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| The Ruins at Uxmal: The so-called "Governor's Palace" is one of the finest examples of large-scale Puuc Hills Mayan architecture. |
Published 1/8/15
Museum Review:
Uxmal Archaeological Zone, Yucatan Mexico
I am a huge fan of ancient civilizations- not in a crazy, ufo, alien kind of way, but just in the things we can learn from their rise and fall. The more the merrier is what I say and if I have a legitimate shot to go and see those places I'm going to take it. Uxmal is probably the number two Mayan site, behind Chichen Itza. Both sites benefit from being accessible by modern transportation and fairly near standard tourist destinations (Cancun, Tulum and Merida.) The so called Classic Maya period happened further south, mostly in Guatemala and Belize and those sites are less served by the modern travel-industrial complex.
Chichen Itza is generally regarded to be more sophisticated, though with an obvious central Mexican influence. Uxmal represents an extension of the purer Mayan "Puuc" style, and seemingly represents a continuance of the Classic period groups into the 10th century. Uxmal is very much a developed, modern tourist attraction, with a hefty-ish admission fee, and bus loads of tourists being brought to the entrance. After a hellish, unshaded wait in a line that took us the better part of an hour and can obviously take longer at busier times, the actual park was relatively uncrowded.
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| The Nunnery/Quadrangle is the third of the major attractions at the Uxmal archaeological zone. |
The major sites at Uxmal are "The Nunnery"/Quadrangle, the pyramid of the soothsayer/magician, the governor's palace, a secondary temple, and a ball court. They are in a well preserved, shaded landscape. Compared to the rough undergrowth that permeates the countryside for a hundred miles in all directions, the Uxmal park is a comparative garden of Eden. It is also waaaaayyyy out in the middle of nowhere. Uxmal is about an hour and a half from the cruise-ship port of Progreso and an hour from Merida. Merida is the standard point of departure for a visit to Uxmal, it is about an hour south of the city on decently maintained but largely empty roads. We visited from our hotel- the Hacienda Santa Rosa, a Starwood Luxury Collection resort that is midway between Merida and Campeche.
If you are going, I would very much recommend driving yourself vs taking one of the hellish looking giant tour buses. The crowd there over New Years was very much a mix of Mexican and American/Europeans- almost no "Asian" tourists- whether Chinese, Japanese or Korean. Americans seemed to predominate among the non-Mexican tourists. You have to buy not one but two tickets for entrance- one from the local state and one from the feds- the ticket booths are next to one another- one person working each booth. It almost boggles the mind that the government would only have one ticket taker working, but it does manage the flow into the park quite nicely so that there is no rush of people in or out.
The story of Mayan architecture is the gradual usurpation of native Mayan techniques with a fusion architecture that integrated later Central Mexican influences picked up as the Mayans migrated north after the Classic period disruption. Thus, Uxmal is a late example of the "Classic" style, and the standard cluster of ruins doesn't feature any Toltec influence. Despite the lines and tour buses, Uxmal is a must for anyone visiting Merida or Campeche.
by C. Bruce Hunter
Second edition, published 1986
Personally, I think the classic and post-classic (pre-Spanish) Maya are a hot topic in world prehistory/archaeology. Mostly because of the way that their "rise and fall" coincided with variations in climate and rainfall. Also though there are interesting questions about the relationships between the different cultures in Mexico- the Maya interaction with the Olmecs, Toltecs and Aztecs. Finally, there are the issues surrounding the local elites and their interactions with the "commoners." You can't understand any of these subjects simply by looking at large stone ruins, but the ruins do give a certain amount of perspective of all three major issues of interest.
The physical description of Mayan ruins has lagged beyond the wider trends in historiography that guide the questions outlined above. I found this particular book in the San Diego Central Library, where I just looked up the pre-Columbian civilizations subject in the History section. First published in the mid 1970s, the 2nd edition was published in 1986, and the San Diego Library didn't buy it until the mid 1990s. I suppose that would make it the pre eminent work in the area, but I would like to read something that integrates more recent advances in Maya studies.
That said, the ability of the author to give a coherent viewpoint and discuss all the major sites with the goal of "servicing" a prospective visitor to the area is not to be missed. A Guide to Ancient Maya Ruins is probably a classic because of the ability to give a touristy gloss to not-overly academic source materials. The tips I would pass along from my reading- this is after actually going to Uxmal on a recent trip but passing on other sites; the tip is that you should just hit the most accessible ruin you can and then read about the others. There's nothing so glorious in the mix that you would simply plan a trip around it, except possibly Ticul/Tical in the Guatemalan rain forest.
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| The distinctive "stadium" design of the Gran Museo Del Mundo Maya De Merida is somewhat deceptive, the museum is in the low slung rectangular building pictured with the lettering on it. |
Published 1/7/15
Gran Museo de Mundo May
Merida, Mexico
visited January 2015
I very much doubt I would have agreed to visit Merida Mexico were it not for the Mayan sites. Ultimately, I went to only one ruin site during my week long stay, but I made sure to catch the newish Gran Museo de Mundo Maya (Or Grand Museum of the Mayan World for english speakers.) The opening of the Gran Museo de Mundo Maya had the effect of gutting the older Museum of Anthropology, which is harmed in a converted mansion closer into town. The Gran Museo de Mundo Maya is located at the northern periphery of Merida, and a visitor is best advised to either arrange for round trip or simply drive- walking there from the center of town is simply impossible for a variety of good reasons ranging from heat to the traffic lay out.
The Gran Museo de Mundo Maya is an effective, if basic, look at the entire Mayan World with a bias towards someone looking for the most basic information about them. The long run-way design of the permanent collection starts in the present day and works backwards. The contemporary Mayan stuff is Museum 101- basically lots of exposition and few artifacts, but as the Museum moves back in time the level of detail improves. The artifacts are drawn from the Yucatan area- this is a regional museum, and you shouldn't expect to see any of the show stopping classic era Mayan artifacts that you would see in Guatemala or other provinces of Mexico. There are several detailed films that are only in Spanish, so bear that in mind. The wall plaques are tri lingual- Spanish, English and Mayan.
Another note of caution for potential visitors- the only on site food and drink is literally the movie theater snack bar located on the mezzanine of the bird's nest building. Good luck with that! Do not expect to eat there at a cute museum cafe!
Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán and Incidents of Travel in Yucatán,
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| Mayan stela drawn by Frederick Catherwood. For the audience of that time period (1840s) these images essentially demonstrated the existence of a hithero "unknown" people, despite the fact that the natives of the area spoke Mayan. When I was staying out in the jungle, I actually picked up a copy of the book itself, but unless you are deeply, deeply interested in mid 19th century/Victorian travel narratives I'm afraid I can't recommend the text to read. But the pictures- those are worth looking up. When you are talking about the Maya, you talking about a people who were still fighting Spanish/Indian wars INTO the 20th century, and yet in 1841 literally no one in America had heard of them. Published 1/18/15 Empire's Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day by Carrie Gibson Atlantic Monthly Press Published November 11th, 2014 (BUY IT) Currently occupying the number one slot in the Amazon category for Caribbean & West Indies History category, Empire's Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day is a genuine hit in the category, and since Gibson is a sober, responsible scholar I'd feel remiss in doing anything other than giving it a hardy thumbs up. I think probably the acknowledged touch stone for any scholarship, popular or scholarly (Empire's Crossroads is a kind of academic/popular hybrid title) on the Caribbean is Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History by Daniel Mintz, Penguin Press (Non Classics Division) p. 1986. I read Sweetness and Power back in 2010. Sweetness and Power isn't strictly speaking, a Caribbean history title, but rather a history of sugar. But the history of sugar is the history of the Caribbean, so sugar, and Sweetness and Power are the foundational work for any understanding of the history of the Caribbean. To her distinct credit, Gibson acknowledges the influence of Sweetness and Power but to her credit she tries to build on the approach and tells the story up the present day more or less. Some of the negative reviewers on Amazon have mentioned a "liberal bias" but you'd have to be a real tea party wacko to NOT see the Caribbean as a case study for many of the colonial and economic problems the face the developing world. In a sense, the Caribbean is THE location to look at the "problems of globalization." Any writer who tries to ignore the negative side of American and Western involvement in shaping the present of the Caribbean is missing out on a major, major theme of Caribbean history. It would have been nice to see a fuller treatment of Central America and the Yucatan of Mexico, which has MANY Caribbean features in terms of economy, culture and climate and is ignored entirely. The narrative structure is strongest in the colonial period, after the fracture between independent and colonial populations makes Caribbean wide generalizations difficult. Published 2/2/15 One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (History of the American West) by Collin G. Calloway University of Nebraska Press p. 2003 One Vast Winter Count is an able synthesis of a half-century of good work in the field of "Western American history." This field has been marked indelibly by three unmistakable trends: ignorance of Native Americans, "discovery" of Native American history and integration of Native and European perspectives in narrating the history of the West. The "Native American West" of the title refers not just to the greater Western United States, but also includes practically all of the United States east of the original thirteen colonies including the Midwest and and South East and what would today be Northern Mexico. The major development in this field between 1950 and today is a greater understanding of Native archeological sites like the Chaco Canyon complex, Cahokia/Monks mound outside of St. Louis, and other "mound" sites of the present South Eastern United States. A thorough understanding of these locations and their representation of a complex Native civilization happening during the European Middle Ages was retarded by some of the trends listed above- notably an insistence that the archeological sites in North America were made by some culture OTHER than the ancestors of the tribes present after European contact. In one sense, it's true, because the experience of the Spanish traipsing through the Southern United States in the sixteenth century was itself enough to set off an epidemic of disease and warfare among the cultures who were themselves three centuries removed from the large civilizations of Cahokia and the South Eastern United States. Thus, by the time the 17th century rolled around, the European powers were playing on a field that had already been drastically altered. Calloway presents a coherent narrative of the time between the "fall" of the great culture complexes of the Native American Middle Ages and the gradual integration of the European experience- it happened over centuries, to rebut many of the stereotypes and misunderstanding about the contact between tribes and Europeans. American education embraces the losers without acknowledging that there were Native winners who thrived and expanded for centuries after European contact. The final subjugation of Native tribes was largely confined to the very end of the 19th century- an almost half millennium period between first contact and final "victory." This rewriting of the typical "conquest" narrative of books like Diamond's best seller, Guns, Germs and Steel is loooonngggggg over due, and someone seeking a coherent synthesis in recent developments in the field of pre-European North American history would be well obliged to check out One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark (History of the American West) by Collin G. Calloway. |
Story of a Prostitute (1965)
by Seijun Suzuki
Criterion Collection #299
This will be 40th post labeled "Japanese Literature" on this blog. I think maybe 2 of those posts are about books, so I might as well change the label to "Japanese film." Out of all the directors I've watched, Seijun Suzuki is probably my favorite on the strength of his anarchic b-movies like Branded to Kill (1967.) I suppose, at some level, it is possible to connect the somber pre-World War II melodrama Story of a Prostitute with the crazy crime noir Suzuki would turn out later in the 1960s, but that level is not the films have a similar feel, style or look.
Story of Prostitute is about a volunteer(!) comfort woman serving in Manchuria (northern China) during the Japanese invasion of that area, prior to the start of our World War II. Comfort Women are still in the news in the twentieth century, but only in the form of Korean women who were forced to serve as comfort women later during the period of Japanese military aggression in the mid 20th century. Harumi(played by Yomiko Nogawa) is a Japanese prostitute who signs up as a comfort woman to spite a wealthy client who had falsely promised marriage.
Serving in the occupied territory of Manchuria, she is torn between the overbearing Lieutenant Narita (winningly portrayed by Isao Tamagawa) and the bookish Private Mikami (Tamio Kimachi.) Anyone who has watched any of the Japanese films involving prostitutes and their lives in various periods of Japanese history will not be surprised to learn that it does not end well for Harumi.
The source material- a Tajiro Tamura was a critical look at Japanese culture as well as a tragic love story, but its easy to see how the critical perspective on Japanese military culture might be missed or "lost in the translation" between cultures. The aggressive pre-war Japanese military culture stands somewhere between the way the English feel about their empire and the way the Germans feel about the Nazis- a complicated attitude to be sure.
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| Albert Finney as British Counsel Geoffrey Firman in the John Huston directed movie version of Under the Volcano by Malcom Lowry. |
Movie Review: Under the Volcano (1984) d. John Huston (2/5/15)
Movie Review:
Under the Volcano (1984)
d. John Huston
Criterion Collection #410
I read a recently published paperback version of the Malcolm Lowry novel while on vacation in Mexico over the holiday. I was taken, as indeed, are many who read the book, by the bleak portrayal of "self-destructive" British Consul Geoffrey Firman. He is played in the movie by Albert Finney, who received an Oscar nomination for best lead actor. Finney's visceral portrayal of a man who is quickly drinking himself to death brings a certain energy to the proceedings that is shocking even if you have recently read the book.
This performance makes up for the tampering with a plot that is very much concerned with rhythm and structure. Huston goes so far to as change the ending of the book, where both Firman and his wife die in separate events around the same time, to simply having Firman die and the wife cradle him in her arms as he expires from the gun shots he suffers at the hands of Mexican fascist. The "all in one day" format is just as suitable for the movie as it is for the book, and it left me wondering why people said that Under the Volcano was an "unfilmable" book. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon- those are examples of really unfilmable books. Under the Volcano takes place in 24 hours and has three main characters. You could make it into a play.
Show Review: Is Kate Tempest the next Eminem? @ The Echo Los Angeles, CA. (3/3/15)
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| Kate Tempest is a 29 year old poet/playwright/musician who made her US musical debut at the Echo last night (March 14th, 2015) |
Show Review:
Is Kate Tempest the next Eminem?
@ The Echo Los Angeles, CA.
The week before SXSW is the traditional opening of the season for live music in Southern California. Bands either start their journey in Los Angeles (many foreign bands) and play here before heading there, or they continue on from Austin to play Southern California after the festival (many bands from the East Coast and Midwest.) After that happens, the pre-Coachella period begins, where many of the non Coachella artists start touring the West Coast, then Coachella, then post-Coachella, etc, on through the summer.
For me, this period is typically one of reengagement with music and live music in particular. Several years running I've hardly done a music related thing between November and mid March, and the traditional period of detachment was brought in to focus by my decision to leave Zoo Music. I'm currently talking to Alex of Dirty Beaches about working with him on something, but who knows really. If my relationship with music is meant to be a hobby, then I've had my fun and why not just end it. If it's something that I can grow into a separate profession alongside lawyering, I'm nowhere close, so either way no rush and why worry.
It was with those thoughts in mind that I agreed to attend the Kate Tempest show at the Echo last night. She was sold to me as a published poet and playwright from London who also did music. Doing no prior research, I expected a singer songwriter type. My first inkling that I was hugely mistaken was when my companion, a music industry professional, Id'ed Steve Berman AKA the man who signed Eminem to Interscope and as of 2012 the 96th most powerful man in the music industry according to Billboard Magazine. (BILLBOARD POWER 100: STEVE BERMAN) He was escorted by a half dozen healthy looking music industry bros and as I sat there on the patio of the echo watching the gaggle of them kill time waiting for the headlining set to start, I joked, "What, does Steve Berman think that Kate Tempest can be the next Eminem?"
Turns out the Eminem comparison is not wholly unmerited, and certainly more appropriate than other white, English, female artists who were influenced by hip hop(who will not be named here, you know who I'm talking about.) Kate Tempest fairly commanded the stage in a way that you would expect from an artist who was not making her US musical debut that very night. She had a great report with the audience and the stage show, which featured a backing female singer, a guy on drums and a producer with backing tracks, was far beyond what I normally see at Echo level venues.
The idea of Kate Tempest being signed to Interscope is not particularly far fetched. She is managed by ATC Management. ATC Management also manages Twin Shadow. In November, Twin Shadow announced that he was leaving 4AD (after two records) for Universal. 4AD is not known for giving artists two record deals, so Universal either bought him out OR he had negotiated a two record deal with 4AD.
I'm not sure what Steve Berman thought of the act. I left about six or seven songs in and it looked like Berman and his Interscope bros had beat us to the exit. Personally, I found Tempest revelatory- a voice with authenticity and a well worked out, positive message. Although it is clear that she developed her delivery in the context of the poetry slam circuit- not really something I'm into- the sophisticated production of her backing tracks added an element of interest for people like myself who have little interest in poetry slams.
I frankly shudder to think what a major label would do with Tempest- I can imagine her debut single being a duet with Iggy Azalea- I mean that is how the major label system works. But I wish her all the best, and she seems like she has a clear vision for herself and her art. Kate Tempest can take care of herself is what I'm saying, and if she wants to sign to Interscope, and Interscope wants to sign her- or some other major label- more power to the both of them. The world needs more artists like Kate Tempest.
And if you are shopping for SXSW musts- she is most certainly a must watch to believe. The recordings don't even give you a sense of her charisma on stage.
Show Review; Marina and the Diamonds, Christine and the Queens @ The North Park Observatory (FKA North Park Theater) (4/19/15)
Show Review:
Marina and the Diamonds, Christine and the Queens
@ The North Park Observatory (FKA North Park Theater)
I confess that the sale of the North Park Theater to the people who own the Observatory in Orange County took me by surprise. I hadn't even been to it before it changed hands. My impression is that they had a stable ownership group and a booking agreement with Tim Mays. Under those circumstances, why sell? Of course the answer is likely simple and obvious, "Money." Judging from some of the high profile gigs planned in the next several months: Passion Pit! Best Coast! Decemberists! they either kept the already booked shows or are able to get the same level of acts as Tim Mays.
I found the oppressive security impossible to ignore. I try to eschew the whiny, nit picky type complaints that are the bane of on line reviews, but the sold out Marina and the Diamonds show was populated entirely by younger women under 21, LGBT's and people who were both under 21 AND LGBT. And yet, I was at the show with someone who had a ball point pen confiscated at the door. I counted something like 20 separate security guards working the crowd. The only explanation I received was that the permit was up for modification as part of the balcony being re opened, so the venue wanted everything to go smoothly.
And you know, I understand when security guards cop attitudes WHEN THE SITUATION REQUIRES it, but part of security is customer service, and the unsmiling, demeanor of the staff was totally out of synch with the warm, open style of the music and the fans. I felt as if the venue was disrespecting the fans, honestly, like no one had given a thought what to expect from the nights audience.
So there were four of us there, we were there to see openers Christine and the Queens and then Marina's make up artist and her producer boyfriend who has played in Deftones and is in the band Crosses with Chino for Deftones. I felt like he and I were the only two straight guys in the place who weren't there with our daughters. My entire preparation for the show consisted of reading Pitchfork's decent review of the new Marina and the Diamonds LP.
Arriving at the venue fifteen minutes before Christine and the Queens took the stage, I was literally the only man in the gender segregated frisking line- which is fucking ridiculous- particularly considering the show. The main reason we were there to see Christine and the Queens is that she has sold upwards of 400,000 records in Europe, and I guess the idea is that she's looking to expand here audience in the United States, perhaps with the assistance of a US based representative. I don't know the details, because I'm not privy to the conversation, but the idea that this woman has sold 400,000 records in Europe intrigued me to say the least.
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| Christine of Christine and the Queens |
Christine and the Queens performed as a three piece, with songs that I understand had been translated from French into English for the occasion. Unlike Marina, Christine had not played Coachella, but she had been in Austin for SXSW. She performed with two musicians and two back up dancers, who I was told had been flown over from France as "part of the touring party." Watching Christine open for Marina at the North Park Observatory was something like seeing Kasabian headline the San Diego outpost of the House of Blues last year; the experience of seeing an Artist used to playing for thousands play for hundreds.
I was told that Marina had ordered her fans, via social media, to appreciate Christine and the reception she received was so unlike that normally accorded to opening acts that I thought people in the audience might have thought she was Marina (only an ignorant rube would have thought that, but there you are.) Christine moved effortlessly between high energy dance pop and slower confessional dance pop. The introduction of the two hunky French-African male dancers lent some real pop star energy to the performance. Christine also sported a major league level stage prance, she was like a little elf capering back and forth across the stage.
I could see Christine garnering a larger audience state side, but my opinion is that it would have to be on the back of a novelty radio hit, which would have to cross over between pop stations and adult contemporary. She is fun though, and worth checking out if you have the opportunity.
In between sets the conversation centered around Marina and her rise to prominence, with a general agreement that she had been able to motivate a legion of fans via savvy (and personal) use of social media. Marina is now on LP 3 (FROOT is the name of the new record.) She followed a path that has become very familiar in the internet era: Emerging from Welsh obscurity via the internet, releasing a well regarded debut LP in 2010 (on a major label), releasing a poorly regarded second LP in 2012 where she tried to be both Katy Perry and Lana Del Rey at once (and failing), followed by a "return to roots" 3rd LP (success/failure yet to be seen.)
There is a no denying that she has a legion of devoted fans in the right demographic for pop superstardom, but after reviewing her career trajectory and her label affiliations, I would suspect that the issue is that there are not enough of said fans, and that Marina is what you call a "cult artist" existing somewhere in the middle of a Venn diagram where one circle is "pop stardom" and the other is "critical approval" and not really maxing out on either side.
If you look at the top "similar artists" for Marina and the Diamonds on Last FM (Charli XCX, Natalia Kills, Azelia Banks, Lana Del Rey, Tove Lo and Sky Ferreria) you get an idea of both the challenge and potential for Marina in the marketplace for indie/pop divas. Charli XCX, Lana Del Rey and Tove Lo have radio hits AND major label support. Natalia Kills, Azelia Banks and Sky Ferreria have an outsized grasp on the collective mind set of the internet.
In that regard, the failure of her 2012 LP, with tracks produced by hit makers like Diplo and Dr. Luke, looks like a potentially career defining grasping for, and failing to grasp, the proverbial brass ring. At the same time, the decent review for the new LP from Pitchfork seems to indicate the potential for some kind lasting presence. The Coachella slot and rabid fans last night would seem to weigh in her favor. My questions after the set last night is what, exactly is going on with radio promotion for whatever single they've picked off the new record? Marina needs a radio hit or bust. This is her third record. Rabid teen fan girls and the LGBT crowd are a great start, but I'm positive she sees herself more in line with Charli, Lana and Tove Lo then with Azalia and Sky.
My favorite songs in her set last night were those from that second LP, the fact that I was entirely unaware of this record's existence until last night is strong evidence that it was an abject failure in terms of breaking her to radio, because if any of her songs had made it, I would have heard them on the radio, because I listen to Top 40 radio all the time. Why do two songs with Dr. Luke if you can't get either played on the radio?
I also note that her t shirts were 30 bucks, and that she likely signed a 360 deal with Atlantic, so if you were to ask, "What are the real ramifications of signing a 360 deal with a major label?" a realistic answer would be, "Your concert t shirts will be thirty dollars and up." Perhaps what is most curious about Marina is that she appears to have built an indie type audience from within the major label system, and perhaps it could be said that her ultimate success or failure will speak to the ability of the music industry to adapt and exploit the newest internet generated, self formed, pop starts.
And all you Marina fans from last night! You are beautiful! Don't let anyone tell you that you aren't amazing!
Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History(2015)
by Bernard Bailyn
Published January 20th, 2015 by Knopf
(AMAZON PRODUCT PAGE)
Bernard Bailyn is a heavy United States historian specializing in trans-Atlantic history focusing on the British Empire and the early United States. Over a lifetime of writing and teaching, his is one of a small number of really first rate global-level academic historians who can also write to a broad, popular audience. Among his major hits are The Ideology of the American Revolution (1992), a kind of synthesis of state of the art academic history with some of the revisionist themes in popular history that sprang to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s; he also wrote The Peopling of British North America (1988), which the standard undergraduate level treatment of that particular subject, and for over a period of 30 years at this point.
The general theme of his work is to emphasize the connections between the Empire of Great Britain and the colonies that would become the United States. Thus, this book of essays- many of which seemed to have been adapted directly from speeches given on various august occasions, orbits around the ideas he has explored over a lifetime and other areas: there are repeated mentions of subjects like Australian and Caribbean history. The non-speech essays seem to be either articles or introductions written for various special events within the field of history.
His thoughts are illuminating if you are interested in historiography (the study of the study of history) in a general sense- although endnotes are included, everything is pitched at a general level and the book itself is under 300 pages.
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| This is a map of Europe after the Congress of Vienna. You can see much of Poland belonging to Russia |
Published 4/6/15
by Brian E. Vick
Published October 13th, 2014
Harvard University Press
(AMAZON)
I spent most of December and January listening to the very lengthy free audiobook version of War & Peace. A plausible sub-title for War & Peace would be "The Invasion of Russia in 1812 by Napoleon, told from the Russian point of view." The Congress of Vienna is what happened after the end of War & Peace, which ends with Napoleon's disastrous and eventually career ending loss to the "Winter of Russia." Napoleon left a number of lingering issues in his conquered territories. He had rearranged borderlines in Germany and Eastern Europe. Significantly, the issues resolved in the Congress of Vienna would be revisited as part of the World Wars of the twentieth century. I'm talking about "How to divide up Poland" and "What to do about German principalities that had a Protestant population and a Catholic monarch."
The major players were the Russian and Austrian Emperors, with the Russians in the stronger position. Also important were the Prussians. Less so were the English, the Danes/Swedes/Norwegians and the post-Napoleon French. The classic historical take on the Congress of Vienna is through the prism of early 19th century international European diplomacy. You can take the machinations more or less at face value and use it to explain subsequent developments in 19th century European history, or you can critique the events using any number of critical appartati developed by 20th century academics.
The significance of The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon is that he moves beyond the "power politics" mode of analysis to include interesting discussions of the salon scene of Vienna and the role of "small world" Networks in the formulation of consensus within the Congress. Vick persuasively argues that the salon world, largely run by and for women, was a crucial ingredient of the international negotiations. He argues that the salon world represents an early or intermediary step on the role the crucial "Public Sphere" of discussion, a term coined by German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, and that the salons provided an "off stage" where participants could converse more or less freely.
Vick also devotes sections to a discussion of international human rights issues like the treatment of Jews and the international slave trade. This emphasis helps dissipate the received idea that the Congress of Vienna was populated by a bunch of self obsessed European autocrats. Vick's introduction of recent trends in history to a staid subject like the Congress of Vienna is a welcome one, the kind of once in twenty years type of event that is suited to this event.
Show Review: Stagecoach 2015 (4/28/15)
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| Stagecoach: Jean shorts are not just for women!!! |
Show Review
Stagecoach 2015
I don't know that I necessarily outgrew Coachella, but certainly at this point I wouldn't go unless I was either with a performing artist or the +1 of someone working with a performing artist. There are a couple of reasons for that: First, the "Coachella vibe" is the functional equivalent of the "SXSW vibe": basics, super fans and a holes. Second, the idea of facing Coachella without Artist level wristbands is simply unbearable. The so-called "VIP" section during Coachella is about as VIP level experience as sitting in the "Terrace Level" seats at a baseball game.
If you can get over the fact that Stagecoach is primarily (but not entirely) Country music, it is a superior festival experience to Coachella on every level. Primarily the vibe is better. You can't...go to Stagecoach and have a bad time, even if, like me, you basically tolerate country music because your girlfriend listens to it. There is a lot of depth to the country music experience but as a genre it is also very focused on HAVING A GOOD TIME, and that coincides exactly with the category of "good festival vibes" that the Stagecoach experience exemplifies.
Instead of the five stage set up of Coachella proper, Stagecoach continued with a three stage approach- the main stage is roughly in the position of the second stage and then two tents in a row next to the main stage ("The Toyota Mane Stage") and a Honkey Tonk tent in the terrace area. Unlike Coachella, which continues an EDM tent through and even after the main stage headliner, Stagecoach is very much centered on the head lining performance, and one of the three tents is basically an afterthought with a half schedule.
At Stagecoach, the Main stage/Mane stage is straight up Top 40 country and the second stage this year had a strong "outlaw rock" vibe. The third stage was a mixture of bluegrass style artists and a couple of not-ready-for-main-stage type up and coming artists. The people watching is...exquisite. Words can not express the human circus that is Stagecoach. If you have any interest in the idea of "America" (or as an English friend ask ed on Friday afternoon, "Is it...pronounced MER ica...now?") you will find grist for the thought mill anywhere you go. Especially if you are the sort of person that does not attend NASCAR races or live in a red state, the atmosphere is simply breathtaking. There are elements of the audience that are perhaps troubling- the woman in a confederate flag hat or man wearing a t shirt with a homophobic sentiment, but if you are the sort of person bothered by enthusiastically expressed bigoted sentiments you shouldn't be at a music festival in the first place.
The first artist I saw on Friday was the Handsome Family who are best known for their theme song to the HBO tv show True Detective. Hailing from Albuquerque New Mexico, Handsome Family have been around for some time. They had fiddles and boy/girl vocals. It was a downbeat sensibility, wayyyy out of tune with the sunny Top 40 approved vibes of the Mane stage artists.
An early Friday highlight was Pitchfork approved psych-country artist Sturgill Simpson. His 2014 record Metamodern Sounds in Country Music is a must even if you don't listen to country music. Generally speaking he combines trad country with rock and psychologically astute lyrics. He also puts on a solid live show and he's one of those artists who could easily play Coachella proper. I think probably the question is whether Simpson either can or wants to make a play for the main stream country world, radio, stadium tours opening for mainline country artists. Certainly the path for any "indie" Country artist is murkier than that for a rock act.
Parker Milsap was another Friday afternoon treat. Parker seems like one of those mainline country acts with tons of upside but maybe still looking for that first breakthrough hit- for himself or another artist, that will bring him to the main stage audience. As it stands, he's young, he's cute and talented. Unlike your up and coming rock acts, a hit is not a question of if but when.
My personal headliners for Friday were Merle Haggard and Kacey Musgraves. Haggard was the headliner on the second stage, and Musgraves was the second opener for headliner Tim McGraw (the execrable Jack Owen was the opener for McGraw)
Merle Haggard played a typical heritage/legacy rock set, with a skilled set of back up musicians and soloist backing his singing and playing. I've seen a variety of this type of sets from a range of musicians- Prince stands out, but it is a tried and true formula whether you want to stretch a 60 minute headlining set to three hours OR get through a 60 minute set with a minimum of personal effort.
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| Kacey Musgraves |
Kacey Musgraves was the big winner for the weekend. She is a hit songwriter for both herself and others. At 26 she is on the young side for country stardom, and she projects a cute image that puts her into the same general celebrity-music category as indie rockers like Jenny Lewis and Bethany Best Coast. I mean...she's bigger than both of those artists. On Friday she sported an American Flag themed fringe dressed and oversize sunglasses that were very much in tune with the looks being sported in the audience. She hails from the same East Texas area as Saturday night headliner and it is Lambert who recorded her biggest hit, Mama's Broken Heart.
Musgraves songs are heavy on the "mind your own business" and "don't judge me." Small towns and trailer parks are front in center. Her songs are practiced beyond her years, and she cannily espouses a small town viewpoint while practicing an almost international country style. Watching her, I wondered if a break through to top 40 was in the cards for her. She certainly has the time and the songwriting chops, but perhaps she is more concerned with establishing herself in the country world.
I was utterly charmed, and will probably be spending some time in the immediate future listening to her major label debut, Same Trailer/Different Park.
Saturday was Nashville television show day, with performances from Will "the Gay Cowboy" Lexington (Chris Carmack), Clare Bowen (Scarlett O'Connor) and Deacon Claybourne(Chip Esten). If you don't watch Nashville the television show I do recommend it. The level of music industry insideriness is high (Pitchfork featured in a recent episode) and the actors are enjoyable. All three actors were backed by the same band of Nashville studio pros, and that consistency made the entire exercise a believable musical performance instead of a public relations stunt.
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| Clare Bowen, Scarlett O'Connor from ABC's Nashville, after her performance |
Because my girlfriend is a HUGE Nashville television show fan we stood on stage to watch, and I was able to snap some good candid pictures.
I was impressed by the size of the Audience. I expected they would be in the smallest tent, but they were on the second stage and they half filled it. The three performed with different approaches to their fictional character. Chris Carmack, who I surmise is not a gay Cowboy in real life, introduced each song as being "About Will, the character I play on Nashville...", Clare Bowen didn't talk at all, probably because she is Australian and didn't feel like "playing" Scarlett, outside of dressing like the character from the show and performing "her" songs.
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| Chris Esten, Deacon Claybourne, from ABC's television show Nashville snaps a "selfie" with a fan backstage after his set. |
Chris Esten anchored the three performances and he seemed to be the most enthusiastic about his performance. I guess he has aspirations to music outside of his acting career and you could really tell. He positively exuded enthusiasm for the performance. If you are a fan of the show, you wouldn't be disappointed by going to one of the concerts they are putting on in various locations this year- it was a fun set.
After the Nashville television show set there was a gap until ZZ Top, and I sat out in the terrace and listened to Greg Allman drift over. Saturday was the bbq competition, so that was a situation where you could buy a sample- like one rib, or a small tasting cup of pulled pork for 3 dollars each. It was welcome change from the standard fare, and this year I went over early enough so that it wasn't sold out, something that happens between 4 and five in the afternoon- all ten vendors sell out.
ZZ Top was a strong second stage headliner. There was an obvious overlap between the Mane Stage Stagecoach audience and people who like ZZ Top. ZZ Top will always be affiliated with their 80s radio hits, but they have both a pre and post hit history so it isn't quite a situation where they mixed a couple recognizable hits with music no one cares about. I was surprised to see how much recognition there was in the audience for the deeper cuts. Last year, the second stage vibe at Stagecoach was very much "jam band" with the Nitty Gritty Dirt band being the most memorable representative.
I made my way over to the Toyota Mane Stage in time to see Dierks Bentley do his big hit, Drunk on a Plane, which is a sad song about a man who gets dumped by his fiancé at the altar and is forced to take a solo honeymoon. That song has been such a big hit for him that I wonder how often that scenario actually happened, or maybe it is some kind of common fantasy among country loving men or women.
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| Miranda Lambert performed at Stagecoach 2015 in leather pants with a Loretta Lynn t shirt. |
Unfortunately, Miranda Lambert disappointed as the Saturday night headliner. That is a pity because going in she was my must see artist for the entire weekend. Lambert is a legitimate country music mega star, and she projects a uniquely country "strong woman" image with songs that are filled with threats of violence and vocal combativeness. Of course, she also hits the required notes of nostalgia (see the first single from her last record, Automatic, which is a celebration of the "old timey" early 1980s.) I was expecting more of the pop stagecraft that I've seen from other main stage headliners, but I suppose it is fair to assume that Miranda Lambert has "been there, done that" and that she can count on people continuing to love here regardless of whether she burns the house down or not. She did not burn the house down. I still love her, but the energy just wasn't there to equal the excitement from the Audience.
Where is a good place to stay for Coachella and Stagecoach?
My thinking has evolved on this question. I actually owned a place in South Palm Springs for a couple years. South Palm Springs isn't the worst place to be for the Stagecoach/Coachella festival location, but it's not ideal- almost forty five minutes away without traffic. On the other hand, the communities closer to the festival are either down on their luck (Indio, Coachella, points east) or a voidish mixture of private subdivisions, golf courses and bad restaurants. So if you rent a place closer to the festival, it's not as fun an environment. This year the house was in Palm Desert, where the 111 and the 74 meet, and wouldn't you know it but there is a Whole Foods- the first within a hundred miles- right there at the intersection.
That is a huge development for Palm Desert, and instantly transforms Palm Desert from an after thought to a first choice type of place- and only 15 minutes from the artist parking lot. Palm Desert is also close to The Nest, Lord Fletchers and The Beer Hunter, which are all half an hour or more away from Palm Springs proper.
After the excitement of Friday and Saturday, Sunday was bound to be a let down, and essentially the only must see for the day was headliner Blake Shelton because my companion is an enormous Blake Shelton (even he acknowledged that a large portion of the audience for his set were guys who had been "dragged"(his words) by a lady friend.
The relative lack of music made Sunday a big day for people watching, both inside the VIP bar area and on the terrace. Calling Stagecoach a fantasy land for rich white people isn't exactly accurate. There are also rich people of other ethnicities and nationalities. I saw a decent representation of people I assumed to be locals from the Riverside/San Bernardino metro areas, more often Hispanic and decidedly less well heeled. Women outnumbered men. There were more young people there who weren't explicitly country fans. I personally feel like Stagecoach is itself an excellent "alternative" to Coachella which is just about as "Mainstream" or Basic, if you will, as any thing can possibly be. Attending Stagecoach seems like a much more explicitly political statement, if not a liberal political statement.
Sunday I only watched three acts, George Thorogood and the Destroyers, The Band Perry and Blake Shelton.
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| George Thorogood wears a mean bandana. |
I did not see George Thorogood perform his immortal hit, Bad to the Bone because I was anxious to see The Band Perry on the Toyota Mane Stage. I realize at some level that I am surrendering cool points by making that admission, but honesty, brutal honesty, is what this confession requires. I wasn't quite sure what to expect from a Thorogood performance other than to expect that he would save Bad to the Bone until the end of his set. He opened with a rockabilly number with unusual power because he works with a band of total pros. I saw many "Dads" usually accompanied by their rockabilly style wives and country style daughters, mouthing the lyrics to songs I'd never heard before.
The Band Perry is quite a story. I've been intrigued by them ever since they started gracing billboards for casino shows along the freeway by Palm Springs. This is going back...five or six years. And I don't know that I ever heard their music for some period, and then of course, since I've been listening to top 40 country via my girlfriend I've come to know that they are a brother sister act where the sister is the front man; that they have harmonized vocals, that they have several country hits, but haven't crossed over to the pop chart. Kimberly Perry is the lead singer and driving force of the band. As far as I'm concerned the brothers are literally window dressing, except, I suppose for their harmonizing vocals, male voices and ability to attract female listeners in the same way a boy band member would attract female listeners.
Spending any appreciable amount of time watching the live show by The Band Perry is enough to convince a viewer that they are a slick pop act masquerading as a country band. They easily slid into pop covers. Kimberly Perry prowled the stage and her brothers imped and clowned behind her. The Band Perry actually had doubling guitarists playing behind the brothers, like they were playing the same parts, because there were additional backing guitarists playing rhythm guitar, banjo, etc.
Fortunately I am a fan of pop music, and I thought their show was great. Kimberly Perry is quite a talent, and I am sure that they will be on the Mane Stage for years to come, or at least Kimberly will as a solo artist if not The Band Perry itself.
Sunday headliner Blake Shelton is a kind of measuring stick for the cross over potential of country music stars into the pop world. His recurring role as a judge on NBC's The Voice has cemented his status as a conveyor of "country" culture to mainstream America. I am thinking of his status as an on camera pitchman for Pizza Hut some years ago. He also does soda ads. Blake Shelton is kind of a living symbol of cross over success, but he wears it lightly and has maintained an "aw shucks" demeanor that meshes well with his corporate endeavors. Compare him to the more stand offish demeanor of Friday nights headliner Tim McGraw or even that of his wife, Miranda Lambert. What Blake Shelton is, is friendly.
That charm was well on display- both up front where I was standing in the pit area, and in the general admission section stretching deep into the night. Shelton drank liberally from a black solo cup placed on a stool. Many of his songs are about drinking. You could say that much of his music occupies the area of "smiling through the sadness." Many of his songs are about respecting his woman. I think probably the secret of his success is that his music speaks the language of women and their basic desires. What Blake Shelton is singing about is what his fans want a man to do. It's hard not to draw that conclusion, since his lyrics are often about specifically doing those things, i.e. lighting watermelon candles and mixing up a pitcher of margaritas.
I didn't mind watching Blake Shelton. He just kind of stands up there and sings, but his between song patter and songs themselves are so strong that it works. People were just rabid Blake Shelton fans- 100% including the men standing around me in the pit. I was one of the only people who wasn't rapturous. Shelton well outplayed his spouse, and since I like her and don't actually like Shelton, I think that speaks well for his staying power and long term cross over staying power. He's someone where it's like, anyone could like him.
Concluding Thoughts About 2015 Stagecoach
Goldenvoice/AEG did an amazing job staging Stageoach 2015. All the staff I interacted with were polite and professional. True that I spent most of my time in the VIP or artist area, but I had ample opportunity to hang out in the terrace and I never saw any problems with anyone. I didn't see a single fight, or a single arrest. Pot smoke was nowhere near as prevalent as you might expect in southern California in 2015. The beer prices made getting drunk almost impossible. The honky tonk space was expanded this year, and it was an incredible thing to witness, even if you didn't yourself dance.
Show Review: Tame Impala @ The Hollywood Forever Cemetery (8/7/15)
Show Review:
Tame Impala
@ The Hollywood Forever Cemetery
Last night Tame Impala pulled into LA for the first night of a two night, sold out (3800 tickets a night at 40 dollars per ticket) stand at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. When I was asked whether I'd like to attend, I expressed interest in seeing the venue, The Hollywood Forever Cemetery which is by all accounts one of those "Only in LA" places to see a show. However, I left humming the Tame Impala tunes, impressed with a band whose rise is perhaps the most remarkable rock success story of this decade.
Tame Impala is essentially the solo project of Australian Kevin Parker, who writes and arranges the music himself. They are currently touring as a conventional rock five piece, though their live set veers from rock into a kind of Chemical Brothers style electronica. Although Parker's stage presence ranges from dull to boring, the elaborate laser and light show that accompanies the set adequately compensates for the lack of physical energy. Tame Impala's songs are almost impossibly catchy to the point of being simplistic, a trait which has probably helped them in their rise to alt rock radio levels of popularity. A well-known producer who was at the show with me mentioned a lack of "pre-choruses," and I don't know what those are, but the crowd- wasn't there for musical complexity.
I was prepared to write a review describing the venue as the star of the show, but I scrapped that take based on Tame Impala doing such a great job entertaining the audience. Parker was obviously appreciative both of the crowd and the venue itself. The Hollywood Forever Cemetery is indeed a one of a kind venue- Audience members pass through the front gate and walk through the cemetery itself to the back corner of the site, where there is an open field. The crowds are kept well off the graves themselves, though the mausoleums surrounding the audience area were purpose lit in purple and red shades in tune with the rock show vibe. Fans are encourage to arrive early and bring picnic wares. By the time Tame Impala took the stage (promptly at 830 PM) the crowd was well lubricated (but not rowdy) and the smell of premium California marijuana saturate the air.
Starting with the single from their current record, they interspersed new cuts with old hits and the crowd was held in rapt attention. Not me so much, but I certainly enjoyed the show- more so than many other rock shows I've been to in the past couple years. Who can quarrel with Tame Impala (Kevin Parker)'s success? Playing music that people like, being genuinely appreciative about the fact that people like the music- there really isn't more than that, or there shouldn't have to be. Selling 7600 tickets at 40 bucks a pop ain't bad, neither.
Published 7/14/15
Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
in North Adams, Massachusetts
The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts is a large (100,000 + square feet) museum that was formed out of an abandoned factory site. The factory was first a cloth manufacturing facility and then an electronics manufacturing plant, and then abandoned. In late 1980s, the process of conversion to a museum space began, and the museum opened in 1999. Independent of any specific exhibits, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass Moca) is a must visit for the museum itself. The two obvious comparisons from my experience are the Tate Modern in London, housed in an abandoned power plant, and the Guggenheim Bilbao, which is also set in a Genry designed "deconstructed" building in the former port district of Bilbao.
The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams is different from the two comparisons made above in that it fully inhabits the geographic SPACE of a former manufacturing town. The Tate Modern, for all its authenticity as a South Bank Power Plant, is located in the anodyne London city center of the 21st century, and the Bilbao Guggenheim is a honest to god Frank Gehry designed structure in a port area that has been entirely given over to white collar business and the tourist trade.
North Adams is at the northern edge of the region in Massachusetts known as the "Berkshires." Geographically speaking, the Berkshires are the portion of the Northern Appalachian mountain chain called "the Berkshires" in Massachusetts and "the White Mountains" in Vermont. They are, in fact, the same set of mountains. North Adams is set in a river valley formed by Hoosic river, which flows through western New York, southern Vermont and northern Massachusetts. The Hoosic river was an important source of hydroelectric power for mills operating in the region.
Any trip to Mass MOCA almost requires a stroll into North Adams, since the town functions as an appendage of the Factory/Museum. The juxtaposition of town and factory/museum forces the visitor to think about larger issues of the area: employment options, socio-economic status, changes wrought by the broad economic currents of 20th century history. Which is not to say that the museum exhibits themselves do not intrigue. The growth in popularity of installation art in large, open plan museums is one that spans the globe. You can find such museums, inevitably featuring the word "Modern" in their name, throughout the world.
The defining feature of many such museums is their lack of anything approaching a first rate permanent collection. Some of this lies in the difficulty in acquiring canonical pieces in the ever changing flow of what constitutes modern art. Some of it lies in ideological opposition to the idea of the permanent collection and the role it plays in indoctrinating visitors to the museum in the ideology of the collector/institution art industrial complex.
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| The Sol Lewitt permanent exhibit at Mass Moca North Adams |
The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams neatly sidesteps the dilemma by making its permanent exhibit a single site specific multi floor exhibit of Sol Lewitt patterned wall paintings. It is more Sol Lewitt in one place than you are likely to see in a lifetime of visits to other museums.
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| Jim Shaw, Whistle While You Work, 2014- an example of his work blending Disney and Superhero motifs with a critique of materialism in society. |
The temporary exhibits held their own against the formidable amount of space. There are no paintings on the wall at Mass Moca, or if there are they are likely to be a wry comment on some aspect of the contemporary art world. The stand out exhibit in my mind was Jim Shaw's ....Entertaining Doubts, which combined super hero motifs with religion in a non-didactic way. One room featured banners hung from the ceiling with a Superman type figure in various states of physical distress- Superman defeated. Other aspects of the exhibit referenced Walt Disney and the American West in an effortlessly entertaining and though provoking manner.
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| This is the large ark type thing that occupies a whole room at the Matthew Barney River of Fundament exhibit at Moca Geffen in Los Angeles. |
Published 9/13/15
Matthew Barney - River of Fundament @ MOCA Geffen LA
September 13th, 2015- January 18th, 2016
(Museum Exhibition Website)
Matthew Barney has a certain level of pop culture notoriety from his position as Mr. ex-Bjork, but he's also an unqualified star in the serious art world. For the last several months Barney has been screening his latest work, the six and a half hour movie-opera River of Fundament. River of Fundament is his first major work since he completed the five movie series Cremaster Cycle in 2002. According to reviews, River of Fundament has been seven years in the making. Now, I haven't seen River of Fundament quite yet, but I did sit through all five Cremasters, in order, in the basement of the Guggenheim Museum in NYC during his exhibition there several years back, so I feel like I have a decent grip on the themes that Barney favors.
Anyone expecting River of Fundament to be anything like a radical departure from his earlier work is going to be sorely disappointed. In fact, River of Fundament has much in common with Cremaster (which had much in common with his early Drawing Restraint series): A fascination with the American Automobile industry, bodily functions, Norman Mailer. One review I read of the movie (London Guardian) called it a satire of American consumerism, but having seen Barney himself speak on the subject of his inspiration and themes (in Boise Idaho, thank you very much); I would be inclined to reject that interpretation. I would argue that Barney sees genuine meaning in the rise and fall of the American auto industry, that he genuinely likes Norman Mailer's terrible-by-all-accounts career swan song Ancient Evenings and that he is as deeply sincere about his work as an artist in 2015 can be.
For a variety of reasons, Barney is a polarizing figure in the art world. Some of it is straight forward resentment of the fact that he is a formerly football playing, Yale attending, underwear model who was literally plucked from obscurity and catapulted to international art world acclaim overnight, the art world equivalent of a pop star who strikes pay dirt with their first single. Others see his work as a parody of itself, grandiose statements about nothing. Being quite fond of Barney myself, I feel that the criticism is misplaced, that his early fame was no stoke of luck but rather based on his willingness to test his physical limitations a la Chris Burden (see the Drawing Restraint series) and that his obsession with substances like Vaseline and the anal penetration of men and women simply reflects the world we live in.
For the MOCA Geffen exhibition, the museum is in its familiar open air configuration, with two main galleries and a series of side rooms. One room is set aside for repeated screenings of the six hour film. If you are interested, it shows on Thursdays between 1:30 PM and 7:30 PM, Saturdays and Sundays between 11:30 AM and 5:30 PM, with two twenty minute intermissions between the three parts. Outside the theater is a giant wood ark/boat type construction that occupies the entire second room of the exhibit. In the main gallery there are several sculpture type works that combine car parts/forms and various metals. The walls are lined with etched metal drawings. One side room contains glassed in inspirational photographs- a drawn-in copy of Mailer's Ancient Evenings, a photo of a woman being sodomized by a huge penis, you know, the kind of things one would expect at a Matthew Barney show. The side rooms also contain a couple of sarcophagus style pieces that look like they were made with a substance similar to the vaseline sculptures he made for the Guggenheim Cremaster show.
Those looking for work inspired by his recent breakup with Bjork will be disappointed. Unlike Bjork, who wrote a whole record about the break-up, Barney's work contains no trace of her. Indeed, River of Fundament can best be described as Barney being Barney, and if you love him, you'll like the exhibition, and if you hate him, this exhibition won't change your mind.
I have a Thursday in early October set aside for a viewing of the film, and I'll let readers know how THAT goes. I hear there is a massive orgy in the third act. Several orgies, in fact.
Show Review: Jason Isbell at the Wiltern, Los Angeles, CA. (8/13/15)
Show Review:
Jason Isbell
at the Wiltern, Los Angeles, CA.
As a member of the seminal alt-country-southern-indie-rock band Drive By Truckers, Isbell was a Pitchfork darling before the term existed. As a sober solo artist, he's traded indie cred for the vaster vistas of a number one record on the country, rock and folk charts. You might say he's losing his edge (Pitchfork gave the new record a 5) but a number one record on three specialty Billboard charts at the same time is what you trade Pitchfork acclaim FOR, in an ideal world.
I was never a 'Truckers fan, as I heard Drive By Truckers referred to last night at the Wiltern. I saw Isbell for the first time at Stagecoach a couple years ago, and he made a deep impression, simply on the strength of his song writing and delivery. It's not every day you see an artist perfectly blend Country, Rock and Folk without one element overwhelming the others, but with Jason Isbell, that is what you get. Whenever I contemplate Isbell's career, I'm reminded from one of the Simpson's Treehouse of Horror Episodes, "He was too crazy for Boys Town, and too much of a boy for Crazy Town."
The show last night conclusively demonstrated that Isbell has his fans, and he has written plenty of hits, but that he hasn't yet penetrated mass culture to the point where he is licensing his songs for truck ads. Shows at the Wiltern are good for judging the extent to which a particular artist has transcended their genre by the number of music industry insiders that show up to a show. Last night, there were many, many, many devoted fans, but the industry was under represented, the reserved tables in the back of the room, empty.
Isbell's parade of hits during a two hour set left me grasping for reasons why he hasn't broken through to mainstream success (although a number one record will probably qualify as said mainstream success) and they are probably similar to why he was able to be a part of a band that had such insider credibility.
Isbell's audience are a well mannered bunch, and anyone can see that they are people who have been with him for a long time. At one point, Isbell actually thanked the audience for not heading to the exits when he played material from the new record- hardly what one would expect when said record is number one on the Billboard Album chart.
The Wiltern is a great venue for making an artistic statement, and Isbell's two hour set was a tour de force. I suppose his next level would be having a number one single, and there is no question in my mind that he has it in him.
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| Matthew Barney's six hour film, River of Fundament is now playing at the Geffen MOCA in Los Angeles, CA. through mid January, on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. |
Published 10/9/15
River of Fundament
(@ Geffen MOCA Los Angeles)
It's not particularly easy to see Matthew Barney's films. For example, to see the Cremaster Cycle (over 10 hours) I had to fly to New York City during his show at the Guggenheim and sit in the basement of that museum for nearly 12 hours (breaks between films.) The Cremaster Cycle was five films, and the Guggenheim exhibit was either essentially props from the film or works that were inspired by some aspect of the film. The same is true for his new show at the Geffen Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and while it is totally possible to see the show without seeing the movie, it's a bit like going to see props from a film without having seen the underlying film.
I suppose you wouldn't necessarily have to have seen the Wizard of Oz to appreciate seeing Dorothy's Red Slippers at the Smithsonian but it seems to be an unlikely scenario. The Geffen Museum of Contemporary Art is showing the film three times a week: Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. It will take you about seven hours to watch the film, which is in three parts with a fifteen minute intermission between parts. So if you are reading this review and toying with the idea of doing one, both or neither, I would really recommend at least PLANNING to see the movie if you are planning to see the exhibition. If the movie totally doesn't interest you, maybe skip both the exhibition and the film.
There are numerous correspondences between The Cremaster Cycle and River of Fundament. Like a pop star who knows how to write a lyric with two meanings, Barney is a master of skirting the line between the meaningless and the meaningful. When it comes to moments like the scene in River of Fundament where a pregnant African-American Muslim woman with one eye vaginally penetrates an equally pregnant white woman wearing a New York Giants hoodie with a cigar wrapped in tobacco or something to make it look exactly like a penis, the viewer can be left in the interpretive dust.
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| This is a still of Matthew Barney in his mason's apron in Cremaster 3. He appears at the beginning of The River of Fundament in essentially the same outfit. |
The similarities are so numerous that you could argue that River of Fundament is a continuation of The Cremaster Cycle. To give an example from the overture of the first section of the film, Barney appears on screen in his Mason's apron outfit that was a key portion of the Cremaster Cycle. It literally looks like the same character. Norman Mailer, physically present in the Cremaster Cycle, is a huge artistic influence on River of Fundament. River of Fundament is theoretically a take on Mailer's late, poorly received opus of decadent Egyptian royalty, Ancient Nights. This book was widely panned when it was released, a fact referenced by Elaine Strich, playing herself in the first portion of the film, in a eulogy she makes about Mailer at the wake/passage to the underworld that occupies the first two hours of the movie.
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| This set piece involving the remnants of a Chevy Impala and a working steel foundry is the most visually striking moment in the entire film and a kind of narrative axis. |
The Cremaster Cycle is dominated by the figure of the Chrylser Building, and Barney famously staged a demolition derby in the ornate lobby in the course of Cremaster 3. In River of Fundament, the first portion of the film contains the ritual destruction of a 1967 Chevy Impala in the atrium of a Southern California Chrysler dealership. Barney's focus on landscapes both natural and man made continues. During a particularly striking scene in the second part of the film, the Egyptian God Set/Mailer dinner party guest presides over the destruction of the Chevy Impala via melting it down in a real live foundry. The combination of fire from the foundry and the molten metal which comes out is a kind of narrative center piece to the six hour film, and honestly left me gasping for breath in astonishment.
Despite his ability to craft striking visual images, the lack of narrative typically drags on the actual watching of Barney's films. Here, however the use of an actual opera format- a story, with characters talking to one another in sing-song opera speak (and also singing) means that at least the non-narrative of Cremaster Cycle has been improved upon.
The third portion of the film involves a power struggle between two of the Egyptian Gods/dinner party guests: Set and Osiris, both of home are battling for the throne vacated by the deceased Horus. This leads to an elaborate battle between the two gods at what looks to be a water reclamation plant, replete with accompanying bands who appear to be dressed in Aztec/Meso American garb and playing pre-Colombian instruments. Their feud is eventually moderated back at the Hemingway wake apartment with the help of, I shit you not, a Native American squad of drummer-singers and a chorus of Ernest Hemingway impersonators. The third portion also includes a scene set at an auto body shop, where one of the cars from the second part of the film is dismantled. A vicious fight between two auto body shop works occurs, mirroring the more ornate struggle between Set and Osiris.
At the same time, the auto shop manager, played by visibly pregnant former porn star Bobbi Starr has a sexual encounter with an equally pregnant African American/Muslim woman, wearing a chador and everything, which culminates with Starr having what appears to be a piece of poop inserted into her vagina. Um yeah. Adriana Nicole (also a porn star) shows up in the second chapter of the film, where she has anal sex with a party guest and then excretes a mass of bilious green material from her anus. Poop and urine are all over River of Fundament. In fact, the title "River of Shit" would have been equally appropriate. None of the sex scenes are particularly troubling except in terms of their visual explicitness. It's certainly not pornography, since one would have to be a monster to be aroused by any of the sex acts, but it is very explicit.
Show Review: War on Drugs @ The Greek Theater in Los Angeles, CA. (10/17/15)
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| Adam Granduciel of the War on Drugs played the Greek Theater in Los Angeles last night. |
Show Review:
War on Drugs
@ The Greek Theater
Los Angeles, CA.
I'm at the age (39) where I see people who look "old" to me on the street and ask those around me, "Do I look like that?" The problem is exacerbated in Southern California, where the sight of a 50 year old millionaire riding a skateboard dressed in clothes that would look more appropriate on a 15 year old is not uncommon. Similarly, you might be looking at a 50 something woman with the body type and personal style of a teenager.
Perhaps that explains why my initial reaction to seeing The War on Drugs singer/band leader Adam Granduciel was asking my show companions, "How old is he?" He's 36, but he could easily pass for a 50 year old in my neighborhood. If, like me, you are in the category of casual The War on Drugs fan, you probably know that Kurt Vile was in The War on Drugs and left to pursue his solo career. I've actually spent a fair amount of time listening to Kurt Vile, and almost none listening to The War on Drugs aside from the single I've heard on Sirius XMU. The similarity in vocal delivery between Kurt Vile and Adam Granduciel is impossible to ignore. The differences are in the style of music, with The War on Drugs featuring a Springsteen wall of sound era luxuriousness (two keyboardist and a saxophonist/french horn player) and Vile adhering to a more spartan "man and his guitar" sound.
The wall of sound was very much apparent at The Greek Theater last night, with the combination of a sustained organ being counterpointed with a more staccato piano. Granduciel plays the part of the 80s heartland rocker to the hilt. I can't remember the last show I've been to where the audience cheered BEFORE the guitar solo (also after.) The audience being very much into what Granduciel and the rest of the band was dishing out was the headline of the night. The War of Drugs are the kind of middle of the road rock band that is almost extinct and last night was the equivalent of traveling back in time and watching one of the last big dinosaurs walking the earth.
Newish successful rock bands are few and far between, and in 2015 it doesn't seem fair to criticize a rock artist for anything retro about their sound. The fact that The War on Drugs exists, and that they sold out the Greek Theater last night is all that needs to be said. Also, that they have hits, and they should continue to write hits, and that if they do that they have a chance of making it onto radio and filling stadiums. The Greek Theater has over 5000 in capacity, and they sold it out, so they are already on their way.
Show Review: Blur @ The Hollywood Bowl (10/21/15)
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| Blur as they were. |
Show Review:
Blur @ The Hollywood Bowl
Last night, Blur played the Hollywood Bowl as part of their two city tour of the United States, theoretically in support of their recently released LP. In reality,it was more of a two decades in the making victory lap, building on their 2013 show at the Coachella festival. In between songs, Damon Albarn told a story- first, he said he'd been coming to Los Angeles for 26 years now (Damon Albarn is 47). He described how, inevitably they'd drive past the Hollywood Bowl between their hotel and press ("Radio, yes it was always radio.") and they would pass by and he would say, "Oh, that'll never happen for us, I guess."
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| Blur now. |
It is, perhaps, a little cheeky to say such a thing after the Coachella performance in 2013. In fact, Coachella appearances are often used to set up such a show at the Hollywood Bowl, and the timing here would seem to bear that out. Damon Albarn has got around to other things with varying degrees of artistic and commercial success and all the other members have maintained various levels of public visibility. I've personally experienced The Good, The Bad & The Queen in concert, like everyone I've heard the Gorrilaz singles ad nauseum on alt rock radio and I've not heard his solo record.
I couldn't help but reflect on the recent three part BBC 4 series on "Indie Music" that I've been watching courtesy a vpn program installed on my girlfriend's macintosh and watched on her apple tv. And because we're watching it "live time," by last night I'd watched the first two chapters but not the third. And I was sitting there, and watching Blur and thinking, "Blur is the third chapter to the BBC indie documentary." I mean, not by themselves, but they are alongside Oasis, Pulp, etc.
The first chapter of the BBC Indie Music documentary focused on the initial rise of local clusters of bands, labels and venues, from Manchester working down all the way to Coventry. Here, indie music was essentially individual local scenes with labels inspired by the example of the Buzzcocks AND releases on major labels like The Sex Pistols, and they were largely "punk."
The second chapter of the BBC Indie Music documentary focused on the development of a national and international infrastructure for the distribution of indie bands through both indie labels and major labels. Critical here were the fanzines, the Rough Trade network of record stores and visionary United State record executives like Seymor Stein of Sire Records.
The second chapter also discussed the parallel development of dance music within the indie framework. A major revelation from the second chapter of the BBC 4 Indie Music documentary is the incredible commercial success of dance-art acts like the KLF and the status of artists like Rick Astley as "indie" artists.
More than any other band of the final indie renaissance of the early to mid 1990s, Blur stood astride all of these developments. They broke through with a dance number, found English success with a number of albums that wittily dissected the foibles of modern life and failed to find the kind of commercial success in the United States that would have solidified their success as an institutional modern rock act along the lines of U2, Jack White and the Foo Fighters.
So this performance, coupled with the recent Coachella appearances, doesn't "writer a new chapter" but it add a kind of coda. If one considers recent scientific flirtations with the idea that there are millions of different dimensions, each with its own reality, surely there are more than a few where Blur plays Dodger Stadium, but living in a reality where they play the Hollywood Bowl, even if they don't sell out the Hollywood Bowl, isn't a bad place to be.
Published 11/26/15
A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014)
by Marlon James
Bringing A Brief History of Seven Killings on vacation with me in Jamaica was like wearing a band t-shirt to the same band's concert. Recent winner of the Man Booker prize, A Brief History of Seven Killings is a blood-soaked retelling of an alleged CIA sponsored plot to assassinate Bob Marley and the subsequent move of Jamaican organized crime syndicates into the crack trade in New York City. The attempted murder of Bob Marley is a matter of historical record, and the alleged CIA involvement is an old story- after finishing the book I googled the subject and found the exact plot of the book laid out in a news story from 2010.
The story is told through a multiplicity of different voices. The afterward by the author cites William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying as a direct inspiration, but given the rock and roll milieu it reminded me more of a Spin magazine oral history. The lack of a central narrator or introduction to the back story of Jamaican politics makes the first hundred pages or so difficult to understand. Basically, Jamaica has two political parties, the People's National Party and the Jamaican Labor Party. The People's National Party was the part of independence, and at the time of the book (1979) they were firmly socialist and heading farther to the left. The Jamaican Labor Party was the conservative opposition and supported on the down low by the United States government.
Both parties used Kingston street gangs to control the vote in elections, and the 1980 election was the bloodiest of all time, with over 700 people losing their lives during the campaign. None of this information is given directly in the narrative. Instead you have the voices of the gang leaders, the American operatives and ordinary Jamaicans with various levels of involvement in the shenanigans. Eventually these shenanigans lead to the attempted assassination of Bob Marley (only called "the singer" in the book) by gang members affiliated with the Jamaican Labor Party and bankrolled by United States operatives, most notably a Colombian explosives expert called "Dr. Love."
Love is also the bridge between the Jamaican Posse-gangs and the Cali Cartel, and after the failed assassination attempt, the Jamaican Shower Posse (called the "Storm Posse" ) in the book moves into the crack trade in New York City. James does a remarkable job giving full life into the type of characters that typically only exist as crude stereotypes in American art and popular culture- his portrayal of gay/bisexual Posse members is particularly memorable.
After finishing the book I quickly checked to see who had bought the tv/film rights and was excited to learn that HBO has purchased the rights, and that the author himself was working on the adaptation. Can't wait for that tv show!
Early Mainland Southeast Asia: From First Humans to Angkor by Charles Higham (5/23/15)
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| The Khmer Empire was the major player in the South East Asia of the Middle Ages. Their major rivals were the Cham, who mostly occupied the coast. |
Book Review
Early Mainland Southeast Asia: From First Humans to Angkor
by Charles Higham
Published July 25th, 2014
by River Press Books
South East Asia is one of those areas where investigations into early human history have been thwarted by a combination of circumstances including lack of interest, war and difficult terrain. Fortunately, the 21st century have seen advances on all three fronts. Most importantly the new technique of using "LIDAR" ground imaging technology to map areas covered by dense forest and jungle has been instrumental in advancing historical-archeological investigations in this area.
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| The Funan polity was an early proto-state centered in the Mekong delta area. |
The historical narrative surrounding South East Asia traditionally runs something like this: Stone age people living in the area were raised up from ignorance by Indian Sanskrit speaking traders and holy men, then Chinese traders and armies advanced from the North and this combination produced state-lets that eventually solidified into the Khmer empire, which lasted until the 14th century, after which the civilization of South East Asia was more or less "set."
Higham makes the (convincing) case that the existing civilization was more advanced than what historians have traditionally though. Advances in metallurgy and agriculture were indigenous, not brought by Indian/Sanskrit speaking traders. Rather, the Sanskritization of South East Asia was more likely the adoption of a state-centered ideology by a local elite, who adopted Sanskrit names and Indian methods to support early state building exercises in the area.
The Chinese sent traders and armies south and most importantly, they sent writers who provide most of the factual early descriptions of this area. In fact, any serious treatment of this period and place require that the author have a comprehensive grasp of Chinese historical documents AND archeological findings, typically written in Sanskrit.
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| Photograph of a "Negrito" woman from the Philippines |
South East Asia is also interesting from a pre-historical standpoint, as a major pathway for human migration. Fun fact: African type people called "Negritos" by the locals still exist in South East Asia in remote hunter-gatherer societies, providing a modern link to a historical migration stretching back to Africa.
The Ancient Central Andes by Jeffrey Quilter (5/24/15)
Book Review
The Ancient Central Andes
by Jeffrey Quilter
Published December 21st, 2013
(AMAZON)
It wasn't until I was physically IN Peru that I understood that ancient Peru is waaaaay more than just the Incas. The Central Andes- which covers an area ranging from Ecuador to Chile covers the same amount of distance as the trip from London to Baghdad. The geography ranges from the highest, driest desert in the world to tropical jungle, with everything in between. The serious study of non-Incan central Andean cultures is firmly a 20th century concern, with an early period of indigenous, non-professional archeologists leading the charge, and western educated professional archeologists only showing up in recent years.
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| The so-called Chavin culture was an important pre-Incan civilization. |
Much of the work done in the last few decades has yet to be synthesized in a way that a non-professional can easily access, which means that The Ancient Central Andes by Jeffrey Quilter comes as a welcome addition to the Andean history shelf. Placed in context, the Incans are merely the last flourishing of a common Weltanschauung, similar to the way that the Roman Empire was the heir to thousands of years of Mediterranean civilization.
The interesting, unresolved questions about Central Andean civilization start at the beginning. Did humans come to the region on foot or by boat? The traditional view is that humans crossed a land bridge exposed by the smaller oceans of the last glacial maximum. A newer perspective argues that humans made their way down the Pacific coast by boat. Quilter seems to cautiously support this hypothesis, and the corollary hypothesis that Andean civilization spread from the sea to the mountains.
Other scholars have argues that the first sophisticated cultures came either from a paradisaical "sweet spot" in southern Ecuador or from the Amazonian jungle. Investigations continue but I think the sea travel hypothesis is a strong one. One fact stood out in particular- the chile pepper- which is virtually synonymous with Mexico, actually comes from Peru. This means that at some point someone got on a boat and took a chile pepper to Mexico.
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| This map shows the area controlled by the Tiwanaku and Huari, the two groups who immediately preceded the Incans. |
The major non-Incan civilizations, all named after the places they were discovered are the Chavin, the Moche, the Tiwanaku and the Wari. The Tiwanaku and Wari immediately preceded the Incans. Information about all four groups is still being pieced together. Knowledge about the Wari has been especially slow in emerging because their capital was also near the capital of the violent Shining Path revolutionary group, and archeologists couldn't gain access for several decades.
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| Moche pottery contains several obscene motifs, a favorite being fellatio and another being anal sex. Here, both figures are male. |
Taken in context, the Incans are less impressive, stone cutting and dynastic ambition aside. The outline of a more-or-less common civilization emerges from the combination of archeology and history. The high watermarks of the Chavin and Moche appear to be temple-based. Presumably a temple based elite was able to form a loose polity. Human sacrifice was common through out the various groups. Weaving and pottery, corn and cocoa all characterized the larger Andean culture area.
The War of the Gods (1985) by Jarich G. Oosten (5/26/15)
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| Tuatha de Danann: Irish/Celtic Gods, an illustration |
Book Review
The War of the Gods (1985)
by Jarich G. Oosten
Comparative indo european linguistics and mythology is a deep well. The Indo European languages: English, French, German, Slavic languages, Farsi, Hindi, all the other European languages that aren't basque. Basically every major language that isn't East Asian, Semitic(Arabic, Hebrew) and Tamil (Southern India.) Thus, there is some original language, often called "Proto Indo European" that describes a people whose descendants would make up a majority of the world's population in 2015.
Unfortunately, this was a line of thought very much embraced by Hitler and the Nazi's in support of their disturbed ideology. Hitler, the Nazi's and his favorite scholars identified the "master race" as Aryans. Aryans actually did exist, it was the name that Vedic invaders gave themselves when they entered into India.
Oosten takes the approach of stacking myths from several different cultures: Scandinavian, Roman, Irish and Hindi are particular favorites. His thesis that there is some kind of proto war of the gods that spans across the different Indo European languages. In These War of the Gods he attempts to identify different "structural elements," typically starting with the best attested example of the particular element and then bringing in additional examples from different civilizations. This i isn't state of the art scholarship- and it is more interesting in terms of just seeing someone stack parallel mythos next to one another.
Also, the elements themselves are interesting:
The war of the gods itself: Between two (or more) groups related by blood- he talks of "wive giving" and "wive taking groups," where a group of "new gods" displaces the "old god." Here, the best example is the Scandinavian wars between the giants and gods and the war between the Aesir and the Vanir.
The cycle of the mead: This is the story of a sacred beverage- best known from the "Soma" of Vedic myth, which is a holy, intoxicating beverage. For western europeans, this became mead- a honeyed, fermented alcoholic beverage. In the cycle of mean a god steals the sacred beverage from some keeper and then makes it available to the other gods.
Oosten also compares the lesser known Irish myths regarding the battle of Mag Tured to the better known "history" of the Roman kings. Oosten argues that in the former case, history has been turned to myth, and in the later, myth has been transformed into history.
Without getting too heavy into the subject, any artist searching for deeper rhythms of human understanding should have some idea about these underlying myths that link disparate cultures. These are ideas that resonate beyond an individual language/culture. While not universal, they point towards a universality of mind among all humanity.
Facing East from Indian Country (2003) by Daniel Richter (6/3/15)
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| This map of Colonial North America prior to the defeat of the French in the 18th century shows the high point for Native Americans, when the exercised control of an large part of the American interior and managed to play one power off one another. |
Book Review
Facing East from Indian Country (2003)
by Daniel Richter
(AMAZON)
Daniel Richter is the pre-eminent historian in the area of "Early American Studies" or "Native American History," if you will. You could call him a revisionist, but his work is more of a narrative synthesis of existing sources than a radical rethinking of the field. Richter's concern is telling the early history of America from the perspective of Native actors. He is forthright both acknowledging the limits in the existing sources and being creative in terms of re-creating the perspectives of historical figures who lack their own voice.
One of Richter's major themes in this and other books is that the idea that European settlers simply rolled over the helpless Native peoples is simply untrue. The Native peoples suffered hugely from European diseases that arrived before the Europeans themselves, so that when English settlers arrived in North America "history" was already happening. The fact that neither the English or scholars for several centuries afterwards were willfully ignorant about this history doesn't mean that it didn't happen.
Things didn't really start to fall apart for Native tribes east of the Mississippi till the defeat of the French in the French Indian War. Prior to that, after they recovered from the major epidemics of the 17th century, the 18th was a time of relative prosperity and success. Any reader will come away with the strong impression that even if it didn't work, Native peoples tried many different tactics in an attempt to cope with changing conditions brought about contact with Europeans. They were also integrated into the economic system of Europe and its North American colonies in a way that is rarely appreciated.
New Genetics Studies ID Indo European Homeland, Route into Europe (6/12/15)
Two new studies published in the Science journal this week have identified the long sought, much argued about homeland of the Indo European peoples, a group that includes all the languages of Europe (Basque, Hungarian and Finnish excepted), Hindi and Farsi.
(NYTIMES Article)
Basically, two separate studies looked at different genetic materials and came to the same conclusion, that the "modern" genetic composition of Europe is directly traceable to the emigration of people from the steppes of southern Ukraine to northern Europe.
According to the write up from Science journal itself, the critical migration happened between 2900 BC and 2000 BC. In that period, the genes of people living in Europe came to resemble those of people from the Yamanaya heartland. (SCIENCE journal)
The same studies also provide a reasonable hypothesis for the division of Eastern Indo European languages- the "Indo-Iranian" branch and all others, having discovered a cluster of Yamanaya type genes in the Altai mountains focused on the time between 2900 BC and 2500 BC.
Book Review: The Middle Ages (2015) by Johannes Fried (6/26/15)
Book Review:
The Middle Ages
by Johannes Fried
Published January 2015 by Belknap Press at Harvard University
Translation from the German by Peter Lewis
(AMAZON)
The academic movement to revisit the so-called "Dark Ages" of post-Roman, pre-Renaissance European Century is well over a half century old at this point. This project is just as "revisionist" as revisionist history can be, but since this period evokes few strong emotions among teachers and students, learned Professors have done their work largely unopposed. Much of the work in this area has been done by Authors writing and French and German, so translation is very much a part of keeping current in recent developments and more long term trends in the scholarship.
It's easy to see that The Middle Ages by retired professor of Medieval History at Frankfurt Univerity Johannes Fried is important merely by looking at the book. The Middle Ages is a broad narrative synthesis, meaning that it is written as much (if not more) for a lay audience, but with a depth and attention to detail that is sufficient to evoke interest from specialists in the field. It's like, the main narrative is for the general readers, and then the notes and bibliography are for the specialists. In this case, many of the cited sources are in German, which means that The Middle Ages is likely as close as English readers are likely to get to those books.
Chaco Revisited: New Research on the Prehistory of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (Amerind Studies in Archaeology) by Carrie C. Heitman (Editor), Steve Plog (Editor) (8/4/15)
Book Review
(Amerind Studies in Archaeology)
by Carrie C. Heitman (Editor), Steve Plog (Editor)
Published April 9th, 2015
(AMAZON)
One of the vagaries of cross-cultural comparison is that they rise and fall independent of one another- during the early Middle Ages, the Middle East was at a peak, and Europe was a backwater. In the 18th and 19th century, Europe had it all over everywhere else. This analysis can be extended to the "pre-historical" period in the New World, with the Aztecs, Maya and Incans regularly seeing inclusion in the "high vs. low" civilization peak discussion. Less often included are the cultures of present day United States.
These cultures have been handicapped by a variety of factors: First, they had an early peak- sometime in the late middle ages, with 1000-1100 seeming to be a particular high point. Second, they had a dramatic decline to the point where there were no surviving peoples who maintained the remnants of the earlier high point. Third, none of them developed a written script. Fourth, their major ruins were in a part of the continent (the American South West, Mid West and South East that was colonized later in the settlement period, meaning that what ruins did remain weren't fully "discovered" until the late 19th and early 20th century.
Of the potential North American vanished cultures/civilizations that would head a short list for inclusion into the "great world civilizations" list, the Chaco Canyon/Anazasi of the four corners region of the American Southwest should take priority. They left major ruins (albeit it in one of the most deserted areas of the American continent), they were way ahead of their time in their water management techniques and they appeared to have many survival techniques that helped them live in harmony with a harsh landscape.
Chaco Revisited: New Research on the Prehistory of Chaco Canyon, is exactly what the title says it is, a collection of papers (apparently presented in 2010?) that summarize recent developments in the scholarship on Chaco Canyon. Since each chapter has a different author, approach and focus area, Chaco Revisited doesn't have much cohesion, but it is useful for a reader who wants to learn more about the most up to date specialist scholarship in the area.
Among the things I learned was that it was unlikely that the Chaco Canyon peoples spoke Uto-Aztecan, the most widely distributed language group in the American Southwest and Mexico. It appears that the widespread supposition linking the Chaco Canyon culture with the "great" civilization of the Toltecs is born out in the trade goods found in grave site deposits and some of the cultural practices of the area. It is unclear how many people lived in Chaco Canyon, whether they farmed there or whether they relied on outside sources of Maize (this book argues that they did farm in the canyon) and what languages they spoke. The analysis which rules out Uto Aztecan is based on DNA analysis.
The Bogomils: A Study in Balkan Manichaeism
by Dimirtri Obolensky
Published in 1948
Cambridge University Press
Reprint Anthony C. Hall, 1972
One of the most interesting subject in Medieval history is the persecution of the Cathar heresy by the Pope. Called "the Cathar Crusade" or the Albigensian Crusade, it was the first crusade- before the more famous crusades with the holy lands of the near east as their target. The Cathars were a heretical Christian sect in Southern France and Northern Spain who espoused a Manichean philosophy.
The question I've always asked myself is how a bunch of peasants in Southern Europe were converted to a religion that came from Babylon and had been largely surprised for hundreds of years prior to the 12th and 13th centuries. Manicheanism and neo-Manicheanism are interesting in their own right. Followers of the prophet Mani believed that the world was created by the Devil/Satan and that all matter was sinful. They espoused a strident aestheticism that renounced marriage, wine and meat.
Despite suffering strident persecution from everyone, Manicheanism found a home in Armenia, where a Manichean (or neo-Manichean by this point) group called the Paulicians fought a border war with the Byzantine Emperor, eventually losing in the 9th century AD. After that, groups of Paulicians were resettled by the Byzantines in and around the Bulgarian frontier. Bulgaria was, basically, a tributary of the Byzantine, with a ruling class of central Asian Bulgars ruling over a Slavic underclass.
Bulgaria at the time was nominally Greek Orthodox, but many in the Slavic underclass retained their Pagan religion, and the question of whether the Bulgarians were to be Greek Orthodox or Roman Catholic was itself unsettled. The first major point that Obolensky establishes is that Manicheanism came to Europe via the Bulgarian Empire.
Unlike the Paulicians, who were culturally and ethnically distinct- basically Armenians- settled in discreet communities in the Eastern part of the state, Bogomilsim originated in what is today Macedonia, and was a more directly syncretic attempt to merge Manichean ideas with conventional Christian teachings. These Bogomils were very successful in converting the residents of modern Macedonia and Bosnia. They also went out to proselytize and one of the most interesting chapters of the book deals with first hand Byzantine accounts of illicit Bogomil activities.
A very interesting quality of Bogomilism is the conscious effort to disguise themselves as obedient Christians. They would set up Churches and dress and speak like the local approved Christian doctrine in an attempt to deceive hostile authorities. This characteristic is very much a predecessor of ideas about "the Illuminati" and other secret societies inside and outside the Catholic Church.
Obloensky demonstrates that the proselytizing activity was contemporaneous with the Cathar movement in the West, and while he stops short of showing the link between Catharism and Bogomilism, he does demonstrate the western Cathars knew of the most famous neo-Manichean. Obloensky also includes an Appendix which lays out the argument linking Bogomilism with Catharism. There wasn't quite a pan-neo-Manichean church, but it was a network of ideas with the Bogomils at one end of southern Europe and the Cathars at the other.
The major appeal of neo-Manichean religions like Bogomilism was a compelling explanation for why the world was such a shitty place for rural peasants in the out-of-the-way places of southern Europe in the late Middle Ages. The Devil made the world, no wonder it was such a terrible place.
Anasazi America: Seventeen Centuries on the Road from Center Place (2nd Edition)
by David E. Stuart
Published 2014, University of New Mexico Press
Something I've learned about reading ancient history is that modern people are only interested in ancient peoples to the extent that scholars can make the case that the ancient people have some relevance to modern life. Thus, the West has long been interested in ancient Rome and Greece as inspiring our own cultures, and as you spread out there the interest generally tracks the "discovery" of ruins by Western scholars or the need for practical knowledge in the course of some specific colonial enterprise. Both of those traditional justifications for modern people being interested in ancient history are somewhat passe and they've been replaced by the idea that we can learn lessons from disparate cultures and apply to our own experience.
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| This is an example of Anasazi pit house, the kind of dwelling used outside of the major complexes of the Anasazi and successor civilization. |
These two projects are not diametrically opposed, but the former approach emphasizes the superiority of our Modern culture to the ancient ones, whereas the later, and more modern approach, tends to downplay the superiority of one people to another. Native Americans, huge losers under the first approach, may be winners in the more modern approach, specifically as we grapple with the impact of climate change, the experience of the Native American civilizations of the desert Southwest is of increasing relevance to our everyday existence.
Stuart blends his state of the art knowledge about discoveries in this field with a polemic that resembles the editorial page of a left leaning daily newspaper. He is obviously a critic of income inequality and has concerns about many social and environmental issues. Stuart is also not afraid to engage in the kind of large-scale theorizing/creation of narrative that has fallen out of favor in academic history for the last half century.
Stuart makes the case that the rise of the great Anazasi great houses of the high period- roughly 900 to 1100 A.D. was very much tied to a historically wet period of southwestern history, particularly a period when rain in the summer was very constant. This allowed for a dramatic temporary expansion in population and spurred the building of many late period houses immediately prior to the collapse of said civilization in the late 12th century- 1170-1180 AD.
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| The great houses of the height of the Anasazi culture were out in the open |
After the collapse there was a split between elites who either tried to hold on in the great houses or moved north and east and common farmers who moved east and engaged in mortal combat with indigenous peoples who occupied that territory. After the collapse of the great houses of Chaco Canyons and environs the bigger structures were the "cliff houses"- built for a less expansive and less secure time and place.
Stuart makes the case that one consequence of the collapse of the great Anasazi of the 900-1200 AD era was the deliberate rejection of the elite culture of those people. Successor cultures showed less stratification between elites and every day citizens. He makes the case that the modern day Pueblo and their very egalitarian approach to existence is a kind of less learned from the collapse of the Anasazi.
Stuart makes a passionate, and I would say strong, case that there is no reason to suppose that the Anasazi "disappeared." The name itself is Navajo and means "the enemies of our ancestors" and Stuart actually cites Navajo folk tales that involve Navajo people travelling to the Chaco Canyon great Anasazi houses.
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| This the Taos Pueblo, present day. |
Of course, the Pueblo are very much a people of history, with documentation from the 16th century onward. They also showed an ability to adapt and react to colonization and indeed, endure in their ancestral lands that is almost unmatched. Nowhere else do you have Native peoples who continue to occupy their pre-contact territory.
Stuart argues that succesor civilizations learned from the Anasazi that they needed to diversify their sources of nutrition by spreading out through different environments and placing their dwellings on "ecotones" places where two eco systems intersect. In his telling the Anazasi were done in by putting all their eggs in the basket of dry land farming of corn, beans and squash supported by regular summer rains, and when those rains disappeared, the Anasazi were toast. In comparison, the cliff dwellers and modern day Pueblo draw from nearly a dozen different environments.
Although the politics may make even the sympathetic wince, this is an area of world history in great need of the kind of narrative that Stuart willingly provides, and hopefully this work will be a foundation of new generation of narrative history in the desert southwest.
by Michael North
Translated from German by Kenneth Kronenberg
A newly translated German language history of the Baltic region? YES PLEASE!!!! I actually snatched this volume from the "new titles" section of the San Diego Central Public Library. I've noticed the San Diego Central Public Library is quick to acquire general histories of unusual places. It probably has something to do with the fact that the general histories of less unusual places have all been written long ago.
For the purposes of this book, the main reference point is The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World by Fernaud Braudel, published in 1949. Braudel was the dean of the "annales" school of history, which eschewed the "big man" theory of history in favor of a bottoms up approach that emphasized the material life of the largest part of the population. Braudel was also a pioneer at looking across national and ethnic borders to write broader histories of larger areas. Thus, the idea of a book like "The Baltic" to mirror "The Mediterranean" is one that is more than a half century old by now.
The first fact to keep in mind about "the Baltic" is that it encompasses most of coastal Northern Europe, from German and Denmark in the west to Russia and Finland in the east, and including the Polish coast and a variety of states and statelets that occupied present day Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. Those last three are interesting because they were among the last pagan hold outs in Europe. The most interesting chapters, and probably the only subject that I would pursue further, is this conquest and conversion of these peoples by a grab back of German, Danish, Dutch and Swedish knights, priests and kings.
North devotes a chapter to each historical period, and the basic fact to understand is that the cultural area of the Baltic was German speaking until the 20th century, despite the rise of Sweden, Russia and the Baltic states themselves. This German heritage has been occluded by a number of forces- you have groups like the Swedish and Russians who are interested in establishing their own cultural bonafides on the world stage and the Baltic states themselves, where the tides of 20th century history forcibly removed the German influence.
On a grand scale, the 15th and 16th centuries were relative times of peace (but plague filled) and the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries were incredibly bloody and destructive. Cultural currents were large and slow moving, and you can talk about Baltic Romanticism and Baltic Folk-Nationalism but not much else. One surprise that emerges is the absence of direct French, English, Italian or Spanish influence. These are the major players in almost any broad history of Europe, and it is a shock to read about an area where their influence was almost entirely filtered through Dutch, German and Scandinavian influences. Thus, when you talk about a "Baltic Renaissance" you are talking about the Dutch Renaissance. Modernist ideas come from Scandinavian architecture and furniture making.
A History of Zimbabwe (2015) by Alois S. Mlambo (11/30/15)
Book Review
A History of Zimbabwe (2015)
by Alois S. Mlambo
Zimbabwe has been in the news for all the wrong reasons in the last decade as the sclerotic regime of Mugabe has systemically wrecked the Zimbabwean economy. You wouldn't know it from the coverage but Zimbabwe didn't obtain majority rule until 1980, after a nearly 15 year long civil war fought between the minority rule state security forces and a variety of rebel groups. Zimbabwe represents some of the worst excesses of racist minority-white rule with an extremely effective example of economic development and state building by that same terrible government. Zimbabwe was not colonized until 1890, when a literal column of white settlers funded by arch-imperalist Cecil Rhodes wagon trained into the territory that would become Southern Rhodesia and later Zimbabwe. Many of the colonists were English south Africans who were fleeing what they felt was a South African administration that favored Dutch settlers.
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| For many years, European scholars refused to admit that the builders of the ruins of Great Zimbabwe were white in rather than the ancestors of the African inhabitants of the area. |
Although the white settlers perpetuated the idea that the area was unsettled, Zimbabwe actually had a thousand year plus tradition of multi ethnic states, most notably the Great Zimbabwe from which the modern state would take its name. Minority white rule manifested itself in most unsubtle fashion. Africans were systematically pushed off the best land in favor of white owners, who would often let the land lie fallow as a speculative investment. For years, educated Africans pleaded simply to be elevated to "white" status, only to be rebuffed. Eventually, the refusal of the white rulers to contemplate incremental transition to majority rule led to Southern Rhodesia declaring independence unilaterally and being treated as a pariah state, even by the similarly racist regime in South Africa.
Eventually, the minority rule regime saw the writing on the wall, and power was handed over to Mugabe in 1980. What followed was hardly a model transition to democracy, with continued fighting among native groups for power and massacres of Independence minded ethnic minorities within Zimbabwe. The related issues of what to do with the former guerrilla fighters and the existing Zimbabwe defense forces led to disproportionate spending on defense. Fear of the new regime led to an exodus by white citizens and Mugabe developed into a serial violator of human rights.
Well into the new millennium, the problem of land redistribution continued to plague Zimbabwe, with war veterans expropriating white farms, and those farmers fighting back in the court system.
The Romani Gypsy (2015)
by Yaron Matras
It is really, really difficult to get reliable information about the Romani Gypsy because their language is unwritten. They have suffered from all the indignities that minority populations have suffered in the 20th century. Their entrance into Europe was largely as slaves in what is present day Romania. In recent centuries, isolate populations in western Europe have lost their language entirely and are placed in a situation similar to that of Native American tribes in the United States, trying to resurrect a language few speak fluently.
The most useful parts of The Romani Gypsy are just the straight forward, historical facts that he lays out about their history and culture. The Rom/Romani/Gypsy trace their roots back to western India. They speak a language that is akin to contemporary Hindi or Urdu. In India, they were a caste of craftsman and maybe travelling entertainers. They left India at some point, and probably spent time in Central Asia under Turkic rule. Matras is a linguist, and he uses hisorical-linguistic arguments in a way similar to the methods employed by Indo European linguists.
After that, the Rom spent centuries in the Byzantine empire, where Greek entered the Rom language in a big way. The fall of the Byzantine Empire was disruptive to the Rom, and many entered into Southeastern Europe with the Ottoman Empire Their entrance into Western Europe and the consciousness of the West was in the 15th century, where Rom coming from Romania and southeastern Europe arrived in larger kin groups, often bearing letters of recommendation describing themselves as "Egyptians."
Once they arrived in Western Europe, they attracted local camp followers. In places like Germany, England and Spain local "traveler" groups developed semi-independently of the eastern European Rom. Besides laying out the true history of the Gypsy Romani migration into the West, he also does an excellent job describing hitherto undescribed beliefs of the Romani civilization. These are practices common to both Rom and Traveler groups, and provide the strongest evidence besides shared vocabulary/language that they are all part of one ethnicity.
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