he is making music possible. He sits still and listens.

Last Wednesday evening Adam Long and I watched Marc Thayer sit still and listen, when he wasn't playing violin. He sat still and listened to young musicians from the city of Suleimanya in Kurdistan (northern Iraq), whom he had helped come to St. Louis to study. Marc put together a program of Spanish and Middle Eastern music and encouraged these international conservatory students to play some of their local music on a mix of traditional and European instruments.

"They play lots of Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart," Marc said; "but not tonight!"

In their music school back in Kurdistan, Marc pointed out, they studied both European art music and their own local traditions, playing both symphony instruments and traditional ones. "I'd have a lot more fun playing music if I had learned jazz when I was a music student, and I encourage it," Marc said.

Marc Thayer is vice president for Education and Community Partnerships at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. It's one key reason the symphony in St. Louis is so great, this entrusting to very senior positions -- like vice president or musical director -- people with a genuine passion for music and extreme nerve for testing the limits of what was previously thought possible.

In his remarks between performances, we got a glimpse into what shaped Marc. He talked about being a teenager in Cordoba (in Andalusia), which he described as "the capital of Spain when it was a Muslim country". Why he was there, he did not say -- he sounds of American stock -- but he spoke with unabashed admiration for the city, especially its one surviving mosque. It was spared by the Catholics, but had a cathedral inserted inside it.

"A few blocks from this mosque is where Ferdinand and Isabella gave Christopher Columbus the permission to come look for India, and he ended up here instead," Marc said.

He sat still and listened intently when Alan Salih, Reben Ali and Honar Ali played Kurdish, then Arabic, then Persian music on violin, oud, cello and sharba (a hand drum much like a tabla). "The more I listen to Middle Eastern music, the more I realize I have to learn," Marc said, during one break. Then quipped: "When I play a quartertone, it's by accident."

Yet, the most musically satisfying event of the program, Adam Long and I decided, was the Spanish music performed by Marc Thayer on violin and Maryse Carlin on piano -- and especially the final piece, a trio for piano, violin and cello in B minor (Opus 76) by Joaquin Turina, when they were joined on cello by Ranya Iqbal, who brought an exotic look to the European musical grouping.

Ranya Iqbal visually completed Marc's argument that the music of the Middle East is intimately connected to the music of Spain.

*

Photo of the mosque/cathedral at Cordoba is borrowed from the Flickr of abudoma and belongs to him, not me.

The mountain, the sea, and that fragile relationship that is life

"Never seen no mountain. Never swam in no sea."

This complaint from Paul Westerberg of The Replacements (in "Within Your Reach") always spoke to me. I grew up in a small Midwestern steel town in the Mississippi River Valley. It was a long time before I saw a mountain or swam in a sea.

I have always considered this a net benefit, because it left me easy to impress and open to new experiences. It was not possible, starting where I started, to think you had seen it all, because you knew there were mountains and oceans, yet had seen and swam in none.

In a similar vein, St. Louis was always the big city across the river to me. Coming across the river from Granite City, I was always embarassed for the locals who copped a snoot on St. Louis because they had been to New York or Chicago and thought the lights a little too small for them here. I just saw big lights, and giant experiences, in St. Louis.

I keep seeing it that way. Last Wednesday I took Adam Long to see a performance in the stylus Concert Series at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. This is where David Robertson, musical director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, puts together concerts around the installation at the Pulitzer. I just keep shaking my head (that's SMH, to the text message generation) at the level of creative genius being programmed in and for St. Louis.

The show Wednesday, Adam and I agreed, started at its peak, musically and conceptually, and then descended steadily, but not very far, throughout the sequence of three compositions. In fact, the third (and still wholly wonderful) piece on the program is structured around the ascent and descent of a mountain approached, and then departed, by sail on the sea.

Now I've seen a mountain. Now I have swam in a sea.

The show opened with La Souris sans sourire, performed by a string quartet with David Robertson admiring from a front-row seat. This is a 1988 composition by Franco Donatoni, and please don't feel like you're behind the game if you have never heard of it. My concert guest Adam Long is a cellist with a yen for modern composers and it was all new to him (and me).

I have found a YouTube posting of a good performance of the piece, though it doesn't specify the performers; a friend at the symphony asked David Robertson to suggest the best recording for me, and David could think of none.

The performers at the Pulitzer were Emily Ho (violin), Jooyeon Kong (violin), Shannon Farrell Williams (viola) and Melissa Brooks (cello). They succeeded completely in casting the spell of this music. David Robertson talked at some length about the title of the piece, which you might translate as The Mouse without a Smile, and Donatoni's many plays on words. David prepared us to hear the composition as playing on music the way the title plays on words; and though Donatoni's mouse may have been sans smile, Adam Long and I grinned all the way through it.

We had an aerial view of the action. The physical space of the Pulitzer has the feeling of being carved out of the corners of other spaces. The main seating for the basement floor concert stage are the wide steps walking down to it, which had filled up before we arrived. We stepped past the folding chairs at the top of the steps to stand along the railing looking down at the musicians. The view from there was good, but with Adam standing in front of me I had to thump him to get his attention and share smiles.

"I have recorded the cello player, Melissa Brooks," Adam whispered, after one time I thumped him. Adam records, mixes and masters music for a living.

Between compositions, as the string quartet was replaced on the basement floor concert stage by a solo horn player (Roger Kaza), Adam and I quickly shared geeky delight in the fact that we were seeing one of the greatest shows on Earth tonight, right at home in St. Louis. Adam is from Minneapolis, same city as Paul Westerberg; he also knows what it's like to have never seen a mountain, never swam in no sea.

This feeling of astonishing uniqueness went for a long, pleasant stroll during the performance of the next piece on the program, In Freundschaft by Karlheinz Stockhausen. This is a long, slow, solo piece, most often performed on clarinet, though I adored Roger Kaza's performance on horn. It included a lengthy interruption where Kaza very deliberately cleaned the saliva out of the bell of his horn before stuffing one fist in there to act as a mute.

Before the performance, David Robertson told us how long the piece lasts, I think so that no one made the mistake of applauding the apparent completion of the piece when Kaza stopped playing to dry the spit in his horn, which happened early in the composition. "Here is the place where you let the instrument use the restroom," David described this moment, after Kaza had finished his performance.

David described Stockhausen himself - controversial, as modern composers go - as "a wacko, but a sweet wacko". He expanded in this mood when introducing the final piece on the program, Groundswell by Steven Mackey. "Steven is a native Californian, and we are always the wacky ones," said David, a son of Santa Monica. He free-associated the names of other wacky Californians, thinking of John Cage and Gertrude Stein - a fascinating short list of native Californians perhaps no one else would have assembled.

I would rather listen to David Robertson talk about music than hear most people perform it; and Adam and I agreed that David's remarks on Groundswell were even more entertaining than Mackey's composition and the performance of it - by a superb ad hoc chamber group comprised of the string quartet from The Mouse without a Smile, joined by Weijing Wang (viola), Philip Ross (oboe), Thomas Jostlein (horn), Linda Phipps (clarinet/bass clarinet) and Peter Henderson (piano). David Robertson stayed out of his front-row seat and conducted this one.

Groundswell is a fine musical expression of climbing and descending a mountain, and was performed with expression and unity; but after the surreal mysticism of the Donatoni and the profound inwardness of the Stockhausen, it fell just slightly flat. On a different program, with lesser compositions and performances surrounding it, it would have had much more of an impact, I am certain, because I was thrilled throughout.

And, then, I was more than thrilled.

After such a striking night of original music, in such a unique and rarified space, the last thing the musical director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra needed to do was make a closing reference to a stunning public tragedy. But this is David Robertson we are talking about, and he is the kind of person who makes his own rules and sets his own standards.

Such music as what we had just experienced, David said - making explicit reference to the recent massacre in Tucson, and tearing up without affectation - reminds us "how lucky we are and how important it is to maintain that fragile relationship that is life."

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The photo is mine - a sunset in Santa Monica.