I don’t
know if I’ve ever really visited the Brooklyn Museum before. I’d driven past it
every day for four years of my life.
But yesterday was the first time I’d went in. I obviously didn’t know where I was going though because I’d
confused it in my mind with the Brooklyn Library and told my brother to meet me
there at Grand Army Plaza. On the
cab ride up we sailed past the circle and the Library and continued up Eastern
Parkway for another few hundred yards to the Museum. We were waiting on the right side and I pointed out to my
older daughter, the fan of all things Greek, that Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Herodotus, Thucydides, Pericles, Socrates names were etched up in the crest
that ran across the right of the building. First up was “Pindar.”[1] Someone remind me who Pindar was? More importantly, who was on the
editorial committee that decided all this and made the call to leave Euripides
and, say, Aristotle off the roll call.
Over to the left of the building, I was pleased to see that
a gent from Shandong, was at the head of the liast. After Confucius Laozi, or “Laotse” was up there too. Then there were some Biblical figures
listed. Is the theme that everyone
is an axial-age thinker? If so,
why no Buddha? Do they have to be
secular? Well then why is Isaiah
up there? And one can
imagine the torrent of such inquiry and attendant abuse as to: “how come no one
from my tradition is up there?”
There’s a story there, no doubt, which we’ll uncover when next on line.
Waiting for my brother to walk over from the Library, we
stood amidst some of Rodin’s work, old anguished faces, some buried in hands. I tried to explain what I could remember
about the man. His treatment of
Balzac always seems at the head of my mind’s Rodin-queue. Given the earlier experience in the
MoMA, we were all well prepared without any bags to check. But it didn’t seem to matter. Things were pretty sparsely populated
inside, at least at noon on a rainy Saturday. Turns out there was an exhibit of Ai Wei Wei’s on, “According
To What?” which added a local flavor to the day’s proceedings. Sure. We’ll pay extra for that.
After a lunch above Roman columns, and the obligatory
commencement of matters in the gift shop, we headed in to the first floor
hall. Ai Wei Wei’s stack of some
two hundred or so aluminum bicycles was massive but less interesting to me than
the exhibit they had on beside it.
This was a purposefully pedantic array of pieces outside of their safe,
contextual positionings thrown up to acontextual neighbors like what it feels
like every day on a New York Subway.
A range of traditions juxtaposed against each other, so that Eskimo
carvings of anger were cast against African masks with a similar
expression. A number of Buddha’s
from the Hinhayana and Mahayana traditions were set out to compare the form, so
that Sri Lanka and Tibet and Laos and Hangzhou Buddhas all seemed related. A wall of Arabic tiles reminded us all
of the tiles in the Church in Arraiolos, or the tile murals of the Porto Train
Station.
Somehow it all felt very long-since-post-crack-violence Brooklyn
in a warm and convincing way. I
imagined, perhaps still musing about what had been carved in the façade of the
building since the beginning, for the duration, and of all the criticism that those
figures must have engendered that this museum, more than most, goes out of its
way to drive for something like artistic cultural relativism. This is everyone’s museum and
everyone’s tradition, within reason, will find itself reflected here. And perhaps because the pressure here would
be some of the most intensely well organized and varied, the reaction here on
the first floor, felt nuanced, and refined, rather than forced, or faddish.
Up on the Fourth Floor was the first of two floor halls
dedicated to Ai Wei Wei’s work. We
share a city, but his work, other than the Bird’s Nest I certainly haven’t had
a chance to see featured back in Beijing.
I know of his story. I
think he and I shared some time together in the Lower East Side as well, back
in the late eighties when Tompkins Square Park was reclaimed briefly by the
homeless and squatters. And I
showed my daughter’s some of his photos from that time and tried to
explain.
An entire room opened up to a long carpeting of iron
bars. On the wall were columns of
small Chinese typeface. A
recording played aloud with various voices reading Chinese names aloud, over
and over. Over to the side we read
and discerned that this was a tribute to the thousands of children who died in
the Sichuan earthquake in 2008.
The bars were from the mangled buildings and the names were, of course,
the names of each and every child who’d been killed. It occurred to me that while I’d read about this disaster
I’d never actually confronted it, nor certainly seen it memorialized.
In the back they had a video of parents speaking about the
loss of their children and the frustrated attempts to challenge investigators, complete
with English subtitles. I brought
my girls inside to watch. Standing
there with those two, who attend Chinese schools, I got choked up and began to
cry. No Chinese leader can prevent
earthquakes, any more than any other country’s leader can. And developing nations have poor
constructions and they fall apart easier when disaster strikes. But to the victor go the spoils. If the CCP insists that it is the only
Party, and above the law, then all the fault for corrupt violations of
construction code, and quick cover ups and hasty burials must lie with them as
well.
Why is this exhibit in Brooklyn? I asked my kids.
Why can’t this be shown in Beijing, where the nation should be allowed
to talk about it out loud? Over
and over again the Chinese people endure this denial of catharsis. Ai Wei Wei is right, and brave to
demand memorialization. Poor
instincts on contemporary China’s need for catharsis may just catch the CCP
off-guard one day. Middle class
China may well demand more reckoning for all that’s 刻骨铭心[2].
Lonnie Smith is on the ear buds here and I’m on-guard,
paying attention. Now that’s a
name I’ve known. I don’t know if I
ever purchased one of his albums but I think I came up with some of his work in
a Napster-like trawl, years ago and they sat there in a general jazz section
appearing in year after year of iPod mixes. But when you secure music that way it isn’t properly curated
and you have no idea what album it originally appeared on or what year it
happened or, in today’s case, most importantly, who was playing on it. Now I’ve been feasting on what must, by
now, be at least ten jazz organists over the last few weeks, but that is not
how I made my way, today, to Mr. Smith’s 1969 album “Turning Point,” and his
playing isn’t the reason I’m down here in the basement of Grand Central Station
shaking my head like a teeny bopper on Wonderama with Bob McAllister. Rather, it’s the drummer.
Once again, we are following the thread of just about
everybody that Idris Muhammad played with in the late sixties and early
seventies. The opening tune is
called “Seesaw” and it is just a mighty pleasure to listen to the delay in time
from when Mr. Muhammad hits the high-hat till the point he brings down his foot
on the pedal to crash and kill the sound, while filling the space just the
right second later, with a tap to the ride, again and again. He isn’t commanding on every session he
appears upon, as I’ve stated before.
But for this one, he damn sure is.
The organists like Smith or Reuben Williams seem to know to give the
gent room to spread it all out.
Now, Mr. Smith is, I’m happy to report, alive and well. Born in Lackawanna, New York in
1942. I’m not on line, so if you
know where Lackawanna, New York is please let me know. We can safely ascertain that name
wasn’t derived from a hamlet in Yorkshire, somewhere, and that the Lackawanna
were probably on cussing terms or squash-exchange terms with the Manahatta and
the Lenni-Lenape.[3] Lonnie’s still alive. Dig. So we ought to go out and see him, if we can. The picture they have of the man on his
Wiki page makes him look like ‘Ras the Destroyer’ from “The Invisible Man,” but
people have to work harder in their waning years to look hip enough to invoke
danger. And to my eyes he’s got a
friendly suggestion behind it all.
He came up playing with George Benson and presumably that
was the connection that lead one of the two gentlemen to meet Mr. Muhammad who
was on both their sessions in 1969.
And he since played with dozens of jazz profundities as well as soul
faves like Dionne Warwick and Ester Philips, which suggests there’s some more
discovery to be done of old material heard new. We’ll keep our eyes out for where it is exactly Mr. Smith is
playing, when he sees fit to play these day. Unclear whether it will be Ai Wei Wei or Lonnie Smith who
receives the first invite to incite something permissible in Beijing.
Another earthquake today in Yunnan. “Only” two hundred people or so were
killed. Thoughts go out to the
families. Let’s hope the CCP has
learned something in the last six years.
[1] The ancient
Greek poet of Thebes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pindar
[2] kègǔmíngxīn: lit.
carved in bones and engraved in the heart (idiom) / fig. etched in one's memory
/ unforgettable
[3] It would
have been a long trek to have gone from the Hudson Valley to Lake Erie without
any Canal. Lackawanna is near Buffalo.
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