Large parade in the city today.  Using discretion in my comments on it, given the Prime Directive, though there was a great deal of bonhomie about, especially for the older veterans in the back.  The folks up front were marching with arms, and some very heavy machinery, so I entered "travelling neutral" mode.  At one point, while I was wandering alongside, one of the old veterans called out "Hey, Indiana!"  (I was wearing my tan traveller's hat.)  I hoped he didn't take amiss the fact that I responded only with a smile and a nod -- no signs toward the marching columns, just observing.  Just in the same manner as when I had to cross the paths of the marching students in Belgrade, I made sure to cross against the flow.  Neutrality is a vanishing practice in the world -- given the 24 hour news cycle, everyone generally picks a side based on the information at hand -- and this has resulted in the loss of neutrality generally at the state level.  The Alabama arbitrations after the American Civil War described a completely different world.  But when armed forces are marching, I don't cheer or join in, I observe.

I cut through the city to the destination point, the large concrete complex built for the Olympics. there was a small band playing there, mostly marches unfamiliar to me, but at one point they broke out into a march time/ragtime "Hold that tiger".  I watched the faces of the veterans and the recruits as they reached their destination, just like I used to stand across from St. Pat's and watch the faces of the marchers as they saw it.  Marching in a parade is an event in someone's life, and as they reach the important place they were marching to, you can catch a bit of the glint of the soul in their eyes.

Most units marched down a set of stairs at the end of the concrete plaza, vanishing like the soldiers marching into the mountain in Kirosawa's Dreams.  But they sent some of the units, including many of the older veterans, through the side door, and it was interesting watching these retired mobilized police officers (combatant status varied during the conflict, but given the way wars are generally fought here, that was largely a post hoc determination), who had clearly been out of uniform (and training) for many years, attempting to school one another on keeping the lines straight and heading in the right direction.  Humans.  Those sorts of Dogberry and Verges moments were perhaps my favorite part of the parade. 

Afterwards, did a supply run.  This is a good city for that, because unlike some other places, there are very good supply lines coming to it, and unlike some other other places, the prices are very reasonable. Some bits of the kit were were wearing very thin. 

Opera last night (~$7, side balcony).  My return to theatregoing in the Balkans. The opera was a new one, contemporary sung-through theatre, no breaking the gesamtewerke for aria applause, with only one or two exceptions.  Orchestrations heavy, and basically equally weighted throughout.  Score an interesting balance of influences -- I heard Orff moments, and a good deal of populist Shostakovich/Janacek.  But mainly a popular piece of sung-through theatre.  The story of the legendary 14th c. king (Christian, I think, though the local church didn't really see eye to eye with Rome or the East at the time, and that part was underplayed), who also ruled some areas that are parts of adjacent nations.  But many heartfelt paens to the present motherland, speaking its name reverently.  

If you didn't know what a country was, and you witnessed a human singing about or speaking about their country you might observe something interesting about their manner of expression.  More to come along those lines, I think, once I set down some proper writing on the evening.

 

 

 

 In every place, dividing the chance for a brief repose from the sleep of the place.  Every place has its own unique form of sleep, and they are all uniquely dangerous.

This is a consciously sophisticated city, long looking askance at the emissaries of distant powers.  The dominant faction and faith here are the Sadducees, not the Pharisees.  In contact with the distant center, against the local rebellions, keeping to a faith they hold to be true, despite the wraiths and wreaths of the mountains.  And, in an entirely pragmatic sense, the danger this presents to me as a visitor here for a brief moment is the ease of quietism.  At the end of the morning runs (now back to four days per week, and pushing onward, still rebuilding from the disastrous winter, even as the chills of autumn begin to appear), I can see the three parts of the city -- the pre-Enlightenment, the Hegelian Republic, and the post-Enlightenment.  Each essential for the present recollection of our purposes.

So, to the λεγειν, to the division and unclosing of the world through philosophy and art.  The work continues.  

 "My solitude is the garment of my pride."

(Old Bosnian writer)

 Interesting, I attempted to weigh in on the UK Reform/US crypto money dispute in the Times, but my comment was rejected as noncompliant with the terms of use, with a speed that could only have come from an AI screening.  Two quick lines, the first a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that they could work around the potentially ex post facto law by giving the donations themselves retrospective effect, and the second the Lord Chancellor's line at the end of Iolanthe about the subtleties of the legal mind being equal to any emergency.

It's odd, not only has the mediated world of the present politics created a sort of tone and banter that's unilluminative and instinctual, but the mechanism itself has been trained to recognize it and filter out any discourse that doesn't fit the expected pattern, as it's likely off-topic, and a complete waste of time. 

And it's not wrong about that, just a bit inaccurate.

 The digital economy can be a mixed blessing.  When I was helping to start up a new website in NYC, I consciously attempted to leverage the opportunities for people to job-in to the work flow.  My phrase for it was "giving a home for the birds."  This was natural, as it was a theatre project, and there are many very capable people in the city who, like me, were working at day jobs for which they were very overqualified in order to pay the rent.

The dark side, though: Eventually, that job, which I had taken only on the clear understanding that it was a day job and that I was doing it so I could live while trying to make theatre in the city, eventually began to take up all of my time and focus.  This was because of some peculiar choices taken above my head about how to build out (vel non) the back end of the site, and meetings with the CEO (an estimable executive in the city) were rather difficult, as I was constantly fighting the pressure to commit to a full-time, first-priority job there.  After seven years, I walked away from a peculiarly broad-reaching post-hoc NDA/nondisparagement/release of IP, forfeiting severance (downsizing after the dot com crash) largely because I thought I had been tricked into something that had cost me my life's work.

Then, later on, the Ph.D. program, which looked great on paper, but the reality was that I had to spend 30+ hours every week sitting in a room electronically grading first-year papers, which wasn't typical, either of the program or of the university at large.  And there has been subsequent work, as with many in the world now, that largely forces me to sit in a room tapping into a laptop for the majority of a day, with very little remuneration or intellectual reward.  It's better than delivering food on a bicycle (though I've done that too, in my NYC days--ice-cream delivery in midwinter), or trawling through the smouldering refuse dumps of India looking for metals and recyclable plastics (I've managed to avoid that), but it seems to serve mainly to keep me out of the way, and it has taken many years of my life.

Having gone through many periods when there wasn't even a trireme to be rowed, I am grateful for the opportunity to survive, but the whole setup seems to be calibrated to use the general prosperity to almost unnoticeably sideline certain folks.  

So, I do the work at hand, and I try to figure out how to live a proper life and do the work that I was born to do, despite finding myself perpetually sidelined.  Having gone through conservatory, a decade of practice in the art, and a first-tier law doctorate, I have a good sense of who it is that the gatekeepers let through, and how far things are from a meritocracy.  And again, all of this is made possible by the general industrial prosperity.  But those of us on the outside of things might yet have a role to play in the world.  The stones the builders rejected.

 Exaltation of the Cross.  Notion: as we try to understand things, we try to synthesize the many inside of the one, as the one is defined by the concept.  So to answer the question of why the method of execution is venerated requires us to incorporate the process of execution into the thought, and in synthesizing this, we come up with the notion that this motion, this event, was the cause of the worthwhile thing.  But the killing wasn't what caused the grace.  

When we consider the concept, we have to say that although we use it as a referent, there are parts of it we don't understand, and that the event might not carry its significance as events are usually understood in the world.  The fact of the event, yes.  But If I think of someone going to to the well for water, and say that something happened because of that, the listener's Newtonian mind starts wondering what sorts of reactions and consequences might have been brought into the world by that physical action, but my statement might equally have referred to the fact of the event.  The fact of having gone to the well for water had a result in the world.  In the same manner, the fact of having been killed might be the cause of good, rather than thinking of it according to the mind of sacrifice, and concluding that the murderer provoked the grace.

Weekend reading: Chesterson's The Flying Inn.  An enjoyable trifle, valuable more for the incidentals of the lexis than the mythos of it.  The λεγειν.

When among strangers and traditions that are strange, it's good to keep a handle on the fullness of the things you were thinking about beforehand.  Otherwise, all of your own ideas become as one-dimensional as you (mistakenly) suppose the strange notions and traditions you encounter to be.  We don't just know things.  We ourselves have knowledge of things, and if the things get all flat and one-dimensional, so do we.  We shouldn't admire our own complexity, but it's good to keep an eye on it so that it doesn't vanish completely.

I think the Dolly Parton tribute sort of set the tone for that LNOP.  Bit of a split on whether Britons never&c shall be slaves or never&c will be slaves.  Quick look to AI indicates that the latter was the original, and in the source poem, with the former coming in with the Victorian changes.  Well, they're certainly not slaves to the lyrics. 

Beforehand, dropped by one of the old historic houses for a culture in the streets event -- opera arias.  Elected to stop a a bakery for a bit of bread beforehand (end of the night, only the heavily sweetened kaiser rolls), so the back of the entryway was as close as I could get.  (Fitting, as I always go for partial view at the opera for the cost savings.)  Interesting pause for the last call to prayer of the evening.  In the older part of town, unlike the city generally, they're pretty closely synchronized, but there are many of them -- putting the din in the din and devlet.  When I was here in the winter a year or two ago, I had a great place overlooking the whole city from across the river, and could stand out on the balcony and track the different timings.  They're very interesting to contemplate, and I'm usually drawn into thinking about God for a bit (though not according to the local formulas), so I suppose they're effective.

The core opera repertory, the sort of energy that unified the central piedmont and birthed Garibaldi, is very interesting to listen to here.  This is a consciously sophisticated city, but some (though not all, or even most) aspects of it are also pre-enlightenment, so you'll sometimes have a neo-Romantic 19th c. piece solemnly observed with the respect due to a cultural effort, rather than sparking the effect that it was written to achieve.  At the same time, they're closer to some aspects of it than the usual international style or the post-Enlightenment crowd.  I recall attending a memorial concert here where the Kindertotenlieder was the main piece, and I thought it odd that the community here would look to a Viennese composer at a time of very personal grief, until my slow-moving mind registered the fact that I was sitting in a concert hall built by the Austrians almost a century and a half ago.  Every lineage is composed of many threads.

It struck me that the amplification was entirely unnecessary, given the setup, but these are legitimating devices -- I learned that observing the first piece of theatre on the last peregrination, a street piece in Bucharest.  A sound system makes it clear that things are official -- whether on the Upper West Side, a stone plaza in Transylvania, or a 16th c. caravanserai in the Balkans.  It says that this is an official performance.  Otherwise, it would just be people singing.  Again, it's universal, but perhaps places like this will rediscover the natural sound of song first, likely long before the street performances in NYC step outside of their girder stages and sound systems.  After all, as I understand it, the reason that the call to prayer is spoken rather than sent out using bells and such was the power and simplicity of the human voice.  

 Last Night of the Proms -- so apparently, autumn is here.  The locals here have a theory on springtime, apparently Turkish in origin, that it comes in three shocks on air, water and land.  Perhaps there's a correlative theory of autumn, with the land most tenaciously holding onto the life of summer.  Will likely tune in to the festivities via wireless (that word still works) after wandering the old city again for a bit in the evening.  It's not my cup of tea, tbh, I'm much more in the Yugoslavian enlightenment/post-enlightenment camp, but for what it is, the old shadows and passageways are meaningful.  In the same sense, the only reason that I'll likely tune into the shindig from Royal Albert Hall is because I have some sense of the place, and the meaning of it.  Though it won't occur to most that this is something that has to be imagined in a positive, outward sense, so they'll just accept the programming.

There's a danger in taking life as read.  When people talk about the meaninglessness of modern existence, it's not because, as Hegel thought, there's a simple mismatch between the enactment of life required in pre-Enlightenment times (Habermas) and the modern free and harmonious rational arrangement of life.  Meaninglessness is simply a lack of imagination.  You have to reach for the world, whether it be the pageant or the game.  The world might be announced to you when it walks in the door, but you still have to go up to it and make conversation.

"Live all you can -- it's a mistake not to."  When people quote that bit of Henry James, they usually miss the fact that the American adventurer seeking a bit of freedom in Paris is at a party with an artist whom he admires and his friends, but instead of going inside and attempting to enter into their society, he sits on a bench on the lawn and waxes homiletic to his young misfit artist friend.  Presumably because they hadn't invented blogging yet.

 

 

Interesting small rabbit-hole this AM in wondering why a ballet was called a "white ballet" (technically, in the original, a ballet staged in the white manner).  As it turns out, at least per Gurgle AI, it is a reference to the white costumes, and indirectly to its classicism.  The interesting thing about this is that "white goods" in this part of the world refers to large appliances -- glancing down that AI rabbit-hole as well, I learn that it is from the white enamel that defined expensive household goods in the middle of the last century, and that "brown goods" are rec-room wood-colored entertainment devices and "grey goods" are computers.  Germany is apparently locally the source of the white enamel on appliances, with that industrialized technique dating from the late 19th c.  I recall Hari Kunzru's recent Red Pill, where the writer visits a foundation in Germany funded by the estate of a chemist who had formulated a brilliant white for just that purpose.

Naming things in that manner is perhaps profoundly democratic, in the Deweyan manner.  One of the oldest mosques here, dating from the 15th-16th c. had a madras nearby  which was formally named after its benefactor, but according to a caption in the museum, everyone called it the place with the lead roof, in comparison to the timber roofs hereabouts (much later shifted to ceramic tile).  Similarly, the fortresses overlooking the bend in the river (which must have been much larger in the past, as I can't imagine ships of any size navigating it) have formal names after their respective parts of the city, but are universally severally known by the color of the stone.  The people talking about it came up with the name, according to the logic of their conversation.  Sort of an unlikely Dewey/Habermas nexus there, perhaps.

In general, this is a very pleasant place to visit -- despite the niceness, there's also some deeply rooted ethics of hospitality.  (One doesn't often get the Kirk Douglas kebab, thanks to local vigilance.)  You can learn a lot from the micro-gestures of the locals in public.  One picks up subtle clues from the way the older women stand at the check-out counter, or shift positions when a stranger arrives on a path or to a bench.  I've muttered to myself on more than one occasion on the morning run in past visits, particularly in winter, that in NYC, people use sidewalks for getting from place to place, but in this part of the world people use sidewalks for fighting over the sidewalk.

But this has to do with the nature of the society.  When I stand aside to let someone pass on a narrow path, they might understand it as a meaningful gesture of deference and courtesy (one that at one time might have been legally compelled, as such things were in the deep South of America not long ago).  The visitor from abroad, however, sees it as a logical thing to do for two people on a crowded sidewalk.  The meaning for the visitor is different.  The one who sees the meaning as courtesy and deference makes the encounter more meaningful to them by enacting their role in the action of courtesy and deference, while the person who sees the meaning as being in efficiency usually expects the other to at least lean a bit to the other direction in reciprocal efficiency, and thereby make the encounter more meaningful.  As a result, there's sometimes a slight bump or a grazing of clothing.  (Which is where the mutual ethics of courtesy and hospitality come in, and it remains just a small stumble, and perhaps revelatory for all involved.)

The uniqueness of this city is that it preserves the strata of pre-Enlightenment, Enlightenment, and post-Enlightenment as living realities.  All are necessary to some degree, as those cities composed entirely of the avant-garde are coming to understand.  But this makes the reciprocal obligations of genuine hospitality and genuine courtesy essential.  (As for those only capable of niceness, they're generally well-off enough to afford an insulated vacation in which everyone around them is being paid rather well.)

The capital city of the last country I visited is unique in preserving the Roman and pre-Roman ruins as sites to be walked through beneath the 19th c. & modern office buildings, in addition to the subway stations.  That same stratified reality can also be present socially within a culture, but only when each of the levels is in fact a living reality, sometimes lightly bumping into the others, but carried along by genuine interest and care.

 Wandered down to the piazza in front of the national theatre (that term has a different meaning in these parts; many cities in a country can have a national theatre in them, though this is the principal one here, built for entertainments in 19th c. Austrian days) for a summertime outdoor free piece.  The local opera choir (whom I've heard at a similar event) and the ballet company (doing their Bolero, which I saw indoors as part of a Carmen/Bolero double bill some time ago).  The choral part had some local songs, but I kept struggling to hear the song itself beneath the conventions of modern choral singing/arrangement.  Much more in keeping with the style were the American bits, "NY, NY", "Wonderful World," etc.  And then the Bolero.  The company, from what I've seen is much more of a (skillful) modern ensemble, and while there was a bit of Jerome Robbins-type classicism, even though the movement were very broad and semiotic, it was basically a modern piece.  If Robbins had choreographed Rite of Spring from scratch, perhaps.  Very enjoyable.  

Oddly, from where I was standing, there was a clear echo from the buildings in back, and during the dance piece, it created a second snare line, just a fraction of a beat behind the first.  In any other city, it would have been interesting (and presumably a huge challenge for the dancers).  In this city, being between two drum lines, with the dancers holding firmly to the first was positively unheimlich.  

 Odd headlines about AI.  Apparently, the people building it say there's a ten percent chance it could wipe out the species within the next decade.  Suspicious double use of the order-giving, easy-thinking order of magnitude.  Why not a seven percent chance across the next twelve years?

The fundamental error of thinking on it seems to be thinking of it as a substance.  It's not a disease or a chemical.  It's a way of connecting existing, conventional machines so that they act more erratically in relation to human understanding, hopefully in a beneficent manner.  Quite simple.  If you don't have a handle on how the machines might act, don't connect them in that manner.

 Near the end of his life, Grotowski seemed to place a peculiar importance on not being divided, not having incompatible things and contradictions within himself.  We might very well contain multitudes, but it would be best, if the multitude had, as in Aristotle's metaphor of thought, changed from being a fleeing army, first by one person, and then more and more, stopping their flight and turning to look at something.

The basis of everything was the conservatory training, and whether it was the right part of the country or type of program for me isn't really a question worth asking.  Once you set off down that road, it is yours for good or for ill.  Then the decade or so trying to get a foothold in a very commercialized and compromising industry while keeping my hands clean.  Not in a moralistic sense, just knowing that I might need my hands to defend myself one of these days.  Heading off to law school wasn't a reversal, there was no farewell to the muse, which perhaps explains why I was once again the odd man out in the Midwest as a NYC method actor.  It served me well in the studies, unrelenting focus, memorization, etc. But it seemed that while I was looking for the marrow of things, the others were eyeing the dessert cart.  Then, after several years of rather dramatic struggle, a sort of last redoubt in the academy, and another misfortune in the Midwest, as it proved to be a very corrupt and craven faculty, so I just set myself up in the library for four years, read, wrote, and took philosophy, history and literature classes in other departments.  After my first philosophy coursework there, the professor took me aside and asked if I wanted to do some independent directed study in the following semester -- but even though the corrupt faculty and mediocre program in my own area was interposed between myself and the art, my stand there was firmly set in the theatre, which was my basis for being.  In the years since, I've read far more philosophy than the PhD candidates at even the most rigorous programs (there once was an Oxon. prof who greeted incoming students with the suggestion that they just spend the first year reading novels, and presumably observing their response), so I have a good grounding in that field.  But perhaps its right that after trying these three paths in the culture, the consolations of philosophy are apparent to me in another context.

Apparently, the pumpkin spice lattes have returned to Romanian Starbucks, perhaps the monoculture equivalent of the new beaujolais.  (And, as it's entirely artificial, it can be rolled out much earlier in answer to demand, not being tied to the pesky material reality of maturing wine.)  The Sbux there are a huge status symbol, apparently.  More expensive than midtown NYC, so I usually go to the local chains.  Contrastingly, the ones on the western (Eastern) part of the peninsula are much more reasonably priced and less crowded.  I apply the same logic to coffeehouses as I do to vegetable markets -- very scenic and an enjoyable atmosphere, but difficult for an outsider to determine which of the vegetables weren't grown with incredibly noxious chemicals.  Hence, I tend to trust the German supermarkets, on the theory that they're doing some supply-chain oversight.  And make my own Balkan coffee to enjoy in a thermos in the park.

McDonalds initially thrived in the US because it was the only place a traveller wasn't at the mercy of unknown kitchens in strange cities.  The ethic of hospitality runs deep here, but given the unknown hygiene of back-room kitchens and all of the political anger about, I tend to bring my own food on the journey.