MAGAZINE
Cabinet
Winter 2005/2006, Issue 20
Published quarterly

In the newest issue of Cabinet, a quarterly arts and culture magazine published in Brooklyn, New York, the lead article discusses European curiosity cabinets from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The author describes how specimens of the day—shells, fossils, coins, and bottled and stuffed animals—were cataloged and carefully exhibited in these beautifully crafted cabinets, displaying not only the wonders of the world but also the collector’s own fascination with them.

Cabinet magazine itself is strikingly similar to these historic curiosity cabinets. Now with its twentieth issue, Cabinet is a catalog of thoughtful investigations into interesting and bizarre people, creations, and ideas. Every issue features regular columns like “Ingestion,” which explores the relationships among cuisine, aesthetics, and philosophy; and a main section with stories on unusual individuals and works. In this issue, there is an interview with Richard Reames, who creates furniture out of living trees by bending and grafting together branches. There is an exploration (complete with a large, fold-out diagram) of how the big names in psychoanalysis are connected by their theories. And there are fun extras, like a pullout postcard emblazoned with swatches of patina colors that result from the weathering or aging of copper.

The magazine’s feature articles always tackle a theme. This go-round, the magazine explores the concept of “ruins” with articles raising questions

about the role of wreckage in our modern world. How does a ruin function in the present day? How does it give us insight into how people lived? In “Derelict Utopias,” writer and photographer Mark Sanderson describes the mostly abandoned “colonias,” built in the 1930s, that dot the coastline in Italy; they served as holiday hostels for the children of members of the Fascist Party. The futuristic buildings’ weathered, starkly gray and white walls and uniformity give a sense of the highly regulated society that once lived there, and offer a reminder of how architecture can infl uence the way a society lives, and, conversely, that the ideals of a society can shape its built environment.

Cabinet falls into the category of publications like monthly literary mag The Believer—smart, well-designed magazines that contain articles on

seemingly obscure topics that are rarely timesensitive. The content is not irrelevant, however; rather, this specific approach allows for subject matter that might not normally appear in more mainstream publications. Cabinet thereby functions as a modern kind of curiosity cabinet, one that tells us as much about how we live now as how we lived in the past.

—Marianne Amoss

MUSIC
Hersch Josquin Rihm Feldman
Michael Hersch
Artemis Classics, 2004

“Everything old is new again,” is a mantra used by one generation of artists after another to rejuvenate the creative vanguard. In modern music, the trend is to reach back to the so-called “pre-tonal” composers of the late medieval period for a compositional aesthetic that matches the highly modernist atonality of the present day.

It is with this sensibility in mind that Peabody Conservatory-trained composer and pianist Michael Hersch pairs two new compositions, Milosz Fragments and Sonata No. 2 for Unaccompanied Cello with two austere piano transcriptions of works by the pre-tonal Franco-Flemish master Josquin De Prez on his newest album. Hersch Josquin Rihm Feldman also includes works by twentieth century composers Morton Feldman and Wolfgang Rihm.

Hersch’s star has been on the rise since the Virginia native was commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony, under revered conductor Mariss Jansons, to write three new works for the orchestra between 1998 and 2002. Critics, meanwhile, have always seemed to see potential in this 34 year old’s chamber music, which is darkly dissonant, spastically emotional, and reminiscent of Bartok and Schoenberg.

The sonata for cello, played with wrenching expressiveness by Daniel Gaisford, owes quite a bit to Josquin’s motet-writing style, despite its contemporary aspects. The piece calls for double-stops played in harmonies that shift in the lower part, one step ahead of the melody, almost like the voices in an early-Renaissance mass.

Each section of the eleven-part Milosz Fragments corresponds to one of ten lines from various poems and prose by Polish Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz (“Between the trees, smoke comes from a chimney / And crows fl y in an overcast sky” or “Winter, night, the frozen sky is flooded with red,” for example). The music, like the poetry, is emotionally bleak and suggestive of strange, immutable open spaces and the composer’s personal relationship with them. Fragment II, which corresponds to the line “On the wall a painting that depicts winter,” is made up of jerky and erratic dissonances that are loosely structured around tolling pedal tones. In the following sections, the music first takes on an introspective calm, then builds to a dense, frantic climax.

The question is whether or not we, as listeners, should think of Hersch’s jarring vignettes as a sort of impressionistic soundtrack to the images described in Milosz’s poetry, which would rather devalue it as cinematic and shallow. In response to Hersch’s 2003 work the wreckage of flowers, based on twenty-one excerpts from Milosz and written for Japanese violin virtuoso Midori, the New York Times’ Anthony Tommasini wrote, “... Mr. Hersch seems to have claimed Milosz’s haunting words as an excuse to jot down whatever popped into his head.” Just how important is the poetry to the understanding of the music?

The inclusion of the two works by Josquin, Mille Regretz and De Profundis Clamavi, is a subtle response to this sort of criticism. Josquin’s ponderous, somewhat incoherent use of harmony is a corollary to the ambiguity of emotional tone that is so stark in both Milosz’s poetry and Hersch’s chamber works. He seems to be suggesting not that the fragments should be a backdrop for the scenes the poet paints, but rather that both expressions are guided by the same sentiment: an emotional tenor that is both evocative and open-ended.

—Robbie Whelan

BOOK
Atomik Aztex
Sesshu Foster
City Lights, 2005

The Aztecs believed in circular concepts of time, or, as poet Sesshu Foster puts it, “cyklikal konceptions of the universe where reality infinitely kurves back upon itself endlessly.” This is an important point to bear in mind before surrendering yourself to Foster’s new novel, Atomik Aztex, with its apparently plotless structure and dense paragraphs of “k”-heavy prose (his imaginative attempt to capture the tonality of the Aztec dialect).

Like Philip Roth in The Plot Against America, Foster re-imagines the Second World War—but with darker humor and wilder originality. At the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, the mighty warriors of the Aztek Empire, complete with feathered plumes, face paint, and totemic powers, come to Europe’s aid against the Nazis, because in 1492, the European invasion of Mexico to “enslave our peoples down at the corner liquor store, crush all resistance thru germ warfare and lawyers, lie, cheat, kidnap, ransom, burn our sakred libraries, loot our kapital, install Christian theokratic dictatorships … ” hadn’t quite gone to plan. Under the pretext of defeating the Nazis, the Aztex intend to colonize Europe themselves, in order to harvest the hearts (and minds) of its citizens, human sacrifice being essential to economic growth.

The “hero” Zenzontli deals in European slaves. “It’s one of the great sadnesses of my life that unknowingly I participated in the total destruction of kool ancient civilizations of the Caucasians,” he concedes, pondering his culture’s role in world history with the smug hypocrisy of the conqueror for the vanquished. “We Aztex also gotta admit that we have things to learn from the peoples whose hearts we’re cutting out.” Zenzontli’s life is complicated by the layered nature of Aztek time that causes him to sporadically fall into an alternative world—a contemporary world in which he works on the killing floor of the Farmer John meat packing factory in Los Angeles. Like his Mexican coworkers, Zenzón (Zenzontli’s alternate self) “wasn’t born working in a slaughterhouse. I crossed deserts to get here,” only to become a victim of rampant consumerism and immigrant exploitation.

The book is, fittingly, published by the City Lights Bookstore, that San Francisco monument to the Beat movement of the 1960s; and if you’re feeling nostalgic for angry young writers like Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, then Foster could be your man. He has an (over) abundant gift for writing lists: “The world is full of signs … Stop signs, omens, faded inscriptions on old buildings, indicators, blinking lights, weather reports, routes, configurations, numbers, seabirds fl ying the wrong way, red sky at morning, dark looks … numerology, victimology …” And the list goes on for several more lines.

Zenzontli’s ironic appreciation of the German nation with their “fine athletic ability and a tremendous sense of graphic design” is transposed with Zenzón’s pungently gory descriptions of the abattoir, reminiscent of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. One long, detailed examination of the slaughter of a pig ends with, “Where you think your bologna sandwich comes from?” So we cycle from animal slaughter to human slaughter, gyrating endlessly in Dantean circles of hell.

Atomik Aztex defies genre-labeling, yet it may be pigeonholed as science fiction. That would be unfortunate, as it could limit its audience and belie its serious intent. Foster’s subversion of history is not a simple exercise in what-ifs, nor is it politically correct revisionism. It raises a fresh, if demanding, voice above the recent trend for books composed using understated, psychological, navel-gazing, whispering prose.

Despite his author’s note warning that this is a work of fiction and readers should not attempt to find a plot, Foster is being disingenuous, because there is a plot, or more accurately, a subtext running through this apocalyptic cocktail of parallel realities: It is a critique of “Amerika” and the world, as it is, has always been, and, he implies, always will be.

—Susan McCallum-Smith

CULTURE
Crossing the BLVD and Two Way Street
Maryland Institute College of Art
Decker and Meyerhoff Galleries
February 2–March 12

A Nigerian Pentecostal prophetess who presides over a storefront church. A Vietnamese barmaid working in a strip joint. A Mexican husband and wife who crossed the border in the trunk of a car. These are some of the real-life characters visitors will “meet” in Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America, a multimedia traveling exhibition opening this month at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).

The “Boulevard” in question is Queens Boulevard, a twelve-lane highway that runs through the New York City borough of the same name. Documentary artists Judith Sloan and Warren Lehrer set out to provide a multidimensional glimpse into the lives of new immigrants and refugees living in Queens, a modern day Ellis Island that is home to a vibrant, often chaotic, mix of racially and ethnically diverse residents speaking some 138 different languages.

At the center of the exhibit are Lehrer’s colorful photographic portraits of individuals and families who have arrived in the United States from Barbados, Nigeria, Colombia, India, Austria, China—and just about everywhere else—since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act ended immigration policies favoring white Western Europeans.

The photographs, taken in a variety of settings—from public housing projects to restaurants and bodegas—are paired with printed, narrative excerpts of the subjects’ own stories and objects from their “crossings,” along with contextual information, like international and local maps. Fourteen sound stations feature text/audio compositions, including radio documentaries made for NPR’s The Next Big Thing by Sloan and Lehrer, and original music by composer Scott Johnson and some of the exhibition participants. Visitors are invited to contribute their own migration stories in the Mobile Story Booth.

Although the exhibit focuses on Queens, its implications are broader, according to its organizers. “Queens perhaps is a look at the future of much of America,” Lehrer says. Including Baltimore.

Baltimore itself is the backdrop for a sister exhibit, which was planned in conjunction with Crossing the BLVD. Thirteen students from MICA’s master of arts in community arts program will present Two Way Street, an exhibition that uses oral history and mixed media to give voice to an array of Baltimore residents representing diverse ages and backgrounds.

There are opening receptions for both exhibitions on February 2 in the Decker Gallery and Meyerhoff Gallery, located in the Fox Building (1303 Mount Royal Avenue). Sloan and Lehrer will give a lecture on February 3 at 7:30 p.m. in Falvey Hall in the Brown Center (1301 West Mount Royal Avenue), and they will give multimedia performances at Theatre Project (45 West Preston Street) from February 23 through February 26. Call 410-225-2300 for more information or visit www.mica.edu.

—Karen Baxter


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