January 20, 2012 Filed under Book
By Charles Zhu
John Moynihan, son of New York’s senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, went to work on the Merchant Marine during the summer of his junior year at Wesleyan University. The story of his days spent aboard a super oil tanker were recorded in an illustrated manuscript before he died at the age of 44 from a fatal reaction to acetaminophen.
When his mother discovered the journal, she had a limited run printed for Moynihan’s friends and family. Now, a mass publication of his thrilling tale is being made available by Spiegel & Grau as The Voyage of the Rose City.
Moynihan decided to drop out of Wesleyan before he was 20 years old. His father, who as a young man had been in the Navy and worked on the New York City docks, worried about his son’s intentions and opposed. However, his mother, Elizabeth Moynihan, was an ardent sailor who “immediately set about helping him.”
The boy was bored with Wesleyan’s scholastic life, which he referred to in his journal as “an overgrown playground” where “conversation focused on feminism and boycotting Nestle.”
He also wanted to confront what he called “the sense of failure that has haunted me since I left school.”
His first assignment was “forty-five days from Camden, New Jersey, to the Mediterranean on the Rose City,” a supertanker measuring 894 feet long, 105 feet wide and 64 feet deep. However, as the ship sailed on the sea, forty-five days became four months across the equator, around Africa, across the Indian Ocean, and up to Japan.
It was a far more dangerous voyage than Moynihan, who avidly read Melville and Michael Herr’s “Dispatches,” had expected. The labor on the ship was hard, and dilapidated equipment aboard the ship put the crew’s lives in jeopardy.
They passed through the Straits of Malacca three times, on the rough, stormy sea and constantly faced the threat of pirates. But John felt enchanted by the natural world around him, the lights of Cape Town at night and the phosphorescence that kicked up in the wake of the tanker, he listened to the stories of the old seamen and came to value the drunken friendship among the men.
As a gifted writer, John drew what he saw and kept a journal on the ship that he turned into his senior thesis when he returned to Wesleyan the following year.
A friend of John’s recalled, “The Eire Pub in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood is not really a sailors’ saloon, but it is an inviting, friendly place. I met there several times in the 1980s with John Moynihan, who lived nearby.”
“Over a few pints, John spun out his theories about Walt Disney’s influence on American culture and the flaws in American higher education amid a smorgasbord of topics. An engaging young man of many talents and many interests, he had inherited his parents’ sense of humor and sense of adventure.”
Before he got on board the tanker, an official at the Seafarers International Union asked him to say his father was “a West Side bartender,” which Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan had been. However, the truth leaked out and John received heaps of scorn from the Merchant Marine’s crew. “College boy” was the kindest epithet. Some of the tough guy-type men were bitter as he had taken a job one of their friends might have had.
There was a succession of drama when the dreamy and long-haired Moynihan barely suppressed “fear of being thrown overboard or getting punched out.” He was, he writes, “dangerously alienated.” He could not distinguish between a hatchet and a crescent wrench. Nor could he make out which end of the ship was the bow. “From the hat I was wearing to my complete ignorance of the technical jargon,” he writes, “I was a pathetic joke.”
Gradually, hostility was replaced by the thrills of the sea. Like most crew members, he took a turn at the helm. “I allowed myself a wry smile,” he writes. “What would the executives of Texaco do if they knew a 20-year-old beer-drinking ex-hippie who had been out to sea for only two and a half days was controlling the destiny of one of their largest supertankers?”
John Monyhan was able to crack filthy jokes and describe rowdy, rough and funny scenes in ports like Yokohama, where the seamen, recently paid, went on a drinking spree and wandered into the city in search of more drinks and attractive street walkers while he, a student of Japanese culture, refrained from the line of prostitutes and went looking for temples.
His writing style is unaffected. He is a more mature writer than his years, with the kind encouragement from his Wesleyan writing teacher Paul Horgan, a great chronicler of the American West. After reading Rose City, Horgan said, “Keep sailing – you’re on your way.”
Though not a great work, the book written by a boy barely 20 years old is a stirringly authentic saga that records the fears and glories of the sea and funny scenes at the coast of Africa and Japan for young fans of adventures.
Voyage of the Rose City: An Adventure at Sea, By John Moynihan, 256pp, Spiegel & Grau, $22
By Charles Zhu
John Moynihan, son of New York’s senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, went to work on the Merchant Marine during the summer of his junior year at Wesleyan University. The story of his days spent aboard a super oil tanker were recorded in an illustrated manuscript before he died at the age of 44 from a fatal reaction to acetaminophen.
When his mother discovered the journal, she had a limited run printed for Moynihan’s friends and family. Now, a mass publication of his thrilling tale is being made available by Spiegel & Grau as The Voyage of the Rose City.
Moynihan decided to drop out of Wesleyan before he was 20 years old. His father, who as a young man had been in the Navy and worked on the New York City docks, worried about his son’s intentions and opposed. However, his mother, Elizabeth Moynihan, was an ardent sailor who “immediately set about helping him.”
The boy was bored with Wesleyan’s scholastic life, which he referred to in his journal as “an overgrown playground” where “conversation focused on feminism and boycotting Nestle.”
He also wanted to confront what he called “the sense of failure that has haunted me since I left school.”
January 20, 2012 Filed under Book
Timezone 8 is a Hong Kong-based publisher, distributor and retailer of books on contemporary art, architecture, photography and design. This week, it recommends three upcoming titles to Beijing Today readers.
Zeng Hao: Summer
By Zeng Hao, 149pp, Beijing Center for the Arts, $30
Zeng Hao’s large-format oil paintings depict young Chinese men and women facing the viewer with blank expressions against monochrome backdrops punctuated by oddly isolated trees, occasionally doing away with the figures altogether.
Zhang Yuan: Unspoiled Brats
By Zhang Yuan, 193pp, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, $19
The films and photographs of acclaimed director Zhang Yuan portray individuals on the outskirts of Chinese society. This artist’s book presents a range of his color portraits of disenfranchised youth, lesbians, victims of abuse and monks, all of whom are interviewed about their lives.
We Are Polit-Sheer-Form
Edited by Mathieu Borysevicz, 290pp, Timezone 8 and Shanghai Gallery of Art, $49.95
The Polit-Sheer-Form Office (PSFO) art collective was founded in 2005 by Hong Hao, Xiao Yu, Song Dong, Liu Jianhua and Leng Lin. PSFO initiates group discussions in locations such as factories, farms, schools, artist’s studios, bathhouses and department stores. Their activities are documented in this substantial overview.
(By He Jianwei)
Timezone 8 is a Hong Kong-based publisher, distributor and retailer of books on contemporary art, architecture, photography and design. This week, it recommends three upcoming titles to Beijing Today readers.
Zeng Hao: Summer
By Zeng Hao, 149pp, Beijing Center for the Arts, $30
Zeng Hao’s large-format oil paintings depict young Chinese men and women facing the viewer with blank expressions against monochrome backdrops punctuated by oddly isolated trees, occasionally doing away with the figures altogether.
Zhang Yuan: Unspoiled Brats
By Zhang Yuan, 193pp, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, $19
The films and photographs of acclaimed director Zhang Yuan portray individuals on the outskirts of Chinese society. This artist’s book presents a range of his color portraits of disenfranchised youth, lesbians, victims of abuse and monks, all of whom are interviewed about their lives.
We Are Polit-Sheer-Form
Edited by Mathieu Borysevicz, 290pp, Timezone 8 and Shanghai Gallery of Art, $49.95
The Polit-Sheer-Form Office (PSFO) art collective was founded in 2005 by Hong Hao, Xiao Yu, Song Dong, Liu Jianhua and Leng Lin. PSFO initiates group discussions in locations such as factories, farms, schools, artist’s studios, bathhouses and department stores. Their activities are documented in this substantial overview.
(By He Jianwei)
January 13, 2012 Filed under Book
By Charles Zhu
Michiko Kakutani, an American Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the New York Times, recommended Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith as one of the 10 best books of 2011.
In the biography of this Dutch painter, who might be commended like the French painter Eugene Delacroix as having “a sun in his head and a thunderstorm in his heart,” the authors raised doubts about the conventional hypothesis of his suicide at the age of 37.
Though people commonly believed that the tormented artist shot himself, Naifeh and Smith say the hypothesis has problems: the angle of the shot, the disappearance of the gun and the long walk that the shot Van Gogh would have made to his house, to name but a few.
They propose a different theory: a rough teenager named René Secrétan, who took a fancy to a cowboy costume after seeing Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, was possibly the source of the gun. The gun might have been sold or lent to him by a local innkeeper. Secrétan and his hooligan friends used to tease Van Gogh for his odd mannerisms, arguably caused by epilepsy.
The authors believe that there was some encounter between the painter and the boys on the day of the shooting.
“Once the gun in René’s rucksack was produced,” they write, “anything could have happened – intentional or accidental – between a reckless teenager with fantasies of the Wild West, an inebriated artist who knew nothing about guns, and an antiquated pistol with a tendency to malfunction.” They also argue that the painter might welcome “the escape that he longed for but was unable or unwilling to bring upon himself, after a lifetime spent disavowing suicide as ‘moral cowardice.’”
While critics say that there is no hard and convincing evidence for this theory, it does not prevent the minutely detailed biography from being one of the best ever of the Dutch painter. It interprets his life and art and records his struggles with depression, his iron will in the face of incessant rejections, his willingness to learn other artists’ techniques and the drama-packed evolution of his work.
In addition to David Sweetman’s succinct 1990 study, it chronicles the ups and downs of Van Gogh’s life of solitude and despair.
In a short span of just 10 years, there came a great wealth of brilliant and dynamic paintings that would shock the world in later years. He created a flurry of uniquely different images that would “say something comforting as music is comforting – something of the eternal” such as glittering stars in the yellow moonlight; brilliant irises flowering in a lush garden under the sun; crows flying over a golden field of wheat under a stormy sky.
This book tries its best to avoid simplistic conclusions and base its writing on hard work in the study of the development of his ideas, his techniques and his extraordinary ability to learn lessons from other painters and try to utilize their innovations.
The authors exhausted archival material and scholarship at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and intensively scrutinized Van Gogh’s letters to understand the artist’s mind. These letters not only chronicle his emotional ups and downs, his creative process and his ties with his brother Theo, but also testify to his literary gifts and his tenacious wish to become an artist.
Based on these letters and Van Gogh’s drawings and paintings, the authors make a detailed explanation of his intellectual mind, his philosophy and his art. They argue that although he suffered breakdowns and depression, Van Gogh was far from a madman. He had been well groomed in literature and art through his reading of Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare, which helped shape his vision as an artist.
It is believed that Van Gogh’s works of peasants were inspired by Millet, and that he wished, as the authors say, “to celebrate not just the peasants’ oneness with nature” but also “their stolid resignation in the face of crushing labor.” With an iron will to learn, he also got tremendous influence from the Impressionists in his landscape paintings and the use of colors. He was also indebted to the pointillism of Seurat, Japanese prints and the Symbolists’ imagery.
The authors relived the creative life of Van Gogh in the artistically fermentative Paris of the 1880s and tell how he evolved from his intensive study of light on surfaces to more intense search of his own mind, from realist copying of scenes to a more expressionistic style that showed his own “fanatic heart.”
The world of art should be thankful for a book that offers insights into how Van Gogh’s free-wheeling use of color corresponded with the various states of his moods such as the vibrant yellow sunflowers, the serene violet, lavender and lilac and dynamic blues and ominous clouds in the eulogy of benign or threatening nature.
Van Gogh once revealed his mind when he said, “What I draw, I see clearly,” adding, in drawing, “I can talk with enthusiasm. I have found a voice.” He indeed found a unique voice and a unique way to express his unique art.
Van Gogh: The Life, By Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, 976pp, Random House, $40
By Charles Zhu
Michiko Kakutani, an American Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the New York Times, recommended Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith as one of the 10 best books of 2011.
In the biography of this Dutch painter, who might be commended like the French painter Eugene Delacroix as having “a sun in his head and a thunderstorm in his heart,” the authors raised doubts about the conventional hypothesis of his suicide at the age of 37.
Though people commonly believed that the tormented artist shot himself, Naifeh and Smith say the hypothesis has problems: the angle of the shot, the disappearance of the gun and the long walk that the shot Van Gogh would have made to his house, to name but a few.
They propose a different theory: a rough teenager named René Secrétan, who took a fancy to a cowboy costume after seeing Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, was possibly the source of the gun. The gun might have been sold or lent to him by a local innkeeper. Secrétan and his hooligan friends used to tease Van Gogh for his odd mannerisms, arguably caused by epilepsy.
The authors believe that there was some encounter between the painter and the boys on the day of the shooting.
“Once the gun in René’s rucksack was produced,” they write, “anything could have happened – intentional or accidental – between a reckless teenager with fantasies of the Wild West, an inebriated artist who knew nothing about guns, and an antiquated pistol with a tendency to malfunction.” They also argue that the painter might welcome “the escape that he longed for but was unable or unwilling to bring upon himself, after a lifetime spent disavowing suicide as ‘moral cowardice.’”
January 6, 2012 Filed under Book
By Charles Zhu
American singer Harry Belafonte tells of his twisted and exciting life in the Harlem slums, his first calypso record and his immense success in the singing world in My Song, a memoir co-written with Michael Shnayerson.
The songwriter, actor and producer has been dubbed the “King of Calypso” for popularizing the Caribbean musical style with an international audience in the 1950s. He is perhaps best known for singing “The Banana Boat Song,” with its signature lyric “Day-O.” Throughout his career he has been an advocate for civil rights and humanitarian causes.
Belafonte was born in Harlem, New York, to a Jamaican cleaning lady, Melvine Love, and a ship cook named Harold Bellanfanti. From early childhood, he experienced and endured the stress of poverty when his family was squeezed into a room where four families shared one bathroom. The image of his father was one of a drunkard with blood on his hands, yelling and beating his mother.
It was simply “a terrible claustrophobic closet of fear,” he says.
His mother found comfort in the Catholic Church. She took him to Mass every Sunday, dressed in a blue suit, and afterward to the Apollo Theater to hear Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. “As suffocating and interminable as Mass seemed, I could endure it if I knew that a few short hours later I’d be in the real cathedral of spirituality … the Apollo.”
“Most of the famous black Americans of the day lived there, rubbing shoulders with the rest of us; they certainly weren’t welcome in the fancy buildings south of 96th Street,” Belafonte said.
One of his cult heroes was A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. “I just loved watching him lead his troops through Harlem on parade, with their red collars and shiny buttons and red caps tilted just so. Everyone admired the porters … because they were worldly – they traveled far and wide – and because most had college degrees.”
He recalls that his mother took him and his younger brother, Dennis, back to Jamaica in 1936. Harry loved his white Jamaican grandmother, Jane, who lived in a wood-frame house on stilts on a hillside near Ocho Rios.
“For the rest of my life, I would feel an unusual sense of ease in moving between races and classes – an ease that would help me as an entertainer, later as an activist,” Belafonte writes.
Despite his opposition, his mother sent him to a British-style boarding school, a life-altering experience that Belafonte said ended in tears and the permanent loss of his mother as a supportive figure.
When he returned to New York, he dropped out of high school, enlisted in the Navy and served until 1945. He then worked as a janitor in an apartment building on Amsterdam Avenue. One day when he was repairing Venetian blinds for a tenant, an actress in the American Negro Theater, she gave him tickets to a play.
That play altered the course of Belafonte’s life. It was a play “about returning black servicemen trying to establish postwar lives in Harlem. That play didn’t just speak to me. It mesmerized me.”
He became so enthusiastic about the theater that he joined the company, then a theater workshop at the New School. Among his fellow students was Marlon Brando. Speaking of Brando, he says, “I’d never met a white man who so thoroughly embraced black culture. He loved going with me to jazz clubs. Marlon was a prankster; if he saw you napping, he’d tie your shoelaces together. But as a friend, he was bedrock loyal.”
After seeing Belafonte sing onstage in a New School production, saxophonist Lester Young got him a gig at the Royal Roost jazz club. “I’m not a singer. What you saw me do was acting,” said Harry Belafonte, but he took the job singing songs like “Stardust” and “Skylark” and made his debut with Charlie Parker, Max Roach on drums, Tommy Potter on bass and Lester Young’s pianist, Al Haig – four jazz celebrities doing a favor for an unknown guy.
In 1951, he turned toward folk music, chain-gang songs and ballads, and in 1952 he made his first calypso record, Man Smart (Woman Smarter). He made his Las Vegas debut at the Thunderbird, where he learned that he could master a crowd of loud drunks by walking onstage stern-faced and singing at the top of his voice.
“I would feel the crowd growing tense. When at last I switched to an upbeat song – and flashed them a first grin – I could hear the collective sigh. For the rest of the act, I could be as light and jokey as I wanted to be. They were mine.”
Talking about his role as a gangster in Robert Altman’s Kansas City, he writes, “I realized I could play mean. I just had to summon that old hard streak, the one that had pulled me out of poverty.”
Belafonte went through three marriages and fathered four children. He talks frankly as an autobiographer of his gambling addiction and anger. The Harlem poverty and wounds of childhood urged him to be tenacious and become so successful.
My Song: A Memoir, By Harry Belafonte and Michael Shnayerson, 480pp, Knopf, $30.50
By Charles Zhu
American singer Harry Belafonte tells of his twisted and exciting life in the Harlem slums, his first calypso record and his immense success in the singing world in My Song, a memoir co-written with Michael Shnayerson.
The songwriter, actor and producer has been dubbed the “King of Calypso” for popularizing the Caribbean musical style with an international audience in the 1950s. He is perhaps best known for singing “The Banana Boat Song,” with its signature lyric “Day-O.” Throughout his career he has been an advocate for civil rights and humanitarian causes.
Belafonte was born in Harlem, New York, to a Jamaican cleaning lady, Melvine Love, and a ship cook named Harold Bellanfanti. From early childhood, he experienced and endured the stress of poverty when his family was squeezed into a room where four families shared one bathroom. The image of his father was one of a drunkard with blood on his hands, yelling and beating his mother.
It was simply “a terrible claustrophobic closet of fear,” he says.
His mother found comfort in the Catholic Church. She took him to Mass every Sunday, dressed in a blue suit, and afterward to the Apollo Theater to hear Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. “As suffocating and interminable as Mass seemed, I could endure it if I knew that a few short hours later I’d be in the real cathedral of spirituality … the Apollo.”
“Most of the famous black Americans of the day lived there, rubbing shoulders with the rest of us; they certainly weren’t welcome in the fancy buildings south of 96th Street,” Belafonte said.
One of his cult heroes was A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. “I just loved watching him lead his troops through Harlem on parade, with their red collars and shiny buttons and red caps tilted just so. Everyone admired the porters … because they were worldly – they traveled far and wide – and because most had college degrees.”
He recalls that his mother took him and his younger brother, Dennis, back to Jamaica in 1936. Harry loved his white Jamaican grandmother, Jane, who lived in a wood-frame house on stilts on a hillside near Ocho Rios.
“For the rest of my life, I would feel an unusual sense of ease in moving between races and classes – an ease that would help me as an entertainer, later as an activist,” Belafonte writes.
Despite his opposition, his mother sent him to a British-style boarding school, a life-altering experience that Belafonte said ended in tears and the permanent loss of his mother as a supportive figure.
When he returned to New York, he dropped out of high school, enlisted in the Navy and served until 1945. He then worked as a janitor in an apartment building on Amsterdam Avenue. One day when he was repairing Venetian blinds for a tenant, an actress in the American Negro Theater, she gave him tickets to a play.
That play altered the course of Belafonte’s life. It was a play “about returning black servicemen trying to establish postwar lives in Harlem. That play didn’t just speak to me. It mesmerized me.”
He became so enthusiastic about the theater that he joined the company, then a theater workshop at the New School. Among his fellow students was Marlon Brando. Speaking of Brando, he says, “I’d never met a white man who so thoroughly embraced black culture. He loved going with me to jazz clubs. Marlon was a prankster; if he saw you napping, he’d tie your shoelaces together. But as a friend, he was bedrock loyal.”
After seeing Belafonte sing onstage in a New School production, saxophonist Lester Young got him a gig at the Royal Roost jazz club. “I’m not a singer. What you saw me do was acting,” said Harry Belafonte, but he took the job singing songs like “Stardust” and “Skylark” and made his debut with Charlie Parker, Max Roach on drums, Tommy Potter on bass and Lester Young’s pianist, Al Haig – four jazz celebrities doing a favor for an unknown guy.
In 1951, he turned toward folk music, chain-gang songs and ballads, and in 1952 he made his first calypso record, Man Smart (Woman Smarter). He made his Las Vegas debut at the Thunderbird, where he learned that he could master a crowd of loud drunks by walking onstage stern-faced and singing at the top of his voice.
“I would feel the crowd growing tense. When at last I switched to an upbeat song – and flashed them a first grin – I could hear the collective sigh. For the rest of the act, I could be as light and jokey as I wanted to be. They were mine.”
Talking about his role as a gangster in Robert Altman’s Kansas City, he writes, “I realized I could play mean. I just had to summon that old hard streak, the one that had pulled me out of poverty.”
Belafonte went through three marriages and fathered four children. He talks frankly as an autobiographer of his gambling addiction and anger. The Harlem poverty and wounds of childhood urged him to be tenacious and become so successful.
January 6, 2012 Filed under Book
Located at The Place, Trends Lounge is a bookstore and cafe with a wide selection of books about international art, design and architecture.
Eyewear
By Moss Lipow, 392pp, Taschen, $59.99
Eyeglass designer Moss Lipow trawled eBay, auction houses, garage sales and flea markets worldwide to collect photographs of unusual glasses for his massive eyewear collection. This book, which traces eyewear’s journey over the past millennium, features the best examples of Lipow’s collection and models from other world-class collections.
The New York Times 36 Hours
Edited by Barbara Ireland, 700pp, Taschen, $39.99
The New York Times has been offering up dream weekends with practical itineraries in its popular weekly “36 Hours” column since 2002. The many expert contributors, experienced travelers, and accomplished writers all have brought careful research, insider’s knowledge and a sense of fun to hundreds of cities and destinations, always with an eye to getting the most out of a short trip.
Brazil’s Modern Architecture
By Elisabetta Andreoli, 240pp, Phaidon Press, $39.95
In this book, a new generation of Brazilian cities and historians sets the record straight, providing a truly comprehensive survey and analysis of 20th-century Brazilian architecture. This book clarifies the often paradoxical relationship between Brazil’s political, social and economic history and its architectural development.
(By He Jianwei)
Located at The Place, Trends Lounge is a bookstore and cafe with a wide selection of books about international art, design and architecture.
Eyewear
By Moss Lipow, 392pp, Taschen, $59.99
Eyeglass designer Moss Lipow trawled eBay, auction houses, garage sales and flea markets worldwide to collect photographs of unusual glasses for his massive eyewear collection. This book, which traces eyewear’s journey over the past millennium, features the best examples of Lipow’s collection and models from other world-class collections.
The New York Times 36 Hours
Edited by Barbara Ireland, 700pp, Taschen, $39.99
The New York Times has been offering up dream weekends with practical itineraries in its popular weekly “36 Hours” column since 2002. The many expert contributors, experienced travelers, and accomplished writers all have brought careful research, insider’s knowledge and a sense of fun to hundreds of cities and destinations, always with an eye to getting the most out of a short trip.
Brazil’s Modern Architecture
By Elisabetta Andreoli, 240pp, Phaidon Press, $39.95
In this book, a new generation of Brazilian cities and historians sets the record straight, providing a truly comprehensive survey and analysis of 20th-century Brazilian architecture. This book clarifies the often paradoxical relationship between Brazil’s political, social and economic history and its architectural development.
(By He Jianwei)
December 30, 2011 Filed under Book
By Charles Zhu
The extraordinary life and work of Gustav Mahler, a late-Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation, is now presented as a more manageable overview in Gustav Mahler.
The 700-page book makes a fine alternative to the massive multi-volume biography by Henry-Louis de La Grange.
The new text was written by Jens Malte Fischer, a professor of the theatrical history at the University of Munich and translated from German by Stewart Spencer.
As a composer, Mahler acted as a bridge between the 19th century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century.
Speaking about his own symphonies, Mahler once said, “I have written into them, in my own blood, everything that I have experienced and endured.”
In the eyes of Romain Rolland, author of Jean-Christophe, Mahler was “extraordinarily high-strung, something of the schoolmaster and something of the clergyman,” with a “long, clean-shaven face, hair tousled over a pointed skull and receding from a high forehead, eyes constantly blinking behind his glasses, a strong nose, a large mouth with narrow lips, sunken cheeks, and an ascetic, ironic and desolate air.”
His music is described as idealistic, grotesque, confrontational and confessional. Though he met with professional, emotional and physical crises, he lived like an artist: no matter how turbulent was the outside world, he remained undisturbed, keeping his creative self true to art throughout to the end of his life.
While in his lifetime his status as a conductor was established beyond question, his own compositions only gained wide popularity after periods of relative neglect, including a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era. After 1945, Mahler was rediscovered and championed by a new generation of listeners; he then became one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers, a position he has sustained into the 21st century.
Born to humble circumstances in the village of Kalischt, Bohemia, Mahler displayed his musical gifts at an early age.
After graduating from the Vienna Conservatory in 1878, he held a flurry of conducting posts of rising importance in the opera houses of Europe, culminating in his appointment in 1897 as director of the Vienna Court Opera. During his 10 years in Vienna, Mahler converted to Catholicism from Judaism to secure the post and experienced regular opposition and hostility from the anti-Semitic press. Nevertheless, his innovative productions and insistence on “pure music” secured his place as one of the greatest of opera conductors, particularly with his masterful interpretations of the operas of Wagner and Mozart.
Mahler’s works are mostly in the genres of symphony and song. Most of his 10 symphonies are large productions, with some employing soloists and choirs backed by powerful orchestral forces. These were often controversial when first performed, and were slow to receive critical and popular approval; an exception was the triumphant premiere of his Eighth Symphony, the “Symphony of a Thousand” in 1910.
According to Fischer, Mahler, after completing the work, wrote to one of his friends: “Try to imagine the whole universe beginning to ring and resound. These are no longer human voices, but planets and suns revolving.” Fischer says that the work has “the power of the uplift” that “is unforgettable.”
Fischer discussed Mahler’s marriage to Alma Schindler. Mahler, then director of the Royal Opera, met and fell in love on November 7, 1901 with “the most beautiful girl in Vienna,” Schindler, over dinner at the house of Austrian writer Berta Zuckerkandl. Schindler, who was 19 years his junior, consented to the proposal, and the wedding took place just a few weeks later. She gave to her composer husband the most precious thing she had to offer – her love of music, her own gift as a composer and her social life. However, she was prohibited from composing.
Schindler became an inspiration to her husband, who idolized her. The symphonies of the latter years of his life were unimaginable without Alma. But Mahler’s works also smack of his deep-seated Jewishness in every way. His mix of folkloristic elements, light music and great symphonic form made his symphonies unique from other masters.
While Schindler brought a great deal of happiness and domestic stability to him, there was regrettable unconsciousness, on the part of Mahler, of neglect of her needs and growing unhappiness as the latter’s memoirs and letters testified. Mahler overlooked or ignored her artistic impulses. This culminated in Mahler’s discovery of her liaison with the young architect Walter Gropius while Mahler, gripped by a dying disease, was in great need of affection and care.
In his later years, Mahler went to America for three seasons of conducting. However, instead of being accorded the esteem and fame he deserved, he was belittled and humiliated by New York critics, impresarios and board members who wanted him to share the podium with Toscanini. When he finally returned to Vienna in the spring of 1911, he was ill, unable to stand or walk on his own. He left the world with his Tenth Symphony unfinished, in which he devised an imaginary landscape of loneliness and emotional violence.
Mahler’s cause was carried forward by the Second Viennese School, notably Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten were among later 20th-century composers who admired and were influenced by Mahler.
Gustav Mahler, By Jens Malte Fischer, 766pp, Yale University Press. $50
By Charles Zhu
The extraordinary life and work of Gustav Mahler, a late-Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation, is now presented as a more manageable overview in Gustav Mahler.
The 700-page book makes a fine alternative to the massive multi-volume biography by Henry-Louis de La Grange.
The new text was written by Jens Malte Fischer, a professor of the theatrical history at the University of Munich and translated from German by Stewart Spencer.
As a composer, Mahler acted as a bridge between the 19th century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century.
Speaking about his own symphonies, Mahler once said, “I have written into them, in my own blood, everything that I have experienced and endured.”
In the eyes of Romain Rolland, author of Jean-Christophe, Mahler was “extraordinarily high-strung, something of the schoolmaster and something of the clergyman,” with a “long, clean-shaven face, hair tousled over a pointed skull and receding from a high forehead, eyes constantly blinking behind his glasses, a strong nose, a large mouth with narrow lips, sunken cheeks, and an ascetic, ironic and desolate air.”
His music is described as idealistic, grotesque, confrontational and confessional. Though he met with professional, emotional and physical crises, he lived like an artist: no matter how turbulent was the outside world, he remained undisturbed, keeping his creative self true to art throughout to the end of his life.
December 30, 2011 Filed under Book
The Mahler Album: New, Expanded Edition
By Gilbert Kaplan, 340pp, Abrams, $50
Selected by Gilbert Kaplan, this is the definitive collection of all known photographs of Mahler’s family, his homes, the opera houses in which he worked – including the Metropolitan Opera in New York – and a rich selection of related drawings, paintings and sculptures.
Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World
By Norman Lebrecht, 336pp, Anchor, $16
By following Mahler’s every footstep from birth to grave, scrutinizing his manuscripts and talking to those who knew him, cultural commentator Norman Lebrecht constructs a compelling new portrait of Mahler as a man who lived outside his times.
(By He Jianwei)
The Mahler Album: New, Expanded Edition
By Gilbert Kaplan, 340pp, Abrams, $50
Selected by Gilbert Kaplan, this is the definitive collection of all known photographs of Mahler’s family, his homes, the opera houses in which he worked – including the Metropolitan Opera in New York – and a rich selection of related drawings, paintings and sculptures.
Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World
By Norman Lebrecht, 336pp, Anchor, $16
By following Mahler’s every footstep from birth to grave, scrutinizing his manuscripts and talking to those who knew him, cultural commentator Norman Lebrecht constructs a compelling new portrait of Mahler as a man who lived outside his times.
(By He Jianwei)
December 23, 2011 Filed under Book
By Charles Zhu
Michael Lindsay-Hogg, a film and Broadway director, recalls his Shakespearean drama of life as the unclaimed son of actor and director Orson Welles in his book Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age in Hollywood, New York, and Points Beyond.
Lindsay-Hogg was born in 1940 in New York City to actress Geraldine Fitzgerald and was educated at Trinity School in New York and Choate School in Connecticut.
Fitzgerald and her husband, Sir Edward Lindsay-Hogg, a 4th Baronet and British national, tried to make him believe that he was their natural son. Sir Edward left the US in 1943 to travel in Ireland, Spain and Italy. Lindsay-Hogg described him as “a man of fragile temperament” who was virtually a phantom in his life.
His stepfather was Stuart Scheftel, who married Fitzgerald when Lindsay-Hogg was six, after she had divorced Sir Edward.
Scheftel was a businessman and a grandson of Isidor Straus, one of the owners of Macy’s, who died on the Titanic with his wife, Ida. Scheftel and Fitzgerald had a daughter, Susan. Though his stepfather always seemed to support his ideas or decisions, for instance his plan to drop out of school at the age of 16 to appear in a play, their relationship was lukewarm and he always kept his stepfather at arm’s length. Lindsay-Hogg writes in the book, “If he had a fault, it probably was that he’d married my mother, supplanting my little self.”
As Lindsay-Hogg grew up, he sounded extremely like Orson Welles, who was well known for his baritone voice, both in conversation and on the phone.
Welles worked extensively in film, theater and television after starting his career in radio drama. Citizen Kane (1941), his first film with RKO, in which he starred in the role of Charles Foster Kane, is often considered the greatest film ever made.
Welles is noted for his innovative dramatic productions as well as his distinctive voice and personality. In 2002, he was voted the greatest film director of all time in two separate British Film Institute polls among directors and critics.
However, for years, rumors about Lindsay-Hogg’s true parentage, hinting at Welles, abounded, but he was at first uninterested in them.
It turns out that Welles in 1938 directed Heart-break House in which Fitzgerald played a role. Although they each had their own family, Fitzgerald became pregnant while her husband was in New York. They lived together in Beverly Hills. Fitzgerald did not want her son to know her liaison with Welles and told her son, “We’d go out for dinner together, and you know how people can put two and two together and make three.”
On a school vacation at the age of 14, Lindsay-Hogg’s mother brought him to Off Broadway for the rehearsal of the play The Doctor’s Dilemma, directed by Sidney Lumet. This sparked his lifelong enthusiasm for the theater.
He first met Welles as a teenager in the mid-1950s and acted with him at the Gaiety Theater in Ireland, and continued to meet with him for the rest of Welles’ life. Welles offered Lindsay-Hogg a job as his assistant on a play starring Laurence Olivier.
Once, Fitzgerald gave a party which Welles attended. However, “I didn’t see or hear from Orson for three years,” he writes. This mode of relationship lasted for the rest of Welles’ life: They would see each other and have a friendly conversation and then separate for years.
Lindsay-Hogg began directing the 1960s British pop program Ready Steady Go!, a forerunner of MTV-type programming. This work led to an unaired television special, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (1968), which was finally released in 1996.
He acceded to the baronetcy in 1999 upon the death of his legal father, Sir Edward Lindsay-Hogg.
However, his success would never match his biological father’s. Some people say it might have been a blessing for Lindsay-Hogg to never know his paternity. “With a genius for a father you can only fail by comparison,” he writes.
In January 2010, Lindsay-Hogg took a DNA test to determine if Welles was in fact his father. The test was inconclusive, as the hair used in the test did not contain a follicle. Confirmation of his true parentage came after Lindsay-Hogg sent a copy of his unpublished autobiography to his mother’s friend Gloria Vanderbilt, who confirmed that Welles was his father.
At 71, Lindsay-Hogg can now look at his imperfect family and find something to love in his stepfather, his birth father who always eluded him and his always lying mother. A critic says that is the closest thing to luck – as the title of the book suggests – most of us can hope for.
Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age in Hollywood, New York, and Points Beyond, By Michael Lindsay-Hogg, 288pp, Knopf, $26
By Charles Zhu
Michael Lindsay-Hogg, a film and Broadway director, recalls his Shakespearean drama of life as the unclaimed son of actor and director Orson Welles in his book Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age in Hollywood, New York, and Points Beyond.
Lindsay-Hogg was born in 1940 in New York City to actress Geraldine Fitzgerald and was educated at Trinity School in New York and Choate School in Connecticut.
Fitzgerald and her husband, Sir Edward Lindsay-Hogg, a 4th Baronet and British national, tried to make him believe that he was their natural son. Sir Edward left the US in 1943 to travel in Ireland, Spain and Italy. Lindsay-Hogg described him as “a man of fragile temperament” who was virtually a phantom in his life.
His stepfather was Stuart Scheftel, who married Fitzgerald when Lindsay-Hogg was six, after she had divorced Sir Edward.
Scheftel was a businessman and a grandson of Isidor Straus, one of the owners of Macy’s, who died on the Titanic with his wife, Ida. Scheftel and Fitzgerald had a daughter, Susan. Though his stepfather always seemed to support his ideas or decisions, for instance his plan to drop out of school at the age of 16 to appear in a play, their relationship was lukewarm and he always kept his stepfather at arm’s length. Lindsay-Hogg writes in the book, “If he had a fault, it probably was that he’d married my mother, supplanting my little self.”
As Lindsay-Hogg grew up, he sounded extremely like Orson Welles, who was well known for his baritone voice, both in conversation and on the phone.
Welles worked extensively in film, theater and television after starting his career in radio drama. Citizen Kane (1941), his first film with RKO, in which he starred in the role of Charles Foster Kane, is often considered the greatest film ever made.
Welles is noted for his innovative dramatic productions as well as his distinctive voice and personality. In 2002, he was voted the greatest film director of all time in two separate British Film Institute polls among directors and critics.
December 23, 2011 Filed under Book
Trends Lounge book listing
Located at The Place, Trends Lounge is a bookstore and cafe with a wide selection of books about international art, design and architecture.
Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen
By Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor, 88pp, MoMA, $24.95
This collection examines the 20th-century transformation of the kitchen through the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, featuring a wide variety of design objects, architectural plans, posters, archival photographs and art, ranging from the iconic Frankfurt Kitchen, mass-produced for German public housing estates in the aftermath of World War I, to an electric tea kettle, heat-resistant glass wares and colorful plastics, such as Tupperware and Japanese artificial food.
Color Moves: Art and
Fashion by Sonia Delaunay
By Matilda McQuaid, 204pp, Thames & Hudson, $50.5
The book focuses not only on abstract painter and colorist Sonia Delaunay’s art but also her avant-garde fashion designs from her own Atelier Simultane in Paris during the 1920s and textiles she designed for the Metz & Co Department store in Amsterdam in the 1930s.
Architects’ Sketchbooks
By Will Jones, 352pp, Metropolis Boos, $49.95
It is the first survey to present pages from the private sketchbooks of 85 international spectrum of architects, who use drawing to express their spatial ideas while revealing their unique thought processes.
(By He Jianwei)
Located at The Place, Trends Lounge is a bookstore and cafe with a wide selection of books about international art, design and architecture.
Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen
By Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor, 88pp, MoMA, $24.95
This collection examines the 20th-century transformation of the kitchen through the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, featuring a wide variety of design objects, architectural plans, posters, archival photographs and art, ranging from the iconic Frankfurt Kitchen, mass-produced for German public housing estates in the aftermath of World War I, to an electric tea kettle, heat-resistant glass wares and colorful plastics, such as Tupperware and Japanese artificial food.
Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay
By Matilda McQuaid, 204pp, Thames & Hudson, $50.5
The book focuses not only on abstract painter and colorist Sonia Delaunay’s art but also her avant-garde fashion designs from her own Atelier Simultane in Paris during the 1920s and textiles she designed for the Metz & Co Department store in Amsterdam in the 1930s.
Architects’ Sketchbooks
By Will Jones, 352pp, Metropolis Boos, $49.95
It is the first survey to present pages from the private sketchbooks of 85 international spectrum of architects, who use drawing to express their spatial ideas while revealing their unique thought processes.
(By He Jianwei)
Tags: Aidan O’Connor, Architects’ Sketchbooks, Beijing Today, Book, book listing, Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay, Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen, Juliet Kinchin, Matilda McQuaid, Trends Lounge, Will Jones
December 16, 2011 Filed under Book
By Charles Zhu
John Casey, winner of the 1989 National Book Award for his novel Spartina, talks about his experience of exercising from middle age into old age in Room for Improvement, a new collection of essays that are a personal and joyful self-portrait of a writer who loves going to extremes.
In the tradition of Hemingway’s Old Man and Sea, he writes with beautiful narrative about a sportive and tough Rhode Island fisherman in Spartina, a modern classic, and his daughter in the ensuing Compass Rose.
When he is not writing, he goes skating, climbing and running. Sports seem to be an essential part of his life. He celebrated his 70th birthday by running a 70 kilometer marathon of his own devising that included rowing, bicycling, skating and trotting with his dog for a mile.
Casey attended Harvard Law School and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He currently lives with his wife, the artist Rosamond Casey, and their daughters Julia and Clare in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he teaches English literature at the University of Virginia.
These are the essays that portray with tenderness and humor a lifelong zeal not for drinks or drugs, but for a more natural pleasure: the joy of sport, exercise and rising to any challenge – be it a marathon, a climb up Mount Katahdin or a canoe trip down the Delaware River.
One of the essays describes how he was pinned by a 90-kilogram judo instructor who cried at him, “Come on, white boy. Don’t give up.” Another tells how he led a lost couple on a yacht through the rocky waterways of Narragansett Bay in a rowboat.
As a student at the University of Iowa, he used to go running in the countryside. Local farmers wondered why a young man was wasting his energy in such a way. For Casey, running was never a waste: it was driven by his quest for health, vanity, adventure, competition and endorphins – what he calls the sheer pleasure of physical movement.
In The Social Life of the Long-distance Runner, Casey writes, “From my soccer-playing days, I remembered running laps, wind sprints and other devices of tedium and torture, designed, it seemed at the time, to weed out the unenthusiastic,” he writes in The Social Life of the Long-distance Runner.
“It is true that friends of mine, usually longer-legged and somewhat reedy, had described attaining a certain pleasurable trance while running long distances, but I had put them in the same category as people who sat through two consecutive showings of Last Year at Marienbad.”
He described one time he took off his pants to reveal his shorts on a long-distance run, and was watched by a crowd of amused elementary school pupils and their teacher, a sport fisherman and a face-down drunk, before a policeman came up to enquire, “What’s your story, Charlie?”
The officer assumed that the only people who ran were boxers-in-training or criminals.
Casey is faithful in recording what really happened and what he really felt in his sportive activities.
Of his 26-day Outward Bound course in the dead of winter, during which he was left for four days on a remote island in Maine, he wrote the following in his journal after building a temporary shelter: “Tide almost in. Not much time before dark. Boil whelks and mussels. Mussels so-so. Whelks awful. Thank God it’s dark so I can’t see them. Just pop the whelk in. I’m sure it’s writhing around in my mouth. Could it still be alive? Do they resist boiling? It’s fighting back at being chewed, lashing its white wormy coils. I chew it in a rage. Die, repulsive whelk! Eat rose hips to get whelk memory out of my mouth.”
As a refined essayist, he describes his experience of cross-country skiing like plowing a canoe on a lake: “Once you begin to get the motion right, the kicking and gliding and riding the driving ski with your body weight floating over it, you may find that you have swallowed your boat whole – that you are your boat moving across a lake of still air and snow.”
As a stylist, he recalls rowing with a partner, “After a fast start, we settled into a good rhythm. The air was cool and still, the water smooth. We got into that state of grace rowers call swing. At the catch I heard all four oar blades drop into the water with a single note – a short liquid chink – then the rising note off the stern as the wake gurgled faster during the drive. The three of us were in tune, Brett, I and the boat. Sometimes it can be like that.”
Casey offers his wisdom, encouraging people to engage in sports for vanity, health, competition or personal pleasure.
Room for Improvement: Notes on a Dozen Lifelong Sports, By John Casey, 256pp, Knopf, $25.95
By Charles Zhu
John Casey, winner of the 1989 National Book Award for his novel Spartina, talks about his experience of exercising from middle age into old age in Room for Improvement, a new collection of essays that are a personal and joyful self-portrait of a writer who loves going to extremes.
In the tradition of Hemingway’s Old Man and Sea, he writes with beautiful narrative about a sportive and tough Rhode Island fisherman in Spartina, a modern classic, and his daughter in the ensuing Compass Rose.
When he is not writing, he goes skating, climbing and running. Sports seem to be an essential part of his life. He celebrated his 70th birthday by running a 70 kilometer marathon of his own devising that included rowing, bicycling, skating and trotting with his dog for a mile.
Casey attended Harvard Law School and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He currently lives with his wife, the artist Rosamond Casey, and their daughters Julia and Clare in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he teaches English literature at the University of Virginia.
John Casey
These are the essays that portray with tenderness and humor a lifelong zeal not for drinks or drugs, but for a more natural pleasure: the joy of sport, exercise and rising to any challenge – be it a marathon, a climb up Mount Katahdin or a canoe trip down the Delaware River.
One of the essays describes how he was pinned by a 90-kilogram judo instructor who cried at him, “Come on, white boy. Don’t give up.” Another tells how he led a lost couple on a yacht through the rocky waterways of Narragansett Bay in a rowboat.
As a student at the University of Iowa, he used to go running in the countryside. Local farmers wondered why a young man was wasting his energy in such a way. For Casey, running was never a waste: it was driven by his quest for health, vanity, adventure, competition and endorphins – what he calls the sheer pleasure of physical movement.
In The Social Life of the Long-distance Runner, Casey writes, “From my soccer-playing days, I remembered running laps, wind sprints and other devices of tedium and torture, designed, it seemed at the time, to weed out the unenthusiastic,” he writes in The Social Life of the Long-distance Runner.
“It is true that friends of mine, usually longer-legged and somewhat reedy, had described attaining a certain pleasurable trance while running long distances, but I had put them in the same category as people who sat through two consecutive showings of Last Year at Marienbad.”
He described one time he took off his pants to reveal his shorts on a long-distance run, and was watched by a crowd of amused elementary school pupils and their teacher, a sport fisherman and a face-down drunk, before a policeman came up to enquire, “What’s your story, Charlie?”
The officer assumed that the only people who ran were boxers-in-training or criminals.
Casey is faithful in recording what really happened and what he really felt in his sportive activities.
Of his 26-day Outward Bound course in the dead of winter, during which he was left for four days on a remote island in Maine, he wrote the following in his journal after building a temporary shelter: “Tide almost in. Not much time before dark. Boil whelks and mussels. Mussels so-so. Whelks awful. Thank God it’s dark so I can’t see them. Just pop the whelk in. I’m sure it’s writhing around in my mouth. Could it still be alive? Do they resist boiling? It’s fighting back at being chewed, lashing its white wormy coils. I chew it in a rage. Die, repulsive whelk! Eat rose hips to get whelk memory out of my mouth.”
As a refined essayist, he describes his experience of cross-country skiing like plowing a canoe on a lake: “Once you begin to get the motion right, the kicking and gliding and riding the driving ski with your body weight floating over it, you may find that you have swallowed your boat whole – that you are your boat moving across a lake of still air and snow.”
As a stylist, he recalls rowing with a partner, “After a fast start, we settled into a good rhythm. The air was cool and still, the water smooth. We got into that state of grace rowers call swing. At the catch I heard all four oar blades drop into the water with a single note – a short liquid chink – then the rising note off the stern as the wake gurgled faster during the drive. The three of us were in tune, Brett, I and the boat. Sometimes it can be like that.”
Casey offers his wisdom, encouraging people to engage in sports for vanity, health, competition or personal pleasure.
