The Shadow Puppets

Mauricio sent me this photo--found in his desk drawer--from Fowles Street in Oceanside. The Indonesian shadow puppets--they were on that high shelf in my parents' house for as long as I could remember. Dad purchased them at the World's Fair, in New York--maybe 1964, brought them back for us. It was very much the kind of thing he liked to do--a souvenir, yes, but with something of a higher purpose--a part of the wider world, like the cards--many, many of them--that he'd send me from the museums--the Guggenheim, the Modern, the Whitney--modern museums, the ones of today--how these things could become part of our lives, shared that is... Rememeber pondering his choices--Anuszkiewicz, for instance, or Vasarely--"It's what they're doing, son." A great hope in that--the bounty of the ongoing...

Of course, and more recently it was Colin McPhee's book, A House in Bali--with McPhee's own photographs and stories. Read it last spring. McPhee had listened to Balinese music in New York, maybe 1929--the early gamelan recordings--and knew instantly that this would be the rest of his life. An absolute journey of discovery--the past becoming the present, disappearing at the same time. Priceless in its telling...

Also important--the books below, captured incidentally (as with everything). And the shelves themselves, now with me here, holding songs...

Deux Nues

This fragment from studio notes: "Small Bonnard drawing that I found on line—an etching, used in one of the books. 'Deux Nues.' Forever a reminder—line and touch and smudge."

So elided in the French that at first I didn't recognize the word--nue. More rude in English--the pose as well? But with Bonnard all fluid line, a tentative retouching, built up around the edges--not so much patience as anticipation...a graceful eagerness. Also--always--a sense of the past, the possibility of an earlier time, era of myth--redolent gift. Every woman a goddess--each shop girl a saint...

Song

Tom Waits, "Step Right Up..." For one thing, it's not rural, the curve in the railway trestle, with houses behind. Bending forward just so--the anti-hero--a kind of inwardness, even with the snatch of white t-shirt showing--wirey hair, sideburns, furrowed brow. The effort here--one foot turned in, knees almost touching--he holds the microphone (on a railway trestle?) with one hand, fingers relaxed, delicate even. It's only later that you wonder what he's singing--it could be almost anything, but with a road, the distance, that impossible gravel voice...

Le Vieux Carré

That these images might come from anywhere--like this one, in rural France... Le Vieux Carre. A man in a beret, sitting in front of the hearth, maybe with Alfonse (his old beagle) close alongside. But why the high chair in the foreground? And no fire? Maybe a sculptor's table--everything covered with dust...a clay studio, like the older art student in the hallway at school yesterday evening, elaborate tattoos prominent, on back and neck above a black t-shirt, swatch of clay on her upper arm... And the dried flowers--the ones in the bell jar on the table behind--or is it a votive figure, next to the old cross, like something out of Bernanos... And the man himself, equally unreal--carved full size from life--or is it just the light, the layers of dust, the scattered closeness, the revelations of age...

Chopin: The Mazurkas

According to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the mazurkas "that remained unaltered by influences of urban music seem to have no definite ending, as the repeats are made ad libitum, or their concluding bar finishes on the dominant on the third beat, without accent leaving the impression of disappearance into the air [...] A certain pride of bearing and sometimes a wildness sharply differentiate (their) mood from that of the more sensuous waltz. The dance has the character of an improvisation…”

“...like handkerchiefs waving on a railway platform when one is leaving everything one loves.” Marcel Schneider (quoted by Olivier Bellamy).

The Little Path

From Satyajit Ray's film, Pather Panchali--The Little Path. The scene here takes place just before the moment when "little Apu and his sister Durga watch with fascination as the first railway train they have seen passes by." Ray made the film in 1955--but it feels as if it were set in an earlier time. (His own childhood?) "In Apu’s youthful mind...the train evokes wonder and amazement, the vaguely humanistic dreams of an indistinctly imagined future of immense possibilities and boundless distances."