This is the fourteenth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia—to spend time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of Donald Trump. (This week, Trump’s diplomatic dream team, armed to the teeth with iPhones, readied an illegal attack on Yemen’s Houthi rebels by assembling a Signal chat room and sharing both attack plans and emojis, as if on Facebook pulling together a bachelor party.)

Erzurum is a fortress city in eastern Turkey surrounded by tall mountains and many redoubts, and it has been the scene of endless battles between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Photo by Matthew Stevenson.

At the main Ankara railway station, I was early for the Dogu Express and killed time by inspecting Atatürk’s sleeping car, which is on permanent display along a platform. He used the car for “his domestic travels”. In one of the windows of the car, there’s a photograph of Atatürk looking out a train window, no doubt taking the pulse of his nation.

Unlike the current Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Atatürk wanted Turkey to be a secular nation. He favored equal rights for women and minorities, and he saw no reason that women should wear headscarves or that men should pray five times a day, unless they so desired. He wanted to integrate Turkey into western alliances and economic systems, and he personally enjoyed many western products as he moved around the growing nation in the 1920s and 30s. He died of liver disease in 1938. Some say it was from consuming half a liter daily of Turkish raki (it’s about 50% proof). Others say he died from chain smoking cigarettes all his adult life.

At the time of his death, Atatürk was the “father of the Turks.” In his personal life he was unmarried, although he adopted eight children. He was married briefly, between 1923 – 25, but divorced his wife for unknown reasons and lived alone (although surrounded by his presidential staff, the army, and his adopted children). There has been some speculation that Mustafa Kemal might well have been bisexual, but no proof exists, just innuendo in conversations and speculation in various biographies.

In official publications Atatürk was a devout Muslim, but there’s ample indication that he might well have been agnostic (although he denied having said: “I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea…”). Certainly in his political lifetime he (unlike Erdoğan) made little effort to fuse church and state. Nor did he arrest journalists and opposition party leaders (at least not more than was necessary).

Personally and politically, Atatürk preferred to see Turkey and Turks as apart from the Arab and fundamentalist Islamic worlds, and he took it in stride that Mecca and Medina were no longer part of his empire, outposts on the Hejaz Railway, built to connect the Sublime Porte to the holy cities. (As well, to be closer to the West, he changed the Turkish alphabet from Arabic to Latin.) He preferred business suits and, on weekends, dressed casually in sweaters and messed around in boats. And, as we know all too well, on formal occasions he preferred top hats and tails.

+++

My night train to Erzurum left at 17:55. After boarding and stowing my bicycle under my berth, I confirmed what I had feared, which is that I was in a full compartment of four passengers. At least I had a lower berth and my assigned seat was next to the window.

For fellow travelers I was lucky to have been allotted two cheerful Erasmus (exchange) students, one from Italy and one from Spain, who were studying architecture in Istanbul. They were on their spring break and had decided to ride the train to Kars, and fly home from Tbilisi, Georgia. The fourth passenger was a Turkish worker, perhaps for the railways, who was asleep for long stretches, and then vanished in the night, like a character in a Russian novel.

The sleeping car was adjacent to the dining car, where I found it easy to work on my computer and look out the window. The meals were “ready to eat” frozen foods—not the chef’s special—but acceptable provided they were washed down with a cold Turkish beer. I might not have gotten my dream of a single compartment and a traditional dining car, but I was happy to be heading east on the Dogu Express, having spent so much time in the previous years plotting a course to Erzurum and Kars.

I don’t think I had heard of either city, except in some vague general sense, until November 2016, when I embarked on a round-the-world journey using nothing but discount airlines for my travels. I wanted to see if I could make it around for less than $1500, and still make stops that interested me, which in one case included some battlefields in Bulgaria from the 1877 Russo-TurkishWar.

I began the trip flying on Wizz Airlines from Geneva to Sofia for about $38, and the next morning early I took the train to Pleven (sometimes called Plevna), where, at the start of the 1877 war, attacking Russian troops (who said Russia only gets invaded by the West?) besieged Plevna for almost six months until they finally broke through the Turkish lines.

Much remains of the siege lines in the modern Bulgarian city, and I spent a morning inspecting towers, trenches, and a diorama of the siege. On my Kindle, I had a memoir by an English doctor, Charles Snodgrass Ryan, Under The Red Crescent: Adventures Of An English Surgeon With The Turkish Army At Plevna And Erzeroum, 1877-1878, which describes the war’s end in the deep snow around Erzurum.

I remember looking up Erzurum on maps in the Pleven war museums, wondering how I might someday get there. Then, in a World War I museum in Istanbul on the same trip, I discovered that the Russians had again attacked Erzurum in 1916, during their Caucasus offensives in World War I. In those battles the Russians had taken the fortress city and held it until they withdrew from the war in 1918. Why did I know so little about it?

+++

Nor had I heard of Kars until 1985, when my friend Geoffrey Moorhouse published a book (To the Frontier) about the Northwest Frontier Territory in Pakistan, and the New York Times assigned its review to another travel writer, Philip Glazebrook, who panned Geoffrey’s book.

Upset about the review, Geoffrey (who lived in England) asked me in New York if I knew anything about Glazebrook, which I did not, other than that he had once written a book entitled Journey to Kars, which in those days had me leaning over an atlas to figure out where Kars was. (From such a melodramatic title, I assumed it was on the dark side of the moon, not simply in eastern Turkey on the main line of Dogu Express.)

Geoffrey brooded about the snarky review, and then wrote a letter to the New York Times that I have always admired. It read, in full:

Philip Glazebrook is, of course, perfectly entitled to say whatever he thinks about my book “To the Frontier” (June 16). I find it strange, though, that among his generally withering comments he failed to mention that “To the Frontier” won the Thomas Cook Award for the best travel book of 1984, a competition in which the runners-up were those two considerable writers Eric Newby and Norman Lewis and an understandably disappointed newcomer named Philip Glazebrook. I’m even more surprised, in view of his public hostility to my book in New York, that he should have been effusive about it when we met at the prizegiving in London.

Geoffrey and I were close friends until he died in 2009, and we exchanged many letters and visits during the course of our friendship. In the shorthand of our shared humor, a “journey to Kars,” was any ordinary trip dressed up as an adventure, something I had in mind as I embarked on my own travels to the Turkish frontier.

+++

Kars had also come to my attention in 2021, when during a lull in the pandemic and just before the Russian war with Ukraine, I decided to take my folding bicycle on a series of night trains from Moscow to Crimea.

It wasn’t the first time I had tried to get to Crimea. Once in 2014, I had train tickets to Simferopol when the Russian president Vladimir Putin sent his little green men to take over and annex Crimea, rendering my Ukrainian visa useless for getting there. But in 2021, after about five visits to the Russian consulate in Geneva, I got a Russian visa that would get me into Crimea (and, so I hoped, out of it).

It took close to a week (with some stops around Volgograd aka Stalingrad) to ride trains from Moscow to Sebastopol, for which much of the Crimean War (1854–56) was fought.

During my time in Balaklava’s valley of death (where the Light Brigade charged to its destruction), I discovered that the last battle of the Crimean War was fought in Kars, not in the hills above Inkerman, which gave me yet another reason to make this journey to eastern Turkey.

On the twenty-two hour train ride to Erzurum, there wasn’t much for me to do other than eat in the dining car, read my books, and work on my computer. Thus I could catch up on emails and plan my time in Erzurum, where all I had done was reserve a room in the Grand Catalkaya Hotel.

Unsuccessfully, I had tried to book a car and driver in Erzurum, as many of its battle sites, I discovered, were well outside the city and many more were on the road to Kars (about four hours to the east).

In rural Turkey, I didn’t want to drive myself in a rental car, but I wasn’t getting a positive vibe whenever I explained in my e-mails that what interested me the most was the Köprüköy Military Memorial or the Battle of Sarıkamış.

+++

I slept surprising well in my crowded train compartment. We had the window slightly open, and the fresh air combined with the sounds of the rocking train gave me about seven hours of sleep.

In the dining car, I discovered I could mix the fruit that I was carrying with some of the prepackaged meals. Hence I could eat well, dig into my books and computer, and stare at the passing landscape, which in eastern Turkey is a combination of alpine passes, dried river beds, grasslands, agricultural fields, and snow-capped mountains on the horizon, as we snaked our way toward Sivas, Erzincan, and beyond.

Just after I made this trip, Turkish State Railways announced that it was planning to open a high-speed rail link from Ankara to Sivas, which would cut the nine-hour trip down to three hours. Occasionally, I would see evidence of the new line—modern, straight rails cutting across the dry plains.

I am glad I got to ride to on the slow, twenty-two hour night train and spend the day in the dining car with nothing to do except look out the window and read my books. And the book that had my complete attention was J.A.R. Marriott’s The Eastern Question: An Historical Study in European Diplomacy, which was published in 1917 (as the last of the battles for Erzurum and Kars were being waged).

+++

The book grabbed me from its first sentence, which is a quote that defines “the problem of the Near East” as “that shifting, intractable, and interwoven tangle of conflicting interest, rival peoples, and antagonistic faiths that is veiled under the easy name of the Eastern Question.”

While planning my train rides east, I had gone looking for a book to help me understand the historical context of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. A lot of the problem is that Russia’s western border, for two hundred years, has floated in the air.

Marriott became my trusted guide. In clear, crisp language he made sense of many of the conflicts that I had traversed on my night trains, so far, from Vienna to Ankara and beyond (all those Balkan and Crimean wars in the 19th and 20th centuries); and now, as I was heading toward the Verdun of eastern Turkey, Erzurum, the war between Russia and Ukraine felt like a variation on the fighting of 1853 and 1877, which were similar wars to see who would control the Black Sea and its environs.

If you want a sampler of Marriott’s diplomatic prose, here is his description of how great power politics over Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1877-1914 broke Europe apart along the lines of its competing monarchies:

The virtual annexation of Bosnia and the Herzegovina to the Austrian Empire was Bismarck’s acknowledgement of the obligations which in 1870 he had incurred to Habsburg neutrality. But the gift bestowed upon Austria caused the first serious breach in the good relations between Berlin and St. Petersburg. The wire between those capitals was never actually cut so long as Bismarck controlled the German Foreign Office; but his successor found himself compelled to choose between the friendship of Austria and that of Russia, and he deliberately preferred the former.

It flew in the face of Bismarck’s axiom: “The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.”

The post Erzurum: The Verdun of Eastern Turkey appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Harpsichord after Andreas Ruckers, Antwerp 1638, built by Adlam Burnett, 1983.

Inscribed on the nameboard of an ottavino spinet (a small tabletop, or even laptop, harpsichord) dated 1710 and now in the Russell Collection of musical instruments at the University of Edinburgh, runs the motto: “Dum vixi tacui: mortua dulce cano” (While living I was silent; dead, I sing sweetly). Nothing is known about the builder, one Petrus Orlandus, although reigning scholarly opinion holds that this Pietro Orlando came from Palermo, the length of Italy (and across the Strait of Messina) from the Val di Fiemme in the mountains of Northern Italy where the spruce soundboard may well have come from. Perhaps the preciousness of the natural material elicited, even if indirectly, the maker’s expression of the resonant truth—and abiding guilt—that a living thing had had to die so that his creation could spring to sounding life.

“Messiah” violin by Antonio Stradivari, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

Some keyboard instrument builders of the present day, such as the Fazioli piano makers and Bizzi harpsichords) tout the quality of their materials, boasting that their soundboards, the essential element of resonance, are carefully sourced from the Val di Fiemme, rebranded in their advertising copy as the Stradivarius Valley. The prospective buyer dreams that her harpsichord or piano will sing like “The Messiah,” the sobriquet of one of the master violin makers most famous, and perhaps most valuable products, now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University. There this “as new” instrument spends its time in a climate-controlled glass case, visible but silent.

The motto of the Russell Collection ottavino truncates a couplet associated with the 16^th-century luthier Kaspar Tieffenbrucker, who was born in from Füssen southern Bavaria in the in the northern shadow of the Alps, 170 miles away from the Val di Fiemme: “Viva fui in sylvis: sum dura occisa securi. Dum vixi tacui: mortua dulce cano” (I was alive in the woods: I was cut down by the hard axe. While living I was silent; dead, I sing sweetly.) (The term “luthier” refers not just to lute makers, as one might initially think, but to skilled craftspeople building stringed musical instruments.)

Tieffenbrucker’s name served as a prop for spuriously “ancient” (but masterfully made) violins counterfeited in the shop of Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume (who, not coincidentally, once owned the Stradivarius “Messiah”) in 19^th-century Paris. Tieffenbrucker didn’t even make violins, but mostly guitars, lutes and viols. But they were of wood too, and Tieffenbrucker’s expiatory Latin lines artfully acknowledged the violence that is often hidden behind beauty.

Gasparo Duiffopruggar (aka, Kaspar Tieffenbrucker), engraving by Pierre Woeiriot (1532-1599).

In 2014 Aaron Allen, a scholar helping to shape the subfield of what has come to be known as eco-musicology, published “Fatto di Fiemme’: Stradivari’s violins and the musical trees of the Paneveggio.” The article told a heartening, yet admonitory tale of the power of art and careful stewardship of natural resources to hold off the insatiable human desire for wood. The value of violins trumped the rabid demand for planks and masts for the vast Venetian navy being built a hundred miles southwest of the spruce forests on the Adriatic coast. The “Stradivarius” Valley is now in the Parco Naturale di Paneveggio, some hundred miles northeast of Cremona, the birthplace of the violin and also once part of the Venetian Empire.

Cremonese violins are much smaller than Venetian war galleys. Now, a more recent musical technology requires the harvest of the descendants of the trees used by Stradivari.

The Fazioli company makes concert grand pianos that are the battleships of concert stages and billionaires’ drawing rooms. The family business originally produced upscale office furniture from exotic woods—teak, mahogany, rosewood—but turned to piano-making in 1981 under the leadership of Paolo Fazioli. He is a mechanical engineer but was also trained as a pianist and composer. The firm now makes the most expensive pianos in the world. The price-tag on their 10-foot concert grand approaches $300,000. About 170 pianos of various sizes (all large) are now produced in the Fazioli factory in Sacile, a town halfway between the Val di Fiemme and Venice. With an engineer in the driver’s seat of the firm, it’s not surprising that these instruments handle like Formula 1 race cars—light to the touch and super responsive.

The cast-iron frame was the crucial design and manufacture innovation that allowed the 19^th-century piano to increase in power so as to be heard in ever larger concert halls and against ever larger orchestral numbers arrayed for the concerto showpieces of the Romantic repertoire. The German word for this construction is Vollpanzerplatte—full armor plate. “Panzer” conjures images of a battle-ready tank. Without the metal plate, the inexorable force of the high-tension wires would accordion the piano into a heap of splinters.

Buttressed by these armaments is the fine- and straight-grained soundboard from the Val di Fiemme. Fazioli draws on the mystique of Stradivarius and the “Forest of Violins” in the marketing of their pianos.

I have played a Fazioli piano in a San Francisco mansion where the instrument stretches out grandly in the living room. Behind it, a picture window delivers a view of the Gold Gate Bridge so close you feel that if the seven-octave expanse of the keyboard added just a few more notes below its allotment of 88 that the extra keys would rest on the span’s towers so that the piano’s hammers would strike the vertical cables and sound them like strings.

Inside, the massive case is veneered in blond maple that contrasts the with brooding, yet brilliant exterior. To open the piano, one props up the lid on its stick and is amazed that the giant, thin wing does not bow or warp. The visual impression becomes one of interior lightness, sound escaping the forces of gravity that the sheer size and weight of the instrument cannot physically defy.

The action—the ingenious mechanism of wooden (and increasingly, carbon fiber) batons, springs and pins that translates the motion of the fingers to the felt-covered hammers—is exceedingly user-friendly: responsive not only to caresses, but also tothe blows of pianistic heavyweights. The instrument is shaped like the lift-giving limb of a bird. Again, the German word for the grand piano is illuminating—Flügel (wing). Maybe one is meant to feel more like a jet pilot than a race driver, flying above the world firing off missiles of art. The biggest Fazioli model is the F-308, which sounds to me like an American fighter plane of the future.

I found the Fazioli all too perfect: too engineered, the sound lacking in grain, the touch wanting of texture. The piano I’ve played hovering above the Golden Gate is more musical machine than musical instrument.

The Fazioli website trumpets the manufacturer’s commitment to sustainability. The company offers other veneers than just ebony, the default-setting for formal venues: after black on a dealer’s drop-down menu, one can choose blue, macassar, pyramid mahogany, red, tamo, or white. Logged, often illegally in Indonesia, macassar is a threatened species.

The 170 pianos made annually by Fazioli count as a whole fleet of giant crafts launched every year. With respect to the materials sourced from the Val di Fiemme nearer the Fazioli factory than those far-off forests of macassar and mahogany, not every red spruce yields soundboard-quality wood. The vast majority of trees felled there go to other purposes. A true accounting of the environmental impact of piano production has yet to be made on this region. Against stiff competition from luxurious, but still cheaper Steinways made in the U. S. A. and Germany, Yamahas from Japan and a host of newer companies, Fazioli has penetrated the global market, exporting its instrument to places as far as you can get from the source of their soundboards.

Nor has the musical mileage put on these pianos by wealthy buyers been measured. These pianos are prestige objects that come from wood that did not sing when alive and is, I suspect, mostly mute now as furniture, even though the most tuneful wood in the world was killed—by the chainsaw not the hard axe—to make them.

Next week: Musical Instruments, Extreme Weather and Material Acknowledgments.

The post Trees, Singing and Silent appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

This is the thirteenth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia—to spend time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of Donald Trump. (This week, probably without being able to locate Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, and western Europe on a globe, President Trump tried to dictate peace terms in the war between Russia and Ukraine by lip-syncing what he heard from Russian President Putin on a two-hour prep phone call.)

The Ankara home office of the Turkish president, seemingly for life, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Down the hill from the presidential palace and through one more police checkpoint, I found the Atatürk Museum Mansion. Mercifully, in all my planning the night before, I had downloaded its image to my phone, and that’s what I showed at each police stockade. I don’t really think the president police wanted me biking along Erdoğan Alley (or whatever the presidential high street is called), but at the same time I still think that Atatürk trumps everyone else in Turkey, and that’s the reason I was allowed to pedal along the imperial boulevard.

A police woman from a nearby checkpoint came over to me as I was locking my bicycle to a drain pipe near the front door, but unlike the dour cops on the road above, she was chatty and friendly, and told me that she had grown up in Rize, on the Black Sea coast. She inspected the folding bicycle and wished me a pleasant stay in Turkey (which isn’t something you often get).

On my first visit to Istanbul in summer 1976, two policemen with truncheons roughed me up in a public park which, they said, I had entered after it was closed to pedestrians—not something I had expected from the Turkish tourist slogan “Choose Your Memories”.

+++

On this occasion, by the time I entered the Atatürk presidential mansion, I think I had qualified as one of the world’s experts in Atatürk museums. Not only had I been to the two other Atatürk exhibitions in Ankara, but I had also been to his birthplace museum in Thessaloniki (alas now in Greece) and his military academy museum in Bitola, North Macedonia. In Istanbul, I had seen his house there, which is also a museum.

This museum seemed to have what all the other museums had, which is replicas of his sitting rooms, desk, important books and papers, and, of course, more of his formal wear, including a top hat and walking stick.

A few of the museum displays describe his early years, growing up in what was then Salonica. His father was a military officer, and his mother, while probably Turkish, might well have had the mixed family blood that is all too common across that part of the Balkans (then under Turkish occupation)—meaning, her ancestors might well have been Jewish, Bulgarian, or Macedonian (which can be read to mean Slavic). No one is quite sure.

The young Mustafa was destined for a military career from an early age. He was a junior officer, a captain, in 1908 when the Young Turks (a group of senior military officers) staged their coup d’état against the Ottoman sultan, Abdul Hamid II, ushering in a form of limited republican government (with generals at the top to see that nothing got out of hand). Of the democratic stirrings at that time, author Sean McMeekin asks in The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923:

Can the peoples of this simmering ethno-religious cauldron of a country—Muslims and Christians, Balkan Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and Albanians, Turks and Greeks, Circassians, Tatars, Armenians and Kurds, Arabs and Jews—really have believed that a few French words (liberté, fraternité, égalité) would submerge their differences, reverse the Ottoman Empire’s centuries-old stagnation and decline, and bring Turkey into the sunlit uplands of modern constitutional democracy?

+++

Several things saved the Young Turk Revolution from devouring its own during the long course of World War I, which otherwise collapsed the Ottoman Empire.

One was the leadership of certain German generals in Turkey—notable Liman von Sanders who led the defense at Gallipoli and defeated the landing Allies—and the other was the distraction of the Russian revolution in 1917, which coincided with the success of the Russian army in eastern Turkey (which might well have further partitioned the country).

In the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Russia gave away all the gains its army had made against the Turks in Kars and Erzurum, which allowed Atatürk and his compatriots after World War I to use eastern Turkey as the region to rally national consciousness.

In the best negotiations of the war, Russia cut a deal in 1915 that it would control Constantinople (Istanbul) should the Allies be successful in their Gallipoli campaign (which saw few contributions from the Russians). But that transaction came to naught when the Allies lost their bid for the Straits and later when the revolution took Russia out of the war.

McMeekin writes: “It was Disraeli’s summoning of the fleet that had forced the Russians to stand down at San Stefano in 1878. Now that Britain and Russia, in 1916, were wartime allies alongside France, the empire’s death knell seemed to have rung at last—except that the British and Russians kept failing to coordinate strategy in the Ottoman theater.”

Ironically, Turkey has a greater historical claim to Crimea than either Ukraine or Russia, and the issues underlying the current Ukraine-Russia war echo those fought over by Russia, Turkey, and the western allies in 1853-56, 1877-78, and 1914-18.

+++

By the 1920s, it was Atatürk who was the beneficiary of this legacy, which allowed him to push the Greeks out of Asia Minor, the Russians back to the Caucasus, and the occupying British, French, and Italians back to their barracks in the Middle East.

Admittedly, Atatürk had lost Palestine to the French and British, but at the same time the new Turkish state was stripped of its Arab component, which in the long run might well have saved it. As McMeekin writes:

In the end Kemal and the Turkish nationalists, following the failure of Enver’s Caucasian gambit in 1918, chose triage, abandoning the ungovernable empire—and its troublesome minorities—in favor of an exclusionary nation-state they could govern with a firm hand. In this project, they succeeded beyond expectations. Outside Turkey’s borders, the War of the Ottoman Succession rages on, with no end in sight.

The director of the Atatürk Mansion Museum walked me around the house, and afterwards she invited me to her offices for tea. There I met Atatürk the cat, who seemed to have the run of the mansion, and talked with the director about other Atatürk museums in the world. She encouraged me to visit Atatürk’s tomb in Ankara, a memorial complex known as Anıtkabir.

She gave me directions and, fortified by tea, I set off on my bicycle, only this time, at the first police checkpoint, the officers had new policies, and I had to hand over my passport and answer stern questions about where I had been. Yet again, when I showed my pictures of Atatürk’s top hat (not to mention his namesake cat), I was allowed to carry on, and in less than thirty minutes, I was back downtown, this time looking up another access road blocked by a police roadblock.

+++

To enter Anıtkabir, I needed to buy a ticket, stow my bag in a locker, and lock my bicycle to road sign outside the front gate. The irony is that cars, once they were inspected, were allowed to drive up to the base of the memorial. But bikes could not get anywhere near Atatürk’s tomb.

I was leery about locking my bicycle on a busy Turkish street, but I did so in a place that was opposite a police command post, figuring that might either deter thieves or, conversely, incite the cops to join with them in liberating the bike. (Mercifully, it was there when I got back.)

I walked up a sweeping wooded drive to the memorial, which, much more than a tomb, is another retrospective on the life of Mustafa Kemal and an official history of modern Turkey. I was there almost two hours.

The tomb itself is at the end of a long promenade in a building fronted with columns (monumental but less grand than Erdogan’s palace). Inside I found hundreds of school children, writing down the dates of Atatürk’s life and death (1881 – 1938).

+++

Of more interest to me—beside the exhibits of his speed boat and a model of his railway sleeping car—was the attached history museum that, leaving aside the cabinets with more of his tuxedos, went into detail about the Turkish campaigns in World War I (except those against the Armenians) and those in the 1919-22 war with Greece in western Anatolia.

The museum has a number of oversized paintings showing the destruction of Allied warships in the Dardanelles. In one picture the French battleship Bouvet is taking a direct hit to its midships and already listing hard to port. But in the museum I was most drawn to the terms of the Mudros Armistice, which was signed on October 30, 1918, ending the war between the Entente (Britain, French, and Russia) Powers and the Ottoman Empire.

At that point, while Ottoman armies were having success in the Caucasus, from which the Russians had withdrawn (McMeekin: “Of all the deathbed miracles that had saved the Ottoman Empire in the modern era, Lenin’s revolution was surely the greatest.”), they were losing heavily in Palestine, and the combined French-Serbian-British forces had broken through the Axis lines in Macedonia, eliminating Bulgaria from the war and threatening to take Constantinople (which they did).

Not wanting to fight on three fronts, the Ottomans surrendered, and what they gave up is listed in the terms agreed at Mudros, a town on the island Lemnos, not far from the mouth of the Dardanelles.

It was a Carthaginian peace that allowed the Allies to occupy and partition all of the Ottoman Empire. (For example, point 15 of the armistice reads: “All railways shall be under the control of the police forces of the Entente Powers.”) The Allies also secured the right to occupy the Armenian provinces in the east, and they received approval to liquidate what was left of the Ottoman Empire.

Mudros, and then the Greek invasion of central Anatolia, explain why Atatürk and his fellow officers decided to keep up the fight. On one panel in the museum he’s quoted as saying, in May 1919: “The occupation of Izmir by the Greek army has caused a profound agony far beyond our imagination and expression to the nation and army with I have close relations. Neither the nation nor the army shall yield and accept this unjustifiable attack on its existence.”

Other paintings in the museum suggest that Greek Smyrna was destroyed in response to massacres that the Greek army—following the lead of Greek clerics—committed in western Anatolia. (In the painting, Greek soldiers are bayoneting Turkish mothers and babies. I almost got the feeling that the Greeks themselves lit fire to Smyrna and jumped into the burning sea as part of their own plans.) In these accounts, order is only restored when Atatürk marches his troops into the city now called Izmir (Greeks have another version).

+++

One of the British officials most concerned with the war’s end in Asia Minor was Winston Churchill, who in September 1922 was Colonial Secretary and responsible for many British holdings in the Middle East, including the occupation sector around Çanakkale.

After the fall of Izmir, Churchill hated the idea of losing control of the Straits, and wanted the border between Europe and Asia drawn down the channels of the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara, but his colleagues in the British government talked him out of yet another war—although Britain would gets its fair share of conflict in the regions of the defunct Ottoman Empire that it took under its control.

And another way to look at the current conflict in the region between Russia and Ukraine is as the extension of the battles fought in World War I and afterwards between the remnants of the tsarist, Ottoman, and British empires—but to explore those vestiges I needed to head east to Erzurum and Kars, and eventually Georgia and Armenia.

The post The Endless Russian-Turkish-Crimean Wars appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

The Michael Sarin Quintet at the Bar Bayeux: Michael Sarin (drums), Jerome Harris (bass), Brad Shepik (guitar); at left, the neck of Fima Ephron’s bass and the shoulder of pianist Rahul Carlberg; the evening’s emcee, Caleb Wheeler Curtis in the background. (Photo: David Yearsley)

It was only after I left the Bar Bayeux in Brooklyn last Friday night, elated after two riveting sets from the Michael Sarin Quintet, that I realized that the club’s name was a clever pun on its address at 1066 Nostrand Avenue. Oh, I get it, I muttered, simultaneously congratulating and chiding myself for the insight and the slowness with which it had come. Having contended with speed traps along the Susquehanna, harsh winds in the Poconos and sink holes in New Jersey earlier that day, I was just glad to have made it to the right place at the right time, and to have heard and seen the kaleidoscopic succession of compositions—all originals and all by the band leader, my oldest friend and, like me, a transplant to the Empire State from Bainbridge Island, Washington in the Northwest corner of the American Empire.

Also a long way from Brooklyn, the Bayeux Tapestry depicts the Norman Conquest which, as everyone used to know, took place in the year shared with the street number in stylish gold that I now regarded. In more than two-hundred linear feet of colorful needlework, the famed French textile depicts bloody conflict—a broadsword to the thorax here, an arrow through the eye there in the midnight mist on Nostrand Avenue. No unhorsings, mortal blows, or Viking longboats packed with knights armed to the top of their heads decorate the plain red velvet curtain that hangs in the Bar Bayeux’s big glass window. Yet by some accounts, the history of jazz is the history of combat, with instruments referred to as axes, cymbals hurled at insurgent alto saxophonists, tenor duels and kindred cutting contests staged so as to inflict wounds of shame on the losers.

The Bar Bayeux hosts jazz five nights a week and comedy on Sunday. The long narrow space is traversed by an unfussy, but elegant bar, backed by a pair of conjoined oblong mirrors that reflect the glow of Art Deco lamps and the deep red of the walls on which hang vintage gin posters and original art. At the far end of the bar a cluster of round tables and chairs gathers in front of the performers at the back reaches of the space. Doubtless many of these jazzers and jesters have emerged from an evening inside with injuries to their confidence, scathed by self-criticism or otherwise bruised in the struggle to stake the flag of their originality on new territory. The improvising spirit and body do not always answer the call of duty. Spontaneity and perfectionism are the Janus faces of jazz. They scowl plenty, and smile sometimes, though almost never at each other.

Last Friday’s maiden voyage of the Michael Sarin Quintet was not an exercise in five-upmanship nor otherwise competitive display, but a wellspring of collaborative music-making in which individual expression was buoyed by an artistic plan of campaign masterminded by the group’s leader.

Sarin his been living and working in New York City since the 1980s, touring extensively, often in Europe, with an impressively diverse cast, among them the late alto saxophonist, Thomas Chapin, avant-gardist John Zorn, the trumpeter Dave Douglas, the Klezmer clarinet virtuoso David Krakauer, and the saxophonist, Caleb Wheeler Curtis, who introduced the evening’s two sets. Curtis welcomed all who had come for whatever reasons—to hang out, to sample the excellent cocktails, to forget about Trump and his conquests and invasions, domestic and foreign. But Curtis gently reminded the assembled that, while conversation was not prohibited, many in the club had come expressly to hear what he rightly called the “world-class musicians.” Indeed, a host of Sarin’s colleagues were in attendance. The quintet offered them connoisseurs’ music that delighted and challenged anyone listening.

Sarin has made his career as a percussionist. His tool kit is his drum kit. He brings his own cymbals, and they shimmered, shone and flamed not just Bayeux red but in colors from across the spectrum. Relentlessly propulsive at brisk tempos, attentively atmospheric in slower ones, and uncannily incisive and encouraging always, Sarin’s approach is orchestral, full of color and invention, long phrases and dynamic contours, but also marked by unpremeditated bolts of syncopation, unexpected emphasis and humor—the lash and laugh of the skins, the bright chatter of the hi-hat, the instant omens of the bass drum. These shifting effects and clever commentaries ride on an unfaltering rhythmic flow that counts as a force of nature, though, of course, it took years of youthful practice to develop and secure its sustaining power.

But Sarin is much more than a consummate rhythmicist, unfalteringly rigorous yet irrepressibly creative. He is a musical omnivore: he eats everything with his ears, digests the nourishment with his genius.

He commands an astounding musical memory stocked with everything from the college fight songs he used to pick out on his living room spinet, to ad jingles, to movie themes, to the whole history of jazz, swaths of R&B, soul and pop. These staples are augmented classical music, including, of late, reworkings of modernist Eastern Europeans like Lutosławski and Shostakovich which he has been undertaking in recent years in the company of the ingenious deconstructivist arranger Michael Bates. Sarin can sing you anything from this vast catalog on request and in exactly the right key.

That comprehensive knowledge and craft is coupled with a keen sense of social and political contexts, as well as a feel for the connection of music to place and people. Composition is not an academic exercise for Sarin, even if there is much erudition in his complex scores with their searching harmonies, daunting cross-relations, penchant for contrapuntal dialogue, Cubist melodies, and shifting time signatures cut through by syncopation. The work is rhythmically expansive, which means geographically expansive. Among Friday’s set list, “Caetano,” to the great musician, poet, and political activist Caetano Veloso, has a Brazilian lilt and flair. The rhythmic ebullience of the north-African infused “A’ashiri,” which means homeboy in Moroccan Darija dialect) projects a carefree self-assuredness.

From the start, “Crimper” set the high-minded, if still-accessible tone for the evening. The title seems to refer to human trafficking—crimping being a synonym for shanghai-ing. The 5/4 meter of the opening section conveys horrors and violence, the texture aggravated by seasick chromaticism and jagged, tangled leaps. These shackling procedures give way to a more contiguous, comforting melody in lilting triple time that seems to evoke hope or simply the beauty of the seas as seen from captivity—assuming a vantage point of the waves from above deck.

Another uneven 5/4 time signature followed directly on from “Crimper” in “A.I.n’t Shit.” Replete with the irritating routines and tiresome tautologies of LLM and machine learning as represented by self-cannibalizing canons and an incessant single-note piano ostinato, Sarin’s archly human wit cut through the computerized clutter, the composer become living ghost in the machine powered by his solipsistic drum phases churned out like an IBM punch card getting fed through the mainframe.

The first set finished with “Flag Wavers” marching relentlessly upward then down in unambiguous, undoubting on-the-beat chords before arriving in the end at hand-over-heart D-major unadulterated by foreign harmonic elements. These foursquare fulminations were ironized by the snap of Sarin’s snare and the jeering of his ride cymbal, and by Shepik’s careening solo the cut against the red-white-and-blue grain. Later, “Disheveled Dandy” responded to this permanent-press patriotism with an air of unkempt contempt.

Sarin wrote and arranged all the evening’s music with the evening’s four other performers in mind. The unusual use of two electric bassists shows the composer’s admiration for Fima Ephron, who supplied the low fundament, and Jerome Harris who explored the high baritone and tenor strata with his countermelodic investigations. Harris put down his bass and took up his guitar on occasion to raise the ensemble tessitura in dialogues with the Brad Shepik, another Washington Stater also long in New York. Shepik proved an intrepid improviser on “Wheels,” dedicated to him; the guitarist scurried and soared above the Afrobeat, unfazed—indeed uplifted—by Sarinian complexities. Pianist Rahul Carlberg, son of pair of Sarin’s musical colleagues, offered up a ruminative solo introduction to “Meditation” that progressed from the tentative to the poised. Carlberg has the rhythmic smarts and fleetness to keep pace with Sarin’s shifting temporal frames, and his pianism ranges from the pointillistic to the tastefully loquacious to the mighty two-fisted tremolo.

This whole lot of night music was all new material from the composer-arranger-performer-bandleader, bravely and brilliantly presented by his group. As with anything this fresh, there were moments of doubt where decisions had to made on the spot. At these crossroads, Sarin continued to drum while singing the part of anyone who had missed an entry, or he shouted instructions above the glorious fray, as he did just before evening’s end in the high-octane “Geri,” dedicated to the American jazz pianist Geri Allen. After a long, coruscating crescendo of a drum solo in which the maestro surged to the foreground accompanied by the rest of the ensemble, Sarin cried out “last time, last time!” to his bandmates and they joined forces for the final refrain of the evening.

Here’s hoping this is not the last time, but rather the first of many for the Michael Sarin Quintet, a band with many other dates to mark and clubs to conquer.

The post Bayeux Fever appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

The post The King and His Royal Counsellor: a Glyph appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Wivenhoe Park by John Constable.

“Black Earth Rising: Colonialism and Climate Change in Contemporary Art” is a large art exhibition to be held at the Baltimore Museum of Art, May 18 to September 21, 2025. Then the show travels to Europe. Here I present a preview review just of the catalogue, which is published by Thames & Hudson. The guest curator Ekow Eshun has worked with support from Katie Cooke, Baltimore Museum Manager of Curatorial Affairs. And the authors of the catalogue include Anna Arabindan-Kesson and Macarena Gómez-Barris. This exhibition, which presents more than 150 artists, many of them well known, deserves to be seen. But obviously even viewing these excellent illustrations cannot serve as substitutes for the artworks themselves. Here, then, in anticipation is a commentary on the fully illustrated catalogue, which contains important texts by the curators. I focus on this argument and one of its implications, in anticipation of viewing the exhibition. Putting their account in art historical perspective, I raise questions about its political significance.

An enormous amount of varied visual materials are assembled here. Frank Bowling, Middle Passage (1970) shows the slave ships. Kara Walker’s Restraint (2009) depicts an individual slave woman. And Anna Bella Geiger, Native Brazil— Alien Brazil (1976-77) presents the brutal history of that country. Finally, Alfredo Jarr’s Gold in the Morning B (1985) is an image of a mining site. Traditionally European landscape painting has very often been associated with escape from the urban environment. Looking at their Claudes or their Constables, the busy prosperous city dwellers could enjoy imagining being in their countryside house. But when we become aware that this ‘nature’ is a construct, the product of painstaking human labor, as much as the city environment, then making that contrast will seem more problematic. The countryside in Constable’s Wivenhoe Park (1816), the famous painting which was the stalking horse for Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, is a creation of human activity. As you can see by reading his text, or just by looking closely, it’s a working site, the property of the privileged people who own the land. And so leftist commentators have been legitimately much concerned to observe that a real act of repression is required to subtract out the workers whose activity creates those beautiful sites. Indeed, in his painting Constable shows the grand manor house of the property owners in the distance. A generation or two ago, John Berger and other left-wing commentators created an intellectual stir by focusing on these historical realities, which lie behind these beautiful depicted scenes. “Black Earth Rising” takes that critical political discussion a step further, in a dramatic unexpected way. We are very well aware of the dramatic present ecological problems. And we have seen, also, many shows devoted to non-white artists. This important exhibition connects them, by scrutiny of the racial dimensions of ecology.

“Black Earth Rising” presents maps showing the history of colonialism. Thus Jaune QUick-to-See Smith’s Tribal Map (2000) remaps the United States according to Indian tribal areas. Ingrid Pollard’s Valentine Days (2017) uses hand-tinted photographs to rework archival images of plantation life. And Todd Gray’s Sumptuous Memories of Plundering Kings (2021) reworks old photographs of Africa. Presenting the legacies of slavery and colonialism, the exhibition shows images of plantations as seen from the vantage point of the slave worker. Urging that we think seriously about how to reclaim nature, it presents images of the history of our long colonial exploitation of nature. Judging just by the catalogue, the power of the exhibition lies in its massive presentation of visual materials making this argument. Traditional histories of landscape painting show beautiful sites from the viewpoint of the victors. This exhibition presents what effectively is the other side of that picture, the ravaged landscapes as viewed by the victims of colonialism. You really need the text to understand the essential unity of these visual themes, for — as this evidence shows — the land looks very different if you’re forced to work on it.

Recently there has been a great deal of discussion in the United States and also internationally about art by Black people. And, also, and this is usually a separate topic, for some time visual artists of al races have often been dealing with climate change. What’s worth of attention, then, is the novel connections that this exhibition makes between these two themes. Aptly enough, so the museum press release explains, the phrase terra preta—Portuguese for “black soil”— refers to a type of fertile earth found in the Amazon Basin that was created by ancient Indigenous civilizations. Of course climate change affects everyone, but how and how much it affects you personally is typically a function of your race. The older leftist literature devoted to landscape painting takes note of the price of these landscapes. This show takes the argument a dramatic step further. Nature isn’t so beautiful when you look at this history.

The catalogue presents a convincing case for its claims, but doesn’t take up a crucial political issue. And so what I wish to discuss briefly are the implications of this analysis. As we all surely know right now, acknowledging responsibilities for serious unjustified inequalities is often politically perilous. The Germans acknowledged the Holocaust only after their unconditional surrender in 1945. And the United States is not yet prepared to pay reparations for slavery, which is an obviously comparable case.“Black Earth Rising” surely calls for grand changes in how we understand injustice. And since the responsibility lies primarily with White people, this show is surely to cause heated international discussion. It very hard to imagine, in the present state of things, how our nation will respond constructively. For that reason, this show is likely to be immensely important. Should we feel pessimistic? Allow me, if you will, to conclude on a speculative optimistic note.

It might be argued that the kind of self-critical evaluation of a culture of its own history such as is promoted by “Black Earth Rising” is a great constructive achievement. Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality presents such a view of Western critical evaluation of Christian morality. The ultimate aim of the European search for truth led, so he claims, to dramatic self-critical reflection. Now, then, we could apply his argument to the history of colonialism ecology presented in this exhibition. Just as it is a magnificent achievement for a person to honestly judge themselves self-critically; so, it could be argued, it’s a great achievement for a culture to honestly evaluate its history, however painful that awareness may be be.

I wish that this might be true. But everything I see about recent history suggests that this line of thought is hopelessly overoptimistic. More likely, I think, people prefer to have delusions about their history rather than face uncomfortable truths. This, alas, is the dominant trend of American culture right now. Still, if that pessimistic prediction is correct, then this impressive catalogue tells us all too much about ourselves.

The post “Black Earth Rising”: a Preview appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

A Muscovy Duck.

It was a show that forever changed not just the entertainment industry but the world.

As the Sunday afternoon hour approached for the start of the 97^th Academy Awards ceremony, rumors swept down the Red Carpet more quickly than the fires that had ravaged Los Angeles a few months before. That catastrophe’s toxic residue glazed the Californian light in a vintage 1970s hue that conjured a goldener era for American movies.

In every corner of the Dolby Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard could be heard wildfire whispers: was Buster-Keaton-sad-faced-comic-turned-wartime-President Volodymyr Zelenskyy really in Tinseltown, fresh off his star turn in the White House? It could just be true, since the Ukrainian entertainer-cum-politician had gotten rave reviews and registered record-breaking ratings for Friday’s cross-talk act in the White House with the Vaudevillian bad-cop, bad-cop duo, Vance and Trump.

Faced with plunging popular interest and dogged by charges of irrelevance and ennui, the moribund Oscars needed a jolt. Maybe, just maybe the annual ritual would get one before it was too late.

As hundreds of Patek Philippe and Rolex wristwatches ticked past 4 pm Pacific Time and host Conan O’Brien ambled onto the Dolby Theatre stage for his opening monologue, the assembled glitterati emitted a collective sigh of resignation. Another stinker of epic proportions appeared to be underway.

The red-haired emcee cracked a crooked grin and started into his script: “There probably aren’t many of you out there who’ll think this is a Crimean shame, but I’ve been given the hook …”

That’s when the Miracle of the Movies’ Night began.

Four shotgun-wielding G-men marched in headed by Kevin Costner, who informed O’Brien that “we have the right for you to remain silent.” In a lanky cameo, James Comey handcuffed the ousted host and the FBI agents carted him off into the wings as the Academy orchestra’s brass section launched into a military fanfare.

Out sashayed Sunday’s savior and thus began what would become the Academy’s finest hours. His tuxedo piped in the Ukrainian colors was from Tom Ford and therefore “Built to Last,” as Zelenskyy proclaimed when Meryl Streep asked from the front row who he was wearing.

For the next twelve minutes Vaudeville Voldy wowed Hollywood and the world with a top-hat-and-cane song-and-dance routine that choreographed its way into a rollicking production number unsurpassed in the history of the Oscars:

Are you blue and yellow in the White House

And had enough of all those shits?
Putin on the Ritz …

The swelling strings were pierced by a train whistle. A locomotive with “Trans-Siberian Railway” painted across its black body blasted through the backdrop. Up on the big screen, the onstage camera captured the steamy kiss of the engineer and his brakeman—Woody Harrelson as JD Vance and the Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón. Her racist tweets had scuttled her Oscar changes, but now she was back in the spotlight. There was no quicker way to get there than by kicking the Hillbilly Elegist and MAGA-Manchild in the cojones.

From the bowels of the stage, up came Ed Harris strapped to the train tracks as Putin in a Ritz. The dictator’s stubby fingers wiggled nefariously just beyond the scalloped edge of the greasy cracker as it was run over by the locomotive in a spectacular snack explosion.

Academy Award winner Casey Affleck, also eager to feast on the crumbs of decancellation, waddled out trussed up as an Elon Muskovy Duck, dabbled at the buttery debris and quacked:

Have you seen the well-to-do
Up
and down Park Avenue?

Also in urgent need of a reboot, Alec Baldwin slunk on stage as Don the Drag Queen of Hearts casting off falsetto skeins of de-tuned melody: “You haven’t got the cards,” he crooned as he mounted the cockpit for the threesome’s refrain:

“Pants with stripes and cutaway coat, perfect fits
Putin on the Ritz”

Jane Fonda in Ukrainian army-issue helmet and black war fatigues by Versace drove out in a budget-busting Abrams tank as Voldy soft-shoed in time to the rumble of the mighty treads:

“Dressed up like a million-dollar trouper
Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper (super duper)”

Busby Berkeley drones pirouetted in formation above the stage as the whole ensemble sang and high-kicked, the audience rising as one to join in on:

Move to the rhythm
We can
Move
Move
I want you to move

As if aroused by the massed crescendo, the muzzle of the Abrams’ cannon raised to an erotically suggestive angle, gave a “pop” and shot out a giant blue-and-yellow flag with a peace sign to climax the show-starting show-stopper.

And that was just the beginning.

The evening’s first award, for Best Supporting Actor, went to Kieran Culkin for A Real Pain in which he plays a mad/melancholic stoner (the character smokes weed from Ithaca, New York—that line got some laughs when I saw the film in that very city) on a heritage tour of Poland. Along with his cousin (a role taken by Jesse Eisenberg, who also wrote and directed the movie), he vists a death camp and other sites and goes in search of their recently deceased grandmother’s house. Culkin gave a concise and eloquent acceptance speech, first lambasting Rupert Murdoch’s anti-democratic depredations (Culkin played one of the media baron’s sons in Succession), then voicing support for Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer’s speech at last year’s ceremony decrying what Glazer had called the “hijack[ing] of the Holocaust by an occupation that has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” In a witty-weird closing flourish, Culkin promised not to force his wife to have any more children.

Later, Nobel laureate Bob Dylan and Timothée Chalamet, nominated for Best Actor for his portrayal of the bard in A Complete Unknown, sang “The Times They are A-Changin’” together, joined halfway through by the real Joan Baez and her screen epigone, Monica Barbaro (also nominated for Best Supporting Actress in the Dylan biopic).

Even though snubbed for her work in Callas, Angeline Jolie floated down from above like last year’s Barbie, and Mick Jagger bounced up from the auditorium to join in with the gang on a “Mr. Tambourine Man” for the Ages.

Throughout the seamless show, Voldy continued somehow to charm with silly one-liners like the one that started “Elon goes to Kremlin with chainsaw and asks Vlad, What is your Occupation? …”

Late in the broadcast Adrian Brody was declared Best Actor. He strode to the stage already carrying an Oscar—the one he had received for The Pianist more than two decades ago. In a terse but heartfelt address citing George C. Scott’s refusal of the 1970 Best Actor award for Patton, Brody renounced “the crass hucksterism of declaring one artist better than another.” He took his second statuette from last-year’s winner, Cillian Murphy, then handed both to the nearby Zelenskyy. “Not exactly rare earths,” said Brody, “But maybe good for a few bullets.” Sticking to his running gag of making a spooneristic muddle of his English, Voldy nodded and said, “No, no, I give these boys to VD Jance and Tronald Dump on way back to Kyiv to thank them—to really thank them!—for their terrific show on Friday.”

Next, Jeff Bezos bulldozed his way to center stage and announced that Amazon and all other streaming services, from Netflix on down, would close for business before the end of the year. Bezos instead would be putting 200 billion bucks into restoring America’s downtown movie theatres and providing free screenings in perpetuity, funding independent films, and remodeling (with windows and turf roofs!) all Amazon fulfillment centers and converting them to climate-safe agrarian theatre schools, daycares, and free-for-all hospitals.

In the last of the many shocks and surprises, the Best Picture went to the Croatian short film The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, whose dramatic force and moral power harrow and build across its epic 12 minutes. There is no more compelling and urgent piece of cinema.

After this final award, dispensed after a crisp 100 minutes, the director of this year’s show, Steven Spielberg, took to the stage to announce that, however much the Academy had wanted to make it to 100, this would be the last Award ceremony. The first Sunday in March of 2026—if there turned out to be one—would instead find all of Hollywood Royalty in Kyiv’s National Palace of the Arts for the premiere of the first film in a ten-part series to be made in collaboration with Ridley Scott, called Fighting for Freedom and starring none other than …  Volodymyr Zelenskyy! The Ukrainian shrugged: “Then maybe I keep these two Oscars after all.”

The post Vaudeville Volodymyr’s Big Night appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Cartoon: Martha Rosenberg.

There are multiple sides to Evanston resident Martha Rosenberg. Those who know her mainly from her cartoons for the Evanston RoundTable (she was staff cartoonist from 2001 to 2021) think of her as a visual commentator on modern life, while readers of her 2023 exposé of Big Pharma and agribusiness, Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Lies (original 2012 title: Born with a Junk Food Deficiency) see her as an investigative journalist, raking the fragrant muck of the food and drug industries and the federal agencies that ostensibly regulate them. With the recent publication of Food, Clothes, Men, Gas and Other Problems, Rosenberg reveals her lighter side, mining the humor, awkward moments and small-scale triumphs of everyday life.

Her book is a congeries of comic vignettes, sharp observations about the strange times we live in, as well as interviews conducted over the last 20 years or so with movers and shakers. Also included are more than 50 of her distinctive, thick-lined cartoons and illustrations, which underscore the book’s droll, wise-gal spirit.

If there’s anything that binds together this wide-ranging collection of Rosenberg’s pictures and prose, it’s the simultaneously engaged and ironic tone she maintains. It’s a cool tone, without overt anger or accusation, but leaving no doubt where she stands. One catches a whiff of Erma Bombeck here and there, especially in the pieces on home and the work world. Rosenberg’s book, however, isn’t just about wry acceptance of life’s ups and downs. There’s usually a critique under the surface, but it’s delivered with a gentle touch. In a world with altogether too much pontification and dogmatism, Rosenberg never addresses us from on high. Her stance is that of an Everywoman going through what we go through, and sharing her stories the way a friendly neighbor or co-worker would.

The interview was conducted by e-mail and edited lightly for clarity and space.

HI: Tell me a little bit about yourself, Martha. How did you get into the writing and cartooning field?

MR: I began writing for underground newspapers in New Orleans, then did a stint as an advertising copywriter – which got me so mad at corporate spin that I returned to underground reporting. A few years ago I experienced writers block (nature’s own rejection slip, as they say) so I began cartooning, a skill that uses the right rather than the left hemisphere of the brain. I also attended medical school, which made me more health-oriented.

My writing and reporting style were inspired by Village Voice writers like Alexander Cockburn, James Ridgeway, James Wolcott and Eliot Fremont-Smith, as well as the inimitable Tom Wolfe – writers who could be funny while also challenging the status quo.

HI: What inspired you to write this particular book?

MR: I’ve been reporting on corruption in the food and drug industries for 20 years and just got sick of being such a Debbie Downer. There are so many things that are funny in this world: romance and its mishaps, job searches and interviews, the cluelessness of the fashion industry, etc. I just wanted to be less serious and do some standup-type writing for a while. I especially wanted to look at under-reported social developments like apartment rage during COVID, transit rider aggravations, the changing retail and food landscapes, and the decline of print journalism.

HI: The title – “Food, Clothes, Men, Gas and Other Problems” – suggests this is a woman’s book. But I found much of interest here. How should men approach this book?

MR: The jokes about single women, clothes, PMS and men not helping with housework certainly skew female. But most of the book is general humor about the economy, bad employers, romance, driving, sexuality, Starbucks, cooking, working from home, family and other topics that I think and hope will amuse everyone.

HI: Do you think America has less of a sense of humor than it used to? Have we become a nation of finger-wagging killjoys? If so, why – and what can be done about it?

MR: Good question. Old-time wit has taken a hit as people prefer to listen instead of read and talk rather than write. Universities now consider listening to audio “reading.”

Also, I think a lot of once-tolerant Americans – including maybe myself – have morphed into social justice warriors. Nothing is funny because everyone is potentially offended. People are quick to feel “unsafe” or become victims of “microaggression.” Reactivity and proxy indignation are the national emotions. In the chapter about telling a joke, I note that you can’t tell a “dumb blonde” joke even if you are a blonde, as I am. In Mad Magazine days, people used to say, “That’s not funny; it’s sick.” Today the meme is more like, “That’s not funny; I’m offended.”

But if you look at comedians of the past like Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory or George Carlin, you see that humor can change society, too. Bill Maher certainly gets people mad but his humor gets them to listen.

HI: In addition to the comic observations, your book contains a series of interviews with political and cultural figures. Who was your favorite interviewee?  

MR: Well, I had the good fortune of interviewing some public figures like Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart; William Moyers, addiction expert, author and eldest son of television journalist Bill Moyers; former Rhode Island Rep. Patrick J.  Kennedy; and psychology experts Melody Beattie and Brene Brown.

One of my favorite interviews was with Gail Collins of the New York Times, who wrote a book called As Texas Goes: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda, as well as America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines. She is witty, and had me in stitches with an anecdote about the late Charles Keating, the crooked banker central to the S&L crisis of the 1980s and ’90s. When Collins was a girl, Keating lectured her class at a Catholic school on behalf of an anti-pornography group called “Citizens for Decent Literature.” In his speech, he blamed a fatal car accident on a woman wearing Bermuda shorts.

One of the funniest interviews in the book is with the late cartoonist John Callahan. He was an alcoholic wheelchair user with a spinal cord injury who would joke about his own situation, as in the title of his book, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot. One of his cartoons shows a woman at a 12-step meeting for arm amputees crying “I just need a hug.” He titled one of his cartoon collections, Digesting the Child Within.

HI: Talk about your friendship with the late film director – and one-time National Lampoon editor – John Hughes, whom you interview here. Was he a big influence on you?

MR: John, known for movies like Mr. Mom, Some Kind of Wonderful, Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and many others, was a huge influence on me. He taught me how to find a kernel of sociological truth in characters and events – the skill that made him the undisputed cinema chronicler of the 1980s. John also taught me how to write a screenplay.

If you had met John, you would never have known he was a Hollywood great. He was humble and inquisitive. He thirsted to know about other people’s experiences whether they drove a truck, worked as a landscaper or were 12 years old.

HI: In part, this book is a reflection on social change. In what ways has America changed dramatically for better or for worse, or both, over the past generation?

MR: Certainly, gender roles have changed – for example, as one essay here asks, what would the Camel Filters Man think about cell phones, bottled water and messenger bags – and the recession and COVID have severely squeezed the American pocketbook and workplace.

In terms of quality of life … well, just try to find a live person on the phone or at a reception desk today. Thanks to Amazon, the Internet and cell phones, food, retail products and information are accessed more quickly but are not of better quality. As a result, too many people are overweight, depressed and isolated.

Just as bumper stickers used to read, “Hang up and drive,” I think people need to “Unplug and laugh.”  They need to go on a run, a hike, or visit a friend … in person, not online.

HI: Your book points to so many absurdities and nuisances that all of us – men and women – face every day, from the fact that women’s clothing is often designed by men to the widespread inability to tell a joke. If there was one problem you could solve with a stroke of the pen, what would it be?

MR: If there were any way to abolish AI, I would – though of course we can’t; we’ve created a monster. Not only has AI put many writers and others out of work, it is framing our news, creating and placing ads (including clickbait), and spying on our purchasing and computer habits for profit. It has become the new Fourth Estate. I do not talk about AI in Food, Clothes, Men, Gas, and Other Problems because it’s not funny!

The post Looking at the Lighter Side of Life: An Interview with Martha Rosenberg appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Louis Agassiz Fuertes, Welcome Robin, Winsome Bluebird (1919).

Spring threatens to return to Upstate New York. A barrel-chested robin sits in a bare Cornelian cherry dogwood. Mid-morning, he (the bird sports the more vibrant hue of the male of the species) is not in the mood to sing just now, even though the late-February sun is shining and the ice is melting. Strange happenings, the robin must be thinking, as it was sometimes colder and snowier Down South where he had been wintering before the seasonal migration brought him to my backyard.

The bird is thankful that Ithaca is “centrally isolated” according to the canard uttered ironically by self-styled cosmopolitans in this liberal blue bastion in a sea of Republican robin red. For these progressives, “provincial” is a putdown. Not for the Musical Patriot, and not for my mid-morning visitor as he turns his gaze west across the valley to the still-brown woods stretching west out into Trump country.

Home to Cornell University and Ithaca College spread across adjacent hills, the city is rich in human culture, and not just because of the presence of these institutions of “higher learning.” Local music, arts, literature and theatre flourish. Ithaca’s human population of just over 30,000 matches that of Leipzig in the 18th century, when J. S. Bach lived and worked there. Leipzig had no malls and multiplexes, no Home Depot and Lowe’s, not even the internet. Perhaps partly because of all that, the Saxon city has not been surpassed for musical wealth by American cities a hundred times bigger. The notion that cultural richness corresponds directly to population size is a myth.

My feathered guest—actually, I’m the guest and he the host—seems to have arrived too late to take in any of last weekend’s abundant musical fare. If he had been in town, the robin could have flown up to the Cornell campus spread out on bluffs that command a long view of Cayuga Lake stretching out of sight to the north.

In the colonnaded concert hall on Friday evening, pianist Jonathan Biss presented a program of two monumental Schubert sonatas on either side of the young American composer Tyson Gholston Davis’s three-movement … Expansions of Light. A brilliant player and engaging writer, Biss presents an ascetic, yet ardent figure when hunched at the big black box of Nature modified, his wings flapping.

From his perch atop the dome, the robin might have taken the exuberant contrapuntal lines of Davis’s central “Caprice,” especially that heard in Biss’s fleet and flighty right hand, as an evocation of the songs of our bird’s more virtuosic thrush cousins. Dropping round to the eaves so he could eavesdrop more closely, our avian critic, who writes under the nom de plumage of Turdus Migratorius (T.M.), might have shaken his beak at the way Biss covets, even over-curates, Schubert’s charmed melodies, rather than letting them sing as if from Nature that is, ultimately, their source. Such forthright ease would make the turbulent winds and dark portents of these last sonatas of Schubert’s short life all the more buffeting when they rip through. Real gusts have felled a university Gothic spire or two across Cornell’s 150 years, but a songful Schubertian melody rendered freely rather than forced into the big Romantic phrase has far more power to move.

On Saturday night, T.M. could have winged over to Ithaca College to hear the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra in a program entitled “Flight of Fancy.” This was music of the birds, not for them, though T. M. would have found a way to penetrate the stark, 1970s exterior of the music building and into Ford Hall. I’ve been to this place dozens of times and still haven’t figured out its relation to the rest of the structure, never mind the outside world. The excellent ensemble is now under the brilliant baton of the Belgian conductor, Guillaume Pirard, who has been living and working in Ithaca for a couple of years now. He has a centuries-spanning repertoire, but is also an expert in the performance practice of 18^th-century music. The concert began with Haydn’s Symphony no. 83, nicknamed La Poule (The Hen), and in it Pirard, in his first year as the group’s director, cleansed the Cayuga strings of the vibrato that in Haydn’s day was a carefully deployed ornament rather than the cloying default setting that it has long since become. Pirard is poised and meticulous on the podium, the occasional sweeping step, the martial closing of the heels, the proud puff of the chest and noble lift of the chin reserved for moments of grandeur and resistance. Crisp gestures demanded and got precision from his players. But his detailed direction also drew wit as well as pathos, not just Sturm, but also Drang from his ensemble. Pirard doesn’t do the Funky Chicken, but the pecking of the first movement’s second theme in the oboe and the clucking of the strings conjured the requisite barnyard image and its rustic-refined humor.

For Ralph Vaughn Williams’ Lark Ascending, composed on either side of the Great War that cost millions of men and tens of thousands of carrier pigeons their lives, the quavering shimmer was back, but in its proper setting and significance on soloist Christina Bouey’s violin. At the piece’s close, the tuneful bird and its song recede into the silence of the concert hall, sonically and spiritually transformed into the English countryside—the haunted and haunting melody emblem of a world gone forever.

After intermission, Solace by Jocelyn Morlock from 2001 fled Olde English fields to take up another mode of elegy—darker, threatened. Now the solo violin surged up from a fatefully suspended backdrop, renouncing nostalgia for mournful dread.

The closer was Cantus Arcticus: Concerto for Birds and Orchestra by Einojuhani Rautavaara, the successor to Jean Sibelius as the leading Finnish composer, and like Sibelius a musician fascinated by living things in their environment. Birdsongs of the bog and of migration were voiced from speakers above the stage; these musicians sometimes sang in canons more beautiful the Bach’s. None of it was natural, nor did it purport to be. Recording technology slowed the shore lark’s song down so that it became a subterranean ghost two octaves lower than its higher self. These soloists were sometimes obedient, dutifully halting their marshy hootings on cue at the conclusion of the first movement. Later they reasserted their superior beauty and aesthetic primacy. Yet only their songs, sometimes in altered form, were present. Do they even exist still or will they for long?

On Sunday afternoon T. M. would have booked a return flight to Cornell to hear Canadian organist Isabelle Demers’s organ concert in Sage Chapel. The doors of the church are often flung open by students short-cutting their way through the building, so the bird would have easily entered, perhaps finding cover in the elaborate forest of branches and leaves painstakingly painted in the vaults of the wooden ceiling. Demers’s program was bookended by two rollicking sets of variations, the first on a 17^th-century dance tune set by the Dutch Golden Age organist J. P. Sweelinck but dragged across much more harmonically and technically varied terrain by Demers’s late countrywoman, the composer Rachel Laurin. These were pleasantly bracing adventures that never phased or ruffled the recitalist. Her small frame houses a colossal virtuosa. Among the challenges unmanageable by others came her note-perfect rendition of the harrowing Variations on a Theme of Paganini for pedal solo by the English organist, George Thalben-Ball, whose life spanned most of the 20^th century. The theme is taken from Paganini’s wickedly difficulty 24^th caprice for solo violin. How to match, or even surpass, the feats demanded by the Italian string superstar of yore? Make these variations for the feet only, except with a few chords at the climax, as if to draw attention to the hand-free wonders that preceded the last-minute deployment of the fingers.

Thalben-Ball attained a stolid portliness during his later decades such that it is hard to imagine him clearing his own work’s continuous obstacles: chords, trills, glissandi, sprints and leaps. So easy appeared even this tour-de-force for Demers that T.M. wouldn’t have been surprise to see her reach into her backpack to drink from her canteen then slice some cheese onto rye crisps, have her snack while carrying on with the pedal heroics, then straightaway scale the concert’s final peak—Laurin’s transcription of Brahms’s Variations on a theme of Handel. This piano showpiece’s twenty-five kaleidoscopic, knuckle-busting demonstrations of diversity of mood and manner, equity between the hands, and ingenuity unlimited, concludes with a rollicking fugue, spurred on that afternoon by Demers jaw-dropping pedaling feet .

Turdus Migratorius is proud of his august name and also knows that fuga means flight in Latin. If he chooses not to take one out of town— a flight, I mean — this weekend, there’s plenty more Ithacan culture to catch.

The post Robin’s Weekend Review appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.