Pushing Rocks
Different Strokes for Different Folks in Different Times and Places
I spent the evening of January 6, 2022, at a Vigil organized by Move On https://front.moveon.org/ for Voting Rights in Verdi Square on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a few blocks North of Trader Joe’s. A snowstorm was predicted. I planned to do a short performance at the event to culminate the project I have been developing for Legal Graffiti. The project has been a series of tests for The Blued Trees Opera.
You are invited!
4:30 PM January 6, at 73rd and Broadway, on the anniversary of the January 6, 2021 attempted coup, a short performance event will conclude my series of online tests for The Blued Trees Opera with the software start-up Legal Graffiti at, “Vigils for Democracy” with Upper West Side MoveOn/Indivisible.”
I will sing relevant original text to the melodic refrain of the first few bars of, “Vissi d’Arte,” from Puccini’s “Tosca.”
Hope and Joy!
The evergreen needles on the collection of seventeen species of pine trees in the four-acre Arthur Ross Pinetum arboretum in Central Park in New York City evergreen stay put through all seasons. May hope and joy stay equally firmly ensconced in your heart throughout the year ahead, come what may.
On Prince Charming, the Beautiful Princess and Immigrations
In the Disney fairy tale, Prince Charming is a white man in shining armor and the wide-eyed princess looks beautiful in her pink prom dress. I once had a lover who declared, when he looked up from fixing his car, “I need you. I want to be your prince in shining armor but my armor is tarnished.” I was, of course immediately enchanted and stuck with him off and on for another thirty fraught years. There’s the problem with fairy tales. They are beautiful. They usually supersede the complexities of reality.
What do we value?
This past week I have been thinking of my grandparents, who failed to escape Nazi Poland before anecdotally committing murder suicide to escape their fate. I never met them and never heard a verifiable account of why they didn’t leave although I know their four children either left on their own or were sent out. Increasingly, as this country appears to move inexorably towards lawless but theocratic and oligarchic fascism- the conflation of all possible abhorrent systems of “governance”- I think about my grandparents decision and the consequences: stay with hope or stay with despair but either way, the end result is tragic.
Are NFTs part of the bricks and mortar of a new world?
Hyperallergic just published a study deflating the idea that NFTs are the next brass ring https://hyperallergic.com/697239/new-study-on-nfts-deflates-the-democratic-potential-for-the-medium
Objects, Metaphors, Venues and Money
I am starting a new phase of the Blued Trees project with legal graffiti: @legalgraffitiAR.
Not much to show yet except some chicken scratches but it’s the revival of an opera I had been working on before the pandemic. The pandemic has changed so much about my thinking about platforming, venue and audience that my ideas about what I want to do and how have transformed my plans. It has also pushed me to consider how I want to present work that could be shown in more conventional indoors space, such as my brilliant young intern, Elia Min Emery recently assembled for my website https://www.avivarahmani.com/3d-virtual-gallery.
Inexorable Hope
As the holidays approach, my mind is on what I can be grateful for. In the image for this weeks blog I consider what the original Ghost Nets site looked like as the town dump when I purchased it in 1990, taken from a 1930 image from the Vinalhaven Historical Society http://www.vinalhavenhistoricalsociety.org.
Silencing Calisto
The image shown is a remarkable detail from Titian's Diana and Callisto in which Callisto is stripped to reveal her pregnancy as the result of Jupiter’s rape. What is astonishing to me in this vignette is the depth of Titian’s cold eye on the status quo of women’s sexual enslavement shown in the cruel expressions in the women’s faces and bodies- calm, relaxed imposition of the status quo. Cruel for how impassive they are.
The Essential Question
The essential question on display as we all watch the COP repeat empty promises for too little too late that many have now is how to we prepare the young for the apparently inevitable collapse of civilization in the face of an absence of adequate political will, for whatever reason it is absent.
This is the heart question. And before we prepare anyone else, it might be prudent to prepare ourselves.