First Grade

               I was six years old. We were all sitting in chairs in a semi-circle in front of Miss Lapiz our first grade teacher at Harper School. She was reading to us some story and I don't have any idea now what it was. This was a ritual. We had our reading groups in the morning and in the afternoon we had our “listening” session where Miss Lapiz read to us. This was a fundamental change from kindergarten in the suburban American educational system, however. First off, kindergarten was totally about free association. It was controlled chaos. It was finger painting and Orff instruments. It was not about reading or writing or arithmetic.
              But first grade? That was the big time. For one thing we had desks. We had our own property. Bill Cosby put some of this in perspective in one of his routines recorded on vinyl in the 60s. (I'm sure it's available online). We had the paper with the dotted lines that enabled us to keep our printed letters straight, and he was right. There really were pieces of wood still floating in the paper.
One afternoon in the semi-circle I was day-dreaming as normal and the girl next to me leaned over and whispered something in my ear. I didn't quite catch it. I said. “What?” She said, “I love you.” I was flabbergasted. She was beautiful. It was also true that I had never seen it coming. I had never looked at her as an object of desire before then, and now, at six years old, I desired her completely. She had short dark hair. She was wearing a light blue and white dress. She was stunning to me at that moment, and I was absolutely clueless. I was embarrassed. I blushed. I can feel it now...and I said nothing.
             It haunts me to this day that I said nothing. The next year in second grade, Robin leaned over at her desk and said to me, “You know... I like Jimmy now this much better than you.” She held out both of her hands about a half a foot apart. That much better? I was even more stunned. Not only had I done nothing about her profound demonstration of love in first grade, I was caught completely flat-footed by my demotion in second. I think that is when I gave up.

A Plaza Story

Statue of Lorca, Plaza de Santa Ana, Madrid

Antonio José working in his apartment in Burgos, circa 1934

Plaque on the wall outside the composer´s apartment in Burgos

             I was babbling like a hippie on bennies and probably made a fool of myself…no wait, definitely made a fool of myself, but so what. It wasn’t the first time and it invariably will not be the last. I was in Plaza de Santa Ana, one of my favorite places in Madrid, where in good weather there's a lot of outdoor seating for the adjacent restaurants. And for late March, it was a beautiful evening, in fact almost picture perfect. Spain has switched to daylight savings and the silver light of the long afternoons is starting to take shape in Madrid. I decided to get a table, but I was going to have to wait a while because the plaza was so crowded. I wanted a good glass of red wine and the one place I knew that had good wine was, of course, very busy and there were a people ahead of me waiting for a table. But I was in no hurry.
             The end of the plaza where this particular taberna had its tables set up is where the statue of the poet Federico García Lorca is located. The statue is life size. Lorca, cast in bronze, is standing, palms up and together in front of him, with a dove just taking flight from the cup of his hands. Under the statue is a marble plaque with the inscription “Madrid a Federico García Lorca”. The statue does not evoke anything remotely like the sentiment of many European capitols and American capitols showing 19th century generals on horseback. There is no flag waving here with Lorca.The former democratic socialist government of Spain, in fact, had finally taken down in its infinite wisdom the last statue of dictator Francisco Franco in Madrid. It was a vaguely anachronistic equestrian piece that was carted off in the middle of the night to prevent controversy, but in the end only the most die-hard Franquista has ever missed it. The Lorca statue, on the other hand, is very simple, elegant, pacifist even, and prominently displayed at one end of the plaza. Unfortunately, as I noticed while standing there waiting for my table, it had just recently been defaced. It seems some “idiota” had plastered the inscription below Lorca with a big bumper sticker advertising something or other. It was hard to tell what the sticker itself said, because it had been torn by someone else in a vain attempt to try to uncover the inscription. The inscription now read “ Mad..a Federico Garc”.
                  Well, not being one to avoid a challenge, I decided it was not only inappropriate that the dedication to a great poet be vandalized, but that it was important 40 years after the dictator, whose paramilitary allies had offed Lorca, that the tourist public collecting in large numbers in the plaza this evening understood: Madrid, nor any Spaniard really, was somehow angry with Federico. If anything it is quiet the opposite these days. So, I knelt down and began slowly tearing away as much of the sticker as I could with my thumbnail. That day the sun in Madrid had been very warm and possibly the heat had melted the glue underneath, because slowly at first, but with much more ease as the minutes went by, the sticker started to yield. First I got the “rid” of Madrid uncovered, and then bit by bit I could peel back all the rest. It took maybe all of 15 or 20 minutes. And what did I get for my service to Spanish culture? A table. Not that anyone noted my gallantry (some kids came running by and a few people took the chance to have a picture taken with the statue while I was hard at work), but my timing was just perfect, because a table opened up right near the statue just as I finished. I saw it as a sign. Thanks Fred.
                   So a little later while into my wine and potato chips (a Spanish delicacy that I am now totally addicted to, especially if the potato chips are cooked in olive oil) an elderly gentleman walks by my table looking for some place to sit down and rest a little. He was waiting for friends, he said, and I offered him a place. Now I am an older person, but I guess I still chaff at being called “elderly”. I have avoided joining AARP precisely because I still live by the myth that I’m really 19, only I never got around to telling my hair and my left knee. Nevertheless, I insist on keeping this self-mirage intact as it gives me great comfort…in my old age. But this man, probably in his 80s and relatively distinguished looking in a tweed jacket and a sweater, definitely fit any description of elderly. His gate was a little slow, he was tall and thin, but a little hunch over ,and he spoke in measured tones. He started to speak in Spanish and in my accented way I answered him until we realized we both probably spoke English better. In fact, he was Swedish, a theater director in Stockholm. His name is Mans Westfelt. He ordered a water from the camarera and asked me why I was in Spain. I told him that I was doing research on artists who lived under the regime of the dictator and his eyes lit up. He had recently finished directing a performance of Lorca´s poetry in conjunction with the Stockholm Cervantes Institute (the institute is the Spanish cultural ambassador worldwide, much as the Goethe Institute is for Germans). The presentation, he said, included music and at one point he showed me the brochure and pointed out that the program even included some of Lorca's own music. Lorca, in addition to being Spain’s premier twentieth poet, also was an amateur painter and an accomplished pianist. The brochure noted each poem and its musical setting, and the last poem was set to Lorca’s own composition. Mans was credited at the top. I was very impressed.
                     This appeared to me to be a great stroke of luck. I had just run into a gentleman, an artist, whose interest is right up my alley. This is the kind of thing that a fellow graduate student friend of mine says you just can't beat by sitting at home on the internet and doing research. But my luck was just beginning. My doctoral research has to do with the lives of three artists: a composer, a writer, and a painter. The composer is Antonio José Martínez Palacios, a brilliant young Spanish musician who was killed in 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War at the time and under circumstances almost identical to those of Lorca. The poet´s death is one of the iconic tragedies of that war and certainly of artists under the regime’s rule. The story of Lorca is also a direct model for my interest in the life of Antonio José, as he became known. The composer, like Lorca, had mistakenly believed that when civil war broke out somehow being in his native city would offer him protection. Un gran error. In the end, neither artist was safe. Both cities, Lorca´s Granada and Antonio José's Burgos, rapidly fell to the armies of the Nationalists, who had revolted to overthrow the Republic. Both artists were associated with Republican values and were arrested by the Spanish fascist paramilitary. Finally, both were incarcerated without charges for a couple of months and then were given “paseos” into the countryside, meaning they were put in a truck with other Republican prisoners, driven outside of the city, shot and buried in an unmarked grave. And, as in the case of Lorca, people are still not completely sure of the precise location where the remains of Antonio José are buried. There has been and continues to be an investigation over Lorca’s remains, but in Antonio José’s case, at least so far, no one has ventured into the countryside outside Burgos, shovel in hand, to start digging. Burgos, however, like Madrid, does have a plaque dedicated to the the artist. The plaque is placed up on the wall just outside of the second floor apartment, where Antonio José lived when he was arrested and taken to jail. Its translation in English is “Here lived Antonio José Martínez Palacios, composer and folklorist from Burgos. The city dedicates this remembrance to him.” Well, at least a plaque hi up on a wall where it can't be reached is probably safe from vandals.
                     However, although Señor Westfelt sitting across from me at my table was a wonderfully articulate and interesting person for me to run into by accident this night, he was not the real story. The reason that Mans was hanging out in the plaza near the statue was, it turns out, because he was meeting with a Spanish theater producer and with Ian Gibson, noted British literary critic and historian who has made his career on researching the death of Federico García Lorca. To a would-be historian interested in the Spanish Civil War, the mystique that has surrounded the death of Lorca, and the horrendous years of the Franco repression after the war, the chance of running into Ian Gibson was akin to being a Red Sox fan and running into the head of Ted Williams. Except, Ian Gibson is very much alive and, as far as I could tell, his head is still firmly attached. And so, when the British author and his Spanish friend appeared near the statue, my guest got up to walk over to them and I followed behind. I figured, what the hell, the opportunity probably is not going to occur often.
                   After introducing myself, and after Mans himself had commented on my project, I saw my chance and launched into an encapsulated explanation of my research. It is here where I couldn’t shut up. Mr. Gibson seemed slightly bemused as I explained that I had read some of his work on Lorca and that I was trying to utilize some of the same ideas surrounding the meaning of the great poet's life, but only using an artist who was not as well-known, and that my project really had to do with three artists anyway, who were sort of a cross-section, you understand, for the travails of artistic expression during the dictatorship, and that I would love to sit down sometime and talk to you about my work and by the way I am sending Mans here links to the composer’s music and I am sure that he would be glad to forward them to you if you wanted to listen to some of the incredible compositions, and …and …

     “That’s nice” Gibson offered. “It’s good to be excited with one’s work.” With that he turned and went on chatting with Mans and the Spanish director and I sort of faded back to the table.
                   Oh well. This was one of those, what I like to call “Kid. You’ll shoot your eye out” moments. You have to have seen the movie A Christmas Story, I guess, to get the reference, but suffice it to say it has to do with ego-deflation. Still, at least I tried and you get nowhere if you don’t. There may be other opportunities and anyway, I can still put Gibson in my acknowledgments as an inspiration. Not that he’ll ever read the acknowledgments or any other part of the work for that matter, but it looks good to a publisher…that is...should any publisher ever read it either. Time will tell. If not, I had some good wine in a great setting and met some interesting people. Call the whole thing a plus and you can’t have too many of those at my age.

Blindfolds

   Malevolent Neutrality: The United States, Great Britain, and the 
                               Origins of the Spanish Civil War                                                         by Douglass Little. Cornell University Press, 1985

            Far sighted the politicians of democratic Western Europe and the United States were not in the summer of 1936. For those who have repeatedly pointed to Munich as the place where the Western democracies most grievously caved into Hitler, they need to go back and reexamine that history. By Munich, Hitler already had no doubts that he could manipulate the British. It was in Spain in 1936, not Munich in 1938, that Hitler became emboldened. The civil war in Spain from the beginning gave the Western powers plenty of options to confront Hitler without going at him head on. Had they given even a modicum of aid to the fledgling Republic they could have made Hitler's experience there far too costly, while at the same time ensuring that Stalin would not be looked to by the Republic as its remaining option. Germany was barely a year into its rearmament program, and of course the three years Spanish Civil War gave it an enormous proving ground. Instead, Stalin's entrance on the Republic side late in 1936, after aid had been turned down by Britain, France, and the United States, just gave right wing groups in those countries more ammunition to claim the Republic was a closet socialist project. And in fact, had the Republic with Stalin's aid been able to stem the tide of Franco's Italian and German backed army, it would have been incredibly indebted to the Soviet Union.
              But then in 1936, we are talking about Baldwin in Britain, Blum in France, and Roosevelt. Consumed by their own domestic politics, none would win any prizes for clairvoyance on the world stage. Of the three, only Roosevelt later admits his error. This book written over 25 years ago by Douglas Little, an American historian who specializes in American diplomatic history, is still an insightful overview of how the policies of non-intervention championed by Britain during the Spanish Civil War masked deep foreign policy failures on the part of all three governments.

The Quiet Work

               For the last two years I have been working on research for my doctorate in history. I have found this work enormously rewarding because it has challenged me to the root of my sense of humanity, and to the drive of humanity that most interests me, the human potential to imagine...to create.  But what is creativity in the face of obstacles severe enough to break a person's life in two? Are artists any more susceptible to the crushing weight of repression than other human beings? Is artistic expression a matter of life or death or a matter of whim and conceit? The answer to that last question came long ago in my life and I can safely telegraph the answer here. One has no choice in the matter. But how that answer plays out in history and in particular in the history of societies driven by authoritarian control in the twentieth century, is to me the Rorschach test of creativity. The regimes of Stalin and Hitler offer their own diabolical perspectives as to the efficacy of control over artistic expression to be sure. But in the twentieth century they were not the only ones, nor necessarily the most adept.

               My research is a cultural history project focusing on three artists that serve as a broad cross-section of dissident, artistic expression during the Francisco Franco dictatorship in Spain (1936-1975). They are composer Antonio José Martínez Palacios from Burgos (1902 – 1936), poet and novelist Jesús López Pacheco from Madrid (1930 – 1997), and painter-sculptor Antoni Tàpies from Barcelona (1923 – February 7, 2012).  The “dissidence” of their expression stems from the meaning of their lives and art as counterweights to the Spanish dictatorship’s National Catholic cultural project, a project begun in the earliest days of the Nationalist controlled areas of Spain at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. This then is a review of that work so far with a particular emphasis on one of the artists, Antoni Tàpies and his understanding of the role of art in society.

               Composer Antonio José, the name he went by professionally, was executed at the outset of the Civil War by the Falange in Burgos under circumstances closely reminiscent to those of Federico García Lorca in Granada. For me his story is outwardly the most tragic of the three. As a victim of the regime’s most violent repression, his abundant talent as a composer, musicologist, and choral teacher were cut short. I still believe that his status has yet to be fully recognized and hope this research can help promote him as one of Spain's preeminent twentieth century composers.

Author Jesús López Pacheco’s 1958 novel Central eléctrica was a centerpiece of Spanish social realism writing of the 50s and 60s and established his reputation among his colleagues as a preeminent spokesman for social change. He represents for me the artist who had achieved some recognition under the regime, but who, as an active dissident, suffered severely from its censorship policies. These policies, as seems apparent from my research, became even more intense in the years between 1951 through to the end of the dictatorship. In López Pacheco’s case, I have focused on archival evidence from documents held in the Archivo General de la Administración in Alcalá de Henares and personal interviews. In addition, the experience of the author as an exile at the end of the 1960s gives his story an added dynamic, common to other Spanish artists who fled the regime.

            The censorship documents on writers of the period also reveal that literature went through a rigid sieve of approval that other forms of expression did not.  In fact by the 1950s, the regime began to make an effort to use the plastic arts as a promotional component on the international stage.  And the reason for the use of contemporary art for this purpose was simple. No one in the regime, not the least Franco himself, saw a viable threat from contemporary painting and sculpture, and especially from the kind of abstract expressionist work of an artist like Antoni Tàpies.

              My work at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona has concentrated on the great store of periodical resources from the period of his early career and the Fundació's wealth of primary and secondary works. By the first Bienal Hispanoamericana del Arte in Madrid in 1951 supported by the regime, and through subsequent exhibitions in Venice, Barcelona, and Sao Paulo,  Tàpies was establishing himself as one of the most critically acclaimed Spanish artists since Picasso, Dalí and Miró. But his art, far from being a tool of the regime, became a force against it.  

             Antoni Tàpies discusses later in his life how he and other artists were well aware of the intent of the regime to manipulate contemporary Spanish artists and he recognized that cultural openings like the Bienal gave contemporary painters an advantage in terms of the distribution of their work both in Spain and abroad. Nevertheless, he disagreed with vehemently about the effects of artistic expression on society, and it is this view of art that for me has made him so important to my work. The way this story is unfolding for me now, Tàpies becomes the culmination of the power and presence of artistic expression in culture. 

             One interpretation of the regime’s view of modern art, and Franco´s himself, who visited some of the early exhibitions, was that art of a nature that demands more participation on the part of the viewer, more contemplation is lost on most and therefore not a revolutionary threat to the regime, or as Tàpies put it represented the “inoperancia” of art.  “To me,” he says “it demonstrates the exact opposite: the ignorance of Franco about contemporary art. The facts show that art, and all of culture, if not instantly triggering the spectacular revolutions that some imagine, do silent work, on the other hand, that prepares the consciousness in a manner generally more permanent than many violent acts.  Franco continually underestimated culture, intellectuals and artists without realizing that to his own discredit and that of all Francoism the consciousness of the inhabitants of the Spanish state were being fed by the intellectuals and artist”.  

         Using his notoriety through active involvement with student demonstrations for democracy in Barcelona, and through his own artistic expression he puts his reputation on the front line in the 1960s. Tàpies writes that this direct action involvement was a revelation that infused him with a new sense of humanity and community. He found this sense in both the  students who were fighting for more open universities and in those activists who were older and who had spent most of their lives fighting for democracy under Franco. It was they who had come to him as a well-known artist, seeking his help in a seminal student sit-in at the Canpuchinos de Sarría Convent in Barcelona in 1966.

            This sense of community and involvement revolutionized his understanding of the role as an artist. Instead of being concerned with strictly finding his own space in life through his artistic expression, he incorporated that space into a larger statement on how the artist confronts his material reality and his society.

       

Day Dream Believer

Many (many) years ago when I was in high school the Monkees surfaced. I only watched the TV show for a few seconds at a time while flipping channels. It wasn't funny, and anyway, please. None of us, meaning me and my friends, bought into this contrivance. I thought Last Train to Clarksville was a catchy little tune and I thought it was quirky that a band could be prefabricated and still have a hit in the real world, though I didn't understand much then how often publicity machines could crank out hits. But that was about it. We had more important music at hand that bridged the gap between fantasy and reality, first off. And believe me, for us music was the expression of both, and growing more so every year. It gave as an unspoken language and bond and it threw down a welcomed wall between us and the generation of our parents. The Beatles, the Stones, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix...they were real musicians, they played and wrote their own music. They didn't need some cardboard cut-out Hollywood tune factory to describe the world to us. The fact that Hendrix went out on his first American tour as an opening act to the Monkees was always bizarre to me. It was the musical equivalent of Jackson Pollock painting Mickey Dolenz's kitchen.
         Of course, this didn't stop us from building our own fantasy worlds around those "real groups". By my first year in college Paul was about to commit suicide for peace, Jagger really was Satan eternally going to a party, and Jimi Hendrix was God (okay...there were some who thought it was Clapton. Frankly, I would have taken either of them in place what I grew up with). But those were our choices, those fantasies. We chose to construct them, and we used them to while away the hours with a joint in hand and huge Koss Plus earphones with the liquid in the ear pads and the volume crank up higher than workers on speed at a munitions factory working overtime under contract to the Defense Department. No one could manufacture those fantasies for us-not the least of all some wanna-be, pseudo musical, bad imitation Beatle hair-cut (and goofy demeanor) group of child star actors masquerading as "artists".
          But then, of course, the inevitable. We got older and the fantasies started to inexorably grind down to an unrecognizable pulp. Paul is still alive, Mick Jagger looks like Dorian Grey a second after he stabs the painting, and Hendrix proved to be, well...mortal. From all reports I've read Davey Jones did not adhere to this inevitability. He seems in the end to have been a nice enough guy. He reportedly looked fit and was still lively on stage at 66. Having run into a variant of the clogged artery syndrome myself a number of years ago, though at a younger age where there is the possibility of shifting gears, I have great sympathy for those that knew him well, but didn't have a clue as to his condition. And maybe even he didn’t, and maybe that is best. Why let reality in the door?
         I stick a couple of sayings under my emails as a signature and they are there for a purpose. They always come in handy because they carry universal weight. They chime in for almost any human condition, but they are not trivial. Probably at some point I am going to run out of places to use them, but not yet anyway. One of them is pertinent here, I think. Davey Jones died Wednesday morning. The Monkees' lead singer was reportedly sleeping at the time and there is no way to know what near death incites he might have offered to us had he survived. He may never have another day dream, but my guess is that dream in the dark was as good as it gets. In Long Day’s Journey into the Night Eugene O'Neill writes "For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning!" Everybody gets one.

Good Will Hunting

            This is not a movie review blog, but nevertheless, I was lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling and I couldn't get this movie out of head. I never get tired of watching it and I know why. I heard Robin William's voice (I'm channeling him , I swear) saying something to the effect "and those are the really good  bits, sport." He was, of course, speaking to Matt Damen's character  in Good Will Hunting about the little peccadilloes that make a relationship so endearing: the farts in the night, the parts of us that we don't show openly to others, but when in love, show unabashedly to our other. Robin Williams was spot on in this role. That he won an academy award should be no surprise. That he didn't win Best Actor award is a crime. Yes, Matt Damon was the protagonist and he and Ben Affleck won the Best Original Screenplay award for an astoundingly warm and nuanced script. But Robin Williams does more than play a character, he throws his character's life, his character's total history in your face every second in every move, every question he has about himself. Yes, the script that Damon and Affleck created make that possible, but the delivery is the clue. This role is one of the great lights of American acting. Williams is so deep into this man that his improvisations speak with the characters voice. And I do not doubt there were improvisations. There is plenty of brilliance to go around here and when a script is good as this and a actor absorbs a role so deeply as does Williams, it would be a huge mistake to not let him run with his role at times and that is what Damon and Affleck do.

Jardineros

Jardineros
       You have to love the Spanish word that Mexicans gave to outfielders in baseball. Jardineros. Outfielders are that. They, and not the pitchers, not the batters even, not the infielders for God´s sake...they are the heart of baseball. They plow the outfield. They nurture their space and wait patiently.They check the wind. They look to see where the sun is in the sky, where the clouds might surprise them, or where the light standards for their artificial garden don´t throw enough light on their land. They are the gardeners.
        Baseball is a came of patience and one wonders how the hell Americans ever could have claimed it their national pastime. And the truth is they don´t any more. We have too many distractions. We are not who we were and I do not say that nostalgically. It's over between baseball and us. Football rules! Basketball, soccer, tennis, ...hell beach volleyball, all now have a place and there is neither the time nor the patience for baseball. And I get it.
       We are a frenetic lot. When one sees how baseball appeared in the nineteenth century, I still marvel at how it took hold among us. But really the architecture created the attachment. We were looking for an organization and it provided a form and structure that settled our fears after a very frightening and debilitating civil war.
         But it is also important to remember that we were a nation created at a time when modern nations were created. We came to be when the idea of the imagined community that Benedict Anderson talks about was in fact being realized in many places in the world. So to us, this little off-shoot of an English game played on stoops in front of nineteenth century American tenements, that involved an individual, but also a team's concerted effort to win in life, was our imagination of an ideal. We were gardeners, tending our fields, but trying to grow something monumental at the same time. And of course we had fucked up.
          We had created a nation based on an ideal that many of us in reality did not believe in. We were a pseudo-people, who claimed one thing and did another. But the game we invented, and rounders and cricket notwithstanding we did invent it, was not a game at all in the end. It was real. It was our true creation. The Constitution enshrined slavery of individuals, Native Americans were driven from their homes, and when we stretched from ocean to ocean we decided that was not enough. But baseball knew better. Nine innings (more if you need them, but you have to pay the peanut man overtime), three outs an inning,...and three strikes and you´re out! No sudden death overtime. No penalty shots. No shoot outs. And no ties (unless it goes to the runner). It is our meme, as Richard Dawkins would say and I for one think it may be the greatest gift we have ever given to humanity.