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Sentimentalissimo

9/28/2014

       I have a weakness for the sentimental, so I have to be careful, just as I am with my weakness for sweets. Like candy and cookies, the sentimental is often around to tempt me, but I’ve learned not to indulge – except once in a while, when the occasion calls for it and the candy or the cookie or the sentiment is especially good.
     Too many sweets are bad for my health and too much sentimentalism is bad for. . . well, I don’t know. Is there a word, this side of shame, for self-embarrassment?
       The greatest art is created at the cusp of the sublime and the banal: Shakespeare, Beethoven, Rembrandt. Other great works are heroic struggles to reach that peak, with artists on the sublime side – George Eliot, Mahler, Monet (for example) – deliberately working with the material of sentiment to temper their subject matter of grand philosophical concepts, and artists on the sentimental side – Hemingway, Richard Strauss, Hopper (for example) – creating a transcendental structure which will drape their sentimentalism in the mantle of art.
       I love 19th century writers, composers, artists, but some of them most of the time and most of them some of the time descend into a kind of unsubtle, primitive sentimentalism that I react to, inadvertently, with the tawdriest of emotions. Yecch. It’s embarrassing. I am embarrassed that I never fail to cry when Rodolfo cries out “Mimi! Mimi!” and the music swells at the end of La Boheme. I do not enjoy it. I am not “having a good cry.” I am aware of the brutal, tawdry, cynical power with which Puccini is pulling my heart strings, and it makes me angry.

On the other hand, when Ich bin der Welt Abhanden Gekommen brings tears, as it often does, I feel that instead of being manipulated by Mahler, I have become his companion. The human condition is his subject and we can cry about it together, high-mindedly and unashamed.

        There is one sentimental musical work, though, with which I have a deep personal, not a transcendental aesthetic relationship. It seems to speak to my own life, not to some imagined life or life in general. It expresses the emotions I feel when I look back on the shape, the flow, the trajectory of my experiences.
       It was so personal, it spoke so directly to me that the first time I heard it I played it over and over. There are some sections that do not resonate as much, but as a whole, it is as if Janacek had set to music not my life, but the feelings I have looking back at that life.
       The piece is On an Overgrown Path.

        As a post-script, I must include one last piece of music. I’ve already posted it as a bit of humor in the Drapers Guild Music Hall, but it here it is again, with the real artist, Tito Schipa, and real title, Ay Ay Ay. (Google is useless on its origin. Although in Spanish, it seems to have been an Italian popular song, perhaps from a stage work called Guyano, perhaps composed by an Italian.)
       I don’t know what it is about this – well, I do know what it is, but I can’t put it into words – but when Schipa holds that high note in the third line of the refrain
                   Que ya la aurora temprana ay, ay, ay
I feel as that there is nothing more beautiful in the universe. In a perfect world, it would be the last thing I heard.

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The English Language -- It's Alive. Aaaargh!

9/17/2014

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                We watch television shows with captions (you see, our aging cat has become hard-of-hearing). Captions act as a kind of window into the minds, in general, and the verbal skills, in particular, of the (I would guess) under-thirty-year-olds who, with their degrees in “communications,” are working their way up the media ladder. Captions, besides recording the dialogue with varying degrees of thoroughness, also describe, in brackets, whatever sound effects accompany the video – [car screeches to a halt], [gunshots], [body thuds downstairs], etc. It is in describing sounds that captioners often reveal details of their minds’ contents, or lack thereof.
      One indication of the waning of the culture, or of the old culture, anyway, is the captioners’ in-depth knowledge of the popular music of the last year or two, with a caption such as [The Egg Poachers’ “I Wish I were Here”, second take], followed by every word of the tawdry, lugubrious lyrics, as the hero wanders disconsolately into the end of the movie, compared with their ignorance of such iconic works as the Moonlight Sonata [classical piano music] or, just as likely, [melancholy piano music] or simply (if it’s not a BBC production) [sad piano music].
             A door may slam, it may click quietly shut, it may smartly latch, yet in all cases, [door closes]. However, all the subtle sounds of cell phone use are carefully delineated, [bubbly ringtone], [phone vibrates], [text message signal], [keyboard clicking], [back cover of phone snaps shut]. One recently watched drama used the word “smooch” for any act of kissing outside coitus. A father kisses his daughter on the forehead, [smooch]; later, a lover kisses his seemingly fatally shot sweetheart (we know she’ll recover, but he doesn’t), [smooch].
         Occasionally, a captioner will be stumped by a word [unintelligible] because it is mumbled or drowned out or simply because it is unfamiliar. Some time ago I was watching a bad film, which I soon ceased to watch, some scenes of which were set in and around Barcelona. One of the characters was an architect who, to the captioner’s repeated [unintelligible]’s, kept using the word “Gaudi.”
              All the above examples are indications of cultural deterioration. I am not so sure, however, that other examples of outré captioning are not simply signs of the inevitable transformation of language. Last night we were watching the forty-fifth episode of the thirty-first series of Midsomer Murders and whenever the creepy camp music swelled (Midsomer Murders, as far as I know, is the only television series that employs a theremin for one of its leitmotifs), indicating that the mundane pursuits of the character on the screen will be his or her last, came the caption [music fades up].
                “Fade up.” Why not? You might say that “fade in” has become accepted as the converse of “fade out,” but I have yet to see “fade down.” “Fade up” seems to be the opposite of “fade.” I assume that in a few years the definition of “fade” will change from “diminish” to “gradually change in intensity.”
                Many years ago I encountered what I thought was the start of an interesting transformation of the word “lyrical.” A rap musician, being interviewed in Billboard, talking about his song-writing partner, said something like, “Billy’s the lyrical one, so he’s got tighter rules to follow, rhyming and words and all. I can let myself go wherever I want because I’m doing the music.” This new definition of “lyrical” – restrained, limited in choices – never caught on.
                Nor is there any such word as "captioner."

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Bohemian Paranoid

9/8/2014

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       If you happen to have hung out in Bohemian circles in the last century you probably are familiar with the self-sabotaging artist. The large majority of artists, those I’ve known personally and those I have read about, have had the trait to some degree. Wyndham Lewis is the worst case I’ve ever come across.
       He also was mentally unbalanced. Mentally ill? I’m not sure. Jeffrey Meyers, the author of a biography of Lewis I just finished reading, The Enemy, sometimes calls Lewis’ problem “persecution mania,” sometimes “paranoia.” He was not a paranoid schizophrenic, though. There are three or four instances where he is reported to have heard voices or have had hallucinations, but these do not seem to have had the profound effect on him that auditory and visual hallucinations have on schizophrenics.
       The onset of schizophrenia usually occurs in a person’s twenties. Lewis’ paranoia seems to have been set off (never to be reigned in) when he was thirty-one, when Roger Fry – if Meyers’ recounting of the story is true, which it seems to be – deliberately, almost criminally, did Lewis out of an important commission.
       Lewis, at the time, was an up-and-coming impoverished artist. Fry, sixteen years older than Lewis, a prominent artist and critic, was the Bloomsbury Group’s hetman for the visual arts. (It was he who coined the term “post-impressionism.”) In 1913 Fry founded a collective, the Omega Workshops, which aimed at integrating visual art and design. Lewis, who had been friendly with Fry and other Bloomsbury gang-members, was happy to become part of Omega, even though his paintings were not in the post-impressionist style of Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Fry.

Vanessa Bell: Interior with Duncan Grant

Roger Fry: Portrait of Virginia Woolf

Interestingly, Lewis’ paintings conformed more to Omega’s decorative side, than its artistic side – which is not to say that Lewis’ painting were decorative – hardly! – but his use of repetitive geometric forms was closer to Omega’s design work than its members’ fine art.

Rug by Christopher Farr

Wyndham Lewis: Figure Composition

This is the way Meyers tells the story – and he seems to have researched the affair thoroughly and, as I say, is convincing: In 1913, Lewis and an artist named Spencer Gore had gained some notoriety for the decorations they had done for a nightclub, The Cave of the Golden Calf, owned and operated by Frida Strindberg, the second wife of the playwright.

One of Spencer Gore's murals for The Cave of the Golden Calf

(Wyndham Lewis' murals for the nightclub -- typically for his blasted career -- are lost.)

       The art critic of The Daily Mail suggested to the newspaper that Spencer Gore do similar decorations for the “modernist room,” which the newspaper traditionally sponsored in an annual decorative arts exhibition, “The Ideal Home.”
       Gore was otherwise engaged and recommended Wyndham Lewis. Gore also suggested that Roger Fry should provide Omega Workshops furniture for the room. The Daily Mail critic was fine with both suggestions. It was an important commission, so Gore hurried around to the Omega Workshops with the good news. Neither Lewis nor Fry was there, so Gore relayed the news – that Lewis would be doing the decorations, Fry providing the furniture – to Duncan Grant.
       Grant later said he “may have forgotten” to relay the message to Lewis. The message reached Roger Fry, though, who phoned The Daily Mail, and ended up getting the commission for the decorations, as well as for the furniture. The Daily Mail art critic soon made it known that the commission for the decorations had been meant for Lewis. Fry refused to relinquish it and, as a sop, offered the design of the room’s mantelpiece to Lewis. Lewis was furious. It was this incident that seems to have pushed him over the edge into his lifelong paranoia.
       Like most paranoiacs, Lewis’ mania had its stealth aspects – in restaurants and other public places, he would make sure always to sit with his back to the wall – but mainly it took the form of public vituperation. Most of his novels and virtually all of his non-political non-fiction writing were devoted to lambasting prominent figures in the art world – especially those who had helped him out in some way. (“If Wyndham Lewis asks you to lend him a hundred pounds,” Ford Madox Ford once said, “Don't do it. He'll never forgive you!”)
       He was a far better artist than a writer, but prose was an outlet for his eruptive anger, his wrath at Bloomsbury, especially the Sitwells, and the cultural elite. He spent much more time and effort spewing out unsubtly satirical invective than on his painting.
       His self-sabotaging went beyond embittering people he knew. He went on to alienate anyone in the public who might have bought his books and his art with his hagiographic 1931 book, Hitler, which referred to Hitler as “a man of peace” and presented the Nazis as Western culture’s bulwark against Communism. He recanted, too late, in his 1939 book, The Hitler Cult. In the same year, he also published a book condemning anti-Semitism, but the imp of self-sabotage prompted him to title it: The Jews, are they Human? (You’d think someone at George Allen & Unwin would have set right that faux pas.)
       Pound and Eliot remained stalwart supporters; the former until his alliance with Fascism made his support onerous, the latter right up to the very end, even though both had been at the receiving end of some of Lewis’ ham-fisted salvos. Eliot always maintained that Lewis was a great prose writer – an opinion, by one of the last century’s best literary critics, that puzzles me. I’ve looked into more than one of Lewis’ fifty books, usually because their striking covers stood out among the same-old same-old on the shelves of used bookstores. I found them pretty much unreadable.

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Sentimentalissimo

The English Language -- It's Alive. Aaaargh!

Bohemian Paranoid

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