Margotlog: The Tuba, the Orchestra, and the Business Model
No offense, Senor Tuba, but you mostly don't belong in a symphony orchestra. Like your overgrown business compatriot--the contemporary "business model"--your music is too raucous, too lumbering, too prone to go awry in favor of swagger and ump-pa-pa. Good for a military goosestep, or "down home" flashy parade, but not flexible enough for sonorous blends or wild, heroic shouts at the white whale of the world.
The Twin Cities of Minneapolis/Saint Paul are currently in the unenviable state of having both symphony orchestras "locked out" by managing boards composed largely of the "business model." I am not privy to these "heads" who are wielding the cleavers, but I've learned enough during the recent recession to be suspicious. Let's recall how the business model brought the world to its knees within recent memory.
As I understand the financial mess circa 2008, huge insurance companies were betting against their wealthiest clients. This meant insiders would benefit mightily if clients failed. Picture tall columns of glass and steel filled with computer savants who rigged schemes of gigantic proportions, so out of touch with real-life below that they believed they could tweak the strings of the world with impunity.
Compared with such high-flying machinations, cutting a symphony orchestra down to size is small potatoes. But the mentality may very well be the same. Something along the line of a tuba swaggering its big bulk and flashy golden bell, drowning out everything less brassy and exaggerated in its wake.
In the place of the tuba, substitute large expenditures on building renovations. Both Twin Cities orchestra boards have committed their players/audiences to expensive building renovations. One of them, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, has also kept ticket prices so low as to be offensive (especially now, given the cry of threatening insolvency).
I've seen similar moves in another area where the business model has taken hold: i.e. higher education. How many smallish, liberal arts institutions have been "blessed" with new buildings on campus, while within those buildings, staff and faculty are trimmed so tight that credible functioning is called into question?
Bricks and mortar versus the people that actually play the music. Big donors getting their names on glass and steel, while, horror of horrors, it's revealed that nearly 50% of the orchestra's budget is musicians' salaries! What else should an orchestra management be spending its money on?
A lovely young lady of my acquaintance recently commented that she thinks these orchestra boards simply don't want, in their heart of hearts, to do their jobs. Consequently, in her gentle parlance, they "need to be asked to step down."
I'm for it. It's time for the swaggering tuba to exit stage left. And let the serious tinkering necessary to preserve both orchestras begin.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Friday, October 19, 2012
Margotlog: The Painted BIrd
Margotlog: The Painted Bird
One of the strangest novels I've ever read. Yet as the small boy wanders from one grotesque encounter to another, uprooted and friendless in war-torn, peasant Poland, it is hard not to become fascinated, even obsessed with the bizarre horrors that envelop him.
Is this an autobiographical tale, or a series of macabre fantasies, engendered by folklore and wartime's loose civilization? Or it is both? Jerzy Kosinski, born Lewinkopf, was dubbed Kosinski, by his father when the family went into hiding during World War II. They were sheltered by peasant Catholics, who risked being discovered by the Germans for sheltering Jews. Jerzy even became a Catholic altar boy.
As does his character in the Painted Bird. But so inept and terrorized is the child, that he stumbles, drops the sacred text, and all hell breaks loose. By this time in the novel, however, we expect the worst. We expect brutish peasant fathers to force their daughters to copulate with goats. We expect an aged herb healer to stumble into death, pushed by boy she's taken in. We expect gangs of village boys to torture rabbits and wayfarers. We expect the kindly bird catcher to paint his favorite birds in gaudy colors, one by one, after his Ludmilla, a whore repeatedly raped by soldiers and villagers, disappears. When the bird-catcher sends the painted birds into the sky, they fly instantly to their kind, who attack them savagely, unable to recognize them through their gaudy disguise.
It's hard not to consider this an allegory of the artist's life, for Kosinski painted himself with one fable after another. He married an heiress who died shortly after from a brain tumor. She left him nothing. He was recognized as a fine polo player, he had a part in Warren Beatty's movie, Red. And he received grants and awards from a fake foundation he himself founded, as well as the bona fide Guggenheim. When he committed suicide in 1991, it's not hard to imagine that his own fictions were pecking him to death.
Still the powerful work remains, with its rather slow, subdued ending. As the war nears its close, the wandering boy is taken in by a group of Russian soldiers and becomes the side-kick of a crack marksman, as fine a shot as was the adult Kosinski himself who also enlisted with the Russians. When the boy finally is reuinted with his parents, a period of intense testing ensues. One can't help but consider this psychologically accurate. How could a child, forced to witness and participate in adult horrors, easily settle down to obedience?
Several times, I almost stopped listening to this novel. But after a period of disgust, I began again. It is an astonishing tour de force, and its truth, though extreme, became, for me, ultimately believable. Or at least knowable.
One of the strangest novels I've ever read. Yet as the small boy wanders from one grotesque encounter to another, uprooted and friendless in war-torn, peasant Poland, it is hard not to become fascinated, even obsessed with the bizarre horrors that envelop him.
Is this an autobiographical tale, or a series of macabre fantasies, engendered by folklore and wartime's loose civilization? Or it is both? Jerzy Kosinski, born Lewinkopf, was dubbed Kosinski, by his father when the family went into hiding during World War II. They were sheltered by peasant Catholics, who risked being discovered by the Germans for sheltering Jews. Jerzy even became a Catholic altar boy.
As does his character in the Painted Bird. But so inept and terrorized is the child, that he stumbles, drops the sacred text, and all hell breaks loose. By this time in the novel, however, we expect the worst. We expect brutish peasant fathers to force their daughters to copulate with goats. We expect an aged herb healer to stumble into death, pushed by boy she's taken in. We expect gangs of village boys to torture rabbits and wayfarers. We expect the kindly bird catcher to paint his favorite birds in gaudy colors, one by one, after his Ludmilla, a whore repeatedly raped by soldiers and villagers, disappears. When the bird-catcher sends the painted birds into the sky, they fly instantly to their kind, who attack them savagely, unable to recognize them through their gaudy disguise.
It's hard not to consider this an allegory of the artist's life, for Kosinski painted himself with one fable after another. He married an heiress who died shortly after from a brain tumor. She left him nothing. He was recognized as a fine polo player, he had a part in Warren Beatty's movie, Red. And he received grants and awards from a fake foundation he himself founded, as well as the bona fide Guggenheim. When he committed suicide in 1991, it's not hard to imagine that his own fictions were pecking him to death.
Still the powerful work remains, with its rather slow, subdued ending. As the war nears its close, the wandering boy is taken in by a group of Russian soldiers and becomes the side-kick of a crack marksman, as fine a shot as was the adult Kosinski himself who also enlisted with the Russians. When the boy finally is reuinted with his parents, a period of intense testing ensues. One can't help but consider this psychologically accurate. How could a child, forced to witness and participate in adult horrors, easily settle down to obedience?
Several times, I almost stopped listening to this novel. But after a period of disgust, I began again. It is an astonishing tour de force, and its truth, though extreme, became, for me, ultimately believable. Or at least knowable.
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Margotlog: To Grandfather's House We Go
Margotlog: To Grandfather's House We Go - Part One
"Over the river and through the woods/ To Grandfather's house we go" meant traveling three days and two nights on the train from Charleston, South Carolina to Hankinson, North Dakota. Grandfather's house was a glorious, gingerbread affair set on a huge lot with elm-shaded boulevards on two sides. In Charleston, our apartment lay at the back of the block-long, castle-like Old Citadel, with a row of palmettos in front and beyond that, the wide expanse of a gravelly Marion Square. Waking up mornings in Grandfather's Hankinson house was like waking up in another country.
Not only another country, but another way of life. In our Old Citadel apartment, sixteen-foot ceilings rose into shadows, and window-wells were so deep I could lean my elbows on them. But we had only four large rooms edged by a long narrow hall and narrow bathroom. Nothing like Papa Max's house with its six rooms downstairs and five bedrooms up, topped by an attic covering the whole house. The quiet was so intense I sometimes "heard" sun motes keeping time to Papa Max's canary Sweetie Pie singing in the bay window.
Hankinson, named for a colonel in the Civil War, sat on the edge of onetime prairie, turned into fields of wheat. Glacier moraines sloped gently above sloughs and Lake Elsie. When my grandfather arrived there as a young man from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, it was probably around 1890. Calculating back from my mother's birth in 1908, he must have married his first wife, the daughter of his employer, around 1892. They must have built the house, only one-story at first, a year or so later.
The first wife died in childbirth, leaving my grandfather with a daughter. He was on the go a lot as county auditor, "giving the horses' their heads" to carry him over snow-mounded fences home. It must have been during one of these trips around the county that he met my grandmother-to-be, a school teacher whose name was Augusta Olein. She'd been born in Sweden. I never knew her. She died five months after I was born.
Her parents, who brought the family to Fargo, left her a kind of orphan, to be raised by two older sisters who, for the rest of their lives, kept watch from a distance over Augusta and her children. These were the Aunt Emma and Aunt Hulda who eventually moved to Spokane, Washington, and whose cards of congratulations fill my mother's fat fat memory book. My mother Maxine was the second-born twin to brother Max,. He was sturdy, she was slow to thrive, plagued with rickets (which gave her spine "two curves") and a weak stomach all her childhood. But she outlived all her siblings to die in Charleston, South Carolina, aged 94.
By the time she took my sister and me on these cross-country train trips, she was intrepid, vigorous, and truly fond of "home," meaning Papa Max's house. By the time we started visiting in the late 1940s and early '50s, the roof had been raised on Papa Max's house. Its scalloped and diamond-shaped shingles, painted tan, taupe and light pinkish brown, made it look like a gingerbread house.
Yesterday I had a call from a woman who, out of the blue, just bought Papa Max's house on the internet. I kept calling her Carol or Carla--not her name. I don't know what go into me. Cindy wants to return the house to its former grandeur before Papa Max died and it was carved into apartments. We spent at least an hour talking, and I was amazed at my ability to guide her through the front door, and into the spacious entrance hall with the parquet floors and the three-tiered staircase ending in a bronze Winged Victory.
I remembered how the staircase divided just before its final descent, and one set of steps headed back to the kitchen, the other to the front hall. She corroborated that the beautiful stained-glass window at the top of the stairs had been walled in for the apartments, but she has retrieved it, and is having it repaired. "We will hang it in the dining room," she said, "so it isn't buffeted by weather."
She has also located the second stairway, very narrow and steep, and entirely closed off from view. This was for the live-in maid--whom my mother called something like "Ennutz," telling us it meant "good-for-nothing" in German, my grandfather's family tongue. It's this sharp humor I've come to associate with my grandfather, altogether a sharp-dealing businessman who bought up farms around Lake Elsie, when the original owners couldn't pay their back taxes during the Great Depression.
My grandmother's taste (with the funds to indulge it) ran to dark walnut and oak furniture, with subdued, embroidered silk upholstery and drapes. I have some samples handed from my mother to me: deep turquoise silk, with leaves and vines and berries and flowers embroidered in subdued yellows, greens, and reds. The parlor, to the left of the entrance hall, had only one wide window overlooking the porch. It was always cool and shaded . Then I was reading from huge volumes stored in glass-fronted cabinets below half-pillars which separated the parlor from the entrance hall. More half-pillars and glassed-in cabinets led to the much sunnier dining room and Sweetie Pie's cheerful singing. We two girls and our mother flanked Papa Max who sat at the head of the long table, a huge napkin spread across his vest, as he ate lettuce soaked with cream and sugar. To us girls, raised on our Italian-American father's salads dressed with oil and vinegar, this was as strange as eating dirt.
"Over the river and through the woods/ To Grandfather's house we go" meant traveling three days and two nights on the train from Charleston, South Carolina to Hankinson, North Dakota. Grandfather's house was a glorious, gingerbread affair set on a huge lot with elm-shaded boulevards on two sides. In Charleston, our apartment lay at the back of the block-long, castle-like Old Citadel, with a row of palmettos in front and beyond that, the wide expanse of a gravelly Marion Square. Waking up mornings in Grandfather's Hankinson house was like waking up in another country.
Not only another country, but another way of life. In our Old Citadel apartment, sixteen-foot ceilings rose into shadows, and window-wells were so deep I could lean my elbows on them. But we had only four large rooms edged by a long narrow hall and narrow bathroom. Nothing like Papa Max's house with its six rooms downstairs and five bedrooms up, topped by an attic covering the whole house. The quiet was so intense I sometimes "heard" sun motes keeping time to Papa Max's canary Sweetie Pie singing in the bay window.
Hankinson, named for a colonel in the Civil War, sat on the edge of onetime prairie, turned into fields of wheat. Glacier moraines sloped gently above sloughs and Lake Elsie. When my grandfather arrived there as a young man from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, it was probably around 1890. Calculating back from my mother's birth in 1908, he must have married his first wife, the daughter of his employer, around 1892. They must have built the house, only one-story at first, a year or so later.
The first wife died in childbirth, leaving my grandfather with a daughter. He was on the go a lot as county auditor, "giving the horses' their heads" to carry him over snow-mounded fences home. It must have been during one of these trips around the county that he met my grandmother-to-be, a school teacher whose name was Augusta Olein. She'd been born in Sweden. I never knew her. She died five months after I was born.
Her parents, who brought the family to Fargo, left her a kind of orphan, to be raised by two older sisters who, for the rest of their lives, kept watch from a distance over Augusta and her children. These were the Aunt Emma and Aunt Hulda who eventually moved to Spokane, Washington, and whose cards of congratulations fill my mother's fat fat memory book. My mother Maxine was the second-born twin to brother Max,. He was sturdy, she was slow to thrive, plagued with rickets (which gave her spine "two curves") and a weak stomach all her childhood. But she outlived all her siblings to die in Charleston, South Carolina, aged 94.
By the time she took my sister and me on these cross-country train trips, she was intrepid, vigorous, and truly fond of "home," meaning Papa Max's house. By the time we started visiting in the late 1940s and early '50s, the roof had been raised on Papa Max's house. Its scalloped and diamond-shaped shingles, painted tan, taupe and light pinkish brown, made it look like a gingerbread house.
Yesterday I had a call from a woman who, out of the blue, just bought Papa Max's house on the internet. I kept calling her Carol or Carla--not her name. I don't know what go into me. Cindy wants to return the house to its former grandeur before Papa Max died and it was carved into apartments. We spent at least an hour talking, and I was amazed at my ability to guide her through the front door, and into the spacious entrance hall with the parquet floors and the three-tiered staircase ending in a bronze Winged Victory.
I remembered how the staircase divided just before its final descent, and one set of steps headed back to the kitchen, the other to the front hall. She corroborated that the beautiful stained-glass window at the top of the stairs had been walled in for the apartments, but she has retrieved it, and is having it repaired. "We will hang it in the dining room," she said, "so it isn't buffeted by weather."
She has also located the second stairway, very narrow and steep, and entirely closed off from view. This was for the live-in maid--whom my mother called something like "Ennutz," telling us it meant "good-for-nothing" in German, my grandfather's family tongue. It's this sharp humor I've come to associate with my grandfather, altogether a sharp-dealing businessman who bought up farms around Lake Elsie, when the original owners couldn't pay their back taxes during the Great Depression.
My grandmother's taste (with the funds to indulge it) ran to dark walnut and oak furniture, with subdued, embroidered silk upholstery and drapes. I have some samples handed from my mother to me: deep turquoise silk, with leaves and vines and berries and flowers embroidered in subdued yellows, greens, and reds. The parlor, to the left of the entrance hall, had only one wide window overlooking the porch. It was always cool and shaded . Then I was reading from huge volumes stored in glass-fronted cabinets below half-pillars which separated the parlor from the entrance hall. More half-pillars and glassed-in cabinets led to the much sunnier dining room and Sweetie Pie's cheerful singing. We two girls and our mother flanked Papa Max who sat at the head of the long table, a huge napkin spread across his vest, as he ate lettuce soaked with cream and sugar. To us girls, raised on our Italian-American father's salads dressed with oil and vinegar, this was as strange as eating dirt.
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