As an example, take this

All crooks and madmen in the Art of the 20th century find inspiration in classical music. The examples in films and movies are countless. Real characters are no exception -Hitler was an extraordinary whistler (although a vulgar and failed painter) and Stalin frequented the Bolshoi. But still, classical music is presented as the music of order, the kind of music the fetus must listen to in order to better develop its internal organism. The order of a symphonic orchestra is reflected and somehow transposed to the order within the baby to be born. Such argument is heard over and over again.

But Classical music calls for something evil in the human nature. It is in the spinal chord of the doomed poets of the Beat Generation, the monsters of Kubrick and the singers of the masculine devils: Bukowski, Bellow and Vonegut. There is nothing instructive in it. Evil is a substance compatible with virtue. In the back-cover note of my cheap edition of Charles Bukowski's Tales of Ordinary Madness, I can read: "In this tales (...), Charles (...) mixes high and low culture, from prostitutes and the philosophy of Kant to despair and classical music, to create his modern dystopia". The murderer was listening to Brahms in Philadelphia in 1942 when the FBI knocked at the door and arrested him. Joseph, the Dangling Man and Bellow's journal keeper, lost control of himself in the house of his brother Amos on the Christmas Day of the same year while listening to Haydn's Divertimento for Cello. There is always a different reading of a well-known composer, full of pain, violence, passion or some other unspeakable human emotion, from Rachmaninoff to Tchaikovsky.

And the madmen and doomed seem to be the only ones to grasp it... . That Evil takes hold of remarkable souls is a uneasy fact and, as an example, you can take this above.

(PLEASE, LEAVE YOUR COMMENT).

The big and the small

The lyrics of Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changing are no gentle, but rude and somehow cruel. They are changing the times and that means that nothing from the Ancien Regime must survive, not a chance: "the waters around you have grown", "you'll sink like a stone", "for he that gets hurt", "there is a battle outside and it's ragin'", "it'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls", "don't criticize what you can't understand", "your sons (...) are beyond your command", "your old road is rapidly agin'", "please get out of the new one (...)", "the line it is drawn", "and the curse it is cast"... What can I say?... Lovely kid.

The air is Marxist, right? At a certain point, the lyrics mention: "don't speak too soon / for the wheel is still in spin". The moment is yet to come. Paul Johnson described Marx as "an eschatological writer from start to finish". As a youngster, Marx was a poet of "savagery", with lively images of a world at the edge of hell and on the verge of collapse. Its features, Johnson says: "intense pessimism about the human condition, hatred, fascination with corruption and violence, suicide pacts and pacts with the devil". Marx wrote, the historian reports: "We are chained, shattered, empty, frightened / Eternally chained to this marble block of being". And, more: "I shall howl gigantic curses at mankind". The current course of events carries the seed of destruction and eradication.

However, again: the soul and purpose of Dylan's song do not match the scenes of domestic peace in the BBC documentary I mentioned in the previous post. The chaos of the sound does not hold the order of the images. So here it is my vision: a small, genuine, personal choice against the smashing wheel of universal disaster; the anonymous life at one's own risk against the super big, universal tragedy impose to everyone. What a massive virus born from a small jewel of tenderness and liberty!

***

It is nevertheless surprising to realize how readily some accomplished people fail to recognize this important difference. Or how easily they are ready to ignore it.

A couple of weeks ago, the founder of the charity Emergency, Gino Strada, and the dear British journalist, Giles Duley (http://gilesduley.com), met the audience in the Baptist Church at the top of Shaftesbury Avenue in London. I have to say that my admiration for both Gino and Giles is enormous. During their intervention, it immediately stroke my understanding that their work, testimony and spirit are only possible and admirable because of their personal sacrifice. For sure these two gentlemen have given in a few comforts and followed and irresistible something, Giles' case being clamorous -he lost both legs and one arm in the course of his work. It is precisely their personal choice what led them to change the lives of individuals, being children or adults. The pictures that Giles showed shone with smiles of girls and boys alive because of Gino's work devotion. Girls and boys smiling, touched in their wounds and heart. A pure blessing.

However, the questions of the audience were centered in politics, the military and the always viscous substance of the moral. Gino's main concerns, indeed, seemed to be more the elucidation of the stand and responsibility of Westerners and, further in the horizon, the eradication of war. The tone was lugubrious, certainly, but it is this tone that we tend to relish in this kind of gatherings, isn't it? Once, again, "the pessimism about the human condition" is set surrounding a titanic and impractical effort to wash off the current world... .

Again, my admiration goes to the tenacity of people like Gino and Giles who, after seeing the most atrocious corners of our condition, keep yearning to their original utopias, maturing and aging and fading towards them. However, all I am saying is this: they should focus their vision -the best they can do and the best they do is making people smile... What is Paradise but an ocean of flourished smiles? A Paradise aware of every one of them, one by one -the livestock farmer knows all his sheep. A dump will always nest disease, but daisies can grow beyond consent, multiply and overflow color.

And do it -the smile creation- giving in oneself... . To me, this small heaven is Heaven.

Drop city

This week, The Barbican hosted the UK premier of Joan Grossman's new documentary, Drop City (2013) -the story of the so-called primeval hippie colony outside Trinidad, CO and, especially, the inner experience lived by their builders. http://www.dropcitydoc.com. The history of the city is short (1965 - 1973), but the effect that the first years had on the lives of the original inhabitants is mystic and endurable, expanding down into their senescence. At the very end of the doc, Gene Bernofsky, one of the original founders and now a handsome gram-pa with deep voice, oracles the sacred nature of the place: "For me, visiting now this land is like entering the time machine - that was one of the best experiences of my life".  One can nevertheless grasp the emotion of those truth-seekers, genuine explorers now annealed by the un-extinguishable fire of time. It is the same feeling of the up-rooted that comes back home, that of the old football player in the abandoned field where he learned to play. It is a mark of humane religion.

The evolution of the colony was not steady, being the rise and splendor swift and thrilling and the fall long and painful, exactly alienating, starting in 1967 after the debauchery of the Joy's festival. In the beginning there was a clear element of exclusivity in it. The city was art, talent, knowledge, inspiration, spirit, heart; secrecy, confidentiality, tenderness, everything that is called humanity, etc. Not everyone is capable of that much! Those founders were special... Once the door was opened to all, myth and mediocrity popped in, like water filling the available space. Touristic visits, excessive parties, drugs, justifications and abandonment, everything that was not in the beginning and that the builders did not look for came in. Bans and manifestos were born, catchy sentences and monolithic consensus were drawn. The spirit, gone; the idea, deceased. Just another giant crystal-lie for the world, untouchable and phony... . I was sitting in the theater, looking left and right and whispering to myself that the show itself was the umpteenth perversion of the original idea: all those genuine hippies making themselves naked to the voraciousness of such a gregarious audience... Yes, modern, stylish Londoners, but tribal and fashionable, feeding the prejudiced concept of hippie with all its false and adapted bullet points...

As a matter of fact, the work of Joan Grossman says a lot against the topic. I was not expecting that and I was pleased to find something to really think about. From "I was not ready for that level of communal stuff" to the countless images of the women putting the children to sleep or doing domestic chores. Nothing wrong with that! As a matter of fact, the sequence of Towards Tomorrow: Utopia, showed prior to Drop City, showing domestic life with Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changing is tender and beautiful, albeit traditional. But, alas! They don't change the times! They perhaps can aspire to change themselves and that is a good start. Reminds me of that Sufi story of the youngster than prays to God to get strength and change the world, but ends up his life as an old man asking humbly for strength to change himself!... Watch the scenes here (minute 3' on) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb-DbSGg4Qg.

The founders dropped the world and looked for a renewed and better universe constructed from the disposed and wasted droppings of the old. This is very much in the Christian tradition -in my view, the greatest relief for the wronged: "I will build my Church with the stone disposed by the master mason", says the Christ. The thinking of those years is tidy, the symbolism, neat.  The books of the time, in all the attractiveness of the aesthetics of the 60s talk of "living and non-living forces of nature" with exquisite delicacy. The radical choice of life of the founders of Drop City is as much radical as their search - those hippies took part for something and rejected something else,
took a modern choice, exhibited clear, sharp, exclusive ideas: this is better than that... The contradiction with our postmodern lives is flagrant - flows with the gaudiness of iodine tincture down the skin.

The original hippies of Drop City persevered also in finding new perspectives, new ways of looking at reality and its connection with something beyond. The filming we have today of Drop City were recorded in 16 mm. The presence of cameras those days is typical: you used it in the hope of finding a secret angle and then shared it with the rest. There were something religious in it!

The fall and end of the community came in with fights, the socking death of a 23 year-old girl and appalling stampede. The whole sweet castle of dreams crumbles down like made of cane sugar. The Beach chronicles the disaster in a faithful way. One can ask: The builders looked for everything that is human and that the alienating society had taken away, did they get it at least? Did they get something at last? The answer is no, and here the failure becomes irredeemable: it is the people of Trinidad and surroundings who is terrible concerned with the wretched lives of the adults and the precarious conditions of the children, while the hippies steadily dropped and flew away. Dropping droppers, how ironic!There was a moment when the cooking of outsiders was more valuable that any painting or any art. The moment when the search for humanity has stopped and the evil grass has occupied the darkest corners of the heart.