Back at the apartment, I helped in making sushi with Celine. She joked endlessly about my being in France and yet learning Japanese cooking, or not cooking rather, as the fish is raw. Celine eyed me curiously and stated that she thought most Americans do not eat anything raw; milk, cheese, meat, fish; she inflected her statement like a question which meant I had to respond, which I did. Celine insisted on me washing my hands after rolling each maki and each sashimi because, she explained, of the amidon which stays on your hands. I was too busy flipping through my mental roll-o-dex of French vocabulary that I went ahead and began rolling another sashimi without washing my hands. Meanwhile,Vincent was on his phone trying to translate amidon for me, but he misspelled it as amnidon, and yielded an identical English word. This happens sometimes due either to a shared word that is not in my English vocabulary, or to misspellings. Vincent tried translating a French synonym to amidon and came up with something which he pronounced, "caribou ear wax."
Excuse me, reader, I sincerely beg your pardon, as I did Vincent's, but I thought he was joking. It was just so funny. I burst into laughter. I laughed heartily and genuinely, for a few inexcusable moments, and then looked at his phone's screen, which showed "carbohydrate," and I washed my hands.
Following our sushi dinner, I made my way back to the theater, asking one more time for directions just to make sure I was en route. I climbed the stairs into a low-ceilinged and dimly lit cabaret theater with a bar sprawling the entire back wall, and dark carpeting scattered with small round tables and identical purple velvet armchairs. With my jacket clearly marking my carefully chosen chair, I approached the bar for my white wine. Feeling the agitation settle, I glided back to my chair and found an older gentleman accompanying me at my table. His heavy wool sweater seemed to be purposefully unstylish and lent him an air of maturity and a well-paying job. I contentedly sunk into my chair, nodded to him as I slid my wine closer to my half of the tabletop and made it clear that he was welcome to share the table with me; he removed his trench coat, left it carelessly flung over the back of the chair and promptly returned with a beer and a glass which he poured properly while remarking that they had none of the white wine left, and was it any good, inflection. I juggled my inexperienced opinion of wine and my limited confidence in speaking French and passed for a response for a few back-and-forths about 'young people' not usually attending 'these things,' until I outted myself with an apology for not understanding another inflected statement. Conversation atrophied slowly after that, and then the lights dimmed such that I couldn't barely make out the silhouette of the person in front of me. The music began.
I sipped my wine, noting to myself that I did actually have an opinion of it, and a pretty good one. Not too dry, rather tart, a good enough flavor to drink alone, but one that I could imagine my sister not liking. Oh. I held my head in my hands, elbows on the table, uncaring of whether this was proper posture, thinking probably not and not changing positions. I could see the cellulite on the lady pianist's behind through her black stage pants, and could imagine dragging my tongue along the spinal crease nestled in the male pianist's posture. He hit the keys like a labrador with 10 tails on his hands wagging his body, the whole movement of the music from the nexus of his fingertips. She played a more metalic, sharper-tuned instrument more akin to bells than keys and her hands playful frogs from one note to the next. They subtitled the concert "Bach Transformed," with the headline reading, "Frappe, Pincee," meaning "hit, pinched" I assume because several times throughout the performance, the man with the spine would stand up and pinch the strings of the piano like a guitar rather than the keys themselves. I wondered about my inclination to close my eyes even in such a dark room, and let myself think about Bach, and about transforming Bach's work, and about laughing at Vincent. Also, there's this.
I've heard said that some pieces of classical music have caused riots upon their debuts. Certainly we know art to be powerful, sometimes politically threatening, often emotionally vulnerable. I needn't lecture on that. I thought of great artists and of how we teach art. There is controversy here, to be sure. Some may say that great art shows ideals, universality, and perfection. I am unimpressed by this. Great artists allow total emotion to be honest and complicated. Good wine, for instance, being whatever tastes good. We need little instruction in discerning what we like, only curiosity and willingness to change. When someone asks you if the wine is good, it is a question of taste. Of your taste. "It's just grape juice, after all."* I would once shirk this question, or preface my response with an apology for my unsophisticated tongue, thinking that someone else knows better than I what the wine tastes like. When we learn about Art, the kind we are supposed to worship in the museums, the Artists, the Real Artists mind you, who have books written about them, we are impressed by this sense of having to do what they did, as if they know better what life is than we do. They are dead. We keep swimming in an eddy of stagnant art culture where corpses float.
The theater is named for French poet, Andre Malraux, who once said, "la culture ne s'herite pas, elle est conquiert," which has since been painted on the side of the theater.
"Culture is not inherited, it is conquered."Rather than emulate, we must learn to, once again, swallow.
Jan Svankmajer - Dimensions of dialogue par popefucker
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to be continued.
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