Van Jones, Obama Adviser, Resigns Amid Controversy

I'm very sad that the Obama administration did not stand up for Van Jones. His appointment was one of many hopeful signs I was so grateful for in the exciting times around the inauguration. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't understand why the President and all of us who support him are allowing the demagogues like Beck and his ilk to call the shots by seizing the narrative. Now is the time for all progressives to unite and reject the racist, cynical, hate-filled manipulations coming from a handful of distorted egos like Beck, Limbaugh and the rest. There's no way, in spite of Van's elegant resignation comments, that the the Becks of the world won't see this as their righteous little victory and continue looking for inconsequential but inflammatory factoids they can use to pick off another good person.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Paralleling

Note: I’ve recently published the latest issue of Musing on the Muse. In it you can find links to the works discussed in this post. [go]

I have been living three parallel lives, it seems. I’m not even sure if parallel is the right word to describe the relationship of the three very different places I’ve been inhabiting these days.

First, there’s the so-called everyday or “real” world which, right now is dominated by economics even more than usual. In this world commentators struggle to name the condition the United States and hence most of the world is in. A recession? A depression? Merely a crisis or a melt-down (these last two have the implied benefit of being brief and temporary conditions). Lately, some of the professional namers seem to have settled on “The Great Recession” which, I think, is pretty depressing. Whatever you call it, the poor are poorer, the wealthy are distressed and the middle classes are in shock, panicking and grieving the death of their honorable, American dreams (no irony intended) of home ownership, limitless education for their children and a long, dignified retirement, or regretting the bad counsel they all-too-willingly believed and the indulgences they were given no reason to deny themselves.

Next is the world of Budapest in the year 1944 when the Germans finally invaded and, making up for lost time, set new records for speed and efficiency in achieving their final solution. In a mater of weeks they exterminated three hundred thousand Hungarian Jews. My point of entry to this world is a play I’m writing, inspired by a short piece of non-fiction by Irvin Yalom, who’s known to many as the accomplished author of several novels and collections of short stories and as an eminent psychiatrist who has authored seminal works on group therapy and existential psychology. The material he asked me to adapt for the stage is about his friendship with Dr. Robert Berger which began in the fifties when both were students in the Medical School of Bastion University. Berger, who went on to become one of the world’s great cardiac surgeons, was born in Hungary in 1929. After his family was taken by the Germans in 1944, He escaped from a group that was waiting for trains that would take them to a concentration camp and spent the rest of the war underground. Forged identity papers let him pass as “Aryan” while he worked in in the Jewish Resistance. He was fifteen. In 1947, after a couple of years in displaced persons camps in Europe, he came to the U.S. as a refugee. He put himself through Harvard by working construction and getting scholarships before starting med school.

The Holocaust came late to Hungary. Because the country had allied itself with Hitler’s Germany when the war began, It had not been invaded or occupied until the last year of the war, when elements in the government tried to make a separate peace with the allies. The Hungarian Fascist government that took over, the Nyilas or, “Arrow Cross” are said to have outdone the German Nazis in violence. rapacity, and delight in random murder. Fortunately they were only in power for a few months before the war ended.

I feel honored by Dr. Berger’s willingness to tell me his stories as I write the play. Since he lives in Boston our talks have been by phone. Both he and Irv are amazing men. I need to resist going on at length about their friendship and Robert’s story. I’ll just say that the precipitating event in Irv Yalom’s story and the play I’m writing is a new desire of Robert’s to finally tell his story. During the last sixty five years, he has maintained a nearly complete silence about his life in Hungary. But not too long ago, an unusual and surprising experience triggered a flood of memories, and he turned to his old friend for guidance in forging a relationship to them.

When I listen to Robert. I’m keenly aware that I’m listening to one of the last witnesses to that world-engulfing phenomenon that is still so hard to talk about, write about or imagine. This has prompted me to look at the fact that I’ve been relating to the Shoah [1] one way or another for many years. Perhaps because I’m an American Jew born in 1945 just weeks after the official “liberation” of Auschwitz or for reasons less knowable, I’ve not been able to avoid it for very long. Having committed myself as an artist to material connected to the Jewish imagination, its shadow is unavoidable.

At one point, Robert suggested I read Fateless a novel by a Hungarian author, Imre Kertesz, who is the same age he is. First I saw the film by Lajos Koltai from a screenplay by Kertesz, who was the 2002 Nobel laureate in literature.

It just might be the most powerful film about the Shoah ever made. Both the film and the novel bring a shockingly fresh approach to the experience of a 14 year old, middle-class, extremely assimilated Hungarian Jew without any sort of Jewish identity before his descent into Auschwitz, Buchenwald and a small slave labor camp.

Probably the most unusual element of both film and book is Kertesz’ refusal of all received ideas, all clichés about suffering and victimhood. Like Israeli author David Grossman whose masterpiece, See Under: Love I adapted for the stage ten years ago, Kertesz refuses to sacralize the Shoah, to treat it with the reverence and piety that overlay so many worthy yet ultimately deadening works about it. This allows Kertesz and Koltai to admit the possibility of happiness and beauty even in the deepest layers of hell.

There is a moment in the film when inmates of the slave-labor camp, in striped uniforms and caps are forced to stand in “roll-call” formation for a horribly long and painful time. Koltai places his camera behind and above the prisoners with the entire group of about fifty or a hundred visible. The camera hardly moves for a vary long time. There is mist or fog. After a while various prisoners can no longer keep still and begin to sway, very slightly. As the swaying spreads, stops, starts again, I could not help but be moved by the ethereal beauty of the human movements which had the same ineffable quality as the movement of trees. At the same time, the raw brutality of the situation remained present. The ability to hold both truths in a single image is the sign of artistic mastery that, in this case, is ruthlessly free of ego, polemic, or any hint of inflation. The same mastery exists in Kertesz’ writing. An example, after the boy is back in Budapest just after the war’s end:

But one shouldn’t exaggerate, as this is precisely the crux of it: I am here. And I am well aware that I shall accept any rationale as the price for being able to live. Yes, as I looked around this placid, twilit square, this street, weather-beaten yet full of a thousand promises, I was already feeling a growing and accumulating readiness to continue my uncontinuable life. My mother was waiting, and would no doubt greatly rejoice over me. I recollect that she had once conceived a plan that I should be an engineer, a doctor or something like that. No doubt that is how it will be, just as she wished; there is nothing impossible that we do not live through naturally, and keeping a watch on me on my journey, like some inescapable trap, I already know there will be happiness. For even there, next to the chimneys, in the intervals between the torments, there was something that resembled happiness. Everyone asks only about the hardships and the “atrocities,” whereas for me perhaps it is that experience which will remain the most memorable. Yes, the next time I am asked, I ought to speak up about that, the happiness of the concentration camps.

If indeed I am asked. And provided I myself don’t forget.

After watching Fateless, I thought about the times I’ve heard myself and Jewish friends say that we’d burned out on the Holocaust, the Shoah, not even knowing what to call it any more. We had studied it, researched different aspects of it. Seen every film about it from Night and Fog to Schindler’s List, laughed at Woody Allen’s neurotic, Holocaust-obsessed persona, hoped that the lessons of the Shoah would make genocide unthinkable and agonized over every new replay of “ethnic cleansing” of madness in Bosnia, Rwanda, Congo, where it kept happening anyway; agonized over the Israeli refusal to let go of the Shoah as the justification for their own brutality only to be confronted with elements of the Muslim world embracing Holocaust denial and nineteenth century anti-Semitic screeds that had been discredited for over a century ago while Hindu nationalists in India started book clubs to discuss the management principles for success outlined in Mein Kampf and progressives, people of the left, in Europe and the Americas, with whom I've always identified, were responding to Israel's overwhelming use of force in Gaza with language that seemed to cross some invisible line into, once again, anti-Semitism.

Even so, I thought, after watching Fateless, continuing to contemplate the endless stream of suffering and madness, selflessness and courage that flows from that fissure in the middle of the twentieth century and allowing it to work its way through my imagination seems to be part of my job description for this incarnation. [more about Fateless from NPR]

Way back in the first paragraph I said I was living in three parallel worlds. The third is the newest. A few weeks ago, a health-care practitioner I know hired me as a creative guide and mentor to work with a young man in his care who is being treated for various cognitive, emotional, and substance abuse disorders. I’m being purposely vague in the name of confidentiality. The relevant part right now is how powerful an experience it has been to spend time with a young man so brilliant, aware, sensitive, multi-talented and so lost. I can remember all too well my own lost years at the same age, in my early twenties, and how much I longed for guidance. Whether it was less available then or I just didn’t know where to look I’ll never know. But I catch myself feeling, now and then, when spending time with this young man, that I’m actually able to live the fantasy, that I know many of us share, of being able to time travel and offer reassurance to my younger self that, more or less, things will improve. I’m sure the therapy industry has a term for this. Something like positive-counter-transference maybe.

So here I am, living richly and fully in a couple of different centuries (and I said nothing about my wife, son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren who are another huge part of the collage) while, from a narrow economic perspective we’re all supposed to be teetering on the edge of the abyss. What I can’t figure out, when it comes to the economy is: how much of the enormous losses of recent months are related to what we could all agree has real value, and how much of this panic is in the realm of consensual unreality? But I’ve never really understood what money really is once it gets very far from its origin as a way to make bartering a little easier.

---

[1] Shoah is the Hebrew word for catastrophe that many prefer to Holocaust which carries, in its etymology, a sense of sacrifice and offering which the extermination of Jews, Gays, Roma, the deformed and mentally ill and Communists was definitely not.

art and last two photographs: corey fischer; others from Fateless

Singing Makes me Happier than Worrying

I’ve stopped listening to the radio when I drive. As much as I enjoy Terry Gross and Ira Glass on NPR, I realized that by automatically turning on the radio each time I get in the car, I was overloading myself with proliferating iterations of the bad news I’d already gotten from the NY Times website earlier in the day.

So lately, I either listen to KCSM, the jazz station for the Bay Area, nurturing my new appreciation of a kind of music I never paid much attention to in the past, or I make my own music. If you’ve been reading musing for a while, you know about the song-story-poems I’ve been writing and recording. Recently I burned a CD of some rhythm tracks I had made on my computer so I could improvise with some back-up as I drove. Indeed, this makes me happier than listening to people tell me more things to worry about . *

In a similar vein, I tried something new a while back when I went hiking with a friend. After we’d walked and talked for a while, I asked him if he’d like to do a little free-form vocal improvising while we walked. This particular friend, Evan, is also an improviser so it wasn’t a big leap. Yet, it wasn’t something we’d ever done together outside the studio. One of us started a repeating, rhythmic pattern and the other joined it and after a while, transformed it. And so it went, walking, breathing, listening, feeling the vibrations of voice and the solidity of the ground under our feet, the movement of air that carried our voices. We weren’t trying to make anything in particular, there was no way to make a “mistake.” In improvisation, what might elsewhere we considered a mistake becomes an opening into a new exploration of tone or rhythm. The only real mistake is to stop listening.

For me these are two examples of living the change I want to happen. I feel myself - and sense in others - a longing to balance the insane amount of busy/work/more/overload! imperatives that we live under with activities that are older and healthier, that unfold as we unfold, as we take time to notice our breath and our bodies. That’s why I do workshops and theatre and music and play with rhymes and rhythms. But I find a new desire to make the borders between Art and Not-Art more permeable and bring the attitude of serious play that we cultivate in the studio and rehearsal hall into the rest of life. It comes naturally when I 'm with my grandchildren; it can be embarrassing when we do it with each other. But if I stay with it, the awkwardness soon fades and the pleasure, the joy and the connections grow. And whatever catastrophe I thought I had to prevent by keeping endlessly busy will not take place as a result.

* The offering this time is a sound mix. It's a rhythm track I made on the computer so you can try out what I describe above. Click here to try it. Instructions will be given.

And now, this issue's recommendations (all titles are links to more about the work):

I finally saw The Visitor (on DVD) and found it worth the wait. This compelling film by actor/writer/director Tom McCarthy builds quietly to a climax that left me disturbed, celebratory, sad and angry all in the same moment. Richard Jenkins, whom I've admired since noticing his work on Six Feet Under, deserved the Oscar nomination he got. He's a wonderfully subtle yet fully individuated actor. Also in the movie as a woman who. in lesser hands, might seem too good to be true, is the luminous Haim Abbas, a wonderful Palestinian actor who worked in Israel for years and is now based in Paris. The two younger actors, Palestinian and Senegalese, play unusual, complex people whose fierce love for each other, dignity and generosity are simple and natural elements of who they are and where they come from, and, ironically, are exactly what we North Americans desperately need. In the last frames of the film, all of that knowledge seems to radiate from Richard Jenkins's newly kinetic body.

I'm slowly working my way through The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon. I heard the author on the Moth, tell a story about a recent experience in Senegal taking part in a ritual put together for him by a village healer who uses traditional methods to heal depression. It was such a funny and vivid telling that I was drawn to read his magnum opus. As someone who has had my own troubles with the black dog, I was a little hesitant, but so far I find it anything but depressing. Solomon's willingness, his resolve to tell the truth of his own experience is salutary and his painstaking research into the history, the causes, treatments, symptoms, cultural responses to depression are tremendously informative and in de-stigmatizing the disease, comforting. I haven't finished reading it, but I already sense that anyone who deals with depression in any capacity, whether as someone who is vulnerable to it themselves or as someone who has to interact with depressed people, needs to read this book.

On a purely joyful note, I've been listening to music more than at any time since the sixties. No question that is has to do with the iPhone a friend gave me. I've been discovering a new world of terrific young singers that I enjoy in a big way. If you like downloading mp3 files, click the names. Otherwise, you can find CDs at the usual places. First, there's Hilary Kole who sings the most amazing version of What'll I Do that Irving Berlin could have ever hoped for. Another, better known, angel-voiced singer is Madeleine Peyroux, who at times, sounds uncannily like Billie Holliday, but with a persona and taste all her own. Her version of Dylan's You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go. is delightful and so is everything else I"ve heard her sing.

Finally, TJT's second production of the season opens this week. Pulitzer winner Donald Margulies's Model Apartment gives new meaning to the term dark humor. I'm not involved with this production with Naomi Newman in a central role, but I read the play when we were considering it and I found it both terrifying and side-splitting. I'm looking forward to opening night on Sunday, March 1 at 7PM at TJT. You can get tickets online through the JCC of San Francisco

I’ll be teaching an introductory 3-hour long workshop in Berkeley on Sunday, March 14 called Drop the Blocks that Stop You... It's a chance to get acquainted with your own creativity, usually a much more powerful ally than we expect; one that can give us the energy, the sense of play and hope that we so need in hard times. Appropriate for all levels of experience. $40 up to March 10, $50 after. Click logo at right to register or contact me if you have questions.

Next, I'll be teaching a six-week long class called Finding your Flow: Creativity 101 for Tamalpais Community Education at Tam High's theatre in Mill Valley on Monday nights, 7 to 9 PM, March 31 to May 11. No class on April 13. The cost is $180 and you can click to go to their website to register.

all photographs by corey

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The Voice is a Ladder between Worlds

I dreamed I was singing in harmony with a long-lost friend, our voices vibrating in the air that was both inside and outside of us. It was an ecstatic feeling, as such singing can be in waking life as well.

The dream led me to reflect on the truly mysterious attributes of the human voice. The dictionary lists 24 different meanings for the word, but let’s stay with the top two:

1. The sound or sounds uttered through the mouth; 2.The faculty or power of uttering sounds through the mouth by the controlled expulsion of air.

Through the activity of muscles, nerves and breath, our bodies make sound. Mouth, tongue, teeth, lips give this sound shape and texture. Its resonance comes from the empty spaces inside us, from the vibration of bones and flesh. In all its meanings, voice is invisible, and travels across space as wave forms that set in motion tiny pieces of bone and cartilage deep in our ears which, in turn, connect to our brains, nervous systems, bodies triggering a range of involuntary responses in the listener.

My first experiences of the numinous, as a child, came through hearing. Though I had only the most superficial and literal understanding of the central Jewish prayer, Sh’ma Yisroel… Listen, Israel, this force we call God, is indivisible, is One, I knew from experience that the sacred came to me through hearing human voices under certain circumstances.

Between the ages of eleven and nineteen, I went to a summer arts camp for kids and adults. My mother got an office job there to pay my tuition. My father worked on the maintenance crew and acted in The Taming of the Shrew one summer. I was introduced to theatre, graphic art, ceramics and music in open-air studios surrounded by pine trees whose resins melted in the dry summer heat releasing an odor that still comforts me whenever I smell it, over fifty years later.

The high point of the summers was the annual folk-music festival run by Pete Seeger. In those years that place must have been one of the few that would hire him, ignoring the blacklist which had been terrorizing the country. Hearing Pete Seeger sing the South African song of liberation, Wimoweh, with that falsetto African yodeling he did, stirred my insides and gave me goose bumps When he sang The Bells of Rhymney over the dark crashing chords of his 12 string guitar, something in me swelled and vibrated.

Then I heard blues for the first time. Pete brought Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry up to that Mountain enclave to perform and give workshops, Sonny’s whoops that would pick up his harmonica’s cries when they reached their peak disturbed me as, later, would the voices of Robert Johnson and Bukka White. Brownie’s deeper voice contained landscapes and textures, sun-warmed, smelling of earth and tobacco.

By the time I was fourteen I owned a number of Folkways archival anthologies of the old folk blues people from Mississippi and Texas and other places that might as well have been other planets, so far from my middle-class Southern California were they. Their singing was more raw and much less polite than anything my parents would listen to, and it was where I heard God.

I also heard and felt the sacred in the voice of the young, overweight cantor who taught me my portion of the Haftorah, the Prophets of the Hebrew bible, that I was learning for my Bar-Mitzvah. Irwin Halpern, in his twenties, already a husband and father, not much more than ten years my senior, must have been raised in an unassimilated enclave of traditional Jews. He had learned to sob out those modal melodies and intricate melismas that Eastern European cantors had refined over the centuries. There was something in me, very old, that responded passionately to Cantor Halpern’s channeling of these sounds. The same part that responded to Pete Seeger’s voice and Brownie’s and Sonny’s. Was it the minor third interval that George Gershwin recognized as one of the elements that Jewish and African-American music had in common? Their resonating bodies that focused and amplified their voices which rose directly from the ground? Whatever the connection, it was powerful and blew away the echoes of Pat Boone and Johnny Mathis whom I slow-danced to at parties.

At the same time that I was drinking in the blues, Appalachian ballads and black gospel, I carried a growing bag of shame and frustration over the fact that I couldn’t sing. I couldn’t sing. I was told by a succession of teachers from 4^th grade on to just mouth the words during the winter classroom choral events. I knew they were right. My “tone deaf”-ness had been confirmed when someone gave my father a tape recorder. They had just come on the market that year, 1954. I was nine. The microphone energized my father. He became playful in a way I’d rarely seen. I loved being with him like this. We spent hours singing old songs from the vaudeville shows he’d seen as a young man, and he’d imitate Danny Kaye and Spike Jones. I sang along and piped in with stuff I’d heard on the radio or the playground. This was before music had ever really stirred me the way it would in a couple more years. When my father played back the whole hour or so that we’d recorded, I was appalled. My father sounded pretty much the same as he had when we recorded. But I sounded nothing like the voice I imagined I was producing. What I heard was the weakly quavering voice of a little boy who had no idea what pitch and rhythm were.

I started playing guitar two years later, in the mountains. I still believed that I couldn’t sing. But gradually, my voice started to respond to the sounds of the guitar. The guitar began to teach me. It taught me how it felt to match my voice to its note and to let my voice move with its voice. I began to understand how it felt when I was “on” pitch, more or less in unison, as opposed to being off the note. I started letting myself sing along in groups. Down by the Riverside. This Land is Your Land. I met another kid in my high school who played guitar. He’d learned old cowboy songs from his grandfather and I played and sang along with him. Old Shep. Little Joe the Wrangler.

But I was a long way from trusting my voice. It hadn’t recovered from its delayed adolescent deepening and frequently went its own way, out of control.

Meanwhile I had decided that I wanted to be an actor. Up until then, I hadn’t articulated any particular choice of livelihood. As a six year old I’d passed through a scientist-president-cowboy phase and a writer phase and then forgot it all until a moment when I was ten or eleven and a character actress came into my parents’ cleaning store next to the rear entrance of Republic Studios (now, part of CBS) and chatted with my parents for a few minutes. And right then I knew I wanted to be an actor. I knew it deeply and fiercely though I had little idea of what an actor actually did.

I’ll skip forward a couple of decades during which I completed my secondary education, acted in some pretty dreary high school plays but had a great time playing Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus – up in the mountains – went through four frustrating years in the UCLA Theatre Arts Department with a year of education abroad in France, Spain and North Africa, embarked on a career as an actor in film and TV, got involved with improvisational and other kinds of experimental theatre and avoided going to New York or London which were the only places where there seemed to be a chance of actually getting some real training.

The only training I had received was conventional. At UCLA, it amounted to an incoherent hodgepodge of received wisdom from the “learn your lines and don’t bump into anything” school of acting. I remember being told, in an acting class, that I had a “wonderful vocal apparatus” but given no clue as to what that meant.

Luckily, I stumbled into a powerful source of inspiration that countered the deadly flatness of the academic theatre of those years. Jeff Corey, another legendary figure whose life had been shaped by the anti-Communist blacklist, brought me home to myself by insisting that the actor had to bring his or her own personal, quirky creativity to any role. Use yourself was the secret formula that broke the trance of the purely mechanical approach I had been taught at UCLA. Jeff was the first teacher I’d had who talked about impulses – the irreducible atom-like quanta of intention or desire that manifest as gesture or utterance. Something that begins inside the actor ends up outside. I had been given a way to claim my own experience and I was grateful and frantic to put it into practice.

Although Jeff spoke eligaically about the Group Theatre and the values of experimental, ensemble work, he was, for the most part, helping actors get jobs in the Hollywood marketplace. And though I was happy to make as much money as I could in that world, in my heart I pursued a dream of a very different kind of acting in a very different world.

For three years I worked with an Improvisational group that, unlike the comedic, second-city flavor of improv, aimed at creating powerful, moving, coherent and completely improvised full length plays at least once a week.

In almost all this work, voice was taken for granted. Even in the experimental improv work, the focus was on character and structure with little attention to the basic elements that actors work with: voice, body, thought, emotion…

Then, in the early seventies, I worked with a director who had come out from New York. He had been in the first production that Richard Schechner, editor of The Drama Review, created with a group of young actors who would become The Performance Group, and nurture talents like Spaulding Gray and Willem Da Foe and eventually transmute into The Wooster Group after Schechner left.

This was my introduction to work based on the ideas of the Polish radical theatre philosopher and director, Jerzy Grotowski, about whom I’d been reading for two or three years in The Drama Review. Schechner was one of the first American directors to be influenced by him.

Sam Blazer had acted in Schechner’s Dionysius in ’69 but his real ambitions were toward theatre criticism and directing. I read a brilliant essay he wrote in the L.A. Free Press and was impressed. When I heard he wanted to start an experimental company in LA, I jumped on it.

[Sam died a few years ago in the Bay Area where he had become a therapist working in the Gay community.]

Sam had us do long exercises lying on our backs on the floor that began with whispering our own names to the ceiling over and over and gradually moving the whisper toward voiced speech. He told us to let our voices lead us, to go where they needed to go. I remember hearing multitudes of voices calling my name whenever I did that exercise. My mother of course, schoolyard bullies, lovers, but also voices I couldn’t name. Some of them didn’t seem exactly human. Even less human were the voices that emerged in other explorations when Sam asked us to let go of language and let our voices roam the space and ramble through their own possibilities, pushing on limits of high and low, loud and soft.

The company got smaller and smaller as time went on. There were sessions when Sam and I and Harvey Perr, the playwright who was working with us to shape a play out of our explorations would be the only ones in the studio; my voice, the only one at large in the space.

Sam introduced me to Grotowski’s notion of vocal resonators. Where conventional vocal training usually speaks of only two areas of possible resonance – the chest and the head – Grotowski held that every part of the human body can resonate, that the voice can root itself in a hand, a stomach, a knee. This became my first foray into the vast landscape that the voice can travel. Later, I would discover more when I spent a month in a southeastern French village working with Marita Gunther (1928 – 2002), one of the elders of the Roy Hart Theatre and a direct conduit to the work of Alfred Wolfsohn.

[from Left: Grotowski, Wolfsohn and the young Marita Gunther in London, Roy Hart in performance]

Alfred Wolfsohn believed that the so-called “normal” voice was a pale fragment of the true potential of the human voice. There was no reason men could not sing soprano or women bass, no reason not to give voice to all the angels and beasts within us. He had come to his ideas about the voice, in part, while by hearing the cries of dying soldiers on the battlefield during the First World War. After the war he experimented with the voice in Berlin, at a time when so many healing processes seem to have been developed – Wilhelm Reich, Ida Rolf, Fritz Perls, Charlotte Selver and others were nurturing seeds that wouldn’t fully flower for another thirty years or so. Wolfsohn worked mainly with opera singers until the Nazis came into power and as a Jew, knew he needed to escape.

In London, Roy Hart, a South African Jewish actor, became Wolfsohn’s protégé and, during the sixties, founded his eponymous company. Marita Gunther had been Wolfsohn’s most advanced student as well as his lover. Roy Hart, his wife and his mistress all died in a car crash just after the whole company had relocated to a crumbling chateau in the South of France. By the time I got there, in 1987, a second generation was starting to take the leadership from the founding members who had survived the early years of desolate winters doing odd jobs, repairing the chateau and building a respected international teaching company with a large and devoted following.

Every day for a month, Marita guided me into the “dismemberment” of my voice and then helped me put it back together. Using a process named, with ironic understatement, “The Singing Lesson,” she would begin at the piano asking me to follow the notes she played. These series of notes might be the usual fragments of major or minor scales that we all know so well. But after a while, she might have me repeat one or two notes and then suddenly say, “There! Again!” and I’d try to remember what I had just done. Before I knew it I’d be in a completely unknown territory. Sounds that I’d never ever heard myself make poured out of my body. Marita would exhort me to go further or lower or higher. My skull might feel as if a laser was boring through from the inside out, or two different sounds might be coming from my throat at the same time, or…

The RHT have old recordings from the sixties of Roy Hart himself performing something from one of the few productions that the theatre presented in their London days. You hear what sounds like two distinct voices, though one of them sounds bleached and desiccated like an image of a hungry ghost from a Tibetan Buddhist thangka

What Roy Hart was doing though, was very different from the chorded vocal techniques we’ve grown used to after repeated exposure to the Tuvan Throat Singers or the Tibetan Monks. It wasn’t part of an indigenous tradition of singing with the whole voice. It was Western; it sounded tortured but still carried a sense of the numinous. The right voice for Euripides.

Most days after my Singing Lesson. I would ramble around the narrow roads and goat trails to one swimming hole or another that someone had told me about. A river with a name as sinuous as its shape, the Salindrinque wound its way around the dry, rocky hills of Les Cevennes, the region we were in. The Salindrinque had many smaller tributaries and there was no end of deep holes with water-striders stilt-walking lightly on their surfaces.

I went everywhere on foot which was anything but a hardship. The weather was glorious that summer and the distances were long enough to make travel eventful, but short enough to keep it pleasant.

One day I walked back from a long afternoon at the best of all the swimming holes I’d found. I could lie in the sun on a fifteen foot wide slab of granite to warm up from the bracing water. The swimming hole was in a deep and narrow valley with no houses nearby. As I hiked up to the road, I sang wordlessly, deeply pleasured by the freedom, and a sense of mammalian contentment that saturated every cell. I kept vocalizing, letting my voice roam where it would. It felt fuller, deeper and at the same time, brighter than I was used to. A green lizard, about two feet from head to tail tip rain up the white plaster wall of a house I was passing. Its green was as vivid as a chameleon’s, a radiant, joyful color that looked exactly like my voice sounded to me.

I’ve written and told that story a lot. There’s an earlier version somewhere in an old entry in this blog. One of my favorite gleanings from the world of neuroscience is the discovery that memory is actually nothing like a tape recorder or a camera. Memory, they say, is something we create, over time. As we retell ourselves and others the story of an event, we begin to remember the telling rather than the original experience. The process actually causes physiological changes in the protein structures that build up as memories accumulate. You can read more about this in A General Theory of Love, a book that I consider one of the most important that I’ve read in the last ten years, at least. So in telling this story over and over, perhaps I’ve created a lens that lets me know my voice in a new way.That moment, on my walk in the Cevennes, has become a green metaphor for the mystery of the voice.

Pete Seeger on a 1950's short-lived TV show hosting Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry. They're about the ages they were when I first met them as a young teen-ager.

photos, from top: Pete Seeger and a young folksinger; Brownie McGee; Jeff Corey; The Performance Group in Dionysius 69; Jerzy Grotowski, Alfred Wolfsohn and Marita Gunther sometime in the 1940s, Roy Hart; bridge and stream in the Cevennes where the Roy Hart Theatre is based at the Chateau de Malerargues.

Last.fm: Moving the Air Around

“The word moves a bit of air, and that bit of air moves another until it reaches the ear of the one who hears and is awakened…”- Paraphrased from Rebbe Nakhman of Bratzlav.

I just uploaded seven of my voice pieces to Last.FM. The URL is:
http://www.last.fm/music/Corey+Fischer/Moving+the+Air+Around

You can also click on the "digg" link below to "digg" my efforts. Digg is a web rating site that more and more people are using to spread the word about their various obsessions. Enjoy!

read more | digg story

The Gift. A Pebble. A Shirt.

Years ago, my wife told me to read The Gift by Lewis Hyde. When I did, I felt that Hyde was telling me about the world in an entirely new way, the way of the gift. It has been years since I’ve picked the book up and I’m sure there is much I misremember. But Hyde’s central vision of a “gift economy” in which art has a particular role has never left me. I visited Hyde’s website and found out that his current work in progress is a book on the Creative Commons, which is a notion I’ve been pondering myself [See a previous post here: Originality is Overrated].

The associative path that led me to Lewis just now was an idea that has visited me several times over the last few years. I was hardly the first to have had it. I found versions of it in the writings of ecologist and entomologist E. O. Wilson and the visionary Thomas Berry, among others. But it’s Nobel laureate in medicine, George Wald, who articulates it most clearly:

Surely this is a great part of our dignity...that we can know, and that through us matter can know itself; that beginning with protons and electrons, out of the womb of time and the vastness of space, we can begin to understand; that organized as in us, the hydrogen, the carbon, the nitrogen, the oxygen, those 16 to 21 elements, the water, the sunlight--all, having become us, can begin to understand what they are, and how they came to be.

Forget for a moment any claims of uniqueness attributed to the human species. I’m talking about humans only because I’ve been one for 63 years and thus can claim, at least theoretically, some knowledge of human experience. And in my experience, when I give the gift of my attention to the sky or the ocean, to a tree, flower or fish, to another human or a red-tailed hawk or a cat, I am soon aware of an impulse to praise.

Could the evolution of this capacity to attend to and praise the natural world be a strategy of life itself, used to balance all the aggression against life that humans are so capable of?

Attention. Gift. Praise. Love. Give attention. Give praise, Give love. Praise the gift. Praise the world. Praise love. Love the gift of attention and praise. I have noticed that often, for me, the most affecting expression of these human activities is a form called the object poem. It has been practiced by Neruda, Bly, Hirschfield, among many others. Here is one by the Polish master, Zbigniew Herbert.

The pebble
is a perfect creature

equal to itself
mindful of its limits

filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning

with a scent that does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire

its ardor and coldness
are just and full of dignity

I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth

Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye

Now here’s another associative leap. A few weeks ago, I took a workshop given by the choreographer, teacher and – I would add – philosopher, Mary Overlie. Mary’s best known contribution to the fields of dance and theatre practice and training is often attributed to someone else. I mean The Six Viewpoints. Known as, simply, Viewpoints, it is often assumed to be the invention of Anne Bogart, well-known avant-garde director. Viewpoints has overtaken Stanislavski’s and Grotowski’s methods of training for the actor in some quarters. I was introduced to some exercises third hand that I was told were Viewpoints. But in Mary’s workshop I discovered that, in her original formulation, The Six Viewpoints are not exercises, though many exercises and experiments have been and will continue to be developed as ways to explore them. Bogart and Overlie worked together at some point, though I know none of the details, and would welcome a comment from anyone who knows the story. Bogart altered Mary’s six Viewpoints and presented them in well-attended training sessions that she and members of her Siti Company taught. I sense some tension around the complex issues of ownership and intellectual property though Mary said very little about it.

Mary’s Six Viewpoints are: Space, Shape, Time, Movement (the flow of impulses within the body) Emotion (presence rather than illustrations of feeling sad, glad, mad …) and Story (also thought of as logic). She spoke of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, as one of her conceptual influences, particularly his idea of Qualities. For Mary, the Viewpoints are the performer’s materials and she led us through a series of explorations of each one. In these exercises I began to understand where the forms that I had been told were Viewpoints had come from. Perhaps the one most commonly used is what Mary calls Stopping and Walking. A group of any size begins walking in the space. They are instructed to simply walk – adding nothing, no attempts to “express” or “invent” anything – and to stop and to walk again on their own timing – while noticing, paying attention to the particular viewpoint that is being explored. If it’s Space, then you notice the constant changes to the nature of the space created by the group as it moves or is still. Bogart, as I understand it, added more Viewpoints such as topography (the patterns of movement on the floor).

But here’s the connection I want to make. Mary sees her work as being informed by Post Modernism and its primary tool of deconstruction. As she spoke, it became obvious to me that I had been using these terms for a long time without knowing their real meanings.

Where Classicism and Modernism both assume a vertical hierarchy of values, Post Modernism lies the vertical down on the ground and looks at the world horizontally. On the horizontal, there is no hierarchy. Nothing is more worthy of attention than anything else. I take this as another way of articulating what the Buddhists call Beginners’ Mind.

It’s a state of not knowing and it requires courage to enter. You’re not given a map though maybe you get a compass, or the tools with which to make a compass.

Deconstruction then, is a way of exploring on the horizontal. It has nothing to do with destruction. Mary said: “To deconstruct a shirt, you use a very sharp razor to carefully take the seams apart. You don’t just rip it up. You take it apart to see how it was made and you put it back together.”

So here’s another poem, one by Robert Pinsky, close in form to an object poem and a perfect embodiment of deconstruction.

The Shirt

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes--

The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped up to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers--

Like Hart Crane's Bedlamite, "shrill shirt ballooning."
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
to wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,

The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

I’ll leave off without trying to wrap these associations up. Any attempt at suggesting I know what this all adds up to would be a pose.

Please share any thoughts this give rise to by clicking the comments button below. I’ll be teaching two workshops soon, a three hour, “The Creative Moment” and a weekend intensive on theatre-making. Click here for more.

Pay Attention

Gene Weingarten’s Pulitzer prize winning story from the April 8, 2007 issue of the Washington Post tells about an experiment they conducted that involved the young virtuoso violinist, Joshua Bell, performing in a busy Washington, D.C. subway station during the morning rush. If you haven’t heard about this or read the article, I suggest that after you’re done here, you take a look. The Post asked Bell to dress as a street musician in jeans and baseball cap and play with an open violin case at his feet to see what would happen. When they asked Leonard Slatkin, the conductor of the National Symphony, to imagine what would occur, he predicted that at minimum, a hundred people or so would gather to listen. A pretty humble prediction considering that Bell is arguably the greatest violinist on the planet and that he would be playing a Stradivarius valued at 3.5 million dollars in a place with great acoustics. The article goes on:

“Bell decided to begin with ‘Chaconne’ from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it ‘not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It's a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect. Plus, it was written for a solo violin, so I won't be cheating with some half-assed version.’

“Bell didn't say it, but Bach's ‘Chaconne’ is also considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master. Many try; few succeed. It's exhaustingly long -- 14 minutes -- and consists entirely of a single, succinct musical progression repeated in dozens of variations to create a dauntingly complex architecture of sound. Composed around 1720, on the eve of the European Enlightenment, it is said to be a celebration of the breadth of human possibility.”

On the Post’s website (link above) you can watch a couple of minutes of video and listen to the entire audio recording of the 45 minutes that Bell played. In spite of the background train and human noise, I find the music passionate and soulful.

As you might guess by now, a lot fewer than 100 people stopped to listen.

“Seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

No, Mr. Slatkin, there was never a crowd, not even for a second.”

Reading this catapulted me back to Paris, 1965, when I was seeking maybe not my fortune, but at least a few francs for a meal and a bed by playing traditional blues and fingerpicking folk songs like “Railroad Bill” and “Freight Train.” Before I learned the ropes, I was thoroughly ignored. Like the Bell experiment showed, context is all important. No one paid attention a solitary guy with a guitar on a Left Bank street corner at one in the afternoon no matter how well he played the blues (medium OK, I’d humbly submit). But, find an attractive young woman to pass the hat, work a crowded café at dusk when everyone’s having their apéritif, et voilà, the five franc notes would fall like lovely autumn leaves into the hat. Later, when I hooked up with a Yemenite-Israeli Gospel singer between her bookings with “Big Jones and his Little Sisters,” an American quartet she fronted, passing as African-American, real crowds would gather until a squad of gendarmes would break the party up.

I also thought of the Native American blessing that one may walk in beauty. Years after my street-singing days, when I was going off on a long and arduous tour of Europe with TJT, someone advised me to always look for experiences of beauty as I traveled. It was wonderful advice because it opened my attention to the possibilities that are part of every moment.

In relation to the “Muse,” attention is paramount. Inspiration lurks everywhere, whether it comes in the form of angelic music offered up freely in the unlikeliest of venues, or the faint call of a bird at the edge of morning or an overheard story.

In some forms of Buddhist meditation, the only instruction is to pay attention.You can start with the breath, but you’re told that your mind will, of course, wander, so pay attention to its very wandering. If thoughts start pouring or zooming through your mind, pay attention to the thoughts. Don’t believe them or take them seriously, just pay attention, notice that thoughts are moving through your field of awareness. Or bodily sensations, sounds, memories, emotions.

That same kind of attention, the kind that doesn’t judge or choose or try to change anything is also essential to any kind of improvisation, which is to say, essential to the creative act.

Check my latest newsletter for some related books and some experiments, exercises and games to help wake up your own muse.

photos c corey fischer

Person April 8, 2007

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