Time to rename the Big Apple – if only for the month of September. Orange ruled on the streets, walls and windows of New York City. And that was BEFORE fashion week began which I unfortunately missed by a week or so. By then the streets are filled with truly spectacular outfits.

Today’s orange-and-friends photographs were all taken around the Village, down Ave B, in the lower East Side and Williamsburg.

From hair,

to bags

to clothes,

to walls

orange dominated.

With a sprinkling of yellow.

Of course Black&White will NEVER cease to exist. I guess a dominant mode in American thinking echoed in people’s wardrobe….

Maybe it will change: let’s believe in miracles.

For more serious music, here is Johnny Greenwood’s (remember Radiohead?) new composition Horror Vacui – something you never have to worry about in NYC. Starts at 1:03.33 during the concert at the Royal Albert Hall.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/events/play/m0008932

Can you tell I am jet lagged and unable to get my brain into gear for more serious discourse????

Some days are more surprising than others. Yesterday was one of them. Through a series of misunderstandings and unanticipated cancelation of a meeting I found myself in the area of Grand Ronde and chanced on a tribal museum and cultural center, Chachalu.

The name was given by the Yamhill Kalapuya to the area near the coast range where many native American tribes were relocated after the 1850s’ treaty negotiations. It means Place of Burnt Timber referring to traditional methods of healthy land management. 27 tribes and bands lived and persevered on this reservation, coming from throughout Western Oregon. They lived and persevered through the next loss of land and recognition during the termination policy of the 1950s, with the restored Federal recognition of 1983 not making up for the effects of decades of enforced poverty, lack of access to education and long-lasting effects of displacement.

The museum’s mission: As fire is used to ensure renewal and growth, our mission is to honor tradition by working to propagate and preserve traditional life ways, culture, and traditional homelands of the people relocated to Grand Ronde.

The museum is part of a multifaceted project of the Confederate Tribes of Grand Ronde, known as the Grand Ronde Cultural Development Project, through community input meetings. Other parts are oral history collection and curriculum development for tribal history lessons in public schools which have been successfully implemented since 2016. The museum houses exhibits, archival material for research, rooms for conferences and workshops, instructing in carving, basketry skills and native plant use and identification.

The wooden building is beautiful in its simplicity; it opened in expanded form (4000 share feet) last summer with an exhibition hall that contains artifacts and written information about tribal history and important tribal members.

Salmon and eel, major sources of protein, are displayed throughout the hall, “swimming” above your head.

This summer it also exhibits a truly stunning art installation retelling the history of Tomanowos (Spiritual Power), the Willamette meteorite.

The chunk of metal (the size of a car) fell out of the sky about 15.ooo years ago and was transported within an ice block by glacial floods from Montana to Oregon. It was greeted as a sacred object by the Clackamas tribes believed to be sent by the Sky people.

The next part of the story in a nutshell (details here – some will make you laugh out loud, some angry): Man removes meteorite from now Oregon Iron and Steel Company land. Lawsuit grants the company ownership rights (all the way up to the Suprem Court in 1905.) Meteorite then gets transported to Pdx Lewis & Clark Exposition where it is seen by a wealthy NYC socialite who buys it for $26.000 and donates it to the Museum of Natural History in New York where it resides until today. All efforts to bring it back, including one in 1999 when the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde filed a claim for repatriation of the meteorite under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, are unsuccessful.

In a mediated agreement, the American Museum of Natural History retains ownership unless the museum permanently stopps publicly displaying the meteorite. The Grand Ronde receive the right to an annual ceremonial visit as well as a commitment from the museum to provide a display for visitors that would discuss the significance of the meteorite to the Clackamas.

A tiny, previously sliced-off piece was returned by Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville this February and is part of the exhibit.

The current exhibition, called Witness, was created by Garrick Imatani, an associate professor and chair of the Foundation program at Pacific Northwest College of Art, together with tribal students; it consists of a styrofoam replica of the meteorite, a photographic series reenacting its journey and a film, The Drift.

Here is a description by OPB’s April Baer: Grounded in a huge constructed glacier form, Imatani’s film, “The Drift,” imagines what kind of cataclysmic event might cut through the bureaucracy that prevents the repatriation of some tribal artifacts. It shows Tomanowos levitating from a highly stylized museum environment, amid a natural disaster on par with the Missoula Floods. As Times Square fills with water, the meteorite levitates majestically into the air, its shadow flitting across the Statue of Liberty’s face as it exits the city. Its journey back to Oregon is marked by brief encounters with other tribal objects and artifacts in other museums along the way.

Such historically informed ideas, such – communal – creativity, such teaching of history on the verge of loss with the passing of elders, through art. Filled head and heart.

Some days are happier than others. Yesterday was one of them!

And here is Kronos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lj4jO1iv_HI with Terry Riley’s Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector

In the staunchly conservative, predominantly catholic German village of my childhood, we children eagerly anticipated three occasions each year: Carnival came around in February, an affair that allowed the entire population to break the social rules and party to the point of excess. Kids collected massive amounts of candy thrown during the parade of the few floats the village could muster, and adults knew that all would be forgiven come confession on Ash Wednesday.

In November we jumped around the bonfires of St. Martin’s Day, with paper- lantern processions illuminating the dark streets at night. Your Kindergarten teacher, wearing a ratty red velvet cape that the saintly knight was said to have shared with a beggar, handed out hot cross buns to all. Both occasions were goose-bump territory: being around unrecognizable, disinhibited adults at the beginning of the year could be mystifying. Being allowed out into the cold night at the end of the year, with fires reflected in the silver helmet of St. Martin’s apparition, could be overwhelming.

Neither, however, compared to the emotions riled up when the circus arrived each summer. This was in the 1950s, over half a century ago, mind you, and circus was still a rather modest affair. They’d pitch a tent on an empty field between the diocese and the fire station, with bleachers in the round close enough to the small arena that you could see the sweat on the acrobats faces and smell the cheap brown stage make-up of grown men playing, I shudder to say, cowboys and Indians while performing tricks on the backs of some exhausted ponies. And always, always a ravishing maiden with a trained poodle. Poor poodle.

There was a clown or two, some jugglers, and high wire and trapeze acts that went to the core of the experience: a shared range of emotions between members of the audience and the performers. There was distributed anticipatory anxiety, moments of collective breath holding and then exuberant relief by one and all when once again the laws of nature were seemingly defied, or at least nature’s wrath held at bay. 

There was an immediacy to the experience, and a connectivity, that for me defines this discipline in contrast to many other endeavors in the performing arts: not just skill acquired over years of practice, a sense of the possible, a tackling of the impossible (all of which can be said for musicians, actors and dancers as well who personally interact at least in theory with the audience before them)  – but an element of elective risk taking that in the moment is understood by both acrobat and audience to entail danger, to depend on the confidence and skill or strength of the performer and which is open to, potentially catastrophic, failure.

Music might make you breathe faster through beauty or virtuosity, actors might make your skin crawl with the rawness of their emotion, dancers might lift your soul when your own limbs no longer lift, but circus performers’ acts can make your heart stop – more than goose bumps, they incite empathic fear and subsequent relief, as anyone who has ever held their breath and then audibly released it in unison with hundreds of other audience members, can confirm. 

It does not matter if the connection is made because you admire the daring, or long for the physical prowess or marvel at the creativity of the act. It does not matter, although perhaps plays a role, that circus comes to you – at least during its traditional history and these days when performed in public spaces. What matters is that a bond is established between acrobats and audience, where at any given moment our knowledge of what is norm for a human body, and what is pushing it to the extreme, allows us to connect to those who challenge those norms in front of our very eyes, making us an accomplice to triumph or failure. Circus at its truest conjures empathy between humans who share physical boundaries and an emotional economy, both now challenged. 

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Not for this child, the dream of running away with the circus. I could not stand the intense arousal many of the tricks produced, anxiety-prone that I am. Ironically, somewhat like Alice in Wonderland, I fell through a rabbit hole into circus world this month, some 60 years later, for a gig of photographic documentation of Montreal’s annual Circus Festival and its International Market of Contemporary Circus, MICC.

The 10 year-old festival and the market are presented by TOHU, a non-profit organization that aims to create the world’s biggest international circus community and presents circus activities throughout the city, on the streets and in different venues. Tohu’s building is a green building, LEED certified, surrounded by vegetable gardens. The 360 degree hall is a marvel, with a capacity for 1200 spectators; the building also has spaces for art exhibits, meetings and so on and is located next to the head quarters of Cirque du Soleil and the International Circus School, forming a Cité des arts du cirque.

“The goal was to build a critical mass of infrastructure for creation, training and dissemination in the field of circus arts in the same location. The name was chosen to represent something dearly intended: It is derived from the French expression tohu-bohu, which alludes to the chaos and energy that precedes renewal and transformation.” (Turns out the name Tohu is actually rooted in Hebrew, but became French colloquial early on.)

The adjunct MICC, now in its 5th year, offers conferences with professional lectures tackling issues ranging from networking, international travel/visa requirements, sociological research to the politics of performance in public squares and the obstacles to inclusion.

MICC matches up some 300 professionals, performers, presenters and producers, and culminates in “pitches” that allow companies to describe their artistic vision and creations to a large audience of presenters trying to choose who to book for the next season.

The predominantly female team that curated MICC with a tight, creative focus was under new leadership: Ruth Wikler was recently appointed Deputy Director of Circus Programming by Stephane Lavoi, Tohu’s executive and programming director.

Wikler’s circus background, both applied and with a theoretical bend (a degree from Circomedia contemporary circus and physical theatre school in Bristol, UK, founder and artistic director of Cirque Boom in New York City in the early 2000s, and extensive US and international publications on circus history and practice) make for a good fit with the company.

Her international connections and ability to converse fluently in three languages will also help with the goal to expand TOHU’s impact beyond Montréal, building partnerships and tours across North America. Last but not least, as we here in Portland know from the decade-long history of Boom Arts, her curatorial prowess will serve circus’ cause well – it was certainly in brilliant evidence at MICC. Montreal’s gain, Portland’s loss!

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What did I learn about contemporary circus? Circus world, from the perspective of this layperson, can best be described as being in a dialectical state of tension both with regard to its form and its function. What Theodor W. Adorno, three years before his death, said in his 1966 talk at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, “Art and the Arts” might as well apply to new circus: “Borders between artistic genres have begun to merge, or more precisely, their demarcation lines have gotten lost in the fray.” (My translation.) Perhaps no coincidence that only two years later, Alexander Kluge’s early masterpiece Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed appeared on the German experimental film scene.

Traditional circus, established in England as early as the 1700s, used to be exclusively devoted to “tricks,” often presented simultaneously, from horse-back riding acrobatics to tumbling, juggling and aerial performance. It slowly developed into the spectacles of the kind we associate with the Ringling Brothers performances, and nowadays, of course, the explorations of the likes of Cirque de Soleil.

Contemporary circus, it seems, is torn between wanting to adhere to the traditional form, on the one hand, and exploring content based on narrative, dramaturgy, and theatrical arts on the other hand. This often requires or, more positively put, allows multi-disciplinary interaction, integrating other artistic media from live musical performance, videos, to modern dance into circus performance. Visionary intellectual Yaron Lifschitz, director of Australia’s Circa, described the experiential parts of such collaborations which go beyond the practicalities of modernizing the field and offering more diverse avenues for young talent: the interaction between artists coming from different fields often creates life changing experience, transcending simple application of one’s trade and developing a synergy that transforms circus into art.

And speaking of art: the Whitney has currently re-upped a pioneering piece by Alexander Calder: the joyful, playful, exuberant Circus, a sculptural anti-depressant if there ever was one.

“Circus consists of an encyclopedic, Whitmanesque array of sculptures that look like toys that look like incubi, fairies, strange inventions, mousetraps, gadgets, puppets, and Rube Goldberg–like contraptions. Once upon a time, all of these elements moved, performed, bounced around, zoomed through the air, or danced on the ground. Calder, acting as a one-man ringmaster, would arrive with his suitcases full of stuff, roll out and construct his big top and, one by one in front of delighted live audiences, blow whistles, ring bells, bellow, and roar while his wife played rumba and fox-trot records on a nearby Victrola, the two bringing Circus to phantasmagorical life.”

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Varying degrees of commercialization, differences in size, exclusively acrobatic or interdisciplinary enriched – it all makes for a lot of variety. The same is true for what the differing circus organizations attempt to accomplish: from simple entertainment to a focus on social justice or education, performing in large halls or outdoor spaces that integrate the local population, engaging in universal story telling or autobiographical descriptions, the diversity is impressive. Individual circus schools have now added courses in dramaturgy to their curriculum, and new approaches to analytic psychotherapy have emerged from the study of circus practices.

Modern dance is an obvious art form to be integrated with traditional circus practices, and nowhere was that more evident than in the performance of Spring, created by Gandini Juggling and choreographer Alexander Whitley. Relying on a minimum of narrative and a maximum of light trickery enhancing the brilliant movements, the show was a wonder. Portland’s White Bird has luckily provided our local audiences with similar experiences, with Cirque Alfonse being slated next in February 2020.

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During MICC’s “speed dating” between performers and those likely to book them, there emerged a variety that made me realize how antiquated my own views of circus are (and that spoke to the wokeness of the curatorial team which produced such a smorgasbord for us to contemplate.) To name just a few: Canadian Les sept doigts de la main offers Inuit creation myths, Australian Brief’s Factory plays on gender stereotypes with an all-male Burlesque, Spain’s Amer I Africa (Enva) explores human relationship on a pile of straw, Canadian Le Marche du Crabe performs entirely for infants and toddlers, Les Parfaits Inconnues tackles the other end of life, with a hilarious performance about an aging acrobat, the British Laura Murphy with Contra, a cabaret of contradictions performed unhesitatingly in the nude, Mimbre, also from England, who present Lifted, with three women of differing body shapes interacting and carrying each other. You get the idea.

What moved me most was a circus company, Kingston Circus Arts, that relies entirely on artists living with disabilities, amputees included. It resonated deeply, I assume, given my father’s insistence, a double amputee himself, to spend the annual winter vacation in Switzerland on the ice, participating in curling tournaments, wobbly prostheses be damned. Seeking risk to defy limitations is as close to circus as it gets.

What will stay with me for the longest, without doubt, is the concept of La Compagnie Basinga from France, that offers circus in the public square as both participatory and spectacular.

The artists move into low-income communities for a summer season and slowly integrate first children and then their families into the practices, ranging from actual acrobatics to all of the work involved in preparation of performances, from costume and set design, writing workshops and photography labs, to organizing security.

Bongonga, one of the main tight rope walkers who often risks her life rejecting safety precautions, spoke persuasively of the role of interdependence and mutual aid in forming community. The effectiveness of social circus has indeed found some support in sociological research that is devoted to assessing how circus can change lives of youth at risk and prevent recidivism of those already caught in the penal system.

Circus has come a long way since I sat trembling in the village bleachers. Like any other art form it is struggling to evolve in ways that are meaningful and evocative and to secure autonomy in a world that has made culture a commodity. I certainly got glimpses of the possibility of something radical, utopian, critical and emancipatory in contemporary circus – all that we demand from art.

A few days ago a drab high school campus in L.A. was transformed – community-relevant paintings — done by 31 artists as part of a weeklong festival co-produced by the L.A. firm Branded Arts and the Los Angeles Unified School District – brought color to the Maya Angelou Community High School.

Prominent artists and students had brainstormed, picked topics, vetted themes with the community at large for the last three years. Proposed sketches were discussed at monthly town halls, and the community turned out completely supportive.

The muralists and students worked together, sculptures were developed as well, and there was a concert during the unveiling last Saturday.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-lausd-maya-angelou-mural-festival-shepard-fairey-20190519-story.html

It reminded me a bit of what I had seen in Vienna last year, when various international artists transformed neighborhoods with large graffitied murals, with the support and encouragement of the city administration, art institutions and diverse landlords, whose building walls were used as canvases. I wrote about it here.

However, that project lacked the hands-on participation of people affected by the art – in contrast to the LA mural initiatives which really tried to respond to neighborhood ideas, concerns and needs and ultimately actively involved community members in the production process.

A (fleeting) parallel could be found here in PDX some weeks ago when a group of musicians, presented by Boom Arts, came to town from various US locations and encouraged members of the community to make music together with them. During concerts at the Old Church The Team actively engaged the audience, teaching them new songs, and providing structure through local talent, individual musicians as well as choirs, and political activists. The approach strengthened a sense of community, in addition to loosening inhibitions about singing outside of the privacy of one’s shower.

Outside of volunteering, it is somewhat rare to experience this community spirit, and we are the poorer for it. Most importantly, it brings together people who would otherwise have little contact, fostering a sense of shared interest and/or commitment.

Photographs are from the concert, including members of the Transpose choir.

And here is a young musician from L.A.:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22ZEVklvkEc

And so we conclude my travel adventures with a little story and a link to a longer one.

During one of my hikes I shared an overlook spot with a woman who started to talk to me. She had just completed her annual pilgrimage to Chimayo, an event joined by tens of thousands of people each year during Holy Week.

https://www.newmexicoexplorer.com/pilgrimage-to-chimayo/

Now she was taking in the sights and recommended that there was one other thing in the region I should not miss. The best Trading Post in NM, she said, was some 30 miles away in Nambe. Be warned, though, she continued, I drop a thousand bucks there on every single visit. Hmmm. How do you reconcile pilgrimages with that kind of spending. Well, not my business.

I did make it my business, though, to explore the Trading Post – the perks of traveling alone and changing plans at the drop of a suggestion. I found a sleepy little hollow with a store, an orchard in bloom, and two very tired women, the owners, sitting on the porch. Mother and daughter had just returned from a long trip to Venice, Italy, where the daughter had gotten married to a camera man. She had worked in the film industry as a stylist, while her mother had been a costume designer. We chatted about Italy and the fact that I had photographed in Murano, the glass making center, from which she had shipped her only wedding present, a chandelier. A Murano chandelier in Nambe – I was intrigued.

Enter the shop – photography strictly prohibited. No wonder: there were costumes from Dances with Wolves and other Western movies displayed on mannequins, costumes for which Cathy Smith, the owner, had won an Emmy award. Add to that big pictures of her induction into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame or some such. All amidst a cornucopia of Indian artifacts and tchotchkes. No wonder she had vehemently rejected my request to photograph her with the words: “I look too wiped-out from jet lag, ” despite the fact that we had a longish conversation in which I was told that the area is a “spiritual vortex.”

I wouldn’t know how to confirm that, but can attest to the fact that New Mexico provides a maelstrom of impressions, including one that suggests a single visit is not enough. I shall return!

Attached my musings on the history of art in Santa Fe.

And this from a local composer, title says it all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-pxMFLtd34

I am postponing the posting of a most upsetting article about our current prison system in favor of easing us all into the weekend. There’s always Monday….

Instead I will alert you to murder most fowl when a group of decidedly determined French chickens ganged up on a fox and saw to his demise. He was caught with them overnight in the henhouse when the communal pecking commenced. Maybe they have seen enough yellow vests recently to be alerted to the power of concerted action…. https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/13/europe/france-fox-killed-chickens-intl-scli/index.html

I had just read about this over yesterday’s breakfast treat at a small cafe in NE PDX and somehow could not stop laughing during the required postprandial walk to get rid of croissant calories and crumbs, not necessarily in that order. People must have thought here comes another Madwoman of Chaillot. Except most likely not many people along Sandy and 39th know the 1945 French play…. they probably just assumed I had a fleeting high.

Just like Giraudoux’ eccentric Countess Aurelia, said madwoman, I saw the world in those few blocks as pretty happy and beautiful.

Owls were hovering:

St. Patrick’s Day swag colored the world green:

Billiard beckoned:

And the sight of a barbershop illusion reminded me of the fact that I never, ever have to teach undergraduates Perception again. Hallelujah.

Unlike the madwoman, however, I refrained from locking away numerous oil barons and venture capitalists. Still working on gathering a co-conspiratorial band of fellow outcasts like the ones she had at her disposal. As I said, there’s always Monday.

iPhone Photographs are from a 2 block radius Thursday morning.

Music today from Edith Piaf, who would have fit right in with the mood.

Chain of association: I heard lots of communal singing this weekend. On Saturday, at an Indian Dance concert, people in the seats all around me hummed with the singer(s) who accompanied the performers. Incredibly complex and intricate melodies to the Western ear were quietly and perfectly voiced by young and older women near me. At Sunday’s fundraiser, whole groups of people sang old pop music without a moment’s hesitation.

I cannot remember when I’ve last sung, outside of some religious service or ironing to Steely Dan, and yet during my childhood there was lots of communal singing. In school, in the schoolyard, during bus trips, or simply when kids gathered, even at birthday parties.

Same for playing board games – I know they are up and coming again, but not in my immediate vicinity. This was brought to mind when I spotted this article in the NYT and thought a board game about birds (and math) looked compelling.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/science/wingspan-board-game-elizabeth-hargrave.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Elizabeth Hargrave, an avid birder and public-health scientists decided to teach about birds while having fun.

“Aiming to design a game with scientific integrity, Ms. Hargrave pulled data on North American birds from eBird, a citizen-science project managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. She also made use of the lab’s All About Birds website, as well as Audubon’s online guide. Then she built a spreadsheet. At its most extreme, it ran five hundred and ninety six rows by nearly one hundred columns — sorting, for instance, by order, class, genus, habitat, wingspan, nest type, eggs, food and red-list status. (Endangered birds confer special powers.)”

Apparently the game is a hit and sold out whenever newly printed; I wonder if older folks who have been out of the game, so to speak, can re-acquire strategy skills to play successfully – although what counts as success depends on what type of person you are: a competitor or a connector.

Next associative link: Under the bird game article were, as always for the NYT, links to older, related articles. What caught my eye was a game called Secret Hitler, apparently teaching about the slimy, subterfuge rise of fascism if people secretly put their mind to it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/business/secret-hitler-game.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

It is meant, if I understood correctly, to warn of such strategies and raise consciousness about them. No-one seems to have asked if it works in both directions: teaching the wrong kind of people the wrong kind of methods…which made me think of Monopoly.

Did you know that the game, the seeming tool to raise midget capitalists, was actually invented by Lizzi Magie in 1902 to compel some changes in tax law? A vocal supporter of the single tax movement during the late 19th century she called for the abolishment of all taxes in favor of one tax placed on property. By relying on citizens who owned land for tax revenue, the policy would have hopefully narrowed the gap between wealthy landlords and their working-class tenants.To make these principles as engaging as possible, Lizzie Magie turned them into a board game.” Magie thought the game’s critique of greedy landlords was obvious, but it eventually evolved into a beast far removed from her original creation. It was banned in the Soviet Union and China and apparently drew the ire of Fidel Castro who accused it of being “symbolic of an imperialistic and capitalistic system.”  

Makes you wonder, indeed, how games can backfire.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/93275/origins-7-popular-board-games

For music today, I settled on a website that provides music for boardgames. You type in the name of the game and they provide a playlist. The site is called Melodice. I chose a Settler of Catan song, since it is a German game and gives me an opening to show some beloved German landscapes….