Farewell, JD Salinger
I feel obliged to write something, to salute, acknowledge, remark upon the passing of the writer who I cherish above all others: JD Salinger. I was sitting in Les Schwab, waiting on a tyre change, trying not to smell the combination of rubber and free popcorn, when the news flashed up. Reclusive author dead at 91. The tears that sprang up were undoubtedly for me, not for him. Liquid selfishness.
Franny & Zooey
I don’t remember what Salinger I read first. Not ‘Catcher in the Rye’ because my uptight religious school would never have assigned it. Was it ‘Franny & Zooey’? How would I have encountered it? My sister was my literary guide, but I gave her ‘Franny & Zooey’ when I was a teenager, so it didn’t come from her. Maybe my brother had a copy, or perhaps I stumbled on it at the library. What I do recall, very clearly, is the summer I was 15, living with my sister, working at Wendy’s. It was three months of sweating fry grease and repainting my nails every Friday, because we couldn’t wear nail varnish at work. There was a tiny staff room, the size of a cupboard, and ‘Franny & Zooey’ lived there. Every break I read it in furious, fifteen minute chunks. In the course of the summer I probably read it twenty times.
After that, ‘Franny & Zooey’ became my amulet. I carried the same copy, heavily underlined in pencil, through high school, on class trips, to university, on my study abroad sojourn; it joined me in moving from Oregon, to Philadelphia, to London, to Ibiza. Then, in the last six months, it’s gone missing. I have a horrible feeling it might have gotten lost in Mexico. So I borrowed a copy from the library to foist on my brother, who read it, and laughed uproariously. The library hardback lies next to me, but the rhythms of the language are under my skin. What marvellous language it is: “she was, from an undeniably hoyden point of view, a rather refreshing eyesore”; “why do I go? I go because I’m sick to death of waking up furious in the morning, and going to bed furious at night”; “we speak a kind of esoteric family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle”; “the furniture — seemingly a small warehouse of it — was in its usual static-dynamic arrangement… [it] would have lent a snug aspect to a banqueting hall in Valhalla” and so on and on. My favourite line, perhaps? “It’s a compound, or multiple, love story, pure and complicated.”
Pure and complicated, like Salinger’s prose; like his life. Various reports leaked from behind the walls of his New Hampshire home suggested he wasn’t entirely pleasant, but who is? No-one is going to come out well as the subject of a memoirist with an axe to grind. I’m only curious if we’ll see his writing, have a chance to revel in more of his literary magic. Apart from that, I hope he preserves the same aloofness in death he sought in life. True artists live in their art.
You have the right to work, but for the work’s sake only. You have no right to the fruits of the work. Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working. Never give way to laziness, either.
– “Bhagavad Gita” [from 'Franny & Zooey']
Word-Music: Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address
Posted by Cila Warncke
Abraham Lincoln
An ill-remembered half-line lodged in my head today, something about seeing the right as God gave us to see and the rhythm beckoned me to track it down. I tried the Gettysburg Address first. Nope. Though it, too, swells with marvellous verbal music. The nagging phrase comes from the final paragraph of Abe Lincoln’s second inaugural address:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
This is the most famous part of the speech, but it frankly doesn’t match the rhetorical majesty of what preceeds it:
Fellow-Countrymen:
AT this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Elvis birthday treat – fried peanut butter and banana sandwich
A little shameless self-self publicity for my Portland Cooking column.
An extra-special Elvis birthday goodie – the peanut butter and fried banana sandwich. Make it, love it, go for a run….
All the fixins
Vincent Van Gogh on Ambition and Impotence
Posted by Cila Warncke
According to the worthy Ziem, man becomes ambitious as soon as he becomes impotent. It’s pretty much all one to me whether I am impotent or not [but] I’m damned if that’s going to drive me to ambition. — Vincent Van Gogh
Van Gogh 'Sower'
There are two kinds of ambition. The obvious, socially-approved sort of ambition is the one Van Gogh was at pains to avoid: ambition for money, fame, material success and its attendent fripperies. Not because Van Gogh romanticised the life of the struggling artist as, invariably, only non-struggling artists do. On the contrary, his letters to brother Theo were crammed with references to his constant anxiety about money. He regularly went without food to pay for models, or paint, so his comment about ambition was not a frivolous remark from the lap of luxury. Van Gogh, however, understood the distinction contained in the Gospel admonition that the love of money is the root of all evil. He never wished to and, to his immense credit, though it probably killed him, never succumbed to the temptation to compromise his art for the sake of material comfort.
Unfortunately, Van Gogh’s nuanced understanding of “ambition” is rare these days. Ambition is understood, at least in the Anglo-American social sphere, in terms of money. Anyone not obviously motivated by the desire to make bank is deemed lazy. Real ambition is often directly linked to material “laziness” because, if they’re tough enough, people with great creative talent are indifferent to the siren-call of consumer capitalism. Not everyone is so resiliant, however. Too many fantastically intelligent people are unable to take themselves seriously, and therefore fail to develop their talent, because their gift is meaningless within the social construct they confront. And, distasteful as it is, society’s view matters. Virginia Woolf put it nicely: It is all very well… to say that genius should be above caring what is said of it. Unfortunately, it is precisely the men or women of genius who mind most what is said of them.
This makes the careless linking of “ambition” and “money” dangerous for individual artists and detrimental to culture as a whole. It takes a particular tensile strength for a creative person to mine the seam of his or her talent at the expense of financial security, social acceptance and good company. Why do we demand it? Everyone can agree the world would be a dull place without books, music, art, haute couture, jewellery or any of a thousand other poorly regarded, or poorly rewarded creative endevours.
It isn’t just the arts that lose out, either. What about the born nursery workers, gardeners, cooks, carers and cocktail-shakers who abandon their true gift for a life pushing paper somewhere because beige wage slavery pays better than pursuing their passion? It is a ridiculous state of affairs, justified by an ancient, ugly mix of Social Darwinism, laissez faire capitalism and entrenched class prejudice, that conspires to crush what it supposedly promotes: ambition.
The first step towards a solution is to stop making positive examples of people who are merely ambitious for money. We need a better definition of success than six-figure bonuses and penthouse cribs, otherwise we won’t have any direction for our ambition. This means making an effort to seek out people who change the world without making money from it. Historical figures like Van Gogh are relatively easy to come by. It will take a conscious effort to bring modern examples to light — not because they don’t exist, but because we are so used to ignoring them. We need to find the people who echo Van Gogh’s words: “I can very well do without God… but I cannot do without the power to create.”
Art, solitude and gold-dust
Posted by Cila Warncke
Scribbled in the back of my shatter-spined 2009 diary are the words of Jessamyn West
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends and society are the natural enemies of the writer.
She might have blamed, also, colleagues, television and cookery. Or dog-walking, DVDs and chocolate. Work, sleep, love, indifference, good music, bad movies, weather, furniture, news, caffeine or the lack of it. A literal world of distraction poised like a comic-monster in the closet, waiting for the unwary writer to allow to lapse the protective guard of solitude. For born-contrary loners it’s a childish fantasy. An excuse to kick petulant feet and demand sanctuary, a light in the hall to keep the boogie men away.
I’m one of these cranks. My dreams are of open roads in unmarked cars, the world at the bottom of the sea, places untouched by the hand of man, anywhere you can’t see the end from the beginning. These spaces hold the tantalising prospect of rebirth, endless reincarnation into whatever I want to be at the moment I arrive. They hold nothing: no memory, no backstory, no construction apart from mine. The appeal of solitude has little to do with art and everything to do with the fears of the artist.
Writing is a series of selfish, arbitrary choices. Effective writing imposes order, kills Schroedinger’s cat, insists something is here rather than there. Friends, family, crying children and cocktail parties are a writer’s enemies because we cannot control them. They are, at best, available for interpretion, after the fact. Hence the writerly urge to scuttle off to a hermitage far from forthright reality.
All knowledge is borrowing and every fact a debt. For each event is revealed to us only at the surrender of every alternate course. — Cormac McCarthy
This is why writers have an irrational fear of pets, lovers, must-see TV and the daily paper. We know that to write a lucid sentence is to not-write a thousand equally valid, truthful, consequential sentences. Writers must choose one thing from an infinite number of possibilities. As anyone who recalls being a child in front of a wall of pick-a-mix sweets knows, a super-abundance of choice leads to paralysis. Yet it is a writer’s job to be aware of everything. Not just facts, what “really” happened, what he or she said, but of all the loose threads one might pick up, hidden meanings, fantasies, improvisations, alternate endings. Writers are advised to take notes, write down their dreams, improve their imaginations, scribble down fragments of speech, lie back and absorb life like a sponge. The charge is to then make sense of it. To sift 500 tons of dirt to find that ounce of gold.
Is it surprising writers develop the same cranky relationship to daily life that forty-niners must have had with the California soil? What we need is in there, but the process of extraction is terrifyingly laborious. Every moment of reality holds both promise and distraction. Solitude offers the fleeting hope of achievement. Perhaps, within a protective cocoon, we can shake a few flakes of truth out of the last heap of experience.
Making Amtraks
Posted by Cila Warncke
Union Station, LA
Union Station in downtown LA feels deliberately anachronistic, an amalgam of art deco and country-house library. It is cool, dim, discreetly curved; big tan leather chairs march squarely along the polished floor. All it needs is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s chattering undergraduates clutching long green tickets, or Lane Coutell with his cigarette and unadjusted muffler.
Trains operate on different timescales. Twenty-nine hours from LA to Portland is a languid reproof to modernity. All aboard. Get comfortable. The urgent coping mechanisms of rapid transport (inflight movies, car stereos, PSPs, magazines) are only partially applicable here. An 11-year-old wraps her little sister up, telling her to pretend to be asleep. They both leap up, balancing on the edge of their seats, watching the passing Pacific waves intently, after mum hands them disposable cameras. A much younger mother chats to her parents in English, breaking off to call her wandering toddler back: “Mami! Aqui!” Lengthy complaints from another parent when they discover the change machine in the “arcade room” downstairs (four worn-looking video game consoles) only gives tokens: “I don’t want $20 worth!”
The lounge car is a refuge for beer-drinking veterans and emo kids umbilically attached to their iPods. “They started being nice to us. That’s how we knew it was real. They weren’t yelling at us for once” — an ex-serviceman tells his drinking buddy, recalling the World Trade Center attack.
Downstairs, a middle-aged woman is scanning the drinks menu at the snackbar. “It’s hard to get high on a train, on beer. Something about the motion.” She orders a Jack Daniels, then adds, apologetically. “People think because I’m little I don’t have problems. But after five kids your little old body gets all kind of aches.”
Plump, glossy, brown-eyed Aly is on her way to Chico to sign up for a dental hygienist course. “I told him, ‘get out!’” she chuckles. “Then he came back the next day and said he was sorry, that he’d never had a serious relationship before. That was three years ago.” She is 19; her boyfriend, 22, is shy but a promising baseball player. Aly wants to move to Chico because it’ll give her mom time to miss her, but she’s worried about giving up her walk-in closet. “I don’t want them doing anything to my room while I’m gone.”
The dining car fails to nourish Casino Royale fantasies, but there are flowers on the table and a choice of cabernet sauvignon or merlot. Scott orders scampi and Diet Pepsi. He’s on his way from San Luis Opisbo where he was helping a friend with some building. Getting laid off from his job repairing heavy machinery in steel-processing plants has compensations, like the freedom to take off for a little fishing in Ensenada, Mexico. Someday, he’d like to go to Europe.
Jack wouldn’t. He has vowed to never again leave “the sovereign United States.” His Navy baseball cap shades sharp, Irish-blue eyes: “Americans are targets.” He also won’t return to his home state, Louisiana, because (lowers voice) “The white man is under attack.” Don’t rush to conclusions. Jack has been with his Chinese-American wife for 50 years and three children; has two masters degrees; his manners are impeccable. America — land of contradictions.
Amtrak Coast Starlight
Snow-dusted lakes. Rolling miles of dry, golden grass with the occasional oversized ranch house. Ferns curl wetly on the edge of evergreen woods. Surfers bob sleekly in spumy Pacific breakers. Darkness erases hours as kids pad stocking-footed along the aisles, a mother curls around her sleeping infant, couples sprawl intimate-awkward across their seats and sleepy slumped heads crick necks.
Twenty-nine hours is not half long enough to hear or guess at all the stories. Andrea trots up and down the dining car with trays of food, 13 years on the rails, four days on, six days off. Another waitress, much younger, flirts with the supervisor: “I brought my teddy bear.” He shifts heavily, tells her to go get her things. She’s changing at Salem. Sometime in the night a drunk passenger was met at a station by the police. “Be careful cleaning that room,” the supervisor tells someone. “Someone thought they saw a needle on the bed.”
The Coast Starlight arrives punctually: 15.37 (scheduled, 15.40). Passengers roll off onto the rain-slick platform. Sea-legged. All that’s missing is a man in an overcoat to scoop up my suitcase and offer his umbrella.
Ibiza – Cheap Eats
Originally published in Mixmag, summer 2009
Ibiza’s 10 best budget restaurants/snack bars/soup kitchens
1. Comidas San Juan, Calle de Montgrí, 8 – Ibiza Tel.: 971 311 603
They don’t take reservations and there’s always a queue. That’s because you can get a hearty meal, with wine, for under €10. Croquettes or calamari are a good bet.
2. Bon Profit, Plaza del Parque Ibiza Town
Don’t let the chic bistro vibe fool you. Food here is ridiculously cheap. Huge hunks of lamb, fillets of fish and hearty paellas all for around €6 a plate.
3. Jamal’s Bistro, C/General Prim 16, San Antonio, 971340117
Just off the West End, Jamal’s has a winning combination of classy looks, great food and alluringly low prices. It’s been voted the worker’s favourite restaurant.
4. Croissant Playa, Pais Vasco, Figueretes
The best breakfast/lunch/take-out place in Figueretes with amazing pastries, vast bocadillos and delicious homemade quiche. Works equally well as a breakfast spot or a morning-after comedown hideaway.
5. Casa Ana, C/. Ginebra 8, Ses Païsses (San Antonio) 0034-971 80 36 13Cheap With homemade pizzas, bacon cheeseburgers for under €5, roast chicken and take-aways Casa Ana is just the place to soak up the booze after a night on the town – or line your stomach before you get started.
http://casa-ana.ibiza-restaurants.net/
6. Fisherman’s Kitchen, C/Madrid, San An10 971 34 57 72
All the stodge you need – but nicely made. Homemade pies, chilli, bangers and mash and lasagna will set you back around €7, a full English €5.50. Its sister bar down the road has wi-fi and TV sport. http://www.digitalibiza.com/fishermans/rest.html
7. Il Veccio Molina, C/Navarra, 12 Figuretes 34971305520
Gorgeous homemade pastas in huge quantities – €6 or 7 euros will fill you up quick plus cheap, decent house wine. It’s just up from the Figueretes taxi rank, making it easy to hop to your next destination.
8. Chill Cafe, Ibiza Town Via Punica, 49, Ibiza Town
Chill Café has internet, printers and a fax machine, making this the perfect spot to sort yourself out if you’re looking for work or want to catch up with folks at home. Great coffee, homemade baked goods, vast bocadillos, quiche and salads.
9. JDs, Playa d’en Bossa promenade, 971 307 062
Run by English expats Jo & Darren this popular beach-front hangout does everything from bacon butties to Sunday roasts to cheese & Branston pickle sarnies. It has wi-fi and a shelf of English newspapers and magazines to pass the time.
10. Can Joan, Playa d’en Bossa C/Murtra, 10, 971 30 66 93
Proper belly-filling fare but a cut above the plastic-chair-and-tablecloth competition. Homemade pizzas and pasta, paellas, grilled meat, and plenty of hearty breakfast options.
http://www.ibiza-hotels.com/restaurants/canjoan/
Tate Modern: Pop Life is Rubbish
Posted by Cila Warncke
Wheatfield with Crows
The view from the sixth-floor members’ lounge of the Tate Modern is spectacular. A cool sweep across Saint Paul’s Cathedral, the Millennium Bridge and the sludge-grey curve of the Thames. After that, walking through the ‘Pop Life’ exhibition is like touring a crypt: lifeless, rigid, ostentatious, dull.
There are scenes of a sexually explicit nature (in the demure phrase of the small black-and-white signs dotted around the rooms) but the only shocking thing about them is their banality. Jeff Koons aggrandising pornographic (self) portraits are faintly amusing only for the contrast between the unremarkable dimensions of his penis (photographed) compared to its heroic amplification in the accompanying sculptures. Around me, students scribble on notepads. Hopefully they’re writing: Jeff Koons = outsized cock.
Warhol, as ever in these tributes to shit-for-brains interpretations of post-modernism, has pride of place. One whole wall devoted to tiresome screen prints of his warped, ugly little face. I feel like Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde calf. By contrast, when I walked out of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam the sky itself seemed higher.
Take the self-portraits. Jeff Koons creates himself as a comic-book character with a giant phallus; Warhol wallows in profitable narcissism. Van Gogh looked at himself unsparingly and responded with an honesty that still speaks in every rusty brushstroke. It isn’t that Van Gogh was too unsophisticated to be commercial. He worried frantically about money and his letters to brother-patron Theo are riddled with anxious survival schemes. Yet immerse yourself in his wheat-fields or sunflowers and your mind unfurls. ‘Money’ is a tiny notion, reduced to its proper place by his swirling French skies.
It is fashionable to say that technique is unimportant, but how can anyone claim to be an artist if they don’t respect their art enough to study it? Van Gogh spent his living allowance paying models in order to hone his craft. Warhol found the easiest, most repetitive, least-demanding mediums imaginable (and was too lazy to even use them inventively). In another section of the Tate an artist whose name mercifully escapes me destroyed a bunch of his paintings in some kind of ‘performance’. How original. How irritating. How insincere. If you really believe what you’re doing is art then it must have value, must have something of yourself in it. How can you just destroy it? The corollary is if you can casually wreck something then you must not feel it truly represents you; it’s not your art. In which case, go back and try harder. Van Gogh bled for his art. He worked while confined to a sanatorium, he lived in raw poverty, he wrestled with demons. The fragmentary calm in his paintings is heart-rending because it evokes peace in the midst of passionate struggle. Koons, Hirst, et al, I warrant, never fought for anything more meaningful than a parking space.
DJs 4 DRC – DJs for the Democratic Republic of Congo
Posted by Cila Warncke
An excerpt from my interview with DJ/producer and philanthropist Jay Haze about his
DJs for DRC charity project.
Read the original at Ibiza Voice
Jay believes music can help save the world and he’s leading by example with his charity project DJs4DRC (DJs for the Democratic Republic of Congo).
Jay has changed since he gave Ibiza Voice an unforgettable interview chronicling his chaotic journey from teenage jailbird to musical powerhouse. Then, he simmered with ideas and outrage, drawing a self-portrait of the artist as a bareknuckle brawler. Today he is equally sharp, still occasionally self-aggrandising, but he has the confidence and urgency of someone who is pushing towards the future, rather than meditating on the past. Here’s what he has to say…
What’s new with you, Jay?
I’ve been travelling a lot – Thailand, Brazil, all over. I’m working on DJs4DRC, trying to raise awareness within the club culture and motivate people to do something.
What is DJs4DRC?
It is a charity project I started by donating 100% of the proceeds of my Fabric mix to charities in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is [the site of] the world’s biggest peacekeeping operation right now. There are children being used as soldiers, women being sexually abused. It’s bad. What I’m trying to do is kick people in the butt, remind that even small efforts can have big results.
What are asking people to do?
I’m donating 50% of all my DJ gig fees from September through December to the charity, and asking other DJs to donate 50% of their fee from one gig. Tiefschwarz, Tiga, Loco Dice, Luciano and DJ Sneak are some of the DJs who are contributing.
Where do those donations go?
In January I’m taking the money to the DRC. We’re going with a film crew and we’re going to shoot a documentary. We want to raise clubbers’ awareness, as well as DJs and promoters. We want to create a picture of what is going on [to educate] club culture as a whole. Right now the face of club is one of ignorance.I want to represent dance culture in a positive way, through my charity work…
Does this mean you’ll retire from music?
No! Music is my passion. I’ll never stop making music. But I make music to express myself. I never made music to get a gig, never made music to be cool. I make music to feel. This is why I have so many musical styles. It’s a form of expression to me.
What about paying the bills?
Art and money should be completely separate. One is an expression of thoughts and feelings; the other is an expression of ego.
What’s next for you?
Just keep doing what I’m doing! I want to represent dance culture in a positive way, through my charity work. Through releasing what I believe in and doing projects I believe in. After we shoot the documentary [in DRC] I want to set up DJs4DRC as a foundation.
What kind of work will the foundation do?
I want to build schools to teach music in Africa, to promote peace through creativity. Tapping into my creativity changed my life, and I want to share that. I see my future doing music with children, with people from all different kinds of backgrounds. If people in conflict zones can go and put their mind into something creative it can have a huge impact.
Dance music has a reputation for being self-centred – can you change that?
This industry is not filled with people who only care about themselves. It is full of people who don’t yet know how they can help. DJs4DRC is showing a way they can.
DJs for DRC
Fuckpony ‘Let The Love Flow’ is out 26 October on BPitch Control.
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