Diasporic Dining XXI: Lichtman's Brain Cloud

Go down to Banjo Jim’s on Avenue C on a Monday night and listen to a group named Lichtman’s Brain Cloud. They call what they play Western Swing and have one or two fiddles, a bass, a single drum and an electric guitar, amongst other instruments, including the electric mandolin. The group is presided over by a lead singer named Tamar Korn, a petit, dark haired young woman with a charismatic, startling voice. She can dance in a country music kind of way, but the voice is mesmerizing. It sounds like Billie Holiday as heard through an old-time radio, only turned up loud and clear. It’s distant yet creates vibrations that could make a string ring. It ignites your inner harmonics. Tamar can also use her voice to mimic the sounds of instruments. When she takes a breather, Brain Cloud plays instrumental numbers all on its own. The group has a small following, but some day they are going to make it to the big time. Garrison Keillor’s talent scouts should head down to Banjo Jim’s to hear Tamar and Brain Cloud one Monday. They’d be wonderful guests on A Prairie Home Companion.

Chariots of Shit

Hugh Hudson, the Academy Award winning director of Chariots of Fire, has signed on to direct a sequel called Chariots of Shit. The year is no longer 1924, but sometime in the second decade of the 21st Century, and the arena has changed from competitive running in England to politics in the United States. Two candidates are running for election, one is a conservative Republican who believes that no American should receive health care, that aborted babies should be stuffed back into their mother’s uteruses and that the rich should pay little or no taxes while their employees support the few public programs that remain, such as work-placement making coins at the U.S. Mint. The film will highlight the importance of coins even in the age of electronic transfers, since the American economy will be in such dire straits that begging for them will be one of the few employment opportunities for graduates from elite colleges. The Democratic opponent is a hedge fund manager whose guilt over the enormous profits and tax breaks she has received has turned her into a progressive. She owns an island in the Caribbean to which she retreats on her private plane, but she is the female version of Prince Hal, making forays into the real world and playing the part of everyman in disguise. No, Chariots of Shit will not be a remake of Preston Sturges’s classic Sullivan’s Travels. Instead, our idealistic Democrat learns little from what she sees when she ventures out into the real world, loses the election and simply retires to her island, where in a culminating scene she is shown reading Plato’s Republic, as her Hawaiian “Man Friday,” wearing a lei (and little else), brings her a tall, exotic drink with an American-flag stirrer.

Berlusconi Makes Partner at Goldman

Two recent pieces in the Times segue neatly into each other. The first, “Study Points to Windfall for Goldman Partners” (NYT, 1/18/11), describes the enormous compensation received by Goldman Sachs executives, particularly as a result of stock options offered at the height of the financial crisis. The options were issued in December 2008 "when the stock was trading at $78.78. Since those uncertain days, Goldman’s business has roared back and its share price has more than doubled, closing on Tuesday at nearly $175.” The second piece, “Wiretaps of Berlusconi's Teenage Friend Emerge” (NYT, 1/18/11), concerns “an investigation on charges that he (Berlusconi) compensated Moroccan-born Karima ed-Mahroug, nicknamed ‘Ruby Rubacuori’ or ‘Ruby Heart-Stealer,’ for sex at his villa outside Milan when she was a minor.”  Post hoc ergo propter hoc means if something follows it is necessary, and in the case of the two articles the fact that the Goldman piece was at center stage and the Berlusconi piece bottom right suggests an equation or future etiology. Like a theorem in geometry, these two articles constitute a proof that Silvio Berlusconi should resign his position as premier of Italy and become a partner at Goldman. Any firm where executives can write credit default swaps against the placements of its own clients, as was the case with Goldman’s approach to borrowing by the Greek government, can employ the services of a leader of a country whose finances could turn out to be similarly imperiled. It doesn't hurt that the capital cities of both countries, Athens and Rome, are the seats of classical antiquity, a fact which further strengthens their common bond. Q.E.D. In addition, Mr. Berlusconi would be able to use some of the political skills unearthed in the recent scandal, like spending “evenings with dozens of women, who would strip down to their underwear,” to increase Goldman’s client base.

Miró and Gossart at the Met

The Gossart (Man, Myth and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance) and the Miró (Miró: The Dutch Interiors) exhibitions at the Met, both of which closed on Monday, evinced a pointed concern with the past. Gossart, like Poussin, was infatuated with antiquity, the idealization of which took the form of a brazen sensuality that must have been shocking in its time. He was the Courbet of Flemish painting and traveled to Rome for his inspiration. Now that both shows are firmly parked in posterity, they become energy sources whose images will reach a later age, in much the way that light from distant stars reveals the nature of a universe long past. Miró’s extrapolations were extraordinary, like the work of a realist landscape painter who sets up his easel in front of a nature scene—only the scene in question was a postcard reproduction of a Sorgh or Steen, acquired on a trip to the Netherlands in 1928, that became the basis for his figurative abstraction. The postcards themselves are curiosities in that they exist like relics of a Sebald narrative, coining a geographic and temporal pastness all their own. There were numerous journeys recorded in these two exhibitions—physical, imaginary, religious and esthetic—not the least of which was Miró’s journey back to the Northern European world out of which Gossart’s work emanated. In this regard, Miró’s esthetic is that of the perpetual tourist. The curators quote him as saying, “When I finish a work, I see in it the starting point to another work. But nothing more than a starting point to go in a diametrically opposite direction. Need I remind you that I despise nothing more than permanence?”

Pre-war Four Bedroom, River View

Owner relocating Munich apartment with tableau of idealized figures over fireplace mantel available. The owner of this duplex, a former head of state who moved to a Latin American country after noteworthy career in service to his country, is selling this immaculately appointed pied-à-terre at a price competitive with other apartments in this exclusive neighborhood. The central galleria of the apartment is perfect for entertaining—auspicious and intimate at the same time. Amenable to both ballroom dancing and goose-stepping, the apartment is equipped with an oversized oven, which can accommodate large crowds and is perfect for fowl. The lampshades are authentic tattoo print, giving them the appearance of real human skin. The building has an updated security system that is backed up with electrified barbed wire and sentinels who will shoot intruders on sight. Within walking distance of national library, renowned art institute where former owner studied, and sites of legendary Beer Hall Putsch and Reichskristallnacht festivities.

The Leopard

“For this to remain the same, everything must change.” Prince Don Fabrizio Salina (Burt Lancaster) repeats these words two times in Luchino Visconti’s screen adaptation of Giuseppe Tomaso di  Lampedusa’s masterpiece The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), currently in revival at Film Forum. The paradoxical sounding utterance are the words of both an idealist, who longs for a world that no longer exists, and a consummate practitioner of realpolitik. The film, which is being shown in a magnificent new print courtesy of Martin Scorsese, is remarkably faithful to the complexity of the original novel. Set against the Risorgimento, in which Garibaldi overthrew the old Bourbon order, unifying Italy under Victor Emmanuel, The Leopard is a complex portrayal of the decline of the old aristocracy, represented by Salina, and the rise of a new middle class, represented in the character of Don Calogero Sedara (Paolo Stoppa), the mayor of Donnafugata, the small Sicilian town where the film is set. His beautiful daughter (Claudia Cardinale) marries the Prince’s nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon), himself a striver and a representative of the new world, with its freedoms, its opportunism and its labile sense of values. At one point, the Prince gives an audience to a representative of the new government, who epitomizes the enlightenment values of progress in his attempt to bring modernity to the South. Refusing to accept an appointment to the senate, Salina says about Sicilians, “Their sensuality is a longing for oblivion.” Visconti and Lampedusa, whose work was rejected for publication in his own lifetime, were both aristocrats, and while it’s impossible to make unknowable generalizations about the inner lives of dead artists, one can’t help but feel that the movie and the novel reflect an almost conservative bias toward irrational truths about human beings that defeat the notion of change.  

Take Me to Heaven

The great disco-era singer Sylvester has faded into the past, hopefully buried with his own “band of gold,” to quote the famous Freyda Payne song. Sylvester prefigured RuPaul, the transvestite singer who was popular in the early ‘90s, but he wasn’t ostentatious in the way of Rick James, who was the Caravaggio of disco performers, singing about a violent world and eventually ending up in prison himself. Sylvester’s music was filled with the urgency and cadences of the gospel world out of which he emerged. The lyrics reflected the sexual promiscuity of the permissive San Francisco club scene where he earned his stripes, but like much of soul music, with its big band sound, Sylvester’s crescendos simply turned the love of God to man. R&B, soul and disco of the kind that Sylvester sang are fundamentally romantic idioms, and this differentiates them from the first rap artists like the Sugar Hill Gang, who started to appear in the later years of Sylvester’s career, and who presented a gritty urban realism. “Do You Want to Funk?” was one of Sylvester’s most famous songs, and the answer, in an age when almost anything went, was usually yes. But one of the greatest numbers in his repertoire is “Take Me to Heaven,” a song that inhabits the crossroads between aspiration and sexuality. Heaven is hopefully where Sylvester landed after he died from AIDS in 1982.