Category: Magazine

 

By John Linnemeier

He looked out of place.  Quiet and observant… appeared to be about thirty…neatly pressed khakis, simple black belt, oxford style blue shirt, spit-shined shoes, short dark hair with a razor-sharp part… a small black backpack settled squarely over both shoulders…pants fly, belt and buttons all lined up in what, back in Officers Candidate School, we used to call a “straight gig-line.”

He said he was a Navy veteran.  When I asked what had brought him there he was hesitant, noncommittal and seemed a bit nervous.  Maybe it’s come from a lifetime of traveling to dangerous places where smelling people out becomes a necessity, but I knew surely and instinctively:  this guy was spying on us.

It was the 4^th of July, 2013, and I was furious.  Edward Snowden had just released the shocking news that the NSA was secretly and illegally collecting information on virtually everyone in America.  The NSA is an impenetrably clandestine organization with God-knows-what agenda.  Its director lied about the existence of the program to the Congressional committee tasked with overseeing it, while its agents spied on them as well.

With the exception of Washington, DC, Indianapolis has more space dedicated to war memorials than any other city in America. 

For over a hundred years, my extended family has met near Popcorn Valley to celebrate Independence Day.  Under ancient beech trees, we eat mutton from a sheep slaughtered for the occasion, cooked over an open pit.  My mother’s family, the Armstrongs, are mostly cattlemen…successful ones with big spreads of a thousand acres or more.  My son and I and just about all of the men in the family have served in the military.  Before we sit down to eat together, an elder leads us in the Pledge of Allegiance.  It’s not a formality.  We feel those words deeply.  It’s part of the glue that holds our family together.  If I’m in the country, I never miss it, but I couldn’t go that year.  All the high fallutin’ talk about the land of the free and the home of the brave would have rung hollow.  I decided to skip the picnic and drive up to Indianapolis to be part of a demonstration.

I parked in the multi-leveled underground lot adjacent to the Indiana Museum.  It was a short walk to a wooded park near the White River.  In a small stone shelter house surrounded by great dusty-leaved sycamore trees, forty or fifty of us gathered.  For half an hour or so, while the man in the blue shirt looked on impassively, several of us related our backgrounds and talked about why we were there.

I spoke about my service in Vietnam and how troubled I felt that our nation had become so cowardly that we were willing to forsake some of our most basic freedoms.   Others voiced their outrage as well.

Then we all trooped off as a group to The War Memorial, the hub of this “Circle City.”  It was only four or five blocks away, but I was 69 years old and had recently undergone surgery.  My gait was clump-footed and tentative.  My shoes slapped the pavement as I gazed up at the perfect blue sky, falling behind the pack on this gorgeous summer day.

With the exception of Washington, DC, Indianapolis has more space dedicated to war memorials than any other city in America.  Monument Circle is a brick-paved street that intersects Meridian and Market Streets in the precise geographic center of Indiana.  In its center sits the neo-classical, slightly preposterous looking Soldiers and Sailors Monument, a gigantic obelisk carved from the finest oolitic limestone, capped with a thirty-foot tall statue of “Lady Victory.”  The monument is only 15 feet shorter than the Statue of Liberty and reportedly would cost half a billion dollars if it were built today.  Horses, cannons and determined Union army soldiers jut out in all directions near the base.  At its feet are pools and fountains.  Broad stone steps on both the north and south sides lead to mighty bronze doors and through them to a stairway that leads to an observation deck.  From there you can see almost to the suburban malls of the largest city in the nation not founded on navigable water.

A few blocks away on Pennsylvania Street, I’d worked with disabled veterans at the VA Regional Office for three years.  Upstairs in the huge cafeteria, a panoramic photo covering an entire side of the dining room shows the victorious troops returning from WWI marching down Meridian Street to the circle.  Every fifty feet along both sides of the route, perched on Corinthian columns and decked out like sylphs, slender young girls holding wicker baskets shower flowers on the returning doughboys back from the “war to end all wars.”  Flags are everywhere.  From the windows of the buildings above, shredded paper rains down on the returning heroes, back from the unspeakable horror of the trenches of Flanders Fields. Those young Hoosiers marching along so smartly must have felt like they were entering heaven.

All this patriotic corniness doesn’t offend me.  The idea of America as a beacon of liberty and humane values speaks to my very core.  An America where torture is condoned and spying on each other is justified is a betrayal of everything men and women like these fought and died for.  That’s why I was here today.

 

At Monument Circle, I was surprised to see another group with about a hundred additional demonstrators had beaten us there.  We were a motley-looking crew with many agendas.  At the top of the steps of the memorial overlooking the fountains a contingent of half a dozen “open carry” gun people waved their AR-15s menacingly.  The rest of us milled around, talking and checking out each other’s signs while enjoying the summer weather.  Several people dipped bare feet in the cool water of the fountain.  A few cars honked in support or opposition to the protest. The whole thing was pretty pathetic to tell the truth.

I had my iPhone with me, and on a whim I thought I’d take a short clandestine video of our young undercover man, now milling about aimlessly, looking slightly bored.  I suffer from a severe tremor so I asked a young lady standing nearby if she’d take the video for me.  Before I could stop her she walked straight up to within three feet of the guy and began filming.  He immediately realized what was going on.  Since I figured I was already busted, I impulsively walked up to him myself, threw an arm around his shoulder, and looked him straight in the eye.

Immediately, a young couple with long hair and tattoos rushed up and with feigned courtesy asked if they could take my photo with their Nikon.  When I firmly refused, all three of them abruptly scurried down the steps to a police car with blacked-out windows parked on the street directly in front of the protest and hopped in.  I spent the rest of my time at the demonstration making a point of not facing the squad car.

When things broke up, with my complaining old body supported by a walking stick, I headed off across the circle in the direction of my car.  The dark-windowed squad car ominously crept around the circle toward me.  Before it could get too near I turned my back to it.

Since the circle was one-way, they couldn’t stop or turn around, giving me just enough time to shuffle into a multi-storied parking garage with multiple exits.  Safe for the moment, I tried to gather my wits while checking anxiously for the squad car I assumed was cruising around somewhere outside.  A few moments later I slipped out a random exit and hobbled across an open field scanning the area.

From a block away we sighted each other.  I heard him hit the brakes hard. They were headed north on Capitol, but again on a one-way street.  He’d have to circle the block.  It gave me just enough time to scurry flat-footed across the field, up a side street and down an embankment to a crowded pedestrian walkway that skirted a narrow canal.  From there it was a short distance to the underground garage and my car.

My heart was pounding as I slipped behind the wheel.  My sweaty shirt stuck to the leather upholstery as I caught my breath.  I sat there in the cool darkness of that cave-like space gathering my thoughts.  Three years later I’m still gathering them.

 

 

Aspiring poet Ezra Pound had a scandalous year of teaching at Wabash College. His experience marked his life and changed the course of modern literature.

by Douglas Wissing

[editor’s note: Douglas Wissing lives in Bloomington and is the author of ten books. His coverage of Indiana National Guard units in Afghanistan, Funding the Enemy: How US Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban, attracted wide attention among U.S. policymakers.  The following is excerpted from Doug’s collection of essays, IN Writing: Uncovering the Unexpected Hoosier State, co-published in January by Indiana University Press and Indiana Historical Society. It originally appeared in “Traces,” (Fall, 2007). Doug will read from his new book on March 29^th at 5:30 at Springhill Suites by Marriott, 501 North College Avenue. The reading is sponsored by the Bloom Magazine Book Club.]

 

The winter of 1908 began with storms howling across the Indiana prairie, burying Crawfordsville’s stately Wabash College under swales of snow. Not long after yet another blizzard in early February, a distraught 22-year-old professor of Romance languages (and aspiring poet) wrote an emotionally jangled letter about losing his job to his father back in Philadelphia:

“Dear Dad

Have had a bust up. But come out with enough to take me to Europe. Home Saturday or Sunday. Dont let mother get excited.

Ez.”

The Most Godforsakenest Area

By early September 1907, when the new Romance Languages professor, Ezra Pound sat down at a desk to register incoming freshman, Wabash College was almost seventy-five years old and quite sure of its ethos and values. Founded in 1832 when Crawfordsville had scarcely a hundred houses, the school was staunchly Calvinist in its rectitude, organized by Presbyterian home missionaries to educate young ministers “to furnish the destitute with the preaching of the gospel,” as the school’s first document read.

Wabash College grew into a stolid bastion of mid-nineteenth-century societal norms, educating young men in the established New England college methods. “The traditions of Wabash are, as you are aware, extremely conservative,” President George Stockton Burroughs wrote in his 1899 resignation letter, going on to cite the crisis the school faced: Enrollment had dropped to 165 men in his last year, the lowest since the Civil War. Things had changed in the dusk of the century: Men now attended high schools rather than the college’s “prep” school; burgeoning state universities offered looser entrance requirements, such as foregoing facility in Greek and Latin, as well as offering individualized curricula once the students arrived.

And, of course, there was the issue of coeducation. Beginning with Indiana University in 1868, the state schools had gone co-ed one by one. Even the last Midwestern citadels of exclusive male education, such as Beloit, Kenyon and Illinois College, began admitting women. As the new century dawned, Wabash was a lonely outpost of bachelors, resolutely facing a perilous future.

Ezra Pound cut a foppish figure on campus, a tall, attenuated redhead with his black velvet jacket, soft-collared shirts with flowing bowties, patent-leather pumps and socks in a jaw-dropping spectrum of purple, orange, lavender and green. A wide-brimmed panama hat, Malacca cane and pince-nez that Pound copied from poet W.B.Yeats completed a look that was a sharp departure from the faculty’s typical boiled and stiff dignity.

Pound was soon challenging other Wabash mores. At Pound’s first residence, a Gothic-styled house at 500 Meadow Avenue where he rented a room, he began a cavalier flirtation with the landlord’s sister-in-law, Mary Moore Shipman Young, a young widow who was visiting her sister’s home. Availing himself of access to the parlor, Pound began entertaining Mrs. Young—though he was skating on very thin ice: President Mackintosh, himself a widower in quest of a new wife, also had his eye on Mrs. Young. (Neither ever found favor with Mrs. Young—Pound chortled fifty years later that “old Mac” never got the “widdy.”) When students began visiting Pound’s room until the early hours, it was all too much for the landlord, who suggested in October that Pound find other accommodations.

           

Homesick For My Own Kind

Not long after young professor Pound moved into a south Washington Street rooming house. Located near the Big Four Station, the place was frequented by students and vaudevillians. Two or three times a week Pound hosted a “soirée,” which began after supper and lasted until the wee hours. There was smoking and more than a modicum of forbidden drinking. Harold Hawk, a student in Pound’s French class, recalled beer, “a little vino” and Curaçao, “when we were ‘flush.’” Pound read Blake, Donne and his own poetry, discoursing—often in colorful language—on art, religion and the perfidy of straitlaced attitudes. In an institution that upheld a strict view of theology, Pound told his listeners, “Religion I have defined as ‘Another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.’”

Rumors began to circulate about Pound. Beyond the drinking and smoking and general rebellion, some said he frequented the “Goose Nibble” girls, who lived across the tracks in the so-named poor section of town and reputedly bestowed favors on Wabash bachelors; others murmured of inappropriate relations with his students.

Pound seemed nonplused by the rumors, flaunting bohemian mannerisms better suited to Paris’s Latin Quarter than Crawfordsville, Indiana. He wrote his friend Bertam Hessler he had “a crying need…for mere degenerate civilization as represented by cocktails, chartreuse and kissable girls.” Wont to top off his tea with tots of rum while visiting proper Crawfordsville ladies, Pound quickly hid his flask if a faculty wife passed nearly. “The natives would never approve my Continental appetite,” he told his friend, Viola Baylis.

Ezra Pound’s nonconforming ways were soon to cause him grief. He had made friends with a British woman who lived in his rooming house. She was a touring actress who presented a monocled and tuxedoed male impersonator act in vaudeville burlesque shows. She was stranded in Crawfordsville, as the burlesque audiences evidently failed to appreciate her “toff” act—too “subtle” for the Hoosiers, Pound sniffed. Pound generously shared his coffee and food with the young woman, an act of charity some found unseemly.

In mid-November, Pound wrote a flustered note to Bertram Hessler:

“Two stewdents found me sharing my meagre repast with the lady-gent impersonator in my privut apartments.

Keep it dark and find me a soft immoral place to light in when the she-faculty-wives git ahold of the jewcy morsel. Don’t write home to me folks. I can prove an alibi from 8 to 12 p.m. and am at present looking for rooms with a minister or some well established member of the facultate. For this house come all the traveling show folk and must hie me to a nunnery ere I disrupt the college. Already one delegation of about-to-flunks have awaited on the president erbout me orful langwidge and the number of cigarillos I consume.” Terming Indiana “the sixth circle of hell,” Pound told Hessler he expected the administration would discipline him for entertaining actresses.

Ezra Pound flaunted bohemian mannerisms better suited to Paris’s Latin Quarter than Crawfordsville, Indiana.

Fleeing the scene of the scandal, Pound failed to take to a nunnery, but came pretty close, renting a room across from the campus at 412 S. Grant Avenue, an upright two-story clapboard house owned by the Misses Ida and Belle Hall, two of Crawfordsville’s most reputable citizens. Tall, prim and properly cameo-ed, the Hall sisters were self-appointed moral guardians, confidants of President Mackintosh, and near de facto members of Wabash’s Board of Trustees. Pound was moving into the room previously occupied by Professor Henry Zwingli McLain, a beloved Greek teacher and confirmed bachelor, who devoted his life to classics and the college. The previous January “Dear Zwingli,” as he was known, had suffered a fatal hemorrhage while in his church pew—in the view of his admirers, a perfect end to a faultless life. Pound could not have found more respectable lodgings.

But the Hall sisters were in for a change from “dear Zwingli.” Pound was, at best, an informal housekeeper. Student John A. Bays recalled, “There were scattered on the floor, piled on chairs or on the bed or in the corners clothing, shoes, shirts, underwear, extra suits, hats, etc. No pictures on the walls, one chair, his bed and sometimes a wooden box. Single-burner stove often on the floor. Student written exercises, exam papers and the like were usually visible in the wastebasket or on the floor near the basket.”

Pound continued his soirées. Wabash grad Fred H. Rhodes recalled, “After the preliminary formalities, Pound seated himself on a chair, while his disciples and satellites disposed themselves gracefully, but somewhat uncomfortably, cross-legged on the floor, at the feet of the master. The leader then began a spirited but disconnected discourse on many topics leaping from subject to subject with the agility of a mountain goat.”

 

Orphan in the Storm

Ensconced in the Hall Sisters’ house, Ezra Pound made it through the fall term that ended December 20 without further problems. He spent the Christmas holidays in Crawfordsville. By the time the winter term opened on January 7, 1908, the weather began to shift, snowstorms and blizzards commencing on the tenth. With students back in town and the locals done with their holiday gatherings, Crawfordville’s three vaudeville theaters booked full bills through mid-month. For the month’s lead-off acts, The Majestic offered Alice B. Hamilton, Character Singing Commedienne, and Annette Link, Soubrette, switching to Maudie Minerva’s Novelty Act, and Emmett & McNeil, The Singing and Dancing Sisters, for the week of January 13-18. The Grand countered with Burk & Erline, Automobile Girls, while the Music Hall had the Latimore-Leigh Stock Company’s High Class Vaudeville. After Pound’s long, lonely holiday, the town was perking with vivacious outsiders.

Late one February night, during yet another blizzard, Pound walked down to the Big Four Station to mail a letter, the night train being the last post available. While trudging back, he encountered the vaudeville actress he befriended at his previous rooming house. She was again down on her luck, stranded in Crawfordsville after her burlesque show had gone bust. It was cold; she was frozen. Pound offered her shelter in the Hall sisters’ house, where the actress slept in his bed.

The next morning he had breakfast with the woman, and then left for his 8:00 class. And then things got interesting. As the college historians delicately recounted it in Wabash College: The First Hundred Years, “The ladies from whom he rented the rooms, the Misses Hall, went upstairs to make the bed and found in it the girl from burlesque. Their only experience with roomers was with Professor McLain. This confrontation bewildered them. They telephoned the President, and a trustee or two.”

Not surprisingly, the college authorities called Professor Pound on the carpet for his grave moral lapse. But the complicating factor was that Pound didn’t sleep with the actress—or even in the same room. He spent the night shivering in his office, with only a coat for a blanket. Afraid of attracting the night watchman, he didn’t even turn on the light to read. During what the college history termed, “a discussion at distinctly cross purposes,” Pound stood his ground with the administration. Several of his Crawfordsville friends attempted to intercede with President Mackintosh, repeating Pound’s “orphan in the storm” story. It bore fruit: Faced with what appeared to be a case of mistaken immorality (though yet another example of Pound’s extraordinarily immature judgment), the Wabash elders reversed their decision to fire him. But faced with a recalcitrant firebrand, (Pound reportedly told the Board “To Go to Hell,”), the administration just cashiered Ezra Pound out of the college.

Pound did OK: The College Treasurer’s Report noted:

Ezra Pound

Feb. 12: Amt. paid him, balance salary to February 29, 1908 (order G.L.M.) $200.

With Pound’s earlier two salary payments at the start of each trimester, he received a total of $447.50—approximately a full year’s salary for an instructor.  Ezra Pound had enough to begin his search for the artistic community of his dreams—“kindred e’en as I am,/ Flesh-shrouded bearing the secret.”

 

A Lunatic Asylum

His teaching career behind him, the somewhat crestfallen Ezra Pound climbed on board the eastbound train with little more than a few belongings, his Wabash College severance pay and a severely bruised ego. No one knew he was beginning a journey toward the pantheon of world literature—and an infamous life shadowed by his Indiana scandal.

Pound sailed to Europe in 1908. After a brief period in Venice, he moved to London in hopes of meeting his great literary hero, W.B. Yeats. Befriending Yeats, Pound was soon employed as the poet’s secretary. Fleeing WWI zeppelin attacks on London, Yeats and Pound rented the famous Stone Cottage in Sussex’s Ashdown Forest, where the two of them studied Japanese Noh plays, dabbled with the occult, and, over three winters, revolutionized poetry. It is said that literary Modernism began in the Stone Cottage.

Along with friends such as Yeats, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound was a driving force in a number of Modernist movements, including Imagism and Vorticism, which introduced, among others, William Carlos Williams (Pound’s college roommate), Marianne Moore, Rabindranath Tagore and Robert Frost. To his undying credit, Pound edited T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the first Modernist poem to capture a popular audience. In gratitude, Eliot dedicated the poem to Pound, as il miglior fabbro (the better craftsman).

In 1915 Pound published Cathay, a groundbreaking translation of ancient Chinese poets. Disdaining the strict meter and stanza of earlier translators, Pound cantered off into free verse translations, which still stand as some of the most poetic renderings of the classic texts. Pound eventually translated texts of ten different languages into English.

After WWI, Pound joined the Modernist avant-garde in Paris, where he hobnobbed with Joyce, Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Leger, while continuing to write his masterwork, The Cantos. Married to novelist Olivia Shakespear in 1914, Pound became involved with violinist Olga Rudge seven years later, forming a ménage `a trois that persisted to the end of his life.

In 1919 Pound began to compose concertos and operas, and, after moving to Italy in 1924, organized the Rapallo music festival, which revived the forgotten Vivaldi’s music. Pound made important contribution to literary criticism, championing the role of imagination in what he saw as a gray world of academic poetry.

It was also in Italy that Ezra Pound achieved his lasting infamy. Enamored with Mussolini’s fascism, Pound became a leading Axis propagandist, which climaxed with Pound’s arrest for treason in May 1945. After being incarcerated in an open cage in Pisa for 25 days, Pound suffered a nervous breakdown. His groundbreaking Pisan Cantos, written during his imprisonment about his own desolation amidst Europe’s ruin, won the Library of Congress’s first Bollingen Prize in 1949.

By then, Pound had been an inmate of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. for three years, after pleading insanity at his treason trial—theoretically sparing him the death sentence. St. Elizabeth’s proved to be a productive venue for Pound, writing three books while entertaining a string of visitors, from poets and academicians to the States’ Rights Democratic Party chairman, who conferred with Pound about preserving racial segregation.

Pound remained sequestered in the mental hospital until 1958, when he was released as “incurably insane, but not dangerous to others.” Emerging from St. Elizabeth’s, Pound famously decreed, “America is a lunatic asylum.”

 

History’s Vagaries

The rise of Ezra Pound’s star in the years following his dismissal left Wabash College with an awkward situation, the becoming emblematic of academic priggishness in certain intellectual circles that persists to this day. Pound biographer J.J. Wilhelm wrote, “To some people, the very name ‘Wabash College’ has become synonymous with provincial prudery.” The college history, published in 1932, attempted the best spin: The historians wrote of the school’s administrators, “But they were aware too, from the accumulated evidence of several months, of a gulf too wide to be bridged between two different philosophies. And they were content to use the occasion to make an arrangement about their contract that encouraged Mr. Pound to shake the dust of a small middle-western Presbyterian college forever from his feet and content to rejoice in his subsequent triumphs in poetry.”

After the Hall sisters’ house was demolished, Wabash preserved the gray and white paneled door to Ezra Pound’s room in the college archives, the record reading, “As a footnote to literary history, in February of 1908, Ezra Pound entertained one of the performers from a ‘stranded burlesque show, penniless and suffering from the cold.”’ But the vagary of history is equally cold: Not too many years ago a maintenance man, unfamiliar with the old door’s infamy, threw it out.

Fanfaraï performs at the 2015 Lotus Music Festival

 

By Paul Sturm

Free speech does not guarantee meaningful dialogue and conflict does not ensure thoughtful resolution.

 

It’s easy to be self-assured when you’re clueless. The less you know, the more confident you can be in the inherent primacy of your limited worldview. And so it is with our post-cognitive American penchant for imperious verbal delinquency; our affinity for mass-media stone-throwers of distressing vitriol whose thought-speech aligns with some detail from the canvas of our inherited personal beliefs.

 

Words Get in the Way

2015 has been a provocative year for issues of race, sex and gender in our American laws, crimes and psyche. Encircling the tragedies and the victories of the past year, coursing within the body politic of divergent social factions, has been an army of astute pundits and mental poundcakes weighing in with predictable narratives and laying claim to ever-shifting moral grounds.

Free speech does not guarantee meaningful dialogue, and conflict does not ensure thoughtful resolution or well-springs of empathy. Power dynamics and untempered emotions pollute social constructs that were created, in moments of utopian aspiration, to facilitate increased awareness of our greater humanness; intended to perhaps even usher us to a more enlightened understanding of our world.

So we muddle along, punching at our reflections, shouting at our shadows, measuring accomplishments and setbacks with the same alchemical abacus used to number angels on the head of a pin. Our efforts, proclaimations and deeds are recorded in language, expressed in words desperately insufficient to the task, reduced to absurd memes: freedom, values, equality, family, marriage, rights, opportunity, sex, belief, discrimination, diversity.

Too many meanings; too many syllables….

Clarity would be nice. Some truth would be comforting. Life isn’t so convenient; its tribulations aren’t so generous in offering ready solutions. But there is one idea, one social value that I’m drawn to for its certainty and omnipresence: diversity.

don’t mean ‘diversity’ in organizational terms….not in the well-meaning human resources policies of businesses and organizations that artificially gather people together so that one of every shoe size and astrological sign are invited into the enterprise and on the cruise. I’m interested in the natural and undeniable diversity of the world; a diversity far richer in breadth and depth, and far more elegant and complicated than any attempt at replication in miniature. I’m interested in our differences – as well as our similarities – because they are honest, accurate, and real.

 

Anything for You

People the world over and across the ages have established communities of commonness; associations with like-types that allow and encourage distinctions of ‘them’ from ‘us’ in any number of ways. When things are good and life seems idyllic, we simply chill in our separate hoods, hangin’ peacefully with our peeps-in-uniformity. But when things are not so rosy, all those differences make ready fodder for suspicion, fear, distrust, condescension, blame, conflict and worse. Collective separateness from others (never perceived as equal) fuels rancor and further division, turning hearts cold and minds intransigent as we dehumanize all disagree-ers. In a combative milieu, diversity serves to identify our sparring partners.

As much as anyone, I take occasional solace in sameness. We all have times when we look to ‘family’ for strength, support, consolation, insight, understanding, direction, pity, even entertainment. Whatever perspectives are spoken within our tribe we call ‘true’ because they are heard with frequency and consistency, born of common ideology. But ideas are too often and too easily contradicted and fiercely debated by those outside our tent, leading to conversational stalemate; or policy gridlock in the case of our legislators.

Words fail and beliefs polarize. Where exactly does ‘liberal’ end and ‘conservative’ begin? When is it definitively ‘global warming’ and not ‘just changes in the weather’? What determines one being right and another being wrong? The answer is increasingly: “when I (and my friends) say so.” Facts and proofs, however incontestable or alleged, are swift victims of opinion.

Not all of our discourse is framed in hostility. Our 21st Century “you-do-you-and-I’ll-do-me” creed seems tolerant of individual differences, or at least approving of coexistence. But at its heart is a dismissal of compromise, of finding common ground when we don’t see eye-to-eye. No need for self-sacrifice; no need for collaboration. Technological conveniences contribute to a paucity of face-to-face interaction, but our growing penchant for uniformity through isolation also reduces the odds for genuine interpersonal dialogue. Let alone the fact that honest conversation is just so difficult.

As we observe past efforts at conciliation we come away wanting. We are fatigued into cynicism. Everybody got together and tried to love one another; it didn’t work. We’re better off remaining authentically independent and headstrong in our self-expression, even if that means staying separate and keeping distanced from the dissimilar world. And anyway….integration is so passé; so you can go your own way.

 

Turn the Beat Around

A lot of ill will is advocated under the banner of free speech and individual expression: bullying and broken self-esteem; flags, symbols and icons of hate; appropriations of faith and nation to foment violence; utilitarian employment of physical and economic advantage to achieve supremacy. Despite my abhorrence of hatred and injustice, I’d rather acknowledge the existence and know the nature of peoples’ ideas and perspectives, even those diametrically opposed to my own, than feign ignorance. For better and for worse, our differences comprise an undeniable aspect of our humanness.

I can accept that intractable social discord may be part of the ethereal algorithm leading us to deeper understanding of ourselves; but so too is harmonious collaboration and consensus-based inspiration. While many hands make light work, many diverse hands make provocative work, and provocation is an effective catalyst for discovery. In our struggle for truth and certainty, few things reveal themselves as incontrovertible; few precepts are beyond disagreement and immune from spin. But diversity exists as obvious and inevitable; readily available and fairly ubiquitous. It’s part of our planetary DNA.

I’m the first to concede I have no empirical proof of diversity’s worth. Whatever proposition I espouse in favor of a diverse world, I know that premise is the ‘truthy’ assumption of my pro-diversity viewpoint. But if for no other reason than stark pragmatism, I suggest we embrace diversity for its innate abundance. Humankind is a fertile source for thought. Any progress we make toward incorporating and integrating that rich variance taps an essence and energy uniquely suited to helping us make sense of our most nagging problems, solve our grandest challenges, and pursue our boldest dreams. Our finer destiny ultimately lies in our harnessing all that we are, the world over.

 

Get On Your Feet

We’re fortunate to live in a town that fosters a variety of thoughts and social practices. Bloomington is bountiful in opportunities to engage with wide-ranging perspectives. In particular, the annual Lotus World Music & Arts Festival is an extraordinary vehicle for experiencing cultures from around the world, in a setting that allows tremendous personal control over cultural selection, length of time, and the support-group context within which we share the moments. Inherent in the different musics are lyrics and pedagogies that signal important values, cross-cultural influences, political perspectives, social conditions, assumptions and aspirations of each performer and their cultural home. We only have to want the interaction and choose to act, sparked by the desire to experience, and maybe learn, something new and different.

That’s a choice I whole-heartedly make in the affirmative.

 

 

 

Despite his dependence on the Parisian art market and his active involvement in the artistic circles of the capital, Gauguin longed for a simpler environment where he could live free.

 

by Jennifer McComas

The celebrated French artist Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) left one of the most enduring legacies and fascinating bodies of work of any nineteenth-century artist. One of his final paintings, The Invocation of 1903, is currently on view at the IU Art Museum along with three prints by Gauguin from the museum’s permanent collection. A loan to the IU Art Museum from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., The Invocation offers the chance for Bloomington residents to consider a work that embodies Gauguin’s lifelong interests in stylistic experimentation, spirituality, and the “exotic.” And as a work that is inextricably linked to French colonialism, The Invocation also offers insight into Gauguin’s increasingly ambivalent attitude towards the colonial system at the end of his life.

Paul Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848, a year marked by revolutions across Europe. In the aftermath of the revolutions, Gauguin’s politically active parents sought refuge in Peru, his grandfather’s homeland, and Gauguin spent his first five years there. His early adulthood was also defined by travel. In 1865, at the age of 17, he joined the French merchant marines, sailing twice to Brazil. These events set the stage for the intense wanderlust and fascination with the exotic that characterized Gauguin’s life and art. Initially upon his return to civilian life in 1871, Gauguin attempted to settle into a bourgeois lifestyle, obtaining a position as a stockbroker in 1872 and marrying a Danish woman, Mette Gad, the following year. In 1873 he also took up painting as a hobby. By 1876, however, his work was accepted for exhibition at the Paris Salon and in 1878 he began collecting the work of the impressionists, with whom he exhibited four times.

The stock market crash of 1882 left Gauguin unemployed. At a crossroads, he took a risk on becoming a full-time artist. While this decision had detrimental effects on his family life—their decline in living standards led to a separation from his wife, who returned to Denmark with their children—it also marked the start of his most productive and artistically fertile years. The years 1886 to 1889 were defined by artistic experimentation and conceptual innovation, prompted by his travels to Pont-Aven in Brittany, to Arles in Provence, and further afield to Panama and Martinique.

At this time, working in a style that came to be known as “synthetism,” he began simplifying forms to their essential components and using pure colors in his work, applying pigment to canvas in large, flat planes separated by bold black lines. His imagery drew upon traditional Breton customs and Christian themes, and he portrayed his subjects in an enigmatic and dreamlike manner that was influenced by Symbolism. Symbolism, a French literary and artistic movement of the late nineteenth century, encouraged the rejection of realism, instead favoring dreamlike, intuitive, and spiritual imagery. The emphasis Symbolism placed on individual perception, interiority, and the spiritual world shaped Gauguin’s art for the rest of his life. So too did the rural, unindustrialized landscape and lifestyle he encountered in Brittany, where, partly to attract tourists, the local population had retained traditional dress and certain cultural practices. To Gauguin’s eyes, accustomed to the rapidly modernizing Parisian cityscape, Brittany appeared both “primitive” and culturally “authentic.”

Yet in 1890, having established himself as a leading Symbolist painter, Gauguin considered traveling further afield. Despite his dependence on the Parisian art market and his active involvement in the artistic circles of the capital, Gauguin longed for a simpler environment where he could finally live “free at last, with no money troubles,” allowing him to devote himself completely to his art. Inspired by his earlier travels in South America and the Caribbean and by Vincent van Gogh’s attempt to establish a “Studio of the South” in Arles, Gauguin now dreamed of setting up a “Studio of the Tropics.” Gauguin’s decision to move to Polynesia was likely inspired by popular travel literature, and confirmed by his visits to the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris. Held to mark the centennial of the French Revolution, the exposition celebrated France’s artistic, scientific, and imperialist achievements of the past century. A colonial display within the exposition offered visitors the opportunity to visit pavilions devoted to the colonies, which by 1889 included such holdings as Algeria, Tunisia, Madagascar, Tonkin (Vietnam), Cambodia, and Java, as well as Tahiti and other islands in the South Pacific. The elaborately constructed colonial pavilions were akin to theatrical set pieces, offering visitors a pleasant illusion of colonial life that was part imperial propaganda and part romantic myth.

In the case of Tahiti, which became a French colony in 1880 and where Gauguin would move in 1891, a romantic mythology already predated the fair by more than a century. The perception of the island as an earthly paradise, whose people “breathe only rest and sensual pleasures,” had been established by the publication in 1771 of Voyage autour du monde (Voyage around the World) by the navigator Count Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, who visited Tahiti while circumnavigating the globe in 1767. Misunderstanding the welcome his crew had received in Tahiti—during which chiefs had offered young girls to the French sailors, likely in order to secure trading privileges with the foreigners or to capture supernatural powers they were perceived to hold—he named the island “New Cythera,” a reference to the island which, in ancient Greek mythology, was the birthplace of Aphrodite, goddess of love.

The reports following Captain James Cook’s voyages only strengthened this European perception of Tahiti. In Gauguin’s own lifetime, the French naval officer and popular author Pierre Loti (1850–1923) also offered a romanticized and sensual picture of a paradisiacal Tahiti in his 1880 book Le Mariage de Loti. By situating Tahiti as a paradise, Bougainville and Loti merely shifted the concept of a classical Arcadia or long-lost golden age—long a trope of European art—to the South Pacific, thus aligning it with an intensifying European interest in all things “exotic.” This romantic image of Tahiti as a land of abundance, easy living, and friendly inhabitants was skillfully co-opted by the organizers of the 1889 colonial exposition, who sought to encourage French immigration to the Pacific colonies. While the fair’s attractive presentation of the colonies undoubtedly sparked Gauguin’s interest in Tahiti as a potential location for his “Studio of the Tropics,” so too did the island’s status as a French colony, which would facilitate his move abroad and help him maintain contact with the Parisian art world.

In March 1891, Gauguin requested funding from the Ministry of Public Education and Fine Arts to “study and ultimately paint the customs and landscapes of Tahiti,” a proposition that undoubtedly interested the colonial administrators, who approved his request. The following month, he sailed for Tahiti, where he stayed for two years before returning temporarily to France. The paintings Gauguin produced in Tahiti are among his most iconic; they blend the synthetist style he had developed in Brittany with Christian iconography, motifs he saw in Polynesian, Maori, and Javanese art, and a sense of the spirit world that pervaded traditional Tahitian culture. Upon Gauguin’s return to Paris in 1893 he busied himself with the production of Noa Noa, a book of woodcuts that accompanied an exhibition of his work at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, and were meant to explain his Tahitian imagery to a European audience. Although the exhibition was fairly successful, resulting in the sale of forty paintings, and although Gauguin had found Oceania less arcadian and more expensive than he had imagined, he returned to Tahiti in the summer of 1895. He would never return to Europe. Gauguin’s final years were marked by financial distress, legal problems, severe depression, and ill health, including a diagnosis of syphilis. He also found himself increasingly disenchanted with the French colonial society in Papeete, Tahiti’s capital, and the transformation of traditional Tahitian culture by westernization. Throughout the 1890s, he struggled to reconcile Tahiti’s colonial reality with the paradise constructed by Bougainville, Loti, and the displays of the 1889 colonial exposition, and ultimately determined to travel to a less developed and more remote part of Polynesia. He was prevented from doing so only by his precarious financial situation.

In 1901, the opportunity to resettle in the Marquesas Islands, some 750 miles northeast of Tahiti, presented itself when the Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard offered Gauguin a monthly stipend in exchange for regular shipments of paintings. While this financial stability provided Gauguin with the means to make the move to the Marquesas, the arrangement also placed certain artistic restrictions on him. Gauguin needed to produce pictures that Vollard would be able to sell to Parisian collectors. Therefore, as the art historian Elizabeth C. Childs has noted, Gauguin’s most marketable Marquesan paintings tended to be pastoral landscapes that avoided any indication of colonial strife or European intervention.

Yet, despite these peaceful images, and Gauguin’s own perception that the Marquesas would be more “unspoiled” than Tahiti, they had in fact been greatly affected by their annexation by the French in 1842. In particular, its people had been decimated by western diseases, including venereal disease and influenza. When Gauguin arrived on the island of Hiva Oa in mid-September 1901, the Marquesan population stood at about 3,500, whereas it has been estimated at approximately 80,000 in the late eighteenth century. Indeed, it was during his two years in the village of Atuona on Hiva Oa that he began to question both the colonial system and the Catholic Church’s influence in Polynesia. While he did not necessarily find the more “authentic” Oceanic culture he had sought, Gauguin nevertheless enjoyed a less marginalized social position than he had in Tahiti, and he was able to form closer friendships with Pacific Islanders during his stay in the Marquesas.

Perhaps due to the personal relationships he formed there, he even became embroiled in conflicts with the French colonial administrators due to his advocacy on behalf of the indigenous people. This is not to say that Gauguin’s growing awareness of indigenous rights and colonial exploitation had a significant impact on his art. His own aesthetic concerns, combined with his need to consider the Parisian market, dictated the subject and style of his paintings. Audiences in France expected to see in Gauguin’s paintings the idyllic vision of Polynesia that had been established by Bougainville, Loti, and the 1889 colonial exposition.

The Invocation appears to offer viewers this idyllic vision, yet a closer look reveals a hint of Gauguin’s newly ambivalent attitudes towards French colonialism. The focus of The Invocation’s composition is a nude female figure who stands before a verdant, mountainous landscape—the environs of Atuona—with her arms stretched skywards. She is surrounded by four female figures, two seated and two standing. Three are semi-nude, while the fourth—the only one who looks at the praying figure—is dressed in a style of loose-fitting garment introduced by European missionaries. A cross visible in the upper left of the composition signals the location of a Catholic church and cemetery.

The Invocation is painted in Gauguin’s unique style, featuring a matte surface with a regular pattern of vertical brushstrokes, which almost impressionistically evoke the lushness of the landscape. By contrast, the bodies of the figures in the composition are flatly painted and heavily outlined, in the stylized manner he had developed in Brittany. Motifs and iconography from Gauguin’s Tahitian oeuvre frequently recur in his later, Marquesan works, and The Invocation is a prime example. Most strikingly, the pose of the central praying figure recalls that of the most prominent figure—the centrally placed woman who reaches up to pick a piece of fruit—in the mural-sized painting Gauguin himself considered to be his masterpiece, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, an 1897-98 meditation on the cycle of life

While the precise meaning of Gauguin’s Polynesian paintings is often elusive, many address the topic of spirituality. Spirituality was, in fact, one of the most persistent themes in Gauguin’s oeuvre. Traditional Christian iconography, as well as the depiction of a more esoteric, visionary Christianity, appears in Gauguin’s work around the time of his introduction in the 1880s to the circle of Symbolist artists and writers around the poet Stephané Mallarmé, who himself became one of Gauguin’s staunchest supporters.

In Tahiti, Gauguin’s paintings presented a hybrid vision of Christian and Polynesian spirituality (or at least his own understanding of it). The Invocation, on the other hand, alludes to the clash between Christianity and traditional Polynesian religion, which was characterized by a complex pantheon of spirits, gods, and ancestors. The Christianization that accompanied colonialism became particularly troubling to Gauguin in the Marquesas, where European religion had been introduced more recently. While English missionaries had arrived in Tahiti in 1797, and Christianity had become widely established on the island by 1820, it was not until the 1850s that Catholic missionaries began to make a significant impact in the Marquesas. For the intended European viewer of The Invocation, knowing little about Polynesian culture and religion, the specific nature of the prayer is enigmatic—who or what is being invoked and why? Yet, the praying nude figure offers a clear contrast and perhaps an antidote to the restrictions Christian missionaries imposed on the Marquesans—as represented by the dress and headscarf worn by the woman in the background as well as the cross dominating the distant landscape.

Shortly after completing The Invocation, Gauguin died on the Marquesan island of Hiva Oa on May 9, 1903, at the age of fifty-four, and his body was laid to rest in the cemetery of the Catholic church seen in the painting’s background. Produced at the end of Gauguin’s life, The Invocation occupies a unique place in the artist’s oeuvre, representing the culmination of his lifelong artistic experimentation, innovation, and total dedication to his art. In analyzing Gauguin’s Polynesian oeuvre, scholars in recent decades have often turned a critical eye towards Gauguin’s complicity with the exploitative colonial system. Yet while The Invocation indeed offered early-twentieth-century French audiences the colonial fantasy of a tropical paradise that they expected and desired, it also offers insight into Gauguin’s increasingly ambivalent and complicated attitude towards colonialism.

 

Jennifer McComas, class of 1949, is the Curator of European and American Art at the

IU Art Museum

A conversation with Elizabeth Stephens, Annie Sprinkle and Kara Rooney

[editor’s note: Annie Sprinkle is an artist and a feminist adult film star with a PhD in human sexuality. She and her life partner and collaborator for 13 years, filmmaker Beth Stephens, came to Bloomington as guests of the Kinsey Institute for the fall show, “For Love or Money,” Kinsey. Some of Annie’s photographic artwork was included in the exhibition. Both Annie and Beth were featured guests at the Sex Salon and their film, Goodbye Gauley Mountain–An Ecosexual Love Story, was screened at IU.
“Our film is about the tragedy of mountain top removal mining,” Beth says, “and it is also a love story about the Appalachia Mountains and the people who live in them.” It has screened at international film festivals and major museums; it’s still making the festival rounds and soon it will be released for pay per view by the distributor, Kino Lorber. Sprinkle and Stephens are “so totally thrilled to show the film at IU.”Stephens’ family has worked in mining since the 1600’s beginning in Cornwall, England. Born in Montgomery, West Virginia, she says she was raised to marry into the coal business. Instead she moved to California, became an artist and professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, and married Annie. The two women produced, directed, and star in the film together.
Goodbye Gauley Mountain was three years in the making. This documentary introduces some surprising moments, such as a wedding to the Appalachian Mountains and the gals singing the state song to the police. Earth First Journal’s Russ McSpadden writes, “Without compare, this is the sexiest nature documentary and one of the most profound films to deal with the beauty and tragedy of the Appalachian Mountains in the age of King Coal.”

“Our goal,” say the filmmakers, “is to spread the word about serious environmental issues, and also to make the environmental movement a little more sexy, fun and diverse.”]

 

KARA: Lets start with one of your art projects. You two did a series of nineteen weddings as performance art in nine countries. How do you bring a very private or intimate experience such as a wedding ceremony and its associated connotations into the public sphere, and what was it like to share those encounters for the first time with an audience?

BETH: We started doing the weddings as a form of protest, because it pissed us off that we weren’t allowed to get legally married. Not that we wanted to. It just wasn’t fair.

ANNIE: We had both done a ton of work about sex, so we wanted to try being ‘radically traditional’ and explore ‘love’ in a non-Hallmarky way. Our weddings were big love fests, which were quite humorous and irreverent, of course.

BETH: We married the Earth and other nature entities; rocks, soil, the sea, the sky, a lake in Finland…. Our first wedding was at the Harmony Burlesque theater, which was a lap dancing place on Broadway just below Canal street.

ANNIE: We had about 120 people there. We started out small. We sent out invitations and asked for no material gifts but invited people to help co-create the weddings. We had a procession, then about 20 3-minute performances; then the vows, the rings, the kiss, recession, and a ‘reception’ with more performances. When we got to the part where the officiant says, “does anyone object to this marriage,” our friend Barbara Carrellas objected. She hates weddings and marriage. So every wedding there after always had a couple of people perform objections to the marriage. When we did the kiss at the first wedding, we activated a tesla coil.

BETH: We wanted to do our first wedding of the series in Manhattan, even though we were living in California at the time, because that’s where we met, and where we both started our art careers. It’s where a lot of our close friends and former lovers were. Annie did her first one-woman show at the Harmony Burlesque, so the theater had sentimental value. Plus, it was in 2003 and not that long after 9/11.

ANNIE: Our friend, artist Sheila Pepe, described that first wedding as, “Broadway meets Fluxus in a whorehouse.”

KARA: The first wedding took place relatively soon after 9/11. Was that a coincidence, or were these performances meant to act as group healing sessions in some regard?

ANNIE: When the war in Afghanistan broke out, we thought, “hell, we can get along, let’s just make a commitment to work things out if there’s conflict. If we as individuals can’t work things out, how do we expect countries to get along?” We felt the personal was political, and that we were going to set an example somehow. But it was also a call for love; it was about wanting to generate more love in the world. We definitely wanted to bring some love to Manhattan after 9/11.

BETH: There were three different impulses that came together to create the wedding performances. The first one was that Annie and I got hitched up in a domestic partner ceremony so that Annie could get some health insurance.. I had a job as a professor, with benefits, so it was like sharing health insurance. Then the war in Afghanistan broke out. We realized that the wedding ritual was a great platform for transmitting a message, a feeling, a performance, whatever. At our domestic partner ceremony the press was there and we spoke out against the war and we were on the news all over the USA. If you present something as a special ritual, people seem to pay more attention.

KARA: Would it be accurate then to say that these performances acted for each of you as a therapeutic vehicle, or was this curative element a byproduct of their production?

ANNIE: We have done seventeen of the big weddings and only three were about people, the rest were about marrying nature. So for me, I always wanted to feel more connected with nature. I grew up in LA, lived in Manhattan 22 years, then San Francisco… The ecosexual weddings definitely connected me with nature. We have a video that is ten minutes long that shows highlights from some of our weddings. You can watch it on this web page: http://gauleymountain.com at the bottom of the page.

BETH: That’s where we first became really involved in environmentalism. We thought if there were a way to heal the earth that incorporated the kinds of issues we are looking at, and if people are part of the earth (people are nature) – then we would like to heal that binary system that separates people from nature.

ANNIE: If you think about it, people really are made of water, minerals, even stardust! So if people are made of the stuff of the Earth, therefore they are Earth. So when we married the Earth, that shifted everything for us. We followed our muses and ended up exactly where we are supposed to be today: developing ecosex art, theory, practice and activism. We’re trying to make the environmental movement more sexy, fun, and diverse, and make it a place for queers, sex workers and weird performance artists to feel comfortable. Hey, we don’t all fit into the Sierra Club. We hope our film, Goodbye Gauley Mountain—An Ecosexual Love Story entices other people to love the earth more.

Beth: We started shooting our next film, which is about water issues in California. Working title is Water Makes Us Wet. There’s more info at www.theEcosexuals.org.

KARA: This question of who profits or who benefits has been at the heart of the feminist debate, especially around the sex industry, for quite some time. In opening the picture up, you’ve taken that binary way of looking at the system of exploitation versus empowerment, or oppression versus liberation, out of the equation. You’re moving the conversation beyond these poles, presenting something very different in that regard.

ANNIE: To a lot of Americans, sex is about what sex toys you have, what lingerie you wear, what porn you have. Some people think you can’t have great sex unless you have the right strap-on. As ecosexuals we want to send a post consumerist message. We’re even saying “Stop making and watching porn! Let’s bring back the live sex show! Porn watching is using up so much electricity.” To be honest, I still do love lingerie and strap-ons. But that’s not the be-all end-all. There’s a whole world out there!

KARA: Annie, what you were saying before about the sex industry and its commodified entrenchment, in many ways it can be argued that the technological models we utilize mirror our relationship and needs to art, that our contemporary comfort zones are now to a large degree located either behind or in front of the camera instead of face to face. In your opinion, how does the sensibility of this mediated interface effect the consumption of erotica, porn, art, and other spheres of aesthetic or sexual interest?

ANNIE: From a historical perspective, human sexuality changes and goes through phases and has popular and unpopular styles. I believe everyone is at the right place at the right time. With the Internet, we are definitely exploring and discovering really interesting new territory. Who is to judge what’s better or worse, having computers or not? Now I’ll contradict myself. I’d argue that its important to keep making porn, because is it’s kind of an historical record. If you look at porn from the 1800s or the 1920s, sex was different then. Even blow job techniques change. Each person is an erotic universe unto themselves. We all have more to learn, and we all have something to teach. That’s what is so great about sex as subject matter, its endless, and there’s more to discover and create.

KARA: So this mediated interface does not affect the way that you approach your work or the consumption and reception of it? Whether it’s face-to-face or encountered via the television screen or the computer monitor, it’s –

ANNIE: It’s definitely best to experience our work live, in a group, to actually come with us for a weekend ecosex workshop and camp out and participate and interact with nature.

BETH: But ecosex includes technology too. We do love our social networking interfaces.
There is something ecosexy about computers, and ecosexy about cities too.

KARA: Annie, can you speak to how your prior experiences in the sex industry and the way that technology might have been used in those settings is different or is similar to the way that it’s used in the art world now? Perhaps not in your performances per se, but in other performances that you’ve been a part of, or that you’ve been witness to.

ANNIE: I totally loved combination of having sex and at the same time, shooting a film. It’s a great combo. Sex and creativity are so linked, They are one and the same impulse. With sex, and with creativity, or technology, some days are better than others, some days you just don’t go very far. Sometimes you’re a lead balloon going nowhere, and sometimes you fly. In our last theater piece, Earthy; an Ecosex Bootcamp, we use technology, video, lighting, and computers, to give the impression we are out in nature! That’s crazy. After we did that show, we redid it, we got another director and took it outside and made An Ecosexual Walking Tour which we just performed in June and will do in Central Park on September 16th. Much nicer to do a show about nature outside,

KARA: In terms of the way that you’re engaging with nature, especially in regards to your more recent work, there seems to be an invocation of the goddess in the texts that you’re employing and your physical presentation of self —

ANNIE: If anything, we think of the Earth as transgendered, actually multigendered – we’re not so into “lesbian” either. The word and concept of “lesbian” and “goddess” seems old fashioned, sort of quaint and nostalgic.

BETH: We’re definitely going with more of a punk rock edge these days.

ANNIE: The idea of having making love only with people seems really limiting, when you can make love with a tree, a rock, the ocean… So even this idea of “heterosexual” or “lesbian” or even “bisexual” – bisexual? Why only two? It all seems very limiting compared to what we imagine, which is a transgendered ginormous Universe with, gazillions of erotic and sensual possibilities.

BETH: It’s not just transgender, it’s transgenital.

ANNIE: Yeah, its totally beyond genital sex! But it includes genital sex of course. We love genital sex too. All sex is really ecosex!

BETH: I think a lot of strategies and tactics towards different kinds of political liberation have been viewed as having a narrow horizon – the horizons have narrowed for certain things, and I think with ecosexuality we’re really opening up the spaces of hopefulness that something else could move in a different way because we’re politically very clear about what we’re trying to do. We’re really trying to shift this metaphor around the Earth from ‘Earth as mother’ to ‘Earth as lover,’ to get people to engage in a more mutual way of being in and thinking about the world. But we’re not punitive, you know? We’re not “you’re either with us, or against us”. You can still maintain your heterosexuality and be ecosexual, or gayness, or your bisexuality and be ecosexual – it’s not an exclusive sexuality. It’s also not an exclusive viewpoint of the world. We hope our kind of ecosex engenders more passion, empathy and intimacy with nature, but also a wider vision as opposed to a narrow, gathered vision.

KARA: You’re not requiring people to identify with one state of being in the world; you’re actively challenging those codified norms.

BETH: Yeah, it’s really a campaign of attraction; if you want to be part of it then hey,
everybody’s welcome, but if you don’t, that’s fine too, bye bye.

* Kara Rooney is an artist and critic based in New York, where she currently serves as the Managing Art Editor for The Brooklyn Rail.

 – by Paul Sturm & LuAnne Holladay

 

“You don’t know about me but I’ll bet you want to; Everything will be alright if we just keep dancing like we’re 22.”  -Taylor Swift

Over the course of four fast-flying days (September 24-27), the 22nd annual Lotus World Music & Arts Festival will fill our downtown streets and B-town hearts with fab musics from across the globe.
For the uninitiated, the annual Lotus World Music & Arts Festival is an outrageously enjoyable music festival; one of our nation’s oldest and best-known world music gatherings. Artists from literally all over the world vie each year for a spot on the festival itinerary, so the talent is always impressive and performances are consistently inspiring.
This global shindig commingles a dizzying variety of world cultures presented through a broad range of sounds and musical styles. Lotus has booming party music, thoughtful chamber music, rowdy street bands, intimate solo and duo performers, emerging artists and experienced masters, acoustic groups and totally-wired amplified acts to enliven even the most aloof listener’s inner booty-shaker.

Festival performances are staged within a network of outdoor tents and indoor venues selected for their close-knit proximity. Which means that Lotus also delivers an exuberant, nomadic street scene with sidewalk food vendors, corner buskers, impromptu aesthetic experiences, and the perfect setting for endless social hookups and ‘BF’ hobnobbery.
Music is the main fare, but visual art and participatory activities abound for those who crave multiple ways to celebrate internationalism. Beginning August 28, the Ivy Tech John Waldron Arts Center Galleries will once again devote exhibit space to a Lotus-related exhibition of festival textiles (on view Aug.28-Sep.26, free & open to the public). Athena boutique (on Walnut) will host its usual hand-drum jam sessions in front of the shop.
On September 24, launching the 4-day festival is the annual Thursday night “Kick-Off Concert” at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, this year featuring Baltic Crossing and Sierra Maestra: two of the strongest ensembles in the Lotus-22 lineup. Admission is $15 advance, $20 day of show. Closing the festival on Sunday afternoon is the traditional “World Spirit Concert” at the BCT, featuring Maarja Nuut and Şirin Pancaroğlu, both making their Lotus premiere. Admission is the $5 Lotus pin (a cool keepsake!).

The Lotus Arts Village is moving from 6th Street to Kirkwood Avenue on the south side of the square (in front of Fountain Square Mall). The Village’s usual visual art displays and interactive play spaces will be accompanied by an assortment of food trucks providing delectable street munchies on Friday and Saturday. And fans of public revelry will delight in the return of a Lotus parade on Saturday night led by the members of Fanfaraï, giving our human caravan a lively North African flavor.
More free fun can be had at the annual “Lotus in the Park” family friendly fête on Saturday afternoon at Waldron/Hill/Buskirk Park (aka 3rd Street Park). Concerts, workshops and ‘make-it-&-take-it’ craft tents will be joined this year by four craft artists appearing as part of a partnership with Traditional Arts Indiana and its Indiana Bicentennial arts series. The artists – members of TAI’s Rotating Exhibit Network – provide demonstrations of their traditional craft alongside a free-standing 3×7-foot panel that features engaging photos and info describing the folklife practice. Also joining the Lotus Park action on Saturday will be Bloomington’s Ryan Academy of Irish Dance and a Filipino dance group from Indianapolis, both offering demonstrations.
Looking at the Friday-Saturday Artist Showcase nights, the ‘talent-nova’ will blow your mind and elevate your aesthetic ch’i. Ireland’s all-star Brock McGuire Band returns to provide that dash of Celtic music no Lo-fest would be complete without. The renowned Heritage Blues Orchestra will be in town for one night (Friday) in a set that will irrefutably affirm the power of the blues. On the opposite end of the size-spectrum, Korean duo Su:m will absolutely thrill those who love expressive chamber music performed on traditional acoustic instruments.

Lotus has booming party music, thoughtful chamber music, rowdy street bands, intimate solo and duo performers, emerging artists and experienced masters, acoustic groups and totally-wired amplified acts to enliven even the most aloof listener’s inner booty-shaker.

This year’s festival includes two performers who use electronics with spectacular musical results: Maarja Nuut and tUnE-yArDs demonstrate masterful digital looping technique, and tUnE-yArDs also offers a hefty dose of superb old-skool synth work. Where Maarja’s soundscapes are lushly harmonious, tUnE-yArDs’ loop-jams are lively and invigorating. If you seek unforgettably wonderful musical memories, these two acts are on the must-see list.
Lovers of rich polyphonic choral music will want to see Zedashe from the Republic of Georgia. Their close harmonies and pronounced vocal techniques are the stuff of sonic beauty. The emotional power of great singing also will resonate in many solo and ‘feature’ vocal performers: Bhi Bhiman, Ester Rada, Jessica Fichot, Karolina Cicha & Bart Pałyga, Lula Pena, Martha Redbone, and Nano Stern.
All in all, this year’s Lotus Festival includes 24 different musical acts, with only 6 returning bands; so it’s a perfect year to purchase a 2-night Festival Pass…there’s just that much brand new and superb musical talent to be heard and seen. And only a third of the performers are booked for single sets, which increases your odds of catching every artist by juggling performance venues and artist rosters across two nights of stone-cold sonic bliss.
Lotus Festival tickets for all admission-based events can be purchased in person at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater Box Office, by phone at 812-323-3020, or online at bctboxoffice.com.

Complete artist profiles follow:

Aziz Sahmaoui & University of Gnawa (Morocco, Senegal, France)
Moroccan Aziz Sahmaoui’s musical passions are rock, fusion, and Gnawa, the trance music of Northern Africa. His voice, swinging between the inflexions of bluesman, muezzin, and crooner, pulls the audience into his poetic universe where jubilation is the order of the day. With his talented squad of musicians – his ‘University of Gnawa’ – Aziz will funk your junk with hot tunes, rousing choruses, and an unstoppable beat to drive your feet. Pulsing Gnawan rhythms act as groundwork for inspiring musical improvisation by the high-flying instrumentalists of the University. As Aziz says: “The groove, you’ve either got it or you haven’t.” Ain’t that the truth!
Lotus premiere

Baltic Crossing (England, Finland, Denmark)
The soaring, joyous music of Baltic Crossing comes from the folk scenes of England and Scandinavia. This young quintet’s musical prowess and love of old dance traditions make for brilliant sets of jigs, polskas, waltzes, schottisches, and other tunes. Ian Stephenson (guitar) and Andy May (Northumbrian bagpipes & piano) hail from England; the Scandinavian side is represented by Danish musician Kristian Bugge (violin), and Esko Järvelä (violin) and Antti Järvelä (mandolin & double bass) from Finland. Baltic Crossing’s repertoire is mostly instrumental, often playful, and always tuneful. Fans of Frigg will recognize brothers Esko & Antti, and will find a lot to love in Baltic Crossing.
Lotus premiere

Bhi Bhiman (USA)
American singer-songwriter Bhi Bhiman is known for his fine guitar playing, his clever and edgy lyrics, and a remarkable voice that has earned comparisons to such artists as Nina Simone and Bill Withers. His most recent album, Rhythm & Reason, explores the immigrant experience and the politics of race. The American-born son of Sri Lankan parents, he says that “My sense of place was, is, not limited to my county or my state or my country. It’s…an international feeling of community.” His stylish covers of classic songs make excellent companions to his original material, and Bhi is equally comfortable performing at Bonnaroo, Carnegie Hall, or on a Lotus stage.
Lotus premiere; ONE SHOW ONLY

Brock McGuire Band (Ireland)
Last seen at Lotus in 2011, the Brock McGuire Band returns to town performing Irish music with passion and precision. Founding members Paul Brock (button accordion & melodeon) and Manus McGuire (fiddle) now live in County Clare, and both are award-winning masters of Irish traditional music. The band also includes Dublin-based Garry O’Meara on banjo, mandolin, & vocals, and Limerick-based composer and arranger Denis Carey on piano. Their repertoire emphasizes Irish music; but don’t be surprised if they toss in a few arrangements of American old-time, bluegrass, French-Canadian, and other Celtic tunes. Discover why the Irish American News calls them the Instrumental Band of the Decade.

Delhi 2 Dublin (Canada)
A Delhi 2 Dublin set is possibly the only place you’ll see a fiddle player rocking out with a kilt-wearing Korean, flanked by two Bhangra percussionists and a vocalist who looks like he would be at home in a Bollywood music video. The group began in 2006 as a one-off performance in a Vancouver club, and they’ve been at it ever since, throwing Bhangra, Celtic, dub, reggae, and electronica into a musical blender. Match that multiculti fearlessness with electrifying live performances and you have a perfect Lo-fab dance storm. They brought the funk, the sweat, and a hard-rocking tent scene at their solitary Lotus show back in 2012; this year, make D2D your last-call party stop on Friday and Saturday to find out why one reviewer called them “the United Nations of rock and roll.”

Ester Rada (Israel, Ethiopia)
Ester Rada was born in Israel to Ethiopian parents, and her cross-cultural sound builds on that dual heritage. Her band’s instrumentation and arrangements reflect Israeli music, the influence of Ethiopian jazz, strong rhythmic drive, and a multicultural sensibility. Listen to her powerful, confident vocals and solid grooves, and it’s also easy to trace Ester’s influences to divas of classic and contemporary soul and R&B: Aretha Franklin, Pattie LaBelle, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott. Members of the band come from Yemen, Poland, Morocco, Iraq, and Israel. Ester’s musical melting pot serves up a delicious stew of sonic delights.
Lotus premiere

Fanfaraï (France, Algeria, Morocco)
Fanfaraï fuses a cultural mix of 14 musicians for a colorful explosion of North African music. The Paris-based group grew in 2005 out of a smaller Algerian street band, adding musicians from France, Morocco, and India who share a passion for what they call “the traditions of festive wanderings.” Brassy horns and booming percussion blend with Arab, Berber, Afro-Cuban, and Latin influences to create big, bold street music. Fanfaraï draws on popular brass-band repertoire, salsa, jazz, and funk, as well as the heritage of Idbalen and Zernadjia – itinerant street musicians who have animated Algerian rituals and feasts since the turn of the 20th century. Fanfaraï’s music embodies an energetic, cheerful diversity – as lively and varied as the musicians themselves.
Lotus premiere

Heritage Blues Orchestra (USA)
The grit of low-down country and urban blues mixed with the bold brass of New Orleans; the hand-clapping fervor of gospel punctuated with fiery postmodern, jazz-infused horn arrangements; the haunting cries of work songs and pulsating drums that reach back to musical roots centuries old. You’ll journey across the Middle Passage, be driven down Highway 49 from Clarksdale to New Orleans, go from chain gangs and juke joints to orchestra pits, church pews, and even back porches. The celebrated Heritage Blues Orchestra’s music is a testament to the enduring power, possibilities, and boundless beauty of African-American music. “Heritage Blues Orchestra may be a blues version of what Wynton Marsalis and his Jazz at Lincoln Center cohorts regularly do—namely, apply historical research and practical experience to different traditional styles, and finally (and not easily) to create something that is at once new and timeless” (Wall Street Journal).
Lotus premiere; ONE SHOW ONLY

Jaron Freeman-Fox & the Opposite of Everything (Canada)
Canadian violinist and composer Jaron Freeman-Fox straddles the shifting border between tradition and innovation. The name of his band – the Opposite of Everything – hints at what he likes to call the general lunacy and creative drive of his music. His musical roots are in Celtic and bluegrass fiddling, but Jaron’s further study of Indian classical music and jazz has helped to push his music further into genre-defying realms. He’s even collaborated with a troupe of Rajasthani nomads. You could call this restless energy and boisterous enthusiasm “The New Ruckus” (the title of a track on Jaron’s first CD), or you could just take it from the Ottawa International Jazz Festival folks, who dubbed Jaron “the Jimi Hendrix of the violin.”
Lotus premiere

Jayme Stone’s Lomax Project (Canada, USA)
Focusing on songs collected by legendary folklorist and field recording pioneer Alan Lomax, this ‘collaboratory’ led by Canadian banjo player Jayme Stone brings together some of North America’s most distinctive and creative roots musicians to revive, recycle, and re-imagine traditional music. The song list includes Bahamian sea chanties, African-American a cappella singing from the Georgia Sea Islands, ancient Appalachian ballads, fiddle tunes, and work songs collected from both well-known musicians and everyday folk: sea captains, cowhands, fishermen, prisoners, and homemakers. This was and is music of the people. Lomax Project album collaborators are many; those likely to be on hand for Lotus include Jayme on banjo, Grammy Award winner Tim O’Brien on fiddle, Margaret Glaspy on guitar, and Moira Smiley on accordion. The Lomax Project is this year’s Lotus Dickey Artist, honoring that late, great Indiana old-time musician and song writer.
Lotus premiere

Jessica Fichot (USA)
Los Angeles-based chanteuse, songwriter, and accordionist Jessica Fichot is a lot like her hometown of Paris: French at heart, but with a soul that’s truly international. Drawing from a French, Chinese, and American upbringing, her music fuses styles and languages, taking the listener on a journey out of the French chanson tradition and into the realms of gypsy jazz, 1940s Chinese swing, international folk, and her own imagination. Jessica visited Lotusland for the first time back in 2010; she returns to Bloomington with a new album sung in Mandarin: Dear Shanghai. Armed with accordion, toy piano, and multilingual vocals, Fichot has toured the world with her quartet of like-minded multi-culturalists. Préparer pour la béatitude musicale, dear Francophiles.

Kardemimmit (Finland)
The four young women of Kardemimmit sing and play the Finnish national instrument – the kantele. If you’re new to the kantele, think zither or dulcimer: the quartet has mastered both the 15-stringed and 38-stringed varieties. The distinctive sound of this plucked acoustic instrument and their delicate, tight vocal harmonies in a style of singing known as reki make Kardemimmit a standout contemporary Nordic ensemble. Maija Pokela, Jutta Rahmel, Anna Wegelius and Leeni Wegelius perform traditional Finnish songs as well as their own modern, original folk music – adding to a long and dynamic musical tradition. This quartet racked up an enthusiast following of B-town fans when they played Lotus two years ago; their live performances are simply divine.

Karolina Cicha & Bart Pałyga (Poland)
Karolina Cicha’s impassioned, compelling interpretations of the old songs of the Kresy (the Polish Eastern Borderlands) mix folk tradition, rock and pop, and performance art. Karolina sings in the languages of the Kresy: Polish, Belorussian, Ukrainian, Russian, Lithuanian, Tatar, Romani, Yiddish, and even Esperanto — and while her primary instrument is the accordion, she is a self-taught multi-instrumentalist. A student of Poland’s diverse cultural traditions, Karolina honed her art at the renowned Gardzienice Academy for Theatre Practices. With cellist and vocalist Bart Pałyga, Karolina brings a new boldness and energy to old songs of Poland’s multi-ethnic cultural landscape.
Lotus premiere

Lotus Dickey Song Workshop (USA)
Bloomington folk music maestro, Grey Larsen, will once again recruit a cadre of his pals to lead a workshop on the songs of Hoosier singer/songwriter Lotus Dickey (1911-1989). Lotus was a Hoosier treasure; his curious, humble, gentle spirit inspired everyone who knew him. The workshop is an occasion to celebrate Lotus Dickey’s contributions to the art and life of Indiana and to enjoy the power of voices united in song.
ONE SHOW ONLY

Lula Pena (Portugal)
Fado, the signature musical tradition of Portugal, is embodied in the voice and music of Lula Pena. Elements of Portuguese folk music, French chanson, Cape Verdean morna, and Brazilian bossa nova color Lula’s music, but its heart is in fado. Her deep, sensitive voice and spare guitar work communicate the feeling of powerful longing, or saudade, essential to the genre. Thoughtful, emotional, poetic, stark, mesmerizing: all apply to her unforgettable performances. Lula has rarely toured outside Portugal, and Lotus is proud to present her at this year’s festival.
Lotus premiere

Maarja Nuut (Estonia)
Lyrical, trippy, trancelike, transcendent: fiddler Maarja Nuut creates remarkable soundscapes from the traditional dance tunes, songs, and stories of her native Virumaa in Northern Estonia. Using electronics, she often builds from a single violin motif, deftly looping it and adding harmonic layers with voices and violin improvisations. An Estonian loopmaster in the Andrew Bird/Robert Fripp mode, Maarja spins inventive and beautiful sounds from simple musical origins. Her performances are unforgettable: deeply folkloric, yet thoroughly modern. Her premiere at Lotus is not to be missed.
Lotus premiere

Martha Redbone Roots Project (USA)
Martha Redbone is an Independent Music Award-winning musician of Cherokee, Choctaw, Shawnee, and African-American descent. Martha explores traditional and modern variations of folk, roots, blues, tribal, and soul music. She launched the Martha Redbone Roots Project in 2012 with release of The Garden of Love – Songs of William Blake, a collection of 18th-century poems set to the music of Appalachia. Her latest project, Bone Hill, is an interdisciplinary theater work that brings to light the post-slavery history of people of color working the coal mines of Appalachia amid Jim Crow laws. The music is radically wide-ranging – from traditional Cherokee chants and lullabies to bluegrass, blues, gospel, jazz, rock and roll, R&B, and funk – all powered by her magnificent voice. In the words of collaborator Roberta Uno, “Martha’s music is ancestral, soul-shaking, and elevating.”
Lotus premiere

Nano Stern (Chile)
Chilean singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and musical activist Nano Stern serenades audiences with nothing but a guitar and his voice, bringing listeners to the edge of their seat – and to their feet – to move, laugh, weep, and revel in heartfelt songs of Chile. The grandson of Jewish refugees, Stern has created a sound that incorporates the mid-century folk reverberations of his homeland with rock attitude, classical craft, and jazz techniques. He explores the complexities of the personal and political, and finds new ways to play with Chile’s long-repressed roots music. It’s a mix that also captures the indigenous, African, and European elements that define Latin music. “It’s an enormous gift we received from the people of the past, from the tradition itself,” he says. “Yet…I think it should be open to all kinds of promiscuity, to every sound getting together with everything else. That’s when things get truly beautiful.”
Lotus premiere; ONE SHOW ONLY

Sierra Maestra (Cuba)
Featuring many stars of Cuban music since the group’s formation in the late 1970s, Sierra Maestra was the first of the modern-era Cuban bands to play in the old-style son line-up: tres (3-string Cuban guitar), guitar, trumpet, percussion (bongo & güiro), and vocals. The arrangement reflects the song style’s golden age of the 1920s and ‘30s. Five of the original nine members remain in the band, which has pioneered the son revival for new generations. The band’s name is a tribute to the mountain range in eastern Cuba that is considered the birthplace of son. With our Cuban détente, and Carnival Cruise Lines announcing trips to Cuba, it’s a perfect year to bring la cultura cubana back to Bloomington via Sierra Maestra: the heartbeat of Cuban soul. Fun Lotus fact: Sierra Maestra was last in town for Lotus 1997, gracing the ‘stage’ of the old Indiana Theater before it was transformed into the Buskirk-Chumley. They’re in for a treat…and so are we.
ONE SHOW ONLY

Şirin Pancaroğlu (Turkey)
Her work in unearthing the historical Turco-Ottoman harp called the çeng has earned Şirin Pancaroğlu a unique place in Turkish music and folklore. While she is trained in classical music (with a Master’s degree from the IU Jacobs School of Music), her eclectic influences include Turkish traditional music, improvisation, electronic music, and tango. Şirin’s efforts to re-introduce the harp to wider audiences in her native Turkey led her to active concertizing and to founding the Association for the Art of the Harp. Once a symbol of mysticism among Turkish poets and writers, the çeng has reemerged in contemporary Turkish folk music, thanks largely to Şirin and her music-making.
Lotus premiere; ONE SHOW ONLY

숨[suːm] (South Korea)
숨[suːm] was formed in 2007 by a pair of Korean musicians trained in traditional instruments. They had an ambitious goal: to start a new era of Korean folk music grounded in the experience of modern life. The band’s name (pronounced “soom”) means “breath.” They compose and perform original work on traditional instruments: Jiha Park plays the piri (bamboo oboe), saenghwang (24-pipe mouth organ), and yanggeum (dulcimer), while Jungmin Seo performs on both the 25-string and steel-string gayageum (zither). This is a rare opportunity to hear exceptional music of an instrumental discipline and tradition rife with gorgeous sounds.
Lotus premiere

Trio Brasileiro (Brazil)
This young trio’s stunning virtuosity is matched with a deep devotion to the language of music – specifically choro, a traditional Brazilian genre marked by intricate, lively rhythms, gorgeous melodies, and improvisation. Trio Brasileiro includes Dudu Maia, one of Brazil’s finest players of the bandolim (a kind of mandolin); the celebrated Douglas Lora on violão 7 cordes (7-string guitar); and the amazing percussionist, Alexandre Lora (brother of Douglas) who plays the pandeiro (a kind of tambourine). Trio Brasileiro is dedicated to performing the great traditional choro music of Brazil as well as their own compositions, which are modern reflections of that great traditional musical form. Their sets at Lotus 2012 were popular and packed; if you missed them then, catch them now.
ONE SHOW ONLY

tUnE-yArDs (USA)
tUnE-yArDs is fresh, avant-garde, experimental, groovy, poppy, funky — pick a word to describe Merrill Garbus’s band and a reviewer somewhere in the world has already used it. In addition to writing the music, Merrill (on lead vocals, percussion, ukulele, and a wide assortment of samplers & electronics) and her collaborator (and Bloomington native), Nate Brenner on bass & synthesizers, are joined by an ever-changing array of bandmates to create a post-modern sonic stew; “a lovably scrappy, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink aesthetic that is distinctly their own” (SPIN). Named the top looping artist by BaebleMusic, tUnE-yArDs has a unique sound driven by a relentless hippy-shake groove that comes from Merrill’s love of percussive hooks, pop chords, and singsong melodies. One of the greatest bands I know, tUnE-yArDs is a must-see act.
Lotus premiere; ONE SHOW ONLY

Zedashe (Republic of Georgia)
Zedashe’s repertoire is grounded in ancient polyphonic chants from Orthodox Christian liturgy as well as folk songs and dances from the Kiziqian and Svanetia regions of the Republic of Georgia. Field songs, love songs, historical ballads, war dances, ritual circle dances: these traditional pieces have been passed down through generations of musicians and song masters. The close vocal harmonies are often accompanied by the shunner (Svan lute), pander (Kiziq lute), chonguri (Gurian lute), doll (drum), chibonie (goat-skin bagpipes), and accordion. In the music and song of Zedashe, rich folk traditions that trace back to Pagan and early Christian periods come to life and revitalize the soul.
Lotus premiere

 

 

It’s time we opened our eyes to economic and social dimensions of coffee ● by Catherine M. Tucker

Do you drink coffee? If so, you are among the 80% or more of adult Americans who drink coffee at least occasionally.  Coffee is an ubiquitous part of daily life in the USA, yet few of us have time to think about how coffee is produced, its social and environmental ramifications, or the experiences of growers who depend on coffee as their main source of income.  This is true even though opportunities for awareness are greater today than ever before.  If we look closely at coffee in the grocery store, we are likely to see packages declaring “organic,” “shadegrown,”  “Fair Trade,” or “bird friendly” on the labels.  Each of these labels represents a claim to quality that encompasses environmental, economic and Read more

IU Opera and the Long History of the Middle Ground Between Opera and Musical Theater ● by Chris Lynch

If you’ve been monitoring the national opera scene, you may have noticed a few curious happenings: this season opera-diva Renée Fleming costarred with Broadway leading-lady Kelli O’Hara in a new production of The Merry Widow at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lyric Opera of Chicago is currently preparing Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel for a production this spring, and next year San Francisco Opera will put on Sweeney Todd. What’s with the opera world’s sudden interest in musicals? As it turns out, it’s only new for these big opera companies, which have historically produced traditional operatic repertoire in a conservative manner. There have always been other institutions and artists that didn’t care about the differences between opera and musical theater or that worked to resolve the discrepancies. IU Opera Theater is one such institution, and their upcoming production of Read more