The Possibility of Disaster

You know, one of the things that amazes me to no end is how often people in cars just cut in front of you, leaving precious little space and causing you to have to brake hard and hopefully not have the asshole tailgating you rear end you.

And it's a whole bunch of things about this that amazes me. Did they not go to physics class and learn about MASS and INERTIA?

But what it really is is that they can't imagine disaster.

Well, I can. But humans seem to be resistant to imagining the worst. The real actual worst.

For example, even though some people at British Petroleum were very open about how difficult it is to drill deep water wells, other people at BP were making decisions to use cheaper, weaker, pipes that they had seen blow before and that violated BP's safety standards. (See this article in the NYTimes "Documents Show Early Worries About Safety of Rig") So even though people were aware that things could go wrong, they didn't imagine that it could actually go so spectacularly wrong and couldn't think strategically about what would happen if it did. Because they were expecting everything to be fine.

Just like, how did Condi Rice put it?, no one could know that terrorists would strike the U.S., even though there was a security memo saying exactly that.

Or just like everyone knew that housing prices were totally askew and that there was a bubble but we continued to act like housing prices could never fall, that buying mortgage based assets that were based on sub-prime loans that were rated A by Moodys or S&P because they were being paid by the issuer was not Damocles's Sword about to fall on our little heads. The occasional nay sayers of this scheme were ignored as no fun, and of course the mortgage crisis unraveled a whole lot more, no one was expecting total economic collapse.

I keep on hearing about "Strategic Thinking" and how the best and the brightest of the business world are strategic thinkers. And I think not. If strategy, as defined by my Oxford English Dictionary is "a plan for successful action based on the rationality and interdependence of the moves of opposing or competing participants." then strategy needs to incorporate the possibility of disaster. The worst case scenario can happen. And it can happen suddenly and blow you out of the water.

MOCA Collection; Matisse: Radical Invention

I was walking the dogs one morning and thinking about Mark Rothko's paintings and how one needed to see them physically to understand them. Just seeing a reproduction wouldn't give you a sense of the scale or the subtlety of the surface as shades move into one another, how things glow. You get a sense that they are people when you stand in front of them because you have your physical body in front of the physical painting.

So I popped off to MOCA to see the collection which everyone is rightly excited about. It is a nice collection of modernism. And there, right in front was an entire room of Rothko's. Man that guy could push paint. It was like seeing the room of Monet's waterlillies at MOMA where you need a recovery room. I felt like maybe I should just waver in my physicality. And then it was off to another room of Franz Klines - those winter landscapes of gesture. So beautiful.
Anyway there were some spectacular paintings from the 50's and early 60's and then you wandered into some great Louise Nevelson sculptures and then on into the Rauschenberg combines and Johns - great messy paintings with the kitchen sink thrown in - very exuberant.
The show was arranged roughly chronologically for a large part. The photographic collection was incredible. In the 50's and 60's you have all these beautifully observed black and white prints from Diane Arbus and Robert Frank. Then the 70's happen and painting sort of stops. People paint paintings of stripes. Stripe paintings are kind of boring, especially walking through entire galleries of them. Painting was just not happening. Other things were like performance, conceptual art and photography. For example there was a hilarious Bruce Nauman where you walked through a square box hallway, there was a small black and white tv monitor on the floor in each corner and a small camera pointed at each corner which fed a one monitor back, so you were constantly chasing yourself, seeing just a hint of your back turning the corner on the far monitor you were approaching. It's like you were chasing your ghost. Another thing that starts happening is more color photography, the curators made a Nan Goldin room that is totally devastating.
Leaving the exhibit you pass a series of photographs documenting performances or earth works by the artist Ana Mendieta which are so evocative of loss. The human figure making a mark on the earth and leaving, graves - the metaphors are so rich when you look at the work, it is such a shame she died so tragically.
Then I popped off to Chicago and while there I did a brief run through of the Matisse show there. It's late work for him (and as opposed to the LACMA exhibit of Renoir late work which is go awful) it has some gorgeous important work in it. Matisse understood the 9000 shades of blue in the world. He understood green. He understood shapes. In the painting the Moroccans, he uses the shape of a turban to echo the shape of the mosque domes.

Review: Steve Horowitz at Redcat

Francesca came to visit because there was a performance at RedCat which included one of her collaborations with Randy. Steve Horowitz is an advocate of my old friend Randy Hostetler's (1963 - 1996) compositions and so in addition to Steve's compositions Invasion of the Chicken Planet and The Retaking of Pelham 123 there were two pieces for string quartet of Randy's being played including Palm Quart which he did with Francesca.

So I ended up having a rather flash back week-end. RedCat is such a CalArts experience anyway, but at the party after the performance there were all these people who I HADN'T gone to school with, since Randy was getting his graduate degree two years after I had graduated. But the vibe was the same, and I couldn't help feeling that I had met some of these people, glancingly, since a lot of them were involved with Randy and Francesca and the cacophony of the Living Room Series. I guess the Living Room Series is now an archetypal art event - like being at some of the original happenings by Alan Kaprow or with John Cage at Black Mountain College or watching Marcel Duchamp play chess with a naked woman in a gallery. But I remember the ones I went to as fun and chaotic, the Tuba Trio in the kitchen, actually seeing Randy and his friends play the Living Room performing John Cage's Living Room Music. The shower singing. Camden and I did a piece with Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau. The Bowling Hypnosis tape that put everyone to sleep. L.H. wore a neoprene tutu and performed whale songs in a plastic kiddie pool with all of these electric wires criss-crossing in our old tri-plex with substandard electricity. (Which is funny come to think of it, since years later L.H. and I took a class at Machine Project, where we had to be in the basement with our computers and vats of water boiling away on old hot plates and sub-standard electrical wires criss-crossing the basement as we made felt and circuits. So maybe L.H. is much more of an electrical risk taker than I knew.)
Anyway, Randy's two pieces were interesting. First that he would write for string quartets - who knew CalArts even HAD string quartets. Aren't string quartets helplessly old fashioned even with Kronos??? (Randy never forgave me for being low-brow enough to like the Kronos Quartet). Second that he would write both specifically and abstractly with a completely new kind of musical notation that was both visual and metronomic. So the performers had to learn the new notation to play. And the notation was screened so that the audience could start to learn the notational rules at the same time. Floaters had a visual notation that was little boxes or circles of different colors appearing and moving on the screen. It was written on some sort of program that ran on MAC OS Sub 0.1 beta. I mean that was some OLD operating system we got a look at . In Palm Quart palm trees in a video created the musical notation. Both pieces were witty and brilliant and were so Randy.
Invasion of the Chicken Planet and The Re-Taking of Pelham 123 were both large scale pieces with actors and singers and a video by Zig Gron for Chicken and a film by Jane Brill for Pelham. These were the kind of smoking hot post-minimalist, rock-influenced compositions with a whole bunch of stuff that you get used to seeing at RedCat. Very fun, very enjoyable and with the ease of maturity. You know when you are young and serious you can't ease up and everything has to point out your knowledge. Later you add generosity and heart. It made me sad that Randy had never got to live long enough to have a mature body of work. You can look here to see a video Zig made of Randy doing 8 ball which I think starts to point to how his mature work would have gone.

Pompeii and the Roman Villa

Okay, this photo has nothing to do with the exhibit at LACMA "Pompeii and the Roman Villa" but it is from my aerial photo shoot and I like it. So - on to thoughts about the exhibit.

We caught the tail end of the exhibit, it's closing soon and I was kinda interested but not really interested. It's not a period of art that I know that much about and most of my Roman history has been gleaned from reading Colleen McCullough novels (if I am even remembering the author's name right) and watching I, Claudius from the BBC. However I found the exhibit to be really interesting. In part because it takes art from a small selection of rich people's houses who were all competing to have the most lavish spread (Bernie Madoff anyone?) and they spent wads o' cash on decoration that we now call "Art." There is a disconnect between what we call "art" which we think of as a rarefied pursuit that is expensive and only for those in the know and what in ancient times was thought of as decoration and craft. Opera used to be the tele-novelas of the day - the sculptures and frescoes of the exhibit were things that people bought to live with - children played on the sculptures, people leaned against the painted walls. People create stories and narratives and pictures to entertain and amuse themselves and when we stick things in museums and put huge price tags on them and call them rare we take them out of the ordinary practice of meaning with in the culture and to a certain extent ossify them into non-meaning. Look at the hissy fits about the Met's new Tosca and LA Opera's Sigfried. Outside of the fact that they might be good or bad productions - the new stagings creates a new context for an old story and so brings these old texts somewhere into our contemporary life.
Anyway, the relatives of Julius Caesar and his cohorts were rich and lived with some really nice art. (They also lived with slaves but that's another topic) And it all got nicely saved when Vesuvius blew up in 79 AD. One of the things that I forgot was that the Romans had three point perspective. Certainly the ancient Egyptians didn't have it. But the Romans had it, the frescoes had perfect vanishing points and this absolutely breathtaking three panel fresco of Apollo and the Muses was incredible (The Moregine Triclinium: Apollo and the Muses). Apollo and the Muses are painted (with such tenderness) wandering among a colonnaded and trellised space with perfect perspective for the architecture they are pictured in. Simply gorgeous. And perspective becomes lost so soon after this. As the idea of art becomes entwined with Christianity perspective fractures and flattens. When you look at the ancient devotive icons from St. Sophia's space falls away as if insignificant - leaving you to worship only the sad eyes of the saint. Or if you look at some of the Madonna's from the 12 or 13 Century the landscape and the people collapse and circle around the holy pair.

Another landscape fresco was straight out of some surrealist nightmare. It depicted a garden with statuary and frescoes and heads flying around. What were those heads? Why are they just hanging out in the air? Who knows? It's creepy and beautiful at the same time. The birds are painted so specifically (This one's a swallow, this one a thrush) and these heads are flying around with the birds. Really odd, what were they thinking?

The beloved C. pointed out that there were also portraits of people who were recognizably different - people we would consider to be retarded, hermaphrodites. And that - in those days of Polytheism - that you had multiple models for the holy so that on one level everyone could partake of grace. With the advent of monotheism there becomes only one model of being - male becomes normal, there is no grace for difference. And the landscape changes to flat.

Friedl, Falling and Carrie, Hanging

I don't know about you, but I often feel like this. For example, just yesterday I was being shown another way to get out of "Gazelle" where you take your back arm and twist it around your back, under the bar and then let go of the foot that's wrapped around the rope - you know, the one thing that's keeping you up in the air in "Gazelle" and so when you let go you - you know gravity happens - and you fall. But your other arm holds you up and your other leg somehow hooks onto the bar which it wasn't doing before and you spin around and down and it's kinda shocking the first six times you do it.

More Fun in the Air

I took some photos at the studio today.

Fun in the Air

I took a few photos of my group's recital. I had a fun time, there were about ten people I think in the audience and that really helped because when it got to be my turn on the trapeze I really put a little something extra into my routine. I didn't spend a lot of time taking pictures during practice and I think that I could get some interesting snaps to work with if I spent some time working with the acrobat I was photographing. Luckily for me they are all performers (well, I'm not a performer, I may be a ham, but I'm not a performer) and so they like having photos taken of them.

Self Portraits with Bruises

Someone has asked me "What's up with the trapeze thing?" and well, I just want to be a middle-aged swinger. So I've started taking aerial acrobatics classes at a circus school. I know, first there was the feminist Karate Cult (Yes, Sensei!). Then there was the rhythm tap beatnik world-wide tap dance cult located in Soho. And now I am swinging from ropes or silks or a trapeze and I must say it is fun. I'm in beginning aerial acrobatics (I can do the splits, upside down, swinging!) and we're coming to the end of the semester so everyone is supposed to be working on "Short Choreography with at least three tricks." When I was in first grade we had a school show and my class had to be bunnies and I had to get a pail and long red false eyelashes and we skipped around in a circle with out eyelashes and pails and sat on the pails and did other things appropriate to the coordination level of five year olds. I remember the eyelashes and the pail so well. And sitting down on the pail. This is about my only performance so I remember it. Well I think this choreography with three tricks is pretty funny, about on a par with watching five year olds with eyelashes. But all the teachers and students are very serious about it and they are picking out music and practicing.

So I decide that I'm going to do my piece on the trapeze and not the silks and that it will be about (drum roll here) bent legs and straight legs. And while I was practicing one of my teachers said "Well before you do the Cross, you should do a Reverse Straddle and hang upside down and mirror the angles you've been doing with your legs with your arms. Then roll back up into the cross." Imagine sitting on a trapeze with your legs hanging down and your hands on each side of the rope. Now imagine stretching your arms strait out sideways and sliding your hips off the trapeze bar. Now you are supporting yourself with your arms against the rope and your legs are together pointing and you look like you've been crucified. Hence the name Cross.
Well I didn't know how to do a Reverse Straddle so after I got that down, I flipped back over and off the trapeze into the cross and hit it wrong and got tangled in the ropes. And you can see the results. On both right and left sides - six inch bruises.