Stuck in a Rite of Passage

Max Ernst, Portrait of an Ancestor

Living in a foreign country can sometimes feels like one protracted rite of passage that never really reaches the desired climax. Where you’re terminally stuck in that betwixt and between stage that follows the period of isolation and precedes the (re)incorporation into the family, community or body politic. This cultural coitus reservatus is re-enacted on countless occasions but perhaps nowhere more markedly than on those feast days in which the community celebrates itself in food, song, dance and ritual. Like Easter. I can learn the words to the song and the steps to the dance but it’s all in the head. The feeling is just not there. There’s too much mediation, too much self-consciousness, too little history.

This getting-stuck business is not, of course, the fault of my hosts or my ex-lover’s family or my friends. If anything, they’re eager to welcome me into the fold despite the amusement my faux pas and bungled Greek might occasion. I have never felt I was being made fun of. Perhaps I was teased a few times, mostly by being presented with delicacies like batter-fried calf’s brains (this was in the days before mad-cow scare). But I’m sure this was just good-natured fun. My father, who married into my mother’s very Neapolitan family, had similar stories to tell about his being accepted into the clan (one had to do with live eels in a bathtub).

I can manage a decent syrtaki and the brains weren’t half bad but trust me, you cannot feign a liking for a dish like the Greek Easter standard, kokoretsi: chunks of heart, liver, spleen and lungs which are wrapped in a coil of lamb’s intestines and then roasted on a spit. Kokoretsi is definitely a dish you have to grow up with. It’s the foreigner’s litmus test for Greek-ness.

I was telling my friend Georgia, who by the way doesn’t eat kokoretsi (but of course being Greek she doesn’t have to), about my father and the eels and how that reminded me of some of the “initiation scenes” in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. She screwed up her face as if she had just bitten into a morsel of lung. It turned out that she, like many of my other Greek friends, hated the movie. This struck me as worth pursuing. We usually agreed about movies. We even missed the same scenes in The Wrestler as we burrowed into each other’s chest during the more violent moments of the movie.

Georgia thought the Wedding a tasteless caricature of the importance that Greeks place on the family, the role of food in social and communal bonding, and the significance of the cultural legacy of ancient Greece in the identity of Greeks today. The film, she said, exaggerated national pride into stereotypes of chauvinism and parochialism. It was ridiculous, she said. Which struck me as an odd criticism for a comedy, the whole point of comedy being, as Aristotle said, the pursuit of the ridiculous.

She took affront at the father’s silly penchant for tracing the etymology of words like “miller” and “kimono” to their putative Greek roots. Though she had also told me with pride about a speech their former Prime Minister Xenophon Zolotas once delivered in English in which practically every word save prepositions and articles were of Greek origin. Actually there were two talks, but I’m being pedantic. I looked up the speeches. They didn’t really sound very English: “I emphasize my eulogy to the philoxenous autochtons of this cosmopolitan metropolis and my encomium to you, Kyrie, and the stenographers.” It was nice of Zolotas to remember the stenographers, though. I imagine they almost never get thanked publicly.

She also found far-fetched the father’s fondness for Windex as a cure-all for everything from psoriasis to poison ivy, as his daughter confides to her fiancé. She was right there. Despite the plethora of specialized gels, powders and solutions for all sorts of cleaning jobs from removing calk from faucets to scouring kitchen sinks, Greeks still swear by bleach, not Windex. I once witnessed a friend’s mother adding a couple of tablespoons of bleach to a sink filled with water to wash the romaine lettuce for a salad. Thank God I wasn’t around when she was cleaning the lamb’s intestines for the kokoretsi. Cleaning intestines is a Herculean task (you can guess which one), considering that my ex-lover’s mother, like every other self-respecting Greek housewife, would only use the fresh entrails of a Greek lamb in this dish; I don’t know how she was sure the lamb was Greek but she knew how to spot the difference between fresh intestines and the once-frozen thawed-out guts that unscrupulous butchers would pass off for fresh. Fresh intestines always contain remnants of the lamb’s last supper.

Georgia’s dismissal of My Big Fat Greek Wedding doesn’t mean she has no sense of humor. She does, of course. In his Essay on the Meaning of the Comic Henri Bergson makes the point that humor relies on a certain emotional distance to work. “It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled.” As soon as we start caring about what the comic character is saying or doing, we can no longer laugh. Georgia couldn’t be indifferent, I could. Perhaps my unruffled appreciation of the humor of Wedding was the flip side of my aversion to kokoretsi.

But there’s no going back. I thought Mambo Italiano, Émile Gaudreault’s delightful coming-out film about a young Italian-Canadian and his closeted (and also Italian-Canadian) policeman and of course their Italian-Canadian parents, was absolutely hilarious. It could’ve been subtitled, My Big Gay Italian Wedding. One could say it caricatured the importance that Italians place on the family, the role of food in social and communal bonding, and the significance of the cultural legacy of Italy…

Imagine a cinema in which no one made love

Nikolas and I were finishing dinner in a restaurant in Kypseli, a funky little place with a tongue-in-cheek décor that sports a row of heavy oaken wine casks and the sort of modest tear-drop chandeliers you might find in the home of a maiden great-aunt who had traveled but not widely. I was sharing with him my enthusiasm for Brokeback Mountain. I don’t recall why we got to talking about the movie, it could have been any one of a myriad of conversational triggers. Nikolas seems to find points of departure in things I say that I didn’t know were there, like a scout who can make out the faintest of paths in the undergrowth.

Here is a love story between two men in which the protagonists actually make love, and they do so in a way that is psychologically authentic. Their first sexual encounter is a rough and rushed fuck. Ennis is more unbroken colt than man and indeed the scene recalls Jack’s rodeo rides; here too Jack wants to hold on as long as he can, but it’s seems to be over almost before it starts. Their next time has an entirely different emotional timbre. Jack is lying in the tent half-awake and naked.  Ennis enters the tent, his head bowed, almost apologetically, like a boy who had just hit a ball through the neighbor’s living room window. Jake takes him in his arms. They kiss and slide to the ground, and Ennis lies beside Jake, crouched in a near fetal position, his head cradled on Jake’s chest and surrenders himself to his friend’s caresses and finds solace.  Ennis’s whole body seems to cry out, love me, a cry that he, still bound to his fears about what living  with another man would mean, tragically fails to heed.

Even if Brokeback Mountain weren’t the great movie that it is, even stripped of its cinematography and absent Ledger’s brilliant performance, it would still be a memorable film, if only because of scenes like these and others that follow. Nikolas and I tried to think of another mainstream film which had at least one scene that depicted two men making love. We settled for a kiss. But even then only a few came to mind.  The sloppy wet kiss in a crypt in Verhoeven’s (vastly underrated) The Fourth Man. Kevin Kline and Tom Selleck’s kiss in In and Out. We couldn’t remember if there actually was a kiss in movies like Another Country (there was) and Maurice (still not sure). Ironic, isn’t it? Even in movies like these that focus on relationships between two men and where you’d expect a kiss, you can’t be sure the protagonists pressed their lips together. In his essay “When a Kiss is not a Kiss” Gary Morris calls this the “lost kiss”, as in Philadelphia: “…where we must take the word of the gay partners that they love each other because the filmmakers didn’t have the guts to offer any visual evidence.”

It is perhaps only when movies like Brokeback Mountain come along that we feel so strongly the absence of passion that otherwise we tend to take for granted, and mourn for the kisses lost in other movies. Even then this loss may not be apparent for straight audiences (and certainly not a cause for lament).

But imagine a cinema in which no one made love. A world in which strawberries are served in a bowl and ice-cubes in a glass, kitchen tables are for eating breakfast and the sink for washing up. A world in which William Hurt would have used the door, Lancaster and Kerr would have gone looking for beach pebbles and Patrick Swayze would have let his wife finish her pot. A world in which a man and woman fall in love but never kiss, a cinema in which all the signs of our humanity, the virtue and vices that give life to a character and drive the story—courage, ambition, jealousy, greed, self-sacrifice, envy, and many more—are enacted save one: passion. Where men and women pursue truth or justice or beauty … but not their love for each other.

P.S.    I later ran across an affectionate collage of scenes of men kissing at the movies, many of which slipped Nikolaos’s and my memory, including Deathtrap and Cabaret. Kudos to the anonymous editor who put together this six-minute video.

Don’t Cook Tripe for Friends

Emil Doerstling, Kant and Friends at Table

The thought of how best to cook for a dinner party came to me as I was reading Auden’s poem “Tonight at Seven-Thirty”, which is part of the cycle of twelve poems Thanksgiving for a Habitat that celebrates the house he had bought in Austria and its rooms (the poem in question is of course for the dining room). The poet talks about what makes for a good dinner party—the “authentic comity” of a smallish gathering (“six lenient semble sieges/none of them perilous,/is now a Perfect/Social Number”), “well-liking”, the kids off to bed, a mix of well-mannered guests who are not bores. Men and women who relish good talk and “who enjoy the cloop of corks” but who also “can see in swallowing/a sign act of reverence”. But the only food actually mentioned in the poem is mammoth-marrow, long pig and pickled Leviathan.

Granted, the food isn’t the most important part of the evening. The dinner is a pretext to pamper your guests and celebrate your friendship, but it’s also an occasion to share good food with people who are important to you. Sharing food is laden with social and psychological meaning; cooking for others, which adds the element of gift-giving, is even more complicated, and that’s not even considering questions of skill and technique. The following are more notes to myself than advice, put together from experience (I’ve broken them all at one time or another, almost always to my regret) but also from observing friends who have a talent for making others feel truly at home.

1. Don’t experiment.

So you’ve found what sounds like a great recipe for butterflied sea bass with salmon mousse in puff pastry. What, you’ve never really made a mousse (much less butterflied a fish)? Now is not the time to try. Something will go wrong. Cook something you’ve cooked before and can cook well. A perfectly cooked yoghurt-marinated chicken kebab and an expertly dressed salad is infinitely more rewarding to the palate than a runny salty crab soufflé.

2. Do respect the dietary restrictions of your guests.

None of your friends who are gluten-intolerant, lactose-resistant, vegetarian, Muslim or allergic to shellfish would expect that a meal served at a dinner party would be wholly designed to suit their own dietary needs. But it’s just good manners to ask (if you don’t know) about possible food restrictions and ensure that there’s at least one dish that is free of whatever it is that would send your food-challenged friend into anaphylactic, gastrointestinal or ethical shock.

3. Don’t cook okra, snails or tripe…

or in general foods that are slimy, unidentifiable, too much work to eat, or in any way an acquired taste. It’s a good bet that most of your guests have not acquired it. Save your passion for kidneys or habanero chilies for a tête-à-tête dinner with a fellow aficionado.

4. Don’t try to impress.

Relax. Dinner with friends is not an audition or talent show. The country may be looking for the next culinary superstar but the odds are they’re not looking for him in your kitchen. Even slimmer that they’d find him there. The food is important (it’s dinner after all) and you’ll want to do something special (it’s not everyday you invite your friends for dinner) so you won’t want to serve meatloaf (unless, of course, you make a remarkable meatloaf or meatloaf is the only thing you do well), but the food is not the only reason, or perhaps not even one of the more important reasons your friends have gathered at your home. Besides, there are plenty of other ways, more subtle perhaps, like the notes of a flute in an orchestra, to mark the evening as a celebration. A stack of freshly laundered hand-towels in the bathroom, a fine postprandial grappa, candles of course.

5. Don’t be stingy either

The dinner party, of course, is an instance of those social exchanges which shape others’ perceptions of our hospitality and generosity, so the choice between meatloaf and porterhouse isn’t inconsequential. As David Sutton writes in Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (some of which deals with customs on the Greek island of Kalymnos), food exchanges generate a social (and hence, remembered) narrative that make or break a person’s standing in the community: people remember meals. I recall the first meal I had Giorgos’s new apartment and the exquisite roast potatoes he cooked, I remember nibbling Sofia’s baked ham on the veranda of her home below the Acropolis in the Plaka, M’s kreatopita, Nikolas’s apple dessert, Adrianne’s lentil salad, Eric’s homemade bread. But I also remember the way friends cook and not just specific meals, like Sotiris’s by now trademark medleys of intriguing mezedes. I’ve tended to cook in a rather minimalist, cardio-friendly way, a practice that in my early years in Greece I carried over without much thought to the meals I cooked for my Greek friends. Until I heard a friend joke, as we were unpacking the dishes of a potluck beach picnic “and Stefanos has made a wild rice salad and, let’s see, stuffed artichokes and, ah, some more finetsata anosta (bland but elegant).” Food as memory. I’ve since adapted (somewhat) my cooking to the taste-scapes of my Greek friends.

6. Do think of dinner, not dishes.

Nor is dinner a pentathlon (or triathlon or biathlon) of wholly separate events but a sequence of foods in which intensity and drama is gradually built up and then released. When planning the menu, think of making love or plot development or sonata form or working out. Only the unwise athlete begins a workout with interval training and fails to stretch at the end, only a bad lover jumpstarts the evening with penetration and turns on his side once done without a cuddle or a kiss, and only an inept cook begins with a meal so rich and heavy that the palate is dulled and exhausted for anything else that follows or forgets dessert, or worse, assumes his guests will bring it.

7. Don’t buy your way out of getting fresh, seasonal ingredients.

Asparagus in January can have a certain novelty value but it smacks of arrivisme and culinary insecurity. It says in effect that you think the appearance of luxury is more important than sensory pleasure. In this case, a dish of honey-drizzled slow-roasted winter root vegetables, however humble in origin, is a far classier act than the asparagus. Cook honest.

8. Don’t serve risotto, polenta, tempura…

or anything else that tethers you to the stove while your guests are nursing their drinks in the living room wondering when you’ll appear. Unless you have a kitchen staff to do that for you. One of the reasons they’ve accepted your invitation is to see you. The one exception: you’re comfortable with having your guests hang out in your kitchen as you cook. Of course this presupposes that they’re comfortable with it as well. In the end, though, this guests-in-the-kitchen-while-you-cook thing is very hard to pull off. They’ll want or feel obliged to help, but you shouldn’t really let them. You’re supposed to be taking care of them. And if you can’t make food and conversation at the same time, or make whatever you’re doing look as effortless as folding a napkin, or failing that, at least fun, keep your guests out of the kitchen. Otherwise your sweating over the stove or grunting as you bone the fish will send a very clear message to your guests: look at how hard I’m working for you, which is why we don’t leave price tags on the gifts we give. This is not to say that occasions for social cooking don’t exist — an extended family get-together, two friends cooking an evening meal together — but these are very different from the dinner party.

9. Don’t exhaust yourself.

Don’t overestimate the skills, time and equipment you have at your disposal. You always have less than you think you will.

10. Do have a good time.

Isn’t that why you invited your friends to dinner in the first place?

In Praise of Locker Rooms

Scott Treleaven, Other Skins

Men at a beach, even one reserved for nudists, are never truly naked. Well, not in the sense that they are in a locker room. It’s not just that the men on the beach are in the company of others, which in itself is a distraction that hinders the observation of their nakedness. It’s more that they are invested with their roles as friend or father, and doing something, like opening a sea urchin for their son or slathering sunscreen on a lover’s back, or just talking or reading; somehow action clothes them in a way that is missing from the locker room. The nakedness of a locker room is a pure state of undress, the equivalence in flesh of a cappella song. There are, of course, scraps of biography cast about the locker benches that give a clue to the identity of these bodies —the Gucci gym bag, the discount shaving cream, socks that pill, a frayed collegiate knapsack and Aussie Bum briefs—but they are like endnotes in a paper that tells a good story: you read them, if at all, only after you’ve finished the main body of the text.

I don’t really know how comfortable the men at my gym are in their nakedness. I imagine most are. Or they’ve just accepted it, since the only way around it would be to wrap a towel around you as you slip off your shorts and jockstrap, get dressed and head off to work with a sticky sheen of sweat (which, if repeated often enough, would just earn you both ridicule and a reputation).  I actually think it might even be liberating for some not to have to try to be better or someone other than who they are.

Anyway, there’s no point in trying, since you can’t compensate for whatever shortcomings you feel you might have. The locker room is the great leveler, where the beautiful actor will head to the showers sporting a flabby ring of belly fat, the young investment banker with a back overrun by a colony of crimson pimples, where a man with a hooked nose and pockmarked face will expose perfectly molded lats that flare like a cobra’s hood. Granted, these are extremes, as are nipples no bigger than a  lentil and those the size of a heavy rivet (also to be observed), and the rare Adonis and Ephialtes make their appearance, but mainly the locker room is a place where the normal distribution reigns…and that applies as well to the appendage most men silently compare themselves on.  Most of the bodies are just, well, average bodies. Even if bench presses have pumped up the chest an inch or two, and squats have put meat on the quads, gravity has usually take its toll and the buttocks sag a bit, like a pair of slightly deflated punching bags. And the pleasures of bar and table have exacted their price, too, and the hips are now padded with a handle of body fat. In most cases hair grows in the usual places, and most of the time conventionally wispy, though now and then thatched.

The locker room also holds a collection of secret tales, and written on the pages of the naked skin of the menwho change there. But the stories are censored whodunits in which only the corpse of the victim is revealed and at times the weapon found. We can see the traces left by the surgeon’s scalpel—the long deep furrow ploughed on the chest of one man and the buttonhole scars of a laparoscopic appendectomy on another’s—and the marks by the tattooer’s needle, though we don’t what obsession led the young weightlifter to have a dolphin inked on his lower abdomen with its snout resting on his shaved pubes. We see the disfigurations occasioned by a moment of carelessness or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but are left to imagine the circumstances of the fall, the slip of the knife, the sudden jerk of the power saw. But we also note a pecan-shaped protuberance of a hernia waiting to be repaired, the ropey tentacles of phlebitis, a knob of a cyst in the nape of the neck: tales of ‘crime’ yet to be committed.

As a child in grammar school I hated the locker room. It was both introit and recessional to an hour of embarrassment. I was a hopelessly uncoordinated skinny bookish kid and school athletics, at least back then, were exclusively devoted to team sports in which coordination, and to only a slightly lesser extent, size and strength, played an important role—the unholy trinity of football, basketball and baseball. You had to be pretty awful to get a “D” in gym, but I managed to do so. In any other subject my ineptitude would have gotten me failed, but I suppose just showing up for gym class must have counted and that saved me, together with a two-week reprieve from the “Big Three” in which we played soccer and I found out I could run, if not faster, then certainly longer than practically anyone else.

I like the locker room now. I like the small talk with another swimmer after a session in the pool. I like its camaraderie and the good people I’ve met there, and the small acts of kindness and thoughtfulness these men have shown me—the generous discount a swimmer gave me at his clothing store, the oranges another had picked  from his grove in the country.   And I like the bodies I see, bodies (to borrow a phrase of Auden’s) “made in God’s image but already warped,” but beautiful in their own way.

The photo on today’s post is a work by Canadian artist Scott Treleaven, whose works is currently being exhibited at the Breeder (Iasonos 45) . The show runs till March 25th.

The Love of His Own Excellence

Daniel Vojtech, Old Bicycle

This Saturday I went looking for a new bike and set out for Frederik’s, one of the oldest and most knowledgeable bike shops in Athens. Located at the back of a gloomy stoa at the corner of Patision and Stournara and grimly lit in icy fluorescent light, the high-ceilinged, narrow L-shaped shop is unprepossessing and anything but inviting. It could have been a betting parlor or hardware store. But there are bikes everywhere: a row outside the shop, others set out on the shop floors, still others in a cramped stuffed-to-the-gills loft built above the shop. Not just bikes but bikes to be, since the shop also custom-builds cycles. There’s probably an order to the display of goods, perhaps similar to the logic with which we organize our kitchens, but it’s not evident to the uninitiated.

The shop is named after its owner, a wiry short sprite of a man of indeterminable age with a full shock of graying hair and the extremely lean body of a long-distance cyclist. He moves at twice the velocity of an average man. And he does always seem to be moving, as if his body had an attention span measured in seconds not minutes. He ricochets through the shop, checking a repair made by one of his acolytes (“shop assistant” doesn’t really convey the deference they show him), meting out a piece of advice to a prospective buyer, barking out prices and bike reviews and warranties. He is the shop.

I went up to him and told him why I had come. After a quick battery of questions about why I wanted a new bike, delivered presto with an undertone of impatience (it felt somewhat like an appointment with a renowned neurologist, the kind that doesn’t give receipts) he showed me a bike in the loft and then another one downstairs in a nook off the repair bench—a beautiful, carbon-forked and wonderfully light Specialized Allez.  And then he left me there and moved on to finishing a tire replacement that one of his minions had started.

“Left me there” has a ring of abandonment but that’s exactly how it felt. I didn’t know what I was expected to do. Take notes? Finger the derailleur? I felt as if I had arrived at a party where I knew no one and the host, after greeting me and showing me where the bar was, flitted off to check the amuse gueule and give instructions to the waiters.

However daunting my initiation to Frederik’s was, I’ll probably buy my bike there. His prices are good, and I know that that if I ever need him to deal with a wheel that’s become laterally out of true, he’ll take care of it, probably leaving another potential buyer in the lurch to do so. I’d been to Frederik’s before to get the clamps on my biking shoes adjusted; he did it for free.

His shop will become yet another landmark on my map of the city, another rare find where expertise and the delight in craftsmanship assure me that there isn’t an item in the shop that’s of shoddy quality. The bike shop will join the ranks of places like the Pnyka Bakery on Petraki Street, which makes the best stone-ground whole-wheat sourdough bread in the city (their flour is ground at their own mill!) and the Greek Record Club (the hauteur of whose staff make Fred’s seem like a teenage sleepover with your cousins), a wine shop run by a pair of brothers on Metsovou, the tiny Italian tavern Maltagliati with its marvelous homemade pasta, and a dozen or so more places whose staff exude an almost tangible and highly contagious pleasure in the goods they make or sell, and places where the craftsman’s pride, his “love of [his] own excellence” (Augustine) is not only evident but wholly justified.

Connoisseurship has a bad reputation these days as elitist, but informed and discriminating taste, instilled with passion, is worth seeking out. Especially when you’re about to shell out €1400 for a bike.

Fate is Memory: Savvas Christodoulides at the National Theatre

Savvas Christodoulides, Fate is Memory and Vice-Versa

Memory is a tyrannical mother, without whose steadfast care we would be lost and from whose overbearing presence we sometimes wish to be freed. So much of our lives is predicated on memory—intimacy, trust, fairness, friendship, even a sense of home and belonging. You can take a Polaroid of someone and annotate it with events and impressions, as amnesiac Leonard Shelby does in Christopher Nolan’s disturbing film Memento, but without memory it remains flat, lifeless, devoid of the depth of feeling and the true sense of the other that is built from memory and marks a friend or lover or son or mother.

Admittedly we don’t remember only what binds to a person and a place, but also what alienates us from both: moments of  pettiness and spite, of slights real and imagined, of mistakes we’ve made and lies we’ve told, the times we’ve acted foolishly or selfishly and the instances of stupid self-aggrandizement. Things we’d rather not remember. Regret finds fertile soil in memory.

But memory as fate? And fate as memory? These are the questions that the artist Savvas Christodoulides poses in his installation Fate is Memory and Vice-Versa at the recently opened exhibition Koini Thea (In Plain View) at the National Theater (Rex). The work  depicts two alabaster-white plaster nymphs made in a cast of what once must have been garishly painted kitschy garden figures. They’re are poised, crouched in a dancer’s bow with their backs to each other, on a slab (also plaster) overlying a long wooden table from the 1930’s (another objet trouvé). The table in turn is set on a half-unfurled beige-colored carpet —or rather in, since the table’s wheel seem to sink into the plush pile of the rug.

There’s a gracefulness to the figures that only has been revealed now that they have been stripped of the garish colors that ‘embellished’ the original figurines from which Christodoulides made the casts. (He’s often employed—and ennobled—used materials in earlier works of his, like a cast-iron garden chair, a laundry rack, and even a ladder). A white balloon rises like a fat moon between them, held in space by ribbons which descend and wrap around the hand of each of the nymphs.

There is something appropriately theatrical and the ritual to the installation. The base of the table and the plush carpet remind one of an altar set in sand. The poses of the nymphs, ghostlike in their bloodless whiteness, seem to suggest they are players bound together in some endless danse funèbre, condemned to repeat the same performance, night after night. Memory as fate. It is a commonplace of therapy that we re-enact the relationships of our past with the lovers and friends and bosses and rivals of our present. It is the tragic script of the impotent man or the agoraphobic, the battered wife or the embittered couple, where the next attempt to break free of their impasse is so laden with the memory of fear and angst that it is almost doomed to simply recapitulate the  failure of all previous attempts. It is where one says “I can’t do that” but means “I remember I couldn’t do that”.

But fate as memory, too. How often we perceive our current life as the result of an inexorable march of a remembered (but nonetheless interpreted)  interconnected series of events. We are all historians of ourselves, and like the historian we try to make sense of the outcome of our lives by tracing agents and probable cause. We want to make a story out of what otherwise are essentially random events. As random as the artist chancing upon two kitsch garden sculptures in a flea market.

Late for the Lecture: Joseph Beuys in Athens, II

Joseph Beuys at the Blackboard

Nikolaos came over for dinner on Friday. He arrived laden with gifts—wine and music and a handy pocket-sized notebook he had bought for me at the Musée du quai Branly. He must have guessed that I am an inveterate scribbler.

His gift started me thinking (again) about the act of recording, a notebook being of course just one of various ways of capturing thoughts, impressions, and snippets of conversations, of fixing an arresting but fleeting phrase or metaphor one has heard (like Nikolaos’s own remark later that evening about how infidelity only becomes problematic when it leaches out into the space of a couple’s shared life).

Something about its portability and the miniature scale of the writing surface–and the fact one usually writes in it (a private act) in public places–makes it a medium par excellence for writing fast. The notebook is for notes after all, images and phrases, bits of dialogue, the bare skeleton of a story, for recording things like the scent of stale tobacco smoke in a crammed early morning trolley, a pair of brilliantly polished red high heel shoes worn by a theater usher, a cowboy-and-cattle chase between a motorcycle cop and a troupe of immigrant street vendors.Written fast and without the editorial censorship of careful writing, the notebook’s text becomes a codebook of sorts whose key is known only to the writer, written in an idiosyncratic shorthand of the imagination, interrupted by sketches and threaded with arrows that lead to callouts of text.

Nikolaos’s gift was an opportune one, as I was running out of blank pages in my Moleskine notebook. One of the things I like about that notebook is its first page. “In case of loss, please return to…” followed by four blank lines for name and address, and then, “as a reward: $__  ”. I filled it out, not because I thought the notebook had any particular value but rather because I liked the idea that if I did lose it and someone found it, the promise of a reward might prick the finder’s curiosity enough to read through it… and perhaps to try to make sense of it. I doubt with much success.

I would have a similar if much smaller problem deciphering it if I found it a year later myself. Notebooks have a short shelf life. Because of the elliptical way in which they’re written they need to be worked on soon or they lose their potency. When I leaf through older journals I wrote I can’t always make out what I was trying to say. Sometimes I can’t even make out my own writing. (I wonder what Nikolaos’s notebooks look like. I imagine they’re probably more orderly or readable than mine, if only because as a scientist he’s schooled in the discipline of accurately recording phenomena.)

The more elliptical the writing, the harder the act of reconstruction. It’s like walking into a classroom after a lecture has taken place and trying to imagine the contents of the lecture through the notes remaining on the chalkboard. Or like forensic expert arriving at the scene of a crime. Or like a maid cleaning up a hotel room in the morning. As she clears the smudged wine glasses and the two trays with room-service meals (one eaten, the other barely touched) and strips the rumpled sheets (which have not however been kicked off the bed), does she stop to think how the couple spent the night before? Did they quarrel? Did they make love, and if so, was it perfunctory or passionate?  Was it their first time? I can’t imagine she isn’t at least a little curious. How often do we peer into a bedroom of someone we haven’t slept with?

Apropos chalkboards, the exhibition of Joseph Beuys: Hellenic references in his art now showing at the Hellenic American Union contains two very intriguing chalkboard drawings by the artist. Actually photo-etching on white Fabriano cardboard. (Part of the pleasure of the work is precisely the oxymoron of the ephemeral chalkboard and the conserved etching, of the private drawing and the public engagement with the artist’s audience and students.)  Many of Beuys’s chalkboard drawings, like those of Rudolf Steiner (who exerted a profound influence on Beuys’s thinking), arose out of his engagement with his public and often formed part of his performance art. For Beuys the blackboard drawing, or to use Steiner’s word, Denkbild (thought-drawing) was both political agenda and a means of teaching and communicating with his audience.

One of the drawings on exhibition is entitled L’arte è una zanzara dalle mille ali (Art is a mosquito of a thousand wings). It depicts an antlered man and a pair (?) of horned animals, the hide of one of which seems to have been flayed, revealing what looks like a rack of flesh, from which a line leads to the word Leiden (suffering). At the top of the drawing is a small sun whose rays shower down through the drawing and are reflected back up from the ground. Interspersed through the drawing are a handful of words like  Seele (soul) and Leben (life), and way up in the upper right-hand corner hovering over a simple box stand Vorfertigung (prefabrication) and Tod (death). The opening line from the Odyssey is to be found, as well as a line from Ovid’s Sorrows (I, 9, 5) –  Donec eris felix, multos numerabis amicos (“as long as you are lucky, you will have many friends”, a bitterly ironic quote considering he wrote it in exile abandoned by his former friends).

There was an overabundance of “material” here with which I could reconstruct the messages Beuys wanted to convey or just wander off on my own, spurred on by ideas of recollection and storytelling (the line from Homer) or art as an expression of an unhappy world (quoted in Italian in the drawing), but it seemed like a lot of work. It’s not just the absence of Beuys as shaman that looms over any exhibition nowadays of the artist’s work, it is also the absence of Beuys as teacher. I wished I could have been there at the lecture.

The Circus Comes to Exarchia

Francis Bacon, Three Studies for the Base of a Crucifixion (1944)

In the early evening on my way back home from work I pass by Exarchia Square. A small group of anarcho-punks have built a fire in the middle of the square and arranged a pair of discarded sofas around it. The fire blazes every evening, as regular as the light of an island  beacon. It’s become as much a landmark of the square as Antonopoulos’s 1933 Blue Apartments, a milestone in the history of Modernist architecture in the city (about which Le Corbusier commented, “c’est très beau”.). There’s no sense of apocalyptic Blade-Runner decay to the punk campfire. The row of cafés flanking the east side of the square—distinguishable mostly in terms of the music they play—are just as packed, as are the ouzeries and tavernas that line the rivulets of narrow streets that run out of the square.

The urban cowboys sprawled on the sofa drinking beer could be junkies, but most of them have moved the hangout six blocks away to the pedestrian allée separating the Archaeological Museum from the Polytechnic Institute. This overwhelmingly male congregation varies in number depending on weather and time of day; on a sunny Saturday there might a hundred addicts along this walkway. Even though the allée ends on the north a half-block away  where a squadron of Special Forces policemen stand watch over the Ministry of Culture, this allée is their territory. They are very much chez soi. I passed by this morning and saw a guy on the steps to an unused back door of the Polytechnic, his pants straddling his ankles, stabbing a needle in his thigh.

No one ever seems to even try to disperse them. Perhaps the police recognize the futility of such an action. Shooed away they would probably swarm back together in a few hours, like bees at a honeycomb. The allée is their home, as much as the center, though not the rim, of Exarchia Square belongs to the anarcho-punks. The core of Exarchia remains more or less unpoliced—or at least the visibility of police is deliberately kept to practically zero—though it may be one of the safest neighborhoods at night (mostly because of the many eyes on the street that Jane Jacobs talked about).

Nikolaos thinks there’s a fundamental difference between the allée squatters and punk campers. The punks don’t bother him but the junkies do. He senses a threat (but is wise enough to realize the perceived danger is likely greater than the actual risk) and avoids walking down it. I imagine he sees it as an occupation force of displacement rather than the itinerant circus that has temporarily (?) set up camp in a public space. The latter may even welcome the passersby; they want to be observed (I’m sure the junkies don’t even register the passersby). The addicts do have one thing in common with the circus, though. Carnies have always been burdened with the prejudice that they are “folks apart”, freaks, unclean, even when a minority of enlightened voices may praise them as “dispensers of joy” ) And a similar uneasiness is probably evoked by the emaciated contorted addict, stumbling with hunched back along the sidewalk as if his muscles, like overstretched elastic bands, had lost all spring and tension. But the similarity ends there. It is not joy they dispense but sadness, a sadness tinged with horror that we feel when confronted with a human life wasted. And that, perhaps more than the threat of being mugged or assaulted, is a reason why few now tread the allée.

Joseph Beuys in Athens, I

Joseph Beuys, Flower Nymph

Nikolas and I visited the Beuys exhibition at the Hellenic American Union Joseph Beuys: Hellenic references in his art work and the accompanying Delphi is the place to meet: 12 artists on Joseph Beuys with works by German and Greek artists inspired by Beuys’ work and teaching.

Nikolas said it was a risky venture, by which he meant that it was hard to mount an exhibition of an artist whose teaching and activism, his persona as shaman and showman so dominated his work. I agreed, there’s something monumental to Beuys that could not be accommodated in the galleries of the Hellenic American Union. But then again, the 34 works on exhibit from the Van der Grinten collection in the Museum Schloss Moyland are mostly drawings, which lend themselves to intimate viewing. To give credit to the Hellenic American Union, though, as part of the parallel events to the exhibition the institution showed films of some of Beuys’s performance art, including I like America and America likes me, which unfortunately we missed. I hope there’s a repeat screening.

The drawings all have a reference to or motif from Classical Antiquity—a nymph, women javelin and discus throwers, Leda, Apollo, the bow of the Argo, amphorae, a curious palm-sized lump of bronzed clay named Crete but resembling Cyprus.There is little line in many of these drawings (an exception being a pair of  blackboard drawings, but these deserve a separate post). Most look like studies for a detail of a larger work—but the simplicity of the drawing allows one to focus on the texture of paper.

Some were drawn on a sheet torn from a sketchbook, others on chamois paper or heavy rag paper where the weft of fibers is visible like a ridged grid, yet another, an aquarelle on silk paper whose surface, swelled from the application of the liquid, has taken on the shape of rumpled bed linen. The sense of the materialness of the paper is heightened by its discoloration: the drawings are pockmarked by flecks of brown or deliberately stained by a diluted wash of glue, suggesting the coloring of marble in an ancient statue.

One of the more fascinating drawings on exhibit is Oedipus’s Head and Two Women’s Busts on Pedastals (1960).  Three uneven rectangular pedestals have been drawn  on a piece of chamois cardboard (also marked by discoloration) which has been torn at its bottom, revealing a ragged shore of frayed fiber. The lines seem as if they had been drawn by a child, and indeed the piece itself reads like a riddle. Find Oedipus.  Or at least his head. This is not easy.  There’s a tiny lump of clay resembling a bust that sits atop a pedestal. Another, which looks like a headless torso (two sticks of legs project from the clay) sits (entrapped?) inside the rectangle. On top of the third pedestal is a drawn figure, a bust perhaps. So where is Oedipus’s head? The only heads are on pedestals, but we know from the title that the women’s busts sit there.  A child would match the clay torso with the clay head — Oedipus’s head is the bust of his mother… the two clay pieces are finally and perversely joined.

The Delphi exhibition was held in a separate gallery (masterfully lit as Nikolas noted). We both liked Giorgos Lappas’s little red felt man with the oversized hand (The Water Leveller), another work in which texture and material come to the fore (as it does in Rena Papaspyrou’s wonderful piece on city textures (Samples from an Urban Landscape), but that too in another post).

But I was particularly intrigued by Irmel Dröse’s Da bin ich (Here I am). In an open coffin-like cardboard box affixed to the wall lies an unclothed figure the size and shape of a somewhat flattened ventriloquist’s dummy, whose surface is composed of patches of waxed paper stitched together with yellow thread. The topography of the waxed paper is fascinating: in regions creased, crinkled and cracked in a multitude of tiny triangles like the skin overlying the knuckles of an aged fisherman, elsewhere smooth like the buttocks of a young man. Lacking eyes, nose and mouth, he lies flaccid and dangling at the edge of a side of the cardboard box, half in, half out, as if at any moment he would fall out. The poverty of his internment and his precarious position at the edge of the box give the figure a poignant vulnerability darkened by a sense of abandonment. A child’s doll left forgotten in the clearing of a woods after a summer picnic, perhaps, but even more so it calls to mind episodes in our life when we were abandoned and helpless. A silent cry of a broken figure held together by yellow thread: I am here.

Or maybe it evokes not our need to be cradled and caressed but instead our desire to comfort and protect the other, and the pain we feel when we fail to do so. In her performance piece Königstuhl, an improvisation of voice and gesture (not part of the exhibition but a video is available on the artist’s website), Dröse sits down facing a seated puppet and begins to entertain and cajole and stroke the puppet, flapping her arms about like a frantic chicken and uttering a chain of animal-like yelps and chirps and screeches—much as a desperately harried mother might do to soothe a cranky child that simply will not stop crying—but of course here she is trying not to placate but to animate. In vain.

Painting for an Overcoat

Self-portraits from the Feldberg Collection

“How could you not have a profile on Facebook?” Sotiris asked me. He made it sound as if I were some agoraphobic recluse without a mobile phone. I wanted to say that I couldn’t imagine myself part of a community where people could accumulate 1100 “friends”. The real stumbling block, though, was the profile. Writing up a description of yourself in 100 words seemed to me a particularly onerous game of Mr Potato Head: which of the dozens of properties that describe the object that is you—to borrow a programming term—do you include in your self-portrait? A quick combinatorial calculation yields a thousand possible self-representations. And even assuming you can settle on one that is more or less conducive to the purpose of the profile—because a profile after all is a kind of self-promotion that serves a particular aim, whether that’s to meet friends, get laid or find a job—you can’t really be sure that everyone understands the properties of your profile the way you intended it. You write, “I’m training for a triathlon.” Your readers read, “He goes to bed at 9:00”. Don’t kid yourself. The readers of your profile are (not without justification) a suspicious lot. As Montaigne said, “you never talk about yourself without loss: condemn yourself and you are always believed: praise yourself and you never are.”

For a while I collected profiles I ran across in various sites. From the product label (stats on height, weight, dick size and sexual predilections) and profiles that resembled the personals from the New York Review of Books (“Sensuous 40-something adventurer into Dvorak, micro-brewery beers, pre-Raphaelite painting, cross-country skiing and late afternoon trysts in a good hotel”) to the economical (“Email for details”). The more profiles I read, the more I thought how much they resembled the artist’s self-portrait. Not in terms of the overall aesthetic effect (the texts of some of the profiles were downright execrable) but because of the process of selecting details for self-representation that both profiler and artist engaged in. And I thought of Siegbert Feldber’s collection of self-portraits, some of which I had seen in the Berlinische Gallerie years ago (the collection was also exhibited at the Judisches Museum in Berlin and Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art as The Lost Generation).

Feldberg was born into a German-Jewish family in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland). By his late 20’s he was manager of his family’s men’s clothing firm, whose business often took him to Berlin, business which, together with the barter economy that flourished in the hyperinflation of the late Weimar Republic, allowed him to pursue his interest in collecting the work of the avant-garde artists working in the city, including Max Liebermann, Lesser Ury, Erich Heckel und Oskar Kokoschka. Almost half of the more than 150 paintings, drawings and pastels that formed the core of his collection were self-portraits. He paid for many of them with suits and overcoats.

Although a good number of the artists whose work he collected were or became renowned, some exist for posterity only through the self-portraits in Feldberg’s collection, in effect, thanks to an overcoat. Like Jan van Ripper, whom we know only through the single self-portrait in Feldberg’s collection. Many of the artists Feldberg collected were later branded by the Nazis as “degenerate”. Those who were Jewish (half of the artists in his collection) were deprived of their livelihood, a third were  forced to emigrate, others were arrested and sent to concentration camps where they were murdered. Feldberg himself was forced to emigrate to Bombay in 1934, leaving behind his family and his collection Five years later his wife left Germany with her two sons and the entire collection packed in crates. How she managed to leave with these works of art is subject to interpretation. Some maintain that she was able to persuade the Nazi bureaucrats that the drawings, as degenerate art, were worthless. Others claim she befriended a Nazi officer and thus managed to leave the country with the collection intact.

The artists in the collection painted themselves in various ways: the dandy, the bohème, the ascetic, but most of all the bourgeois gentleman, attired in the kind of suit that Feldberg might have given them in exchange for their art, an odd choice considering how poor most of them were. An imagined future self they yearned for, much as the content of many of the profiles one finds in Facebook? The comparison is unfair, I know. There is an element of teasing ambiguity, irony and challenge in these portraits that is missing from profiles. Conrad Felixmüller, for example, paints himself painting himself. The paint on his palette recapitulates the colors of his face—the sepia tones of his neck, the greenish accent on the left side of his throat, the startling reddened eyes. There is no white on his palette, but behind the artist is a window that reveals the snow-laden trees of an inhospitable Berlin winter of hunger and want. A fascinating painting. Perhaps we would write better profiles of ourselves if our lives depended on it.