a blind flaneur

“In the digital age, every single thing we do with creative work on a digital network creates a copy,” Lawrence Lessig said in an NPR Fresh Air interview last month. “The act of reading on a digital network produces a copy.”

Lessig was promoting his new book, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. According to the NPR blurb:

law professor Lawrence Lessig explores the changing landscape of intellectual property in the digital age — and argues that antiquated copyright laws should be updated.

Lessig is a columnist for Wired and the chair of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that promotes the legal sharing, repurposing and remixing of creative work.

Lawrence Lessig’s blog

Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Luncheon of the Boating Party. 1880–1881. Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. [Source: Miss.Ramos.Science]

In Susan Vreeland’s novel, Luncheon of the Boating Party, the character of actress Angèle Legault calls the throng of artist’s models together for their second sitting with a toast:

“Since this is to be a painting of la vie moderne, I propose that after a week of flânerie on the boulevards or in Montmartre or in the Bois or the cafes, we, the flâneurs and flâneuses of the Maison Fournaise each come back with a report of the most outrageously modern thing we saw.”

Acesart.com provides a dramatis personae to the subjects in Renoir’s painting, including portrait details and an identification key. Wikipedia summarizes the this source:

* The seamstress Aline Charigot, holding a dog, sits near the bottom left of the composition. Renoir would later marry her.

* Charles Ephrussi—wealthy amateur art historian, collector, and editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts—appears wearing a top hat in the background. The younger man to whom Ephrussi appears to be speaking, more casually attired in a brown coat and cap, may be Jules Laforgue, his personal secretary and also a poet and critic.

* Actress Ellen Andrée drinks from a glass in the center of the composition. Seated across from her is Baron Raoul Barbier.

* Placed within but peripheral to the party are the proprietor’s daughter Louise-Alphonsine Fournaise and her brother, Alphonse Fournaise, Jr., both sporting traditional straw boaters and appearing to the left side of the image. Alphonsine is the smiling woman leaning on the railing; Alphonse, who was responsible for the boat rental, is the leftmost figure.

* Also wearing boaters are figures appearing to be Renoir’s close friends Eugène Pierre Lestringez and Paul Lhote, himself an artist. Renoir depicts them flirting with the actress Jeanne Samary in the upper righthand corner of the painting.

* In the right foreground, Gustave Caillebotte wears a white boater’s shirt and flat-topped straw boater’s hat as he sits backwards in his chair next to actress Angèle Legault and journalist Adrien Maggiolo. An art patron, painter, and important figure in the impressionist circle, Caillebotte was also an avid boatman and drew on that subject for several works.

The stalwart, raucous chickadees at my bird feeder this morning reminded me of Emily Dickinson’s poem. Let it be my blessing as one year ends and another begins.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Emily Dickinson

Rusalka by Russian artist Konstantin Vasiliev, 1968. [Source: Wikipedia]

Ms. Modigliani found this image while searching for clips of the Song to the Moon aria from Dvo?ák’s Rusalka. According to Wikipedia:

In Slavic mythology, a rusalka (plural:rusalki) was a female ghost, water nymph, succubus or mermaid-like demon that dwelled in a waterway.

According to most traditions, the rusalki were fish-women, who lived at the bottom of rivers. In the middle of the night, they would walk out to the bank and dance in meadows. If they saw handsome men, they would fascinate them with songs and dancing, mesmerise them, then lead the person away to the river floor to live with them. The stories about rusalki have parallels with those of Hylas and the Nymphs, the Germanic Nix, the Irish Banshee, and the Scottish Bean Nighe. See Slavic fairies for similar creatures.

Bill Cunningham’s On the Street photo essay surveys holiday window displays on Fifth Avenue. He says he’s never seen the likes of these opulent scenes in his 80 years, and worries that with the financial downturn, their likes may never come again.

NPR Music:

John Maltese and his father spent years tracking down the wax cylinders recorded in the 1890s by businessman Julius Block. Maltese finally found them in St. Petersburg, Russia, and traveled there with record producer Ward Marston. The fruit of the long, careful process of restoring the recordings, The Dawn of Recording, is available this week.

Notre Dame de Paris shimmers on a December night. [Photo by  M. Bob] And so do the radiant voices of the Anonymous 4 [Miracles of Compostela: Congaudeant Catholici]

Every family with an oral tradition has a story that is told and re-told at Christmas until it acquires the power of myth. This is mine. It tells how my grandmother, Ona Willis, joined the Salvation Army.

It was a rainy night in Columbus, Ohio on Christmas Eve in 1944. All three of Ona’s sons were fighting overseas in the war. The news was full of stories about the German counter-offensive known as the Battle of the Bulge. Ona knew my dad was somewhere in northern France, and she feared the worst.

Anxious and depressed, Ona walked aimlessly along the streets of her neighborhood that night. She stopped in front of a Salvation Army Hall when she heard people singing. She listened a long time in the rain before mustering the resolve to go in. She stood meekly just inside the door, ready to slip back into the night. When the hymn ended, the Salvation Army Captain at the front of the hall noticed her standing there, wet and frazzled .

“Lady,” he said in a booming, radiant voice, ‘do you know how to play the piano?”

She did.

“Praise the Lord! We’ve been praying for a piano player, and here you are!”

The Salvation Army gave Ona refuge that Christmas Eve, and she made music for them every Wednesday night and Sunday morning for the next 30 years. She played all the stalwart hymns. She wrote several hymns herself, but the scores are lost to the world. What I remember now - I can still hear it - is her jubilation as she marched through the major chords until she made them swing.

I can see Ona now sitting at the piano, a cigarette dangling from her lip, a cold cup of coffee perched somewhere in arm’s reach. Conjure Hoagy Carmichael in a floral print house dress and you get the picture. See the four-year-old boy snuggled next to her on the piano bench? That’s me, mesmerized by her deft hands making such an effortless stream of music. She played it all by ear. Ona and my dad read and wrote music on paper, but they really cut loose when they played without a score. From them I began to learn what it means to listen, remember, and improvise this way. None of us knew then how I would need that knowledge — playing by ear — throughout a life of letting go of sight.

Originally posted December 24, 2007.

Mahalia Jackson soars in a performance photograpghed by Lee Friedlander. [Source: NPR]

Once upon a time, I ran as fast as I could to get away from Holiday Muzak at the shopping mall. One of my earliest newspaper columns railed against the psychotropic effects of hearing “Jingle Bell Rock” twenty times a day. I risk convulsions and catatonia even now after brief exposure to that one. About a decade ago, something changed. I was searching for something. I began to hear clues in some of the schmaltziest songs. The grace notes were taking me somewhere. Every December I listened for it to come around again — not the sight but the sound of that transcendent star spinning in the silent night. That’s how my AltXmas Playlist began.

Early in the journey, I realized the path was taking me back to the music of my childhood. My beacon was Mahalia Jackson’s “Go Tell It On The Mountain.” A lifelong love of gospel music, one of the most enduring gifts my parents gave me, began with this song. Had the Sunday School Methodists sung out as Mahalia sang, jubilantly, straight from the heart, this little lamb might not have strayed so far from the fold. Mahalia recorded several versions of the song. I think my playlist track is the one from my parents’ stack of 33 rpm lp’s. When I listen to it now, I’m drawn to the understated duet by organ and piano behind Mahalia’s canonic, Rock-of-Ages voice.

The duet carries me back to the earliest musicians of my childhood, my father and his mother, Ona. Neither of them could walk past a piano without sitting down to play a song. Both played the organ, too. I know I heard them play four-handed boogie-woogie once. Fifty years later, I imagine them playing a duet together somewhere in heaven whenever I hear “Go Tell It On The Mountain.”

I put my AltXmas Playlist together before there was YouTube and before blogging was accessible to me. The original Mahalia Jackson recording of “Go Tell It On The Mountain” is on YouTube now, and so is the astounding version by the Blind Boys of Alabama with Tom Waits as well as this Blind Boys live concert featuring John Medeski on keyboards.

As I find YouTube versions of other songs from the playlist, I’ll sample them here. It goes without saying that I don’t mean “sample” in the legal sense, so if the Copyright Grinch is snooping around, calm down, dude, it’s Christmas,. However, some brigand did bootleg a few copies of the complete playlist once. If Santa didn’t sneak one under your door and you’d like to hear it, let me know. I’ve got a Santa connection.

Originally posted December 22, 2007.