Memento to a jetlag

Spent about 2 hours rolling in bed, got up, wrote about 20 bars of piano accompaniment to a setting of a Yeats poem I wrote on the plane, read a bit of Mark in Greek, facebooked, e-mailed...

caught the sunrise, albeit a rainy one.

First thoughts of Hong Kong in need of expanding in some other less grogged up time:

Risk Society a la forte
Multiplicity of cultural authority
class stratification
occidentalism
objectification of the body
gentrified music
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Can't go, won't go to Yunnan, it's rain season.

Never weather-beaten sail.

Neuer weather-beaten Saile more willing bent to shore,
Neuer tyred Pilgrims limbs affected slumber more
Than my wearied spright now longs to flye out of my troubled brest :
O come quickly, sweetest Lord, and take my soule to rest.

First half of a poem by Thomas Campion, to which C.H.Parry set to a motet which we sang in Cologne; No recording on Youtube, sadly.
A hommage here to my homecoming next week and the limenal period which is now...

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Our concert yesterday in Koblenz shed a few tears in the audience... here's one of the pieces that did this, by Orlando Gibbons 1583-1625 (and a puzzling background image on Youtube to go with it):

The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached unlocked her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
Farewell, all joys;
O death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live,
more fools than wise.

Me, Kokoschka and Racine.

(www.flickr.com/photos/kt/4465008/)

First impressions of Cologne: bland, architecturally uninteresting... and then it dawned upon me:95% of the city had been bombed by the Allies during WWII.

The massive Cathedral/Dom remained intact, surprisingly; perhaps the pilots and commanders knew it was an important site of human heritage. Here's another photo of it:

What Cologne lacked in its architectural preservation was definitely made up for by post hoc reconstrution of cultural capital.

Heaps of conceptual/abstract modern art at the Ludwig Museum, (and also expressionists, surrealists, and pop art) from David Smith to Lucio Fontana to names I haven't heard before... My little theory of the day:

A piece of artwork exists and can be evaluated on three dimensions: the technical, the symbolic and the aesthetic. That is, how it was executed (technique, medium, light-and-shadow, 'softness of skin' etc.), what it is of/symbolises/the subject matter (Venus and Mars, afternoon on the Seine, Stalin's corpse etc.) and lastly, the emotional reaction it draws from the viewer (religious piety, admiration etc.).

One of the reasons, if not the main one, why many people cringe at and dismiss 'modern art' - or worse, postmodern art - is because they are spoiled by verisimiliar paintings (impressionism at the most, and even Picasso in his less-deconstructed images). People are disgusted at the mention of 'modern art' yet they like Dali.

The works of art that do NOT draw a yuck-reaction have concrete and identifyable subject-matters, and often involve skill on the artists' part that is appreciable by the lay museum-goer.

Much of what can be categorized as 'conceptual art', on the other hand, involves almost no identifyable subject matter (aside from: a red line, a black square, a splash of paint etc.) and sometimes does not take much skill either. To take a cliched example: Anyone who has the guts can rip out a urinal, invert it as Duchamps did, give it a name, and put it in a museum.

The reason why most people cannot palate modern art is because they remain detached conoisseurs - just watch people in front of paintings (middle-aged males mostly) explain to their companions what this and that refers to, waving their hands in the air and analysing where all the symmetries and triangles are.

For the art I saw today I had to let myself go, cease to be 'the conoisseur', RELATE to the artwork, and enter into a two-way, emotional relationship with it... None of the 'non-modern' artworks, even my favourite ones, have managed to provoke nearly as strong a surge of emotion as the splashes and slashes I saw today.

I saw my first Jackson Pollock, and alongside it, my second. There were also a couple of ones by Karl Otto Götz. As I approached his wild 'scrapings' of paint my heart began beating faster in bewiderment. Only with my face almost touching the canvas, smelling it as it were and visually 'feeling' its texture - fixating on individual strokes suffused into adjacent one, slowly gliding from one end of the painting to the other - did I begin to immerse into its tempestuousness and feel the storms of colours resonnating within.

On the top floor there was an alcove with a full view of the Rhein and the steel bridge leading to the Cathedral. On the wall inside the alcove, opposite the small sofa which I was sitting on (pushed right up against the wall) was a painting by Kokoschka of the very same panorama.

The alcove was very small, 4 telephone booths perhaps.

Just me, Kokoschka, and 3 Jean Racine plays.

Vincent's shoes. My shoes.

Vincent's eyes weren't always busy chanelling the heavens into the tip of his brush. Paolo had an art print of this painting by Van Gogh, I remember, on his wardrobe in Ples... Someone once said, somewhere, don't remember where, that these shoes are powerful not so much in their presence as in the void between the leather; the absense of the feet that filled them, the self that filed the body of which the feet are a part; The soul and personhood that once filled these worn-out shoes.
What about mine, my shoes?

I've been packing (and dying, inwardly withering in the process) as I discarded item after item of belongings which present circumstances did not allow me to keep. Among these were 2 pairs of shoes, shoes which I had once filled, shoes which have kissed the soil of many a country, witnessed many a warm embrace, monumental a moment. I took of picture of Elliot's shoes.
The Timberlands that walked with me miles and miles alongsidea dear friend along Provencal highways and riverside paths, the Rockports which once scraped the earthy, calcium-rich soil of Italy. I looked at these 2 pairs of shoes with an unspeakable nostalgia, I finally shed them away.

Off to Cologne tomorrow, fa-la-la-la-la-ing...