The Church of Beethoven

I went to church last Sunday for the first time in fifty years. I was tempted by the Church of Beethoven, in Albuquerque, New Mexico (Slogan: “Church minus the religion!”).

Founded in 2007 by cellist Felix Wurman, the idea of the church is to “celebrate the ecstasy of music” in a church where “music is the principle element, not an afterthought.” “Wurman recruited musicians from the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, and they began playing Sunday concerts in an abandoned gas station off old Route 66. Wurman called the Sunday concerts the Church of Beethoven. Wurman said he founded the church to help people "find spirituality through culture. “ (Wikipedia). Wurman died of cancer in 2009.

The Sunday “services” are currently held in an abandoned warehouse and loading dock in downtown Albuquerque (1715 5th St., NW) and start at 10:30 am, for one hour. I was fortunate to catch a Schubert piece, “Rondo in A major for solo violin and strings.” A standard string quartet was supplemented with a bass (which simply doubled the cello part) plus of course the soloist, in this case, David Felberg, violinist with the New Mexico Symphony and also co-director of the Church since Wurman’s death. It was a lovely, rousing piece with lots of delightful folk elements, which Felberg played entirely from memory. The rest of crew kept a close eye on him and did manage to keep up.

(Felix Wurman)

There were perhaps 150 people there, mostly aged over 40 (perhaps because there is a $15 admission charge). You can get one cup of espresso coffee free and attendees bring home made cookies and other nibbles. It is a very warm, friendly crowd. The other side of the warehouse (which I snuck into) is divided into stalls which are apparently rented out as artist studios and there is a small art gallery as well. The entrance to the warehouse has quirky artistic sculptures around it which warns you that you are entering a light, playful zone.

After the Schubert, poet Richard Vargas read a new composition, which I think was titled “Shenandoah.” Vargas is at the forefront of contemporary Latino poetry and has published several books of verse. See http://www.mainstreetrag.com/R_Vargas.html for a sample of his work. I thought the poem he read, about immigrants from the south, was musical, rhythmic, and extremely heartfelt, but it did not achieve much separation of tone and mood, so the overall effect was something like a jeremiad. Still, the content was edgy and it was courageous to present it to an all-white, middle class, middle-aged audience. It was quite well received by the crowd.

After the poetry reading there were two minutes of silence. Then the duo of Stephanie Bettman (voice and fiddle) and Luke Halpin (voice, guitar and mandolin) played a selection of traditional tunes and their own compositions. The duo bills itself as a “bluegrass duo” and while their instruments and style of playing have a bluegrassy sound, their compositions do not. Instead I would characterize the performance as sappy, sentimental, brain-dead folk music, which was a real disappointment because it is obvious that these players have considerable talent. (Check http://www.stephaniebettman.com/). However, maybe they knew their audience much better than I, for their performance was warmly appreciated.

I forgot to mention that there was also a video artist there, someone who was not on the program, who projected some very creative video shorts onto a sheet while the crowd was gathering before the start of the morning’s performance. He was introduced and said a few words about how the video images were triggered or paced in some way to the sounds of the crowd noises. Too bad he was not better documented for the audience, and remains anonymous.

Overall, this was a wonderful way to spend a Sunday morning. The Church of Beethoven is unique as far as I know, but I don’t see why it should be. If every city had a similar organization, the country would be a better place. (See http://www.churchofbeethoven.org/).

Monterey Jazz Festival On Tour

Monterey Jazz Festival On Tour

The University of Arizona presents an arts program each year consisting of classical music, jazz, ballet, and other fine arts. This April, they brought to town a group called The Monterey Jazz Festival, featuring Regina Carter, Kenny Barron, Russell Malone, and Kurt Elling.

Each year since 1958, the Monterey Jazz Festival is a three day festival, with educational clinics and workshops, performances of course, food, celebration, and all the rest. (This year’s festival is September 17-19 and will feature Dianne Reeves). Then festival performers go “on the road” to bring high quality jazz performances to the rest of the country. It is not clear how these performers are selected each year, but right now it is the group described above.

I attended this performance because of Regina Carter, who I think is the best jazz violinist in the world right now. It was a thrill to see and hear her perform. The only CD she was selling that night was “I’ll be seeing you: A sentimental journey (2006),” not her latest one, “Reverse thread” (2010). The sentimental journey disc is dreadful, full of popular tunes from the 30’s and ‘40s. She adds her unique pizzazz to them, but the disc is obviously designed for a general audience and is not any kind of adventure. I bought it anyway, just so I could say hello to her after the show while getting her autograph, and tell her how much I admired her work. She is a quiet, gentle, and modest person, younger than I thought. And she has a beautiful face. When I raved on about her 2001 CD, Freefall, she said only (“I’m always grateful to work with Kenny”).

Anyway, that CD signing ritual thing is cruelty to performers but I guess it is part of the job. I’m sure they are not capable of hearing anything said to them after their exhausting performance. Malone was actually yawning with fatigue. I complimented him anyway on his performance and told him I enjoyed his disc with Benny Green (Jazz at the Bistro). Barron, who must be at least in his mid-70’s, did not show up for the signing. Bassist Kiyoshi Kitagawa and Drummer Johnathan Blake were also absent. I shook hands with Kurt Elling and left.

The playlist was tame, unfortunately. Tucson has a lot of retirees. I was one of the youngest people in the concert hall. So the group apparently geared the performance so as not to frighten anyone. That was a disappointment. Also, there is not a lot of money in Tucson. With tickets running $30 to $75, there were not too many young people. I estimated an audience of about 1000, so the concert was a success. It’s pretty amazing that many people turned out on a Tuesday night in a place that must seem like the absolute ends of the Earth for these performers. Tucson, AZ? I venture to guess their show is entirely different in San Francisco or New York. I had a cheap seat way back in row FF, but with a pair of Bausch & Lomb binoculars I felt like I was in the front row. Acoustics in the old, restored Centennial Hall are not excellent but quite adequate.

The group opened with a lively piece by McCoy Tyner that featured scat singing by vocalist Elling. Then Carter soloed on a selection originally performed by Stuff Smith, and amazingly, she made it sound exactly like Stuff Smith was playing. That was cool. Barron did a featured piece called New York Attitude, followed by Malone with an emotional ballad from the film, “an Affair to Remember.” Elling sang Horace Silver’s humorous number, “Soul Food.” I admit I am not a huge fan of jazz vocals. I love Johnny Hart and Mel Torme, and a few others of that caliber, but in general, I find that the singer’s ego gets in the way of the music and spoils it for me. Elling is a huge star, but I did not immediately take to his style or to his very limited vocal range. I realize scat singing is hard to do, but I can only take it for about a minute or two then it becomes boring. I thought Elling did more shouting than singing. Also, he doesn’t move well, so his performance seems stiff. The audience seemed to appreciate him quite well, so I guess he just does not appeal to my taste.

Kenny Barron played his own composition, “Calypso” which had good Caribbean rhythms and even sounded like steel drums in places, but the highlight was a wonderful drum solo by Blake. While he was very fast and flashy with the sticks, it was his feet that made the solo great. He kept a hypnotic dance rhythm going underneath the brilliant work on top. It was very Caribbean, very driving, and yet complex, and I thought I could be dancing around a bonfire on the beach and by the end of it I was disoriented. It was a pretty spectacular drum solo. There were plenty of other interesting offerings, including a Monk tune (which I can hum, but cannot name right now) that devolved into scat singing. Regina and Kenny played a soul-stirring duet of Georgia on My Mind, in which she demonstrated again why she is the master of her craft. Astonishingly, the tune somehow morphed into Amazing Grace by the end. There was also a very uptempo rendition of Nature Boy, which involved pizzicato on the violin, a drum solo, and lyrics by Elling.

In all, it was an enjoyable concert, but slightly disappointing. Compared to her work on the “Freefall” album, Regina was sedated. The whole group seemed tired or somehow just not into it as much as they could have been. So the concert was a crowd-pleaser, but what do you expect for Tucson, AZ? I’m just grateful they were here at all.

Toward a Science of Consciousness

Toward a Science of Consciousness
April 12-17 Tucson, AZ

The Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona held its ninth biennial conference in the Tucson Convention Center, as it does every even numbered year. In the odd years, the conference is held overseas. The 2011 conference will be in Tel-Aviv. According to the catalog, “The Tucson conferences are the major world gatherings on a broad spectrum of approaches to the fundamental question of how the brain produces conscious experience, a question which addresses who we are, the nature of reality and our place in the universe. An estimated 700 scientists, philosophers, psychologists, experientialists, artists and others from 43 countries on 6 continents … participate[d] in 400 presentations…”

This is the fourth or fifth one I have attended since the series began in 1994. It was not as well attended as some previous ones, possibly because of the worldwide recession, but it was still deeply fascinating. These are among the most profound questions human beings face. I presented a paper at this one, “Avoiding the Perceptual Model of Introspection,” available online at http://sites.google.com/site/billadamsphd/publications (scroll down 10% or so to find it). It seemed well-received and the Q&A session after was lively. My point was (is) that introspection is not a passive inspection of mental contents but necessarily involves active conceptualization, which is itself subject to the biases of language and culture. It is a tiny contribution, I hope, on the road to development of a full “scientific” method of introspection that would allow us to examine the mind directly in a way that could produce broad consensus.

The conference opened with three interesting talks about William James, founder of experimental psychology in America with his laboratory at Harvard in 1875. His writings are much admired even today by virtually all scholars working in the field of consciousness studies. Eugene Taylor talked about James’ “Radical Empiricism,” the idea that no aspect of human experience should be excluded from scientific study, and that includes consciousness. That was a radical idea then, and it still is today, because consciousness, whatever it is, is not physical, and therefore not amenable to the scientific method. A hundred and twenty five years ago, the scientific method was not as well-defined as it is today and James could get away with such a proposal. Today, the best we can hope for is to study of the brain, and from that, make unverifiable inferences about the mind. Taylor recognized this dilemma, but seemed resigned to it, as there is little appetite in the scientific community for reform of the method.

Bernard Baars, a well-known member of the inner circle at TSC (he teaches the WebCourse on Consciousness for the Center (see http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu/WebCourseAnnounS2010.htm ), gave a talk blaming James for behaviorism. The reasoning is that James “glorified” the mind-body problem, according to Baars, and argued for the reality of mind in that dichotomy. By focusing on on that dichotomy, James gave the behaviorists an opportunity to declare material monism and end the confusion. Compounding his sins, James also put a great deal of emphasis on the problem of reconciling religion and science. Again, the behaviorists ended that dilemma in a stroke by declaring religious questions unscientific. That is an oversimplified history of psychology, although not entirely wrong. Baars himself favors a materialist, neurologically based explanation of consciousness, so it is understandable that he would present history this way.

After the opening plenary speeches, there are multiple, smaller break-out groups run in parallel on such topics as neurobiology and consciousness, the nature of representation, unconscious processes, artificial intelligence, perception and art, altered states of consciousness, and so on. There are about five speakers at each of these mini-conferences, and if one is fleet of foot and lucky with the timing, it is possible to dash among the conference rooms to catch the most interesting talks within several groups, but it is always frustrating that choices must be made. In the evening of the opening day there was a reception in the Hotel Arizona (a very dreary place that used to be a Holiday Inn until it became too run down even for that company). Tucson is sorely lacking in decent hotels to support the convention center.

There was an interesting plenary talk by Marcus Raichle, one of the “discoverers” of so-called Brain Dark Energy. I use ironic quotes because I am not convinced that anything significant actually has been discovered there. Raichle and others have documented the well known fact that the brain is always active, even when the mind is at rest, even during sleep. This fact was noted in 1929 by the inventor of the electroencephalogram (EEG) machine, that measures “brain waves”. What Raichle and others have done is map the intensity and extent of this background brain activity and correlate some aspects of it to other, better known brain functions. He has also indulged in wild speculation about what the background noise might be “for.” (And of course, he had the good fortune to be the first one to call it “Dark Energy.” Woo-woo!). You can get a quick summary of his work in the March, 2010 issue of Scientific American. I think it is interesting stuff, but grossly overinterpreted.

The afternoon and evening were again absorbed by the dozens of concurrent sessions on topics such as Introspection (in which I read my paper), panpsychism (the idea that everything in the world is conscious), phenomenology, dreaming, quantum physics (which some people think is related to consciousness), and spiritual and religious approaches. Alas, when one is giving a paper at one of these concurrent sessions, it is impolite to leave for a different session, so I was obliged to attend exclusively to matters of introspection.

The evening poster sessions were not as numerous as in past conferences, but there were several dozen. I didn’t see a whole lot that was new and exciting there. A lot of the familiar old arguments were re-hashed with some new twist: Can computers think? Are philosophical zombies really conceivable? Is a science of consciousness even possible? The Neural basis of decision-making, What are feelings? What is Shamanism? Each author is supposed to be standing by his or her poster to engage in discussion of it, although many were not. A lot of the posters were little more than the pages of a typed paper tacked to the board – too much to read on a fly-by. Apparently, many people have difficulty summarizing their work. Despite its extreme unevenness, the poster session is usually where one can get a glimpse of the hot new ideas of tomorrow, and a sense of what the young researchers are thinking.

On Thursday, David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher, former director of the Tucson Center for Consciousness studies, and well-loved consciousness rock-star, gave a rare paper of his own on “the Singularity.” This hare-brained idea taken from science fiction, supposes that as soon as we have computers (robots) with intelligence equal to that of humans (right around the corner according to some people), then those robots will be able to build other robots with even greater intelligence. Extrapolate that line of thinking and you see a curve of exponentially increasing robotic intelligence, until at some point a super-intelligence is reached and human beings become irrelevant. Chalmers suggests therefore, that we should program into our artificial intelligence systems basic human values, including a high value on human life. Or even better, as soon as we have a complete map of the brain, we should “upload” a copy of a person’s mind to one of these supercomputers, so we could be part of the superintelligence revolution and not be left behind. But, Chalmers cautions, there are problems. Would the uploaded consciousness be the same person as the biological person it was taken from? Or would it be two persons (Bio-Dave and Digi-Dave)? How could it be the same person, if there are two distinct copies of the consciousness? Additional philosophical perplexities of that nature were brought forth and considered.

The talk was delivered mostly with a straight face, but it is hard for me to believe that Chalmers took it very seriously. I think he was just trying to liven up the discussion. If he was serious, I am surprised, shocked, really, at his naivety. I choose to believe he was pulling our collective leg.

On Friday was one of the most interesting talks of the entire conference. A Buddhist monk, Za Choeje Rinpoche, spoke. In 1984 the Dalai Lama named him the sixth reincarnation of ZaChoeje Rinpoche, one of the highest Buddhist Lamas of Eastern Tibet. At the age of 16, Rinpoche entered a Tibetan monastery for 10 years of studies. He came to the U.S. 1998 to lead the Mystical Arts of Tibet tour. Afterwards, he lectured on Tibetan culture and philosophy at Emory University in Atlanta. He told his tale with self-deprecating humor. He said that as an ordinary 16-year old boy in southern India, he was completely surprised to be identified as the reincarnation of a Tibetan saint. “If I was the reincarnation,” he asked, “how come I didn’t know about it?” It took him several years to “become the person everybody said I was.” He talked about Buddhism and becoming enlightened, which he described as “ceasing to struggle against the struggles of life.” (Which is not the same as ceasing to struggle). When someone asked him what was the nature of enlightenment, he referred to the big screen, on which every other speaker had shown a PowerPoint. But the screen was completely blank. The crowd was delighted. He did say that when you finally burrow down to the bottom human experience, what you find is laughter. And then he giggled. After his talk, which was enthusiastically received by the audience, he was swamped with additional questioners. It was impossible to get to him. I would have liked to ask him two questions: 1. What is mental illness? And 2. When you were in that monastery all those years, learning all the Buddhist prayers, to what or whom were you praying?

A Buddhist Lama is a hard act to follow but Neurophysiologists Antonio Damasio gave a nice presentation on “the Neural Self” accompanied by interesting slides. As he has already done in his numerous bestselling books, he defined several levels of self, including a “protoself” that constitutes one's feeling of existing and living, and arises from the processes in the brainstem that regulate the automatic life functions, such as breathing. Beyond that there is a “core self,” a secondary self that rises to consciousness whenever the primary protoself is modified. A tertiary self is the autobiographical self based on large scale integration of memories and experience.

There was nothing new, as all this has been covered in his books, but it was nice to have it all spelled out in one summary talk. I don’t buy the theory myself, because it presupposes identity of mind and brain, which I find unintelligible, and at the same time presupposes mind-body dualism. Damasio says such things as “The brainstem delivers conscious experience.” What? I defy him to cut open a brainstem and point out the “consciousness” there. The brain is very complicated, but it is just a piece of meat. It does not have “consciousness” lurking within it. And again, the brainstem delivers consciousness? To what or whom does it deliver, we must wonder. The little man in the head, or homunculus, no doubt. I grant that it is nearly impossible to talk about the mind-body problem without getting tangled up in such linguistic absurdities, but I expected better from a world-famous scientist giving a talk with this title.

There were many more plenary talks, and dozens more concurrent sessions and dozens of new posters in the second poster session. There were also after-hours presentations of “Art and Media” where one could marvel, for example at beautiful, colorful magnifications of biological processes captured on film.

After hours on Friday night there was everybody’s favorite, the Consciousness Poetry Slam and the Zombie Blues. At the poetry slam, volunteer conference-attendees read or otherwise perform an original poem on a consciousness related theme. There is quite a diversity, as you can imagine. The hit piece this year was surely one by a young man (didn’t get the name) who played a decent electronic keyboard and sang original lyrics to the Beatles’ tune, “Hey Jude.” Only in this case, it was “Hey Stu,” referring to Stuart Hameroff, the conference director. It didn’t take long before the whole auditorium was screaming, Na, Na, Na, Na-na-na Na, Hey Stu.

(image: logbase2.blogspot.com)

Following the poems, attendees can offer one or more verses of the Zombie Blues (which I think was originally written by Dave Chalmers), to a very forgiving band that is expert at helping non-experts sing their lines. Chalmers

always starts it off singing the original lyrics: “I act like you act, I do what you do, But I don’t know what it’s like to be you. What consciousness is, I ain’t got a clue, I got the Zombie blues.” While not as rich and varied this time as in past conferences, the zombie blues session is still a highlight.

There were too many other fascinating speeches and papers read to be summarized here, but I filled up half a notebook with ideas to follow up on, so that in itself makes the whole thing worth the exhausting effort. I’ll be back next time.

Rethinking Andy Warhol

I recently saw an exhibition of Andy Warhol prints at the Tucson Museum of Art (www.tucsonarts.com) that runs through July 3, 2010. Warhol prints are vastly overexposed in popular culture, so even though I have admired the Marilyns and the Elvises and the Campbell’s Soup before, I had low expectations. But I guess I was not as familiar with his work as I thought, and the diversity of work in this exhibit gave me a new respect for the artist.

No photography was allowed so I can barely remember what I saw. Most, or maybe all of the works were from the Bank of America Collection, one of the largest corporate collections in the world. All ten of the Campbell’s soups were there, and I think one Marilyn.

Somehow I had never been aware of the wildflowers, a set of about a dozen prints of four wildflowers at macro range. The color combinations were an essay in human consciousness. It was impossible to pick a favorite.

Then there was a series of prints of Muhammed Ali that I had never seen. They were thoughtful and intimate. There was an odd group of prints that seemed to be a riff on the work of Keith Haring, on the theme of commercial art and the commercialization of society. I didn’t quite get that bunch.

A set of ten large prints called “Endangered Species” was a knockout. Photographs of the ten chosen animals were enhanced with line drawing and color, color, color. Again it was the colors that knocked me out. The representations of the animals are standard and not that interesting, but the color enhancements were the star. Unlike someone like J.M.W. Turner, also a colorist, Warhol doesn’t just show color for the sake of color, he articulates it in contrasts and complements. I just don’t have the knowledge or vocabulary to explain what he was doing, but the result is stunning.

There was also a series of images about well-known cultural icons, such as Mickey Mouse, Superman, and Santa Clause. These, I felt, were not only exercises in composition and color, but also carried sociological and political meaning. For example, Mickey Mouse had a glitter background. Superman had a comic-book, line-drawing shadow, and Aunt Jemima was imaginatively done in black on black. This was my favorite series of the show.

There was a biographical video showing which was worthwhile in setting the personal and historical context for Warhol’s work.

Warhol was prolific, and this collection represents only a tiny fraction of his print output, but even so it is diverse enough to give an entirely new perspective.

The Capitol Steps

I caught the Capitol Steps comedy troupe in Scottsdale, AZ, around Thanksgiving. The group was formed by staff members for lawmakers in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s. Today there are still members who were former staffers, but the act has become professionalized. See their info at http://www.capsteps.com/ .

The show I saw was 90 solid minutes of parody in songs, many laugh-out-loud funny. Much of the material is sophomoric – weak jokes that you would expect from a college skit. The quality was uneven. Some of it was deliciously wicked however and those are the moments that justify the ticket price ($50).

There were several jokes set to Beatles tunes. A healthcare parody went well with “When I’m 64.” And Paul McCartney’s “Let it Be” is a natural for ribbing erstwhile presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. Those phrases were made for each other. The quality of the singing was remarkably good, enjoyable in its own right. The piano accompaniment (actually leadership) was a driving force.

Of course nearly all the jokes were political, which is the whole point of the show, but there were a few fat and diet jokes that didn’t really fit in, and weren’t too funny either, but they probably realized they were playing to an older audience and couldn’t go wrong there.

Most of the material was surprisingly outdated. There was a number on Sarah Palin promoting her new book, and that was about as recent as they got. Otherwise, there were allusions to old news stories and scandals going back a year or two. Perhaps they choose material that is already well established in the public consciousness, otherwise the allusions would not be funny. The main source of their humor is to flatter the audience with allusions that only the moderately well-informed would understand, so they have to be careful to skirt obscurity. But making fun of Kim Jong Il is really old hat. Cartoon characters do that now.

The material goes by so fast and it is all a collection of non-sequiturs anyway, so it is difficult to remember what was presented. There were the obvious and well-worn Joe Biden and Nancy Peolosi jokes, plenty on health care. Very few on Obama, and what they did have was not very funny. Maybe he is still too new to satirize well. There was a rousing parody of the Beach Boys’ tune, “Help Me Rhonda” but the diction was not very good on that one and I wasn’t sure what it was about. It might have been “Help me ‘Bama” but I’m not sure. There was a very nice piece based on Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina (exceptionally well-sung, too), that substituted Appalachia for Argentina and parodied a recent sex scandal involving a senator.

Anyway, I laughed until I had tears in my eyes, so I was satisfied. The material was not that sharp overall, but there were enough zingers to keep it lively.

The Last Call Girls

This rousing bluegrass/honky-tonk/country band was playing at the 17th Street Market in Tucson, a mainly Asian grocery market and a very unlikely venue for live music, especially of this type.

Only two of the crew are girls, sisters Lisa (left) and Nancy McCallion. Both are lead singers, while Lisa plays electric bass and Nancy guitar. They are joined by Kevin Schramm (right) on guitar and accordion, Tom Rhodes (left), fiddle and mandolin, and Michael Joyal, drums. These guys must be very gender-secure to bill themselves as members of the Last Call Girls, a delightfully ambiguous name.

The set I caught covered a wide range, from Lisa’s heartfelt rendition of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” to some real foot-stompin’ country rock. Nancy has a higher, more delicate voice and she lets a Celtic influence show through from time to time. For some reason Tom Rhodes was dressed to look like Fidel Castro, but his fiddling was good, mainly in comp mode. I wanted him to break out but he never did.

This is the kind of band that you could enjoy all night at any downtown bar. I picked up their latest CD, “It’s never too late to get lucky.” Sample their music at http://www.thelastcallgirls.com/music.html .

What is Art?

The Seattle Art Museum has a thought provoking show called Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78, running now through September 7, 2009. There are 70 pieces, mostly painting on canvas but including some videos and uncategorizable pieces, all of which illustrate how a group of artists worldwide rejected the conventional idea of painting, after World War II. Traditionally, from the cave paintings of Lascaux 30,000 years ago, right up until 1945, painting was about representing visual reality. Pictures were supposed to look like the thing depicted. How they managed to do so remains a philosophical mystery to this day, but that was the game. A picture of a horse was expected to look like a horse.

After the upheaval of WWII traditional values were obviously worthless and nothing could be relied on any more. Reacting against traditional dogmas about painting, many artists around the world challenged just about every convention and preconception. Canvases were cut and slashed. Pictures were displayed facing the wall so you could only see the back of the canvas. Painting began to abandon literalism with the impressionists, who only painted their impressions of light and color without trying to render a literal depiction of a scene. Then the expressionists painted what they felt, not necessarily what was there. The action painters like Jackson Pollock spread paint on canvas with great movements, without a thought for making a picture "of" anything. Representation was out. Words and numbers appeared in pictures and instead of pictures. White was painted on white and it was called a picture. Knives and drills were stuck into canvas and it was called a picture. Forget about the canvas. Paint on people. Couldn't that be art? Why not just paint floors and walls? I painted a bookcase last week. Am I an artist? This exhibit clearly demolishes every preconception you might have held about what is a legitimate painting. No reassuring sunsets and kittens are found here.

It is a lot of fun. It challenged even some of my assumptions, and I believed I had thought this problem through already. It made me laugh out loud. It made me shake my head in despair. That’s a good show.

Jasper Johns’ targets found a path between abstract expressionism and traditional representationalism by exploiting symbolism. His numbers paintings did that also. It’s a tweak of the nose to the dogma of expressionism at the time (1950’s). Rauschenberg did the same with his cartoony, manufactured rendition of an expressionist spontaneous gesture. Yoko Ono had a small panel of painted wood mounted on the wall, and a hammer on a string, and a basket of nails, and the viewer was invited to pound a nail into the wall. Is that art? I thought it was stupid, until later, in the next gallery, I could hear the occasional bam, bam, bam of someone pounding, and then I realized what she had done: dissed the whole museum-going experience of reverent silence. Got me! It was a slick piece of meta-art.

Yet at the same time, it is small-minded, very inside-baseball, artists talking to each other about the minutia of ideas. It is like a huge game of one-upmanship or gotcha, rather than a serious exploration into the nature of visual perception and its representation, as so many artists have self-consciously tried to do, from Picasso to Cezanne and many others. And it ignores pioneers and forebears, such as Duchamp, Magritte, Malevich, and others.

Still, all this leads directly to Art Danto’s theory of what art is. In his book, The Madonna of the Future, he defines it as a conversation. I think he is completely correct. Art is a conversation among artists in an established context of artistic production. Yes, I have myself pounded nails into painted wood in my life, but that does not make me an artist, because I did not do it in the right context. My intentionality was not artistic communication. Painting is not what that hangs on museum walls. It is about the ongoing conversation among artists, their critics and viewers, trying to understand the relationship between humanity and the rest of the world. This has been true since the cave paintings at Lascaux. If you thought art was about pretty pictures, you need to see this show.

Titus Kaphar

Titus Kaphar is a young, upcoming artist with works on display at the Seattle Art Museum in an exhibition called “History in the Making.” See http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/exhibit/exhibitDetail.asp?eventID=15647

Kaphar finds European and American portrait paintings from the 1700’s and 1800’s and repaints them, with a twist, to emphasize, especially, slavery and the history of black people in general. For example, he takes the famous picture of George Washington Crossing the Delaware and turns George upside-down, with a new, brown-faced head, so that the composite resembles a giant playing card. The intent is to comment on George Washington’s ambivalence about slavery (he was a slave-owner), as if to say, George, what kind of a game were you playing?

I especially like Kaphar’s technique of cutting out images from his paintings, and either leaving the cutout completely blank, or letting the cut-out canvas image droop to the floor. It is a startling result.

Kaphar is the first recipient of the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Fellowship, awarded by SAM to nurture black artists showing great early promise. The award is named after Seattle residents and artists Knight and Lawrence.

Kaphar’s work is at the SAM through September 6, 2009.

Seattle Mystery Bookshop

Okay, this doesn’t really count as an arts review, but it counts as a significant “event” whenever I visit the Seattle Mystery Bookshop at First and Cherry. (Slogan: “ for mystery lovers who know what they want and for those who haven't a clue...”)

The shop was founded by Bill Farley in 1990. According to the web site (www.seattlemystery.com), Farley has been reading mysteries since childhood, beginning with the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. He was a bookstore owner in Philadelphia, and moved to Seattle to start Seattle Mystery Bookshop. He sold the store in 1999 to employee J. B. Dickey but remained as a part-time staffer, usually working weekends. I caught him there on a Monday afternoon while I was killing some time before the next ferry. He is a bright and witty fellow with a sparkle in his eye. He was keen to point out a framed embalming certificate on the wall, issued to his grandfather in 1903, but, he said, “Since he had the same name as me, I thought it was okay to hang it up here. Anything you need embalmed, bring it in!”

The store is chockablock with all kinds of mysteries and thrillers. As with any self-respecting independent bookstore, there are so many books, there is barely space to turn around. There are separate sections for the various genres, such as, police procedural, noir, thriller, spies, British cozy (Agatha Christie gets her own shelf),

(Your humble blogger perusing the mysteries of life).

and a large section dedicated to Northwest writers and Northwest locales. The store has book signing parties by noted authors just about every weekend.

Perhaps because I am a psychologist, my preference runs to stories that focus on betrayal, revenge, and paranoia. I require that they be well-written, and I always hope for psychological realism and not too many loopholes in the story. I enjoy astute observation and insightful phenomenology. I am a huge fan of Le Carre and I have not yet found his equal.

(Bill Farley and owner J.B. Dickey. Seattlest.com)

I generally do not care for most of the best-selling authors who take up acres of shelf space in most stores, so it is a challenge to find an author I can stick with for a while. At SMB, my strategy is to go to the shelf of titles recommended by staffer Janine Wilson, who suggests some authors I know and seems to share some of my interests (ignoring her vampire streak). That’s one way I find new authors. (You can see synopses of interesting books I have read recently at my web site, https://sites.google.com/site/billadamsphd/. Click on Book Notes).

You can expect to pay top dollar for your books at SMB. No discount prices, although they do sell some used books. This trip I controlled myself and spent only $63 on five new paperbacks. I could have saved $15 buying these books on Amazon or at Barnes and Ignoble, but then I wouldn’t have had a delightful experience and I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Farley. I don’t mind paying a bit of a premium to keep this store, and stores like it, from the jaws of mediocrity.

There’s a good mystery bookshop also in Portland, OR, Murder By the Book, across the Burnside bridge from downtown, in a suburb, but for ambience, Seattle Mystery Bookshop, right in Pioneer Square, deserves to be a local favorite and should be a destination for every visitor to Seattle.



117 Cherry Street
Seattle, WA 98104
(206) 587-5737 or staff@seattlemystery.com
Open Every Day:
Mon - Sat 10-5 and Sun 12-5

PDX Jazz 09

The Portland, Oregon jazz festival (www.pdxjazz.com/home) was Feb. 13-22, but it almost didn’t happen at all. Just a few months ago it was bankrupt due to lack of sponsors. The whole town and jazz fans everywhere were devastated. Then at the eleventh hour, Alaska Airlines came through with a major sponsorship and some others followed. The festival is now officially called the Alaska Airlines/Horizon Air – Portland Jazz Festival. Fly Alaska!

I attended a few events over the long President’s Day weekend, and from what I experienced, the festival was as great as ever, even though crowds were thinner. Most venues looked to be only 2/3 full. The theme this year was a celebration of Blue Note Records’ 70th year of producing jazz music (25 years since its resurrection). All the festival artists were Blue Note performers.

The opening headliner was pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba. I have appreciated this Havana-born artist since the “The Blessing,” (1991), still one of my favorite albums. His quintet included trumpet, trombone, bass and drums. He teased with the occasional Latin rhythm but mostly stuck to simpler rhythms in favor of complex melody. Instead of a sequence of notes, the melody was comprised of a repeating finger pattern moving around the keyboard. Each gesture was like an individual note in a regular melody. There were few chords. The tunes were mostly minor key, sounding plaintive or angry, but always contained like a pressure cooker within two octaves of middle C. Even a piece that started out light and humorous turned dark and anxious. One wonders what goes on in his head.

Legendary trumpeter Terence Blanchard came on with an orchestra. My first reaction was, “Oh boy, here we go. This never works.” Because despite a composer’s desire for complexity, subtlety and nuance, an orchestra is not a jazz instrument. The sounds blend into the mediocre “orchestra” sound as it tries to express jazz ideas. This kit included a tuba, 3 French horns, 2 trombones, and an enormous bass drum (maybe5 feet tall) in the back row; then a row of 2 flutes and 3 clarinets; then a healthy string section of 6 violins, 4 violas, and 2 cellos. All this was fronted by a piano, bass, sax and drum quartet, plus a conductor for the orchestra, then finally, Blanchard squeezed into a space so tight he could hardly turn around.

But my fears were unfounded and I was happily surprised by what Blanchard did with all this resource. He played from his new album, A Tale of God’s Will: A Requiem for Katrina. He and the orchestra plumbed the depths of emotion surrounding the 2005 tragedy of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Blanchard’s home town. If I understood him correctly, the album is the sound track, or derived from the sound track of Spike Lee’s Hurricane Katrina documentary. Blanchard has scored numerous Spike Lee films.

The music was soulful, spiritual, expressive, and emotional, but also representational, evoking cries of despair and soulful laments along with the relentless forces of nature and the disorganization of the community. All this had a New Orleans flavor: simple, bluesy, well punctuated, and accessible. And the orchestra, instead of fusing into one voice, played discrete layers of sound and meaning so that although it was not a concerto structure, the exchanges with the jazz quintet were chatty (except for one piece, featuring electric guitar, in which the orchestra devolved into “just an orchestra.”). It was a masterpiece of composition, orchestration, and performance; a highlight of the festival.

By Saturday the “Joe Lovano Festival” had begun. The ubiquitous saxophonist headlined with his group, “Us5” but also walked on to jam with John Scofield’s trio, accompanied singer Judi Silvano, and featured with McCoy Tyner. That’s not a complaint; I love the guy, but he was clearly doing his best to support the festival this year. His own show with “Us5” was introduced by his wife, Judi Silvano, but her gushing, over the top praise for him seemed way off base and was embarrassing. She sang a number or two with him where she was able to match her voice closely to the tone and timbre of the sax, making some interesting effects. Still, I was relieved when she stepped away from the mike. The paradox of Lovano is that his sound is hot but he is cool. The music is complex, evolves very quickly and organically, making it exciting and original, but he doesn’t personally get bent out of shape. He rarely resorts to horse whinnies and squeaky balloons as clichés for “emotion.” He lets the music speak for itself, and it’s very good music, albeit somewhat intellectual.

Jacky Terrasson and his trio opened for Lovano. This talented pianist was a winner of the Thelonious Monk competition and that was evident in his music. I enjoyed his rendition of “Caravan.” You would not think there is anything left to say with that song, but he gave it a makeover. Overall, however, I thought his sound was Jarrettesque and although pleasant, undistinguished.

Jazz singer Diane Reeves appeared with the full Portland Symphony Orchestra, 100 pieces or more. She served up an array of standards and other material, interspersed with reminiscences and humorous anecdotes. Those were more than just filler, for they revealed her personality, which is charming, and added value to her singing. She referred several times to her high school days, and “the girl I used to be,” so one wonders if she is going through a period of self-examination just now. I was impressed by her precise diction, in speaking and singing. For some reason I was put off by her interpretations of songs like Fascinatin’ Rhythm and Lullaby of Birdland. They were reworked to seem “creative” but came across only as manufactured. This was a regularly scheduled performance of the Portland Orchestra that had obviously been grafted to the Jazz Festival for cost-saving synergy, but it didn’t really work. Symphony goers are a different population than jazz lovers. Loud, overweight, middle-aged physicians in dark suits were accompanied by over-perfumed, bejeweled wives. Reeves’ playlist was probably designed for that audience. The orchestra was competent but sounded like an orchestra, nothing more. They did not swing.

Guitarist John Scofield has been in the limelight for a long time and his performance at the festival proved again why that should be so. He has played with Miles Davis, Charles, Mingus, Herbie Hancock, and many others. Joe Lovano was a member of his original quartet in the early ‘90’s. I appreciate Scofield’s diversity of styles from traditional to funk, rock and even a heavy metal sound (“The Low Road” performed with Lovano). After a beautiful, soulful rendition of the Tennessee Waltz, he launched an amazing avant-garde piece involving a full array of special effect floor pedals. He was verbing and looping his own licks right there in real time, essentially doing engineering work as we watched, to produce a completely bizarre output. The group also did a tremendously energetic rendition of “Satisfaction.” It is amazing what can grow out of those first 10 notes of the bass line. And it is worth noting that the bass was well miked so you could actually hear it, something that is surprisingly overlooked in many jazz performances. Drummer Bill Stewart, a legend in his own right, treated us with several spectacular solos.

Singer Judi Silvano, wife of Joe Lovano, is a well-known jazz vocalist and has one Blue Note record to her credit. I think she calls herself a vocalist rather than a singer because she does not actually sing recognizable songs, but produces sequences of vocal effects to scat lyrics. It was hard to follow. There were lots of staccato jumps across octaves, but nothing in familiar tropes. It also seemed repetitive and artificial to me, rather than organic, although that could just be my ignorance of her music. I could not get a grip on what her musical ideas were. It seemed she was most intent on demonstrating her impressive vocal range, and it was a large range, especially for a 58 year old, because she can fluidly slip into a falsetto. But it is not the same kind of a range you heard in young Joni Mitchell or Joan Baez, for example. She used her voice as an arbitrary musical instrument rather than as means of personal expressiveness, but then accompanied it with gestures designed to look meaningful, as if to suggest that what she was singing had some human meaning, rather than being contrived. Pseudo-beatific smiling and knowing nods were gratingly inauthentic. She did not move well. Her personal stage presence was thus in conflict with the sound of her performance. I appreciated her skilled vocal control after I closed my eyes. I never thought I would say this, but her presentation of “Love in Outer Space” by Sun Ra was a familiar port in stormy seas. Joe Lovano did what he could to support her.

Lionel Loueke’s Trio was a perfect way to end my jazz weekend. This young guitarist from Benin, in west Africa, is a graduate of Berklee College and the Thelonious Monk Institute. He has played with both Terence Blanchard and John Scofield. The Scofield influence really shows. But Loueke is his own man, much more romantic and self-expressive than Sco. He has a beautiful voice, and sings African songs as he plays, often using the complex click patterns characteristic of African languages such as Xhosa, but using them in a way to create a mini-rhythm section in his voice. On most tunes he sings along with himself even when he is away from the microphone. The guitar is very hot, and he can get an amazing diversity of sound from it. One tune had it sounding very much like a steel drum, and in another, he put a tissue between the frets and the strings to make a sound like a large African hand drum. His drummer, a Hungarian named Frank Nemeth was the most subtle drummer I have ever heard. “Subtle” is not a word you normally associate with drums but this guy excelled in leaving out beats at key moments, not pounding them in. Sometimes in the middle of a fast run the stick would come down but curve away, missing the head, producing a kind of syncopated effect. I could have watched him all night. Bassist Massimo Ducat was also outstanding in his own way. It is a strong trio and they played creatively off each other with good communication. A noticeable characteristic of Loueke’s compositions and the trio’s performance was abrupt changes in tempo. One composition, which Loueke explained had 17 beats to a measure, went far beyond Monk’s wildest dream.

As always, I hated to leave with so much talent yet unsampled. It is a huge festival for being such a small festival. If it returns next year, so will I.