Dr. Metablog

The Art That Hides Art

Today we paid a call on the New Museum of Contemporary Art.  It's an uncompromising, vibrant building, all the more grand for being plunked down in the rusty old Bowery.  The space is wonderful.  But the stuff on exhibition is, in my less than humble opinion, ludicrous.  A mattress covered with buttons.  A cage made of chain link fencing.  Fluorescent light bulbs  arranged in a series of "Y" shapes.  Aluminum foil hanging from sticks. Broken glass on a bench.  Cardboard boxes, some open, some closed.  Plastic pipe threaded through a deck chair.

Three substantial floors littered with such artlessness.  What a dreadful, terrible squandering of space and opportunity.

The unifying principle:  a conspicuous antagonism to craftsmanship.  Every single piece of work left with rough edges and bad joins and unpainted surfaces, as though not to complete the task is fundamental to the aesthetic.  If there is an aesthetic other than fakery. 

I don't get it.  I don't want to get it.  To me, it looked like the detritus of a civilization in utter, hopeless implosive decline.  A decadence beyond ordinary decadence.  In-your-face ugliness.

What is attractive or interesting or even repulsive about old clothes tied into a tight bundle with an orange electrical extension cord?   It's still a bundle of old clothes.  It's not art because it's in a museum, and if it's supposed to be a critique of art, it's not not even remotely clever.  It's stupid.

There were lots of museum-goers who milled unexpressively around the various objects.  Were we all pretending that we were looking at Vermeers?

One of the sculptures, so-called, consisted of a pile of chairs, randomly arranged.  A four-year-old boy looked at the "sculpture" and announced, in a very loud and clear voice, "It's a pile of chairs.  Very funny."  And he laughed.  It was a great clothesless emperor moment.     

Cuisine de Minnesota

The Ranch Restaurant (family-owned, not a chain) in Rochester, Minnesota offered a splendid salad bar. In addition to the conventional fare (greens, onions, tomatoes, peppers, etc.), there were some items that were distinctly regional: herring in wine sauce, baked beans, cherry jello topped with whipped cream, chocolate pudding and also Watergate Salad.

Watergate Salad, new to me I must confess, is a melange of pistachio pie filling, mini-marshmallows, canned pineapple chunks (with syrup), pecans, and Cool-Whip. Here's a question for those who are expert in Minnesotan fine dining: is your Watergate Salad best eaten with or without herring?

Our waiter at The Ranch, asked whether the tomato soup was prepared with cream, replied, "It's a tomato biscuit with peas and stuff in it." He was slightly off the mark: lots of stuff in the bisque but alas no peas. 

Travels with Dorcas

We've named our GPS navigatrix,  who gives instruction with a schoolmarmish London accent, Dorcas (which is, along with Prunella, one of my very favorite English given -- or as they call them,"Christian"-- names).  Dorcas has proved to be, on the whole, a reliable friend. She had a little trouble in Cincinnati, where, it turns out, there are two entirely distinct 225 Hill Terrace addresses. She took us to the wrong one -- but I confess that in this case the error can fairly be traced to information-inputter, Dr. M. himself.

Dorcas also had a royal hissy fit when we had to detour onto a single-lane-on-the-other-side-of the-road somewhere in Ohio -- she "recalculated" twenty or thirty times, until I had to temporarily stop her mouth.   It could only be my imagination, but I thought I detected a trace of exasperation in her tone of voice. 

Despite these failings, the Dorcster is a dream at finding her way around unfamiliar towns. No longer will I have to stop at gas stations for incomprehensible advice about how to get back on the highway.  I just call on Dorcas and I've got a friend, oh yeah, I've got a friend.   

World's Largest Ball of Twine

Today In Cawker City, Kansas, we made a pilgrimage to the world's largest ball of twine. It's enormous: 40 feet in circumference and 14,000 pounds (when last measured and weighed in 1986). And still growing. We were offered some twine to add our bit, but declined. It would be desecration -- like adding a stone to the great Pyramid at Giza or to Stonehenge. Instead, we paid silent homage.

We didn't stop to see the world's largest prairie dog in Oakley. Or the Russell Stover birthplace in Alton. Nor even the Evel Knievel Museum in Topeka. Can't do everything.

And yet there are these pseudo-sophisticates who say that there's no culture in Kansas.

Some Shops

We're just back from a week in Greenwich Village. Here are some of the stores that were within two or three blocks of our temporary residence: "Beasty Feast Pet Food Supplies"; "Cherry Boxx" (sex toys and outfits); "Golden Rule Wine and Liquor"; "Henrietta Hudson Bar and Girl"; "Badlands Entertainment" (xxx videos); "Condomania" -- all kinds of condoms and related gear; "Suds Cafe" (a laundromat and espresso bar); a shop that specializes in "eyebrow threading"; the "Sports Cap and Hat Store"; "Man + Plus" (which I read as Man plus plus); "Yuki's Chinese Restaurant" (bad corporate name); "Birthday Suit" (bachelorette-fetish, the sign clarified); the "Why Not Men's Spa"; "Pet Portraits"; "Doodle-Doos" (a children's hair salon); "Kid's RX" (children's prescription drugs); and "Cowgirl" -- I couldn't recognize anything in the cowgirl stock, certainly nothing that would home on the range; also, an admirable piece of commercial hyperbole: "Splendid Dry Cleaners." In addition, a truck bearing the name "Dr. Playground" -- mobile playground repairs, I would suppose. All in all, quite a remarkable display of capitalist initiative.

How to Deal With Enormous, Man-Eating Pythons

A few weeks ago, I noted that in The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin made the case that early humans were prey more than they were predators. Now I've read a new book on the subject: Donna Hart and Robert W. Sussman, Man the Hunted (Westview, 2005).

The book's title is a bit misleading because it concentrates on primates other than modern man. Nevertheless, it was good to be reminded of the circumstances under which our hominid ancestors lived. Seven million years ago and until recently, our diminutive forbears were forest dwellers who were pursued by huge crocodilians, outsized eagles, packs of hunting dogs, a variety of giant cats, and hyenas the size of modern lions who had jaws strong enough to crunch human skulls in a single bite.

And also man-eating snakes. In the course of their discussion of snakes, the authors of Man the Hunted report on the instructions provided to early missionaries to Africa on the proper response to pythons. (A 25-foot-long reticulated python can weigh up to 300 pounds.)

Remember not to run away; the python can run faster. The thing to do is to lie flat on the ground on your back with your feet together, arms to the sides and head well down. The python will then try to push its head under you, experimenting at every possible point. Keep calm, one wiggle and he will get under you, wrap his coils round you and crush you to death. After a time the python will get tired of this and will probably decide to swallow you without the usual preliminaries. He will very likely begin with one of your feet. Keep calm. You must let him swallow your foot. It is quite painless and will take a long time. If you lose your head and struggle he will quickly whip his coils around you. If you keep calm, he will go on swallowing. Wait patiently until he has swallowed about up to your knee. Then carefully take out your knife and insert it into the distended side of his mouth and with a quick rip slit him up.

Well-meant advice, I'm sure, but perhaps difficult to follow. Suppose you're just not in the mood to allow the python such liberties with your person. Suppose you've forgotten to bring your knife; suppose the python decides to start with your head rather than a foot. Suppose you involuntarily wiggle just a teensy bit. Suppose you just don't feel that it's a good day to be engulfed.

I think that, on the whole, running away and screaming at the top of your lungs is a more sensible reaction. But then again, I never signed up to be a missionary.

Predators Then and Now

There's more neighborhood mountain lion news: yesterday a seven-year-old boy, walking in the rearward of a group of six or seven hikers, was pounced upon in the mountains just west of town by a big guy. The child was bitten and clawed but is now recovering. Family members drove the lion away.

In my view, they should never have allowed the child to pull up the rear. 

I’d been thinking about predators even before this last attack (see the entry for April 8).  By one of those curious convergences that make life so rich, I just happened to be reading Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (New York: Viking, 1987), a travel narrative ostensibly about the sacred but invisible paths along which the ancestors of the Australian aborigines traveled and 'sang the world into existence.'  The thesis of this quirky, self-indulgent and intermittently brilliant narrative is that human beings are by nature not sedentary but migratory.

But the book isn't only about migrants;  n one of The Songlines' many meanders, Chatwin writes a few pages on the age-old interaction of human beings with big predators like the mountain lion. He takes issue with the much-loved claim of right-wing thinkers that human beings are naturally territorial and aggressive -- that we are nothing more than naked apes who must continually strive to control larger and larger dominions. Instead, he offers the alternative view that because of our long history of fending off predators, human beings are naturally not aggressive but defensive  -- and, moreover, that It's the defensive imperative that caused our species to move from savagery to civility. He asks us to think of the situation of the earliest humans. "The first men were humbled, harried, besieged -- their communities few and fragmented… clinging to life and one another through the horrors of the night."  "Might not," he asks, "all the attributes we call ‘human’ – language, song-making, food-sharing, gift-giving, intermarriage... have evolved as stratagems for survival, hammered out against tremendous odds, to avert the threat of extinction?"  It's a challenging, overarching hypothesis -- and whether or not there are facts to validate it is beyond my ken.

It's certainly true that first humans in Africa had to cope with a variety of nasty predators -- lions were there long before people -- and that when  our ancestors migrated to Europe they walked into a wild, dangerous country. The European lion, panthera leo, widespread from 900,000 years ago to the end of the last ice age, was a third taller and longer than surviving African lions, which themselves can weigh 450 pounds and reach a length of 8 1/2 feet. The lions in the virginal land that our ancestors crossed the Mediterranean to colonize would have been as tall as a fully grown Paleolithic man and might have weighed as much as 880 pounds.  And remember that for 99% of our time on earth, humans were either entirely unarmed or possessed only of the hand ax -- a palm-size piece of sharpened but haft-less flint. No matter what theory of the origins of civilization we embrace, we should remember that our genes were selected in a world of woolly rhinoceroses, mammoths, aurochs, and wolves and that we competed with the big bears for what were then the best residences on earth-- the limestone caves in the Ardeche region in France.

It's in these caves that the memory of European lions is beautifully preserved. Thirty thousand years ago, a long tradition of animal representation climaxed in the paintings in the Chauvet Cave. There are beautiful representations of European lions on the hunt and at rest in Jean-Marie Chauvet's The Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave (New York: Abrams, 1995) --  irrefutable evidence that our forefathers knew them at first hand.  It's unquestionable that many a child -- and many an adult -- fell prey to these adversaries. And perhaps Chatwin is right; perhaps those humans who survived to reproduce were selected not for aggressiveness but for congeniality and especially for artistic ability. How else can we account for our species' continual preoccupation, or perhaps obsession, with all the many forms of beauty?

April 17.  The authorities tracked and killed an 80-pound female panther. I sincerely hope that it was the offending animal and not an innocent bystander. 

The Mayflower Hotel

We're in Washington  D. C., this week and inadvertently wandered by the Mayflower Hotel.  

A memory: in July of 1952, I stayed at the Mayflower for a few days with my father's sister, my peripatetic and eccentric Aunt Mollie. It was a rare and unique event. I came from an automobile-less family, and my parents were not in the slightest bit adventurous. The trip to Washington was the sole occasion in my childhood when I was in a city other than New York (and by New York I mean deepest Brooklyn, with an occasional foray to the Bronx Zoo or to the Museum of Natural History). It's hard to convey the full measure of the naivete with which this schoolyard boy approached a new city. I knew that Washington was smaller than New York and therefore assumed that it would consist of a smaller Brooklyn, a smaller Manhattan, etc. I had no conception that different cities had different geographies -- let alone different characters.

Highlights:  the Lincoln Memorial (I was exhilarated), the Jefferson Memorial, a boat ride to Mount Vernon. My strongest memory is of exciting and down-to-earth Harry Truman addressing a crowd from the base of the Washington Monument on the Fourth of July. The result of this voyage into the unknown was the realization that there were other cities, that they were accessible -- in short, that there was a world elsewhere.

I'm permanently indebted to my Aunt for allowing me the opportunity to grasp such a big idea.

And also that there was such a thing as a restaurant. It might seem incredible, but from birth to college, I didn't enter a restaurant more than a half-a-dozen times at the very most. In our family, there was neither the money nor the inclination toward such extravagance. I still consider it a something of a miracle that a guy like me can walk into a shop, sit down, and that people will generously put food on my plate. All that I have to do in return is fork over a few bucks.  

Exactly thirty-five years later, I stayed at the Mayflower a second time when AGP was honored and celebrated. At this Mayflower reprise, it was not Truman but Ronald Reagan whom we encountered. I remember the dyed hair, the unnatural orange skin, the ventriloquist's-dummy delivery of the speech that was handed him, and the undeniable inference that he was already deeply incapacitated by the Alzheimer's that would eventually kill him. 

Alien Abductions and Other Irrationalities

In Abducted:  How People Come to Believe They Were Abducted by Aliens (Harvard, 2005), Susan Clancy recounts interviews with fifty or so "abductees." Each person's experience is unique, but the various stories can be melded into a composite narrative. "I was having problems with anxiety and depression. I was at Fenway Park with my buddies watching a game. The next thing I remember, I was on Mission Hill and it was five in the morning. I was always interested in science fiction. I read Communion; I saw E. T and Close Encounters. I went to a hypnotist, and memories started flooding back. I started sobbing uncontrollably. They were long and tall, with huge black eyes that went around their heads. I remembered them fastening a device like a suction cup to my genitals to suck out the sperm painfully. They inserted a foot-long tube into my nostril. I know it happened because I get nosebleeds. My dad thinks it's a transmitter they put in there.  They've programmed other memories to disappear. Until I experienced the aliens, life was empty, meaningless. Now that I have my memories, I understand everything. What happened to me was overwhelming. It was real. I can't explain-- I felt it. I was changed from the person that I was.  It was the most positive event of my life. It helped me to see life as beautiful, as a gift."

Alien abductees may hold to false beliefs, but they have powerful faith. Clancy reports that once, at a convention of abductees, she tried to talk about the unreliability of anecdotal evidence, the fragility of memory, the nature of the sleep-paralysis syndrome, the creation of false memories under hypnosis, Occam's Razor (the employment of the most economical hypothesis to explain a phenomenon), etc. According to Clancy, there was a long silence, and then one of the participants said, "tell her about the metallic tube that came out of Jim's nose, the one that went down the sink before you both could catch it."

Eventually Clancy brings herself to discuss the obvious parallel of abduction to religion, which, she says, she is reluctant to do because she has "about a thousand Irish Catholic relatives [she] doesn't want to offend." Nevertheless, she concludes that "alien-abduction beliefs can be considered a type of religious creed, based on faith, not facts." Kind to her extended family, Clancy does pursue the argument to the next logical step: that ordinary, accepted beliefs of supernatural intervention in human affairs are exactly as credible -- no more, no less -- as belief in macrocephalic waifs with black wraparound eyes who stick needles into your navel to produce hybrid children.

She also reports that one of her informants, when challenged, responded, "I trust my gut and my gut says aliens." Is there a better argument for listening not to our guts but to our brains?

The Caucasus; Hadji Murad

When I read Neal Ascherson's Black Sea, I had to admit that I knew nothing at all about a huge and contested part of the world. I followed up on Ascherson's bibliography and read a series of ethnographic studies of ancient Black Sea peoples -- Scythians, Sarmatians, etc. -- and from there moved eastward to the Caucasus and leaned about the Abkhazians, the Ossetians, the Chechens, etc. Yesterday I finished Nicholas Griffin's Caucasus (2001), which is half travel book and half a biography of Imam Shamil. Shamil, of whom I also knew zero until a few days ago, is the legendary Avar guerrilla leader who led the opposition to the Russian conquest of the mountains in the mid-nineteenth century. He's the national hero of the Chechens, and is a compound of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Geronimo-- with a little Islamic fervor added in. The Russians conquered the Caucasus with a combination of overwhelming force, superior technology, and ruthlessness: they systematically obliterated villages, murdered as many civilians as possible, and when all else failed, cut to the ground the primeval beech forests -- defoliation not then an option -- in which Shamil and his Murids found refuge.

Reading about Shamil led me to Hadji Murad -- Tolstoy's extraordinary last novel and one in which Shamil is a minor character. In 150 pages or so, Hadji Murad says as much about the brutality, the stupidity, and the vanity of war as War and Peace says in ten times as many pages. Tolstoy, who had soldiered in the Caucasus, wrote in his diary (according to Griffin) that the war was "so ugly and unjust that anybody who wages it has to stifle the voice of his conscience." Hadji Murad is a charismatic leader who's involved in a foolish feud with Shamil; he surrenders to the Russians, tries to escape, and is killed and beheaded. That's the plot, but the genius is in the telling. After recounting an atrocity in which the Russians, in sport, destroy a small settlement, ruin the crops, and bayonet a small child, Tolstoy describes the feelings of the remaining villagers as they set about the hopeless task of rebuilding: "It was not hatred, because they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to exterminate them  -- like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves  -- was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation." Tolstoy is disgusted by the Russian actions, but he's equally repelled by the brutal mountaineers, and he goes out of his way to draw parallels between the utterly cruel Imam Shamil and the fat, ignorant, vainglorious Nicholas, the Czar of All the Russians.

In the nineteenth century, the Russians cut down the forests; in 1999, they conquered Grozhny (the capitol of Chechnya) by dynamiting every significant building in the entire city.       

Addendum to Lermontov

On November 27, writing about Lermontov's A Hero of our Time, I found it offensive that Azamat trades his sister for a horse. I found fault with Lermontov for employing what I judged to be a fraudulent plot device. I've since read Amjad Jaimoukha's The Chechens (2005) where the following appears: "In Ingush society, a man had the right to give away his sister in marriage without her consent." (The Ingush, like the Chechens, are a subset of the Vainakh.) What appears to be a bit of crudeness in A Hero of our Time might in reality be an accurate representation of nineteenth-century Caucasian society. Apologies to Lermontov. 

The Black Sea; Lermontov

In the Black Sea just off the Bulgarian coast lies Nessabar, an island (nowadays artificially an isthmus) that has been a trading center for several thousand years. Still standing in the old city are churches and fortifications that date from the 8th and 9th century. It's authentic and it's intriguing, but it's also one of the very few places in Bulgaria that's distinctly over-touristed, so it was a relief to hop the informal ferry (really no more than a glorified dinghy) from Nessebar back to the mainland. To be afloat on the fabled Black Sea felt--how else can I say it? -- Romantic and a far cry from landlocked Colorado. It was that windy boat ride that pushed me into reading about the inhabitants of the Black Sea littoral and of the neighboring Caucasus. This is the land of the ancient Thracians, builders of tumuli, of the Scythians, who went to war with mares only, and also of the Sarmatians (of whom the sum of my knowledge had been the story of the ten virgins of Sarmatia deflowered in a single night by the Emperor Procopius -- who was, according to Montaigne, a "master workman and famous in the task." It's a land that is presently the home to Abkhazians, Georgians, Circassians, Ossetians, Chechens.

My ruminating eventually brought to mind that I've read a novel set in the Caucasus -- Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of our Time. The novel was written in the late 1830s (its author was killed in an idiotic duel in 1841 at the age of twenty-seven). A sickly but wealthy Muscovite, Lermontov had been sent to the frosty Caucasus several times in his childhood for the bracing air and the healing baths. Later, as a Russian officer, he participated in the displacement and genocide of the Caucasian peoples -- a war that began in the days of Peter the Great and continues to this very moment. Of the novel itself I could recall only vaguely the deep romantic chasms and rushing mountain streams, the unlettered tribesmen, the gallant horsemanship. Re-reading was, as always, a revelation. The nominal hero, Pechorin, of whom I'm embarrassed to say I had not the least memory trace -- but let's face it, forty years is a long time-- is a hyperconscious but conscienceless cad. He's the underground man as cavalry officer.

Here's a sample hunk of plot: at a wedding, lustful Pechorin is taken by the sight of a fair young Circassian girl named Bela. Bela is also sought by Kazbich, a swarthy Chechen fighter, the owner of a most remarkable horse. The horse is coveted by Bela's younger brother Azamat. Azamat and Pechorin conspire: Azamat will kidnap and deliver his sister to Pechorin if Pechorin will help him abscond with the horse. The intrigue succeeds and Pechorin takes the "wild girl" Bela as his concubine. She, of course, sickens. One day, while Pechorin is out hunting boar, Kazbich returns and attempts to re-abduct Bela. Pechorin, returning home, shoots at Kazbich and wounds him; Kazbich escapes but not before fatally stabbing Bela with his dagger -- preferring, it's assumed, to kill rather than surrender her. 

It seems like a horribly racist tale -- made worse by the fact that the Chechens are regularly characterized as thieves, the Ossetians as stupid, and so on. The equation of horse and woman is inherently offensive. But the story is redeemed from bigotry because blonde Pechorin is by far the nastiest character in the novel, and because the whole episode can be and perhaps should be interpreted as a rebuke to the brutality of Russian imperialism.

It's obvious that the novel's themes are not specific to the Russian-Caucasian frontier. It's easy to imagine a translation of A Hero of Our Time into a film set in the American west where Chechens become Sioux, the Caucasus becomes the Rockies, Pechorin is played by James Stewart while Bela transmutes into Debra Paget in a buckskin skirt, and racial, imperialist and genocidal themes are enacted in a frontier that is more familiar but equally falsified and romanticized.