Blog 17, September 2011 – As Good as It Gets?

I am starting writing this on 31st August from S California. Susie and I have been in the USA and Canada now for over four and a half weeks, with another week to go.  East, West, North, South, it will be the longest unbroken time we will have been away together anywhere.

Our time here covering turmoil and fear in the markets, riots in UK, the fall of Gaddafi, Republican hopefuls declaring themselves candidates to become President, each more right wing than the last, rockets in Southern Israel – and for us the birth of our sixth grandchild,  with still a week to go.

Throughout I have been puzzling over this amazing country that is the USA. What has changed? And what has not. The still extraordinary success; mass success as I think of it. But increasingly now the extraordinary excess which strikes the visitor from other planets like the UK and Israel.

But first, some of what we have been up to. In summary five and half weeks of brilliant travel. Five nights in NYC, mainly for board meetings (me) but also time for some Sunday matinee Japanese theatre at The Lincoln Centre, before heading north for a week of complete R and R on the Maine coast.

A combination of Internet searching and word of mouth had led us to Southwest Harbor deep into the Acadia National Park, initially to a B and B which had looked lovely but which we hated when we got there. And then serendipitously to a gem of a discreet “old money” hotel, croquet lawns leading down to the harbour deck with old fashioned row boats, overlooked from rocking chairs on the veranda leading out from the dining room, wooden cabins with huge stone fire places secluded in the forest surrounding the main hotel building. Peak season, so of course when we first enquired the hotel was fully booked – all  except one remote cabin which  had just become available and which, if we would take it for a week, could be ours, hotel breakfasts included, for the price of a regular room. Log fires at night, hikes through the forest before breakfast, days out exploring, sea kayaking one day, harbour sailing another, sunset cocktails on the deck (where President Obama had visited for lunch the month before), the days sped by deliciously.

Acadia, originally a land of hardy fishing villages, was discovered by the Rockefellers, Astors and Vanderbilt’s who established huge estates which, in the best tradition of American philanthropy, were given to the nation to create the Acadia Park, complete with carriage roads where cars are still forbidden, Southwest Harbor itself and its environs were a delight, the sort of small town community one sees in movies from the Fifties.

From there we had two days to get ourselves to Cooperstown, NY, overall about 11 hours driving, experiencing I-95 and other Interstates , parkways, skirting Boston, country roads and lanes  We had treated ourselves to a (by American standards quite small) SUV which gave us a commanding view of the road ahead and surrounding scenery and with the  help of Garmin lady, a soon to be much loved GPS, Google maps on my iPad which tracked  our car accurate to what seemed like a couple of meters, allowing zoom in almost to individual houses and zoom out to show the whole continent, and  two brilliant guide books we set off to explore, finding perfect lunch stops and a sleep over at the University of Massachusetts visitor centre  in Amherst and dinner there in the University club, glad to have paying visitors in the vacation.

Cooperstown is home of the baseball Hall of Fame, of little interest to us, but also of Glimmerglass Opera, a sort of New York Glyndebourne, and the Cooperstown Inn, an original Victorian rooming house where the less well heeled but possibly more authentic opera goers like to stay. There to meet up with our friends Cary and Barbara Carson, from Williamsburg, who, wonderfully for us, had planned and booked five days of some the best cultural riches that America had on offer which we were to spend together.

First off, to Glimmerglass Opera House for a performance of Annie Get Your Gun, a much talked about revival of the original Broadway musical, with apparently famed soprano Deborah Voigt in the part of Annie. We found it excruciatingly awful! Happily this was more than compensated for by dinner al fresco by the lake on which Cooperstown stands.

Next day, two BRILLIANT contemporary operas in the afternoon, the one “Later That Same Evening”, inspired by five Edward Hopper paintings, the opera imagining the lives of the figures in these paintings and connecting them as characters one evening in NYC in 1932, could not have been more enjoyable. The more so for our having earlier been able to see visit an exquisite exhibition of Hopper’s work, including some of the featured pictures, at the local art institute. The other “A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck” a brilliantly impressionistic depiction of the trig-comic battle between Eugene O’Neill nearing the end of his life and his former actress wife Carlotta Monterey which had actually taken place in the winter of 1951. In each case to music reminiscent of the period. Completely American. And for us delightfully unusual and unexpected.

Our cup runneth over. But if this was not enough that evening we were treated to a performance of the seldom performed but completely mesmerising Madea, music by Luigi Cherubini, extraordinary young Italian conductor, astonishing cast. Blown away. So unexpected. As good as anything we had ever seen. So far from Annie get Your Gun. What a strange country.

This was but a beginning. The next day we drove across state back east to Williamstown, Mass, home of Williams College whose graduates, we learned, curate a majority of America’s leading art collections and museums, home also of the Clark Institute, one of those amazing massively well endowed private art collections (in this case from the Singer sewing machine fortune), beautifully and expensively housed, and given to the nation in the best traditions of American philanthropy. The eclectic collection of paintings down the ages and American and English furniture and silver was a joy, the more so with Cary and Barbara to offer erudition when sought, compounded by the totally unexpected bonus of three  completely different but each utterly absorbing visiting exhibits.

Firstly: Spaces

http://www.clarkart.edu/exhibitions/spaces/content/exhibition.cfm

“The large-scale photographs by Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth featured in this exhibition offer distinct but connected perspectives on the ways individuals interact with the spaces they inhabit. Trained together at the Kunstakademie (Arts Academy) Düsseldorf in Germany in the 1970s, Höfer and Struth have embraced photography as a medium of social, cultural, and historical purpose, choosing public spaces as their subjects.

Both Höfer and Struth engage with history and the passage of time. Höfer’s photographs of libraries, auditoriums, and research centers are mostly uninhabited by people but filled with light and the mystery of visual and intellectual contemplation. Although the architecture of these monumental rooms conforms to a symmetrical logic, the photographs are pervaded by a sense of loss as the use and significance of the spaces have shifted over time. Struth’s works capture church and museum visitors engaged in the act of looking, as we, the viewers of the photographs, observe them from a physical and temporal distance. This reflexive impulse allows us to experience several historical moments at once, both inside and outside of the picture’s frame.”

This exhibition is organized by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. All works in the exhibition are from a private collection.”

Secondly: Pissaro’s People.

http://www.clarkart.edu/exhibitions/pissarro/content/exhibition.cfm

Detail from Camille Pissarro (French, 1830–1903), Ludovic-Rodolphe Pissarro Reading, c. 1899. Oil on canvas. 7 1/8 x 9 5/8 in. (18.2 x 24.4 cm). Collection of Cheryl A. Chase and Stuart Bear

“Pissarro’s People offers a fresh look at the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro by examining his portraits, harvest scenes, and market views through the lens of his personal relationships, profound social and economic concerns, and anarchist beliefs. Based on new scholarship by curator and leading Pissarro scholar Richard R. Brettell, this visually stunning exhibition brings together some of the artist’s most iconic figural works with lesser-known pictures from private and public collections from around the world.

Pissarro’s People was organized by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. It is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.“

And lastly:  El Anatusi

http://www.clarkart.edu/exhibitions/pissarro/content/exhibition.cfm

Another surprise! Humbling that art so appealing and original should emanate from such a source.  Immensely gratifying that somehow, perhaps against all the odds, it found recognition.

“The sculptor El Anatsui, born in Ghana in 1944, merges personal, local, and global concerns in his visual creations. Weaving together discarded aluminum tops from Nigerian liquor bottles, Anatsui creates large-scale sculptures called gawu (“metal” or “fashioned cloth” in the artist’s first language) that demonstrate a fascinating interplay of color, shape, and fluidity. For Anatsui, the bottle caps represent a link between Africa, Europe, and North America: “Alcohol was one of the commodities [Europeans] brought with them to exchange for goods in Africa,” he explains. “Eventually alcohol became one of the items used in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. . . . I thought that the bottle caps had a strong reference to the history of Africa. “  “

Six miles to the east of Williamstown lay North Adams, a former mill town, some of whose long defunct mills have been converted into the home of MASS MoCA, the Massachusetts Institute of Contemporary Art which we had heard about at breakfast at the Cooperstown Inn. We had no idea what to expect. But we quickly came across three floors of a former mill housing the work of Sol Lewitt., on the surface far removed from anything that had come before, an iconic American artist I knew nothing of, opening up a world that that I could never have even imagined but which I have come to understand is indeed rooted in all that we had seen that day.

It’s worth a look:

http://www.massmoca.org/lewitt/

I had on the other hand heard of Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but had never expected to go there. But 20 some miles south of Williamstown there it was. And there in torrential summer rain which, coming from parched Israel spoilt it for me not at all, we found ourselves listening  to Martinu played  by Andre Previn and the Boston Symphony Chamber Players who then went on to perform Previn’s own 2010 composition “Octet for Eleven” in his presence. Not bad for an octogenarian; truly an inspiration.

On that note our culture fest finished.  What an extraordinary demonstration of human endeavour, of the human spirit it had been.

The next week, no less extraordinary in its way, was to be entirely physical. By way of Newark and Calgary International Airports and a short overnight in Banff, 7 am the next day found us in the bus terminal of Canadian Mountain Holidays at the start of a week’s Lodge to Lodge heli hiking in the Columbia Mountains, the range which lies immediately to the west of the Rockies and extends almost to the Pacific coast..  I was somewhat apprehensive, wondering if following my “Total Hip” I was sufficiently rehabilitated to manage what lay ahead. I need not have worried. There was something for everyone. All ages, all abilities, brilliant guides, good equipment and some of the most enjoyable terrain anywhere. And I found that I could do it. All of it. Perhaps not quite as fast as before, but stronger and further each day.

The scenery was astonishing:

I found the celebration of human endeavour, of the human spirit, of the beauty and immense wonder of the physical world which we inhabit, very much the counterpart of the cultural riches we had experienced the previous week.

And some of what we got up to was quite wild.

We finished off in California. Palo Alto then Pacific Palisades. In both places to be with good friends made long ago, three generations now, and in the Palisades also to meet up with our daughter Genevieve and her family from across the road in Highgate. For over a week we enjoyed grandkids, family and friendship, living the LA life, easy living, huge distances, great beaches, one superb American movie “The Help”, too much to eat, unbearable media. And then just when we were really feeling it was time, it actually was time to come home.  11 hours overnight, mostly asleep. And boof! We were back into daily life –greatly enhanced  by the arrival whilst we had been away of our sixth grandchild, Gil Alexander Zik, born to our elder daughter Sasha whilst we were at the other end of a Skype connection in remotest British Columbia!

But why, if you have bothered to read this far, did I write all this, you may be wondering?  What has this got to do with anything?

I confess that I did hesitate   – which, beyond lack of time, laziness and simple inertia explains the delay. For I am writing this from Almagor nearly four weeks after I began.

Whilst Susie and I were away having fun, some big things happened in the world. The US showed itself to be truly without effective leadership and seemingly ungovernable, Congress provoking a near Treasury default for no reason other than domestic grandstanding and President Obama sadly demonstrating weak and ineffective leadership in every direction. Competing for the most inept inept leadership, Europe yet again stole the show, thereby ensuring a wholly avoidable sovereign debt crisis which as I write this is unresolved. And for a few days TV screens across the globe were full of burning buildings and seemingly unrestrained looting – in England of all places. Why are they doing this?” I was often asked. “Because they thought they could”, I replied.

Something interesting happened in Israel too. Despite the strong economy, the people who do the daily work of building that economy finally lost patience with a system which, in thrall to an  unholy alliance of Religious parties, the Settler Movement  and Big Business, has moved so  far from Israel’s egalitarian roots as to be unrecognisable. Whilst just across the Green Line the oft derided “weak” Palestinian leadership of Mahmoud Abbas, seeing Netanyahu’s government for what it is, seized the initiative, and is now running rings round Israel, carefully avoiding violence and all the while garnering the sympathy and support of the world.  Vividly demonstrating the effect of good leadership over bad.

So it is that, perhaps with the benefit of distance, of having had real downtime, of having as it were been on another planet, two thoughts come to mind.

The first is that the ills of August that I have described are all the product of just one thing. Bad Management aka lousy or non existing leadership. As in any business, that’s what it always comes down to. It is said that nations get the leaders they deserve. I am not sure that I believe that. But certainly nations, like businesses, that grow over comfortable and complacent, seem prone to poor leaders who instead of pointing the way pander to the comfort zones of their constituencies. I find it instructive to look back to ask who were the last real leaders who were truly looked up to by friend and foe alike?

In America, Presidents Reagan, and perhaps for a time Clinton. In Europe, Chancellor Kohl.  In Britain, Margaret Thatcher. In Israel, Izhak Rabin.

There’s little wrong with the US, Europe or indeed Israel that some good management and effective leadership couldn’t fix.

The second is that I left America astonished by the reminder of what an awesome place America is. In every sense: in geography and resources, Pacific and Atlantic coasts, mountain ranges, plains that are still the breadbasket of the world, abundant  oil, gas and minerals of every description, bio diversity of almost every type within its borders, ice caps and desert, all made easily  accessible. Among the developed world still enjoying a (relatively) young demographic, still a melting pot and still the one country to which everyone wants to go. Still the centre of innovation, and (stem cell research apart) with the best universities with the best brains harnessed to the most experienced and abundant development capital. In California for a few days, it was salutary to recall that from within a few miles of where we were, and in the last two or three decades, had come Microsoft and Apple computing, mobile phones, the internet, Intel and digital everything, Google, affordable mass air travel and  social networking, to name but a few. And culturally, the building, curating, appreciation and making generally available to the public at large of so much great art and music. Who else does that on such a scale?

Likewise the inherent strengths achievements and resilience of Europe and Israel are huge.

So sitting here in Almagor in an Israel whose government is increasingly seen abroad and at home has having “lost it” I do not entirely despair. Time and time again the western democracies have shown their resilience. No less the Jewish people. True, usually leaving it to the eleventh hour and so paying an avoidably heavy price. But eventually the situation does produce the leader; nations do come to their senses.

Fundamentally Americans know too many of them are dangerously overweight, their cars too big, and their consumption of resources too great. Europe knows that it has to pay its way. Israel knows it that socially, politically and religiously it has pushed the envelope too far, that it cannot stand against the world for ever.

America, Europe, Israel, have all recently “enjoyed” years of excess. How come? Because, like the rioters in England, we thought we could. It is now slowly dawning that we can’t any longer.

smo

Almagor

25/09/2012

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