camminando | Islands: Ischia

 

It seems like traveling to a different universe, when a 40-minute hydrofoil ride takes me to Ischia, away from the tense Neapolitan scenes where all the locals approached when asking for directions to Molo Beverello, tell me to be careful with my belongings. Ischia is the closest place I envision paradise to be like, and I am still stating it after my fourth visit to this island.
Ischia is a volcanic island about 30 km from Naples. Hydrotherapy, blessed by is one of the many lures the island offers Among the others: scent of flowers and lemon trees, several hundreds feet cliffs diving in the crystal clear mar Tirreno. Ischia witnessed several thousand years of history: it was inhabited since the Bronze age, as from the Mycenaean pottery findings. Ancient Greeks, Etruscan and Romans followed. Homer and Virgil wrote about Ischia, although was called with different names: Aenaria, Arima, Inarima and Pithecusa.

I would not go in summer as I don't enjoy crowd and noise immersion ---my taste many others do, otherwise the island woul not be noisy and overcrowded in summer. My other visits were in spring, this is my first staying in Ischia in the approaching winter season, in the hope to still enjoy outdoor swimming in the outdoor thermal water pools. The weather in Italy this year is extremely warm (almost 20 degrees Celsius) yet walking to Spiaggia della Citara is not encouraging for a dive in the sea. But the sunlight shining on the ocean is magical and the views breathtaking, my hotel welcoming and beautiful... R&R has finally begun!

 

Excerpts from the conceptual multimedia project

“Axes Mundi: Perceptions and Understanding of Places as Intersections of Space, Time and Culture"

Camminando | Rome to Naples: Layered Decadent Beauty

While leaving Rome from the Termini station you experience dirty train windows filtering many layers of history and socio-geographical imprints.
Urban scenes mingles with countrysides bucolic environment, it seems to be in stage for a time travel movie on lord Byron, where ancient Rome ruins arise from XXI century residential run-down developments "decorated" with graffiti. It is quite romantic and decadent, especially when experienced in the low sunlight of early morning.
The topology is varied and remarkable as the manmade environment: hills and mountains from the Appenino Campano suddenly rise from flat fields, harvested with any kind of vegetables. I learn from my train seat neighbor that vineyard grows to 12-foot height; the local wine is Asprino Avesano.
Yes, indeed, I am traveling through the magical land described by Homer narrating Ulysses' Odyssey.

 

Excerpts from the conceptual multimedia project

“Axes Mundi: Perceptions and Understanding of Places as Intersections of Space, Time and Culture"

Camminando | As a Tourist in the City Where I Was Born: Finding the Angels

Every time I go back to Rome, at my very first day of arrival I do my ritual  pilgrimage to the places of my childhood. Not that glamorous back then, but recently became extremely popular thanks to Dan Brown's Angels and Demons.
Castel Sant'Angelo is my very first visit, while I still experience jet lag from the six hour time zone difference. The initial structure, almost 2000 years old, was built as a mausoleum, called Mole Adriana, for the emperor Adrian, then was transformed by the popes into a castle, becoming a fortress and refuge during invasions and also a prison and execution place. A fortified corridor connected the castle with the Saint Peter's basilica.

This year I am specifically focusing on the many angel statues guarding, Ponte dell'Angelo, the pedestrian bridge connecting Castel Sant'Angelo with the Rione Ponte across the river Tevere.

A magical sunset blesses my visit: the warmest sunlight bathes the building, emerging from the lead color sky.

Roma, you are such a stage set! Isn't life a play?

Excerpts from the conceptual multimedia project

“Axes Mundi: Perceptions and Understanding of Places as Intersections of Space, Time and Culture"

Vernissages NYC | Yoko Ono "Uncursed"

Yoko Ono "Uncursed"

October 28- December 10

Galerie Lelong

Vernissages NYC | Chelsea, October 27

Only visual memories...

Hiroshi Sugimoto"Surface of theThirdOrder" at Pace

 Rebecca Horn "Ravens Gold Rush" at SKNY

Richard Artschwager at David Nolan

Events NYC | Madrigals and Metamorphoses

Out of tune? If your ears like the (artificially) fixed pitch of piano keys, they would have been spinning on your head last Saturday evening as the group Ekmeles presented Madrigals and Metamorphoses at the uptown Italian Academy.



Not everyone’s ears crave such tidiness, and Ekmeles sang their way through a largely 20th-century program of songs by composers known and well-known. But the opening madrigals were by Carlo Gesualdo, a 17th century Neapolitan-born nobleman, murderer, composer. He tuned his music to scales supposedly based on those of the ancient Greeks called “genera”, which leads to intense chromaticism (think pitches between the keys on a modern keyboard).



These were followed by three madrigals by Carl Bettendorf who “decomposed” to various degrees some of Gesualdo’s original music. Folllowing Gersualdo’s model, and in true 20th-century style he added a number of “theatrical” effects, including clapping, laughing, whisperings by the group on the text dealing with Joy and happiness (“Gioia che tutto gioia”). The singers, playing on woodblocks, hammers and metal bowls accompanied their own fine singing.

Thoroughly decomposed was Margin Iddon’s hamadryads. The text was purely phonetic and the pitches were all over the place, relying on heavily experimental tunings. The singers sat at a table as for a banquet, with wine glasses with water at each setting which they used to provide their own accompaniment by running their fingers around the glasses’ rims.

And Elliott Carter, an American composer who will celebrate his 103rd!!! birthday in December was represented by his Mad Regales composed when he was 99 years of age. May we all have such sure-footed creative skills in our 90s. The text by John Ashbery provided the perfect vehicle for Carter’s a capella sextet setting.

Then Peter Ablinger’s Studien nach der Natur took us into the realm of music ecology, where the singers presented sounds of the freeway, the sea, mosquitoes, smoking, a quartz watch, the wind, water drops, etc. Who needs digital sounds when a human voice can create such descriptive sound effects?

Pier Pasolini’s thoroughly baroque texts were set by Johannes Schollhorn in his Madrigali a Dio. Pointillistic notes by the individual singers hovered in microtuned pitches, words were reiterated, repeated and delivered in intense rhythmic declarations, and all at odds with each other. The poet’s vilification of the creator-God leads to his final rejection: “Tua, ch’è in me, a Te non mi conduce.”

events NYC | Homage to Black Mountain College and Its Legacy

A poetry reading and music performances at the Loretta Howard Gallery celebrated the legacy of Black Mountain College. Readers and performers included Margaret Leng Tan, Francine du Plessix Gray, John Yau, Vincent Katz, Maureen Howard and Dave Sear.

Black Mountain College, was founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, and other former faculty members of Rollins College, in Black Mountain, North Carolina. It introduced a new teaching and learning philosophy,  where art was the focus of several disciplines. An interdisciplinary approach, was central to all the student works, including musi composers, poets, and designers, including  Buckminster Fuller (who design and built the first geodesic dome) and John Cage. In Black Mountain College the breadth of experimental art and innovative design was accompanied by liberal thinking and free lifestyle; it was the first college to integrate. Unfortunately the college closed in 1954.

John Yau read from his own poem collections, Margaret Leng Tan played John Cage's composition on her "toy piano" Francine du Plessix Gray read poems from Jonathan Williams, the founder of the "Jargon Society" oress. The readings also included  some of Charles Olson's "The Maximus Poems" and Robert Creeley "Distance". Dave Sears concluded the evening with his music and lyrics recalling civil right battles against segregation. Zuccotti Park "Occupy"was often mentioned, with applause from the audience.

Strolling through the gallery after the very reading I saw a very inspiring exhibition showing the eclecticism of Black Mountain College explorations.

Kenneth Snelson's Tensegrity

 Buckminster Fuller

 Dave Sears

events | Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street celebrate the first month: on September 17 about 2,000 people gathered in Lower Manhattan and marched up Broadway. About 150 people spent the night at Zuccotti Park an estimated 150 stayed the night and began an encampment. The protest is against bank bailouts, corporate greed, and the power of Wall Street on the government, and the message is “We are the 99%” The non-violent movement is "gaining ground globally, with 1500 protests in 82 countries this past Saturday (October 15)."

“Anyone with eyes open knows that the gangsterism of Wall Street — financial institutions generally — has caused severe damage to the people of the United States (and the world). And should also know that it has been doing so increasingly for over 30 years, as their power in the economy has radically increased, and with it their political power. That has set in motion a vicious cycle that has concentrated immense wealth, and with it political power, in a tiny sector of the population, a fraction of 1%, while the rest increasingly become what is sometimes called “a precariat” — seeking to survive in a precarious existence. They also carry out these ugly activities with almost complete impunity — not only too big to fail, but also “too big to jail.”
“The courageous and honorable protests underway in Wall Street should serve to bring this calamity to public attention, and to lead to dedicated efforts to overcome it and set the society on a more healthy course.”

Noam Chomsky

September 26 2011