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Skyscrapers

Posted on December 10, 2013 by admin

Chicago September 21, 2011

The skyscrapers of Chicago are beautiful. In Manhattan they are so packed together you can get no perspective to see what they actually looks like. But here in Chicago, because they’re spread out you have space between the buildings. One is able to stand back and actually look at the shapes and the contours of the buildings. Today I walked along the Chicago River where you can see these skyscrapers lining each side of the Chicago River. Who says there’s no beauty in modern urban architecture? I also strolled towards Lake Michigan along the Lake Shore Walkway and was able to look back into the city to again see all the beautiful shapes and contours of Chicago’s skyscrapers. In New York you can hardly see this unless you get on a boat and go out into the river. But here in Chicago you have a city view from various large parks and walkways.

When I first came to New York City and now to Chicago I came with a negative attitude expecting to see the stereotype image of a northern American city, cold, dangerous, and a wash in graffiti. On the contrary I have found lively and dynamic places with a whole world of their own. Both Manhattan and Chicago are full of life and are safe and actually beautiful.

Both cities have something I certainly didn’t expect, people living in the downtown core. Not people coming during the day to work, only to then abandon the downtown after work. This is Los Angles. In Manhattan and Chicago after work-time there’s a roll out of a new mood of entertainment, restaurants and shopping till late at night. In Chicago walked the downtown late each night until midnight and never felt unsafe or insecure. I hardly saw graffiti. The transit system of Chicago is excellent. I was able to travel directly from O’Hara, the main airport, right into the downtown of the city on a single subway line. The cost was $2.50. It does not get any better. I love Chicago.

The Art Institute of Chicago

Posted on December 9, 2013 by admin

September 22, 2011

The Art Institute of Chicago is one of the premier world galleries. It is worth coming to Chicago just to see this magnificent collection.

One of the joys in life is to have studied a work of art and then to finally see that piece in live. The experience is exhilarating. This is what happened many times in Chicago. Their collection of French Impressionism and American Art is outstanding. And the best of all: their collection is largely unglassed and photographable. This makes the gallery first class. Galleries that do not allow personal photography drop-down many notches despite their wonderful collection. I’m thinking of the Prado in Madrid or the Van Gogh gallery in Amsterdam. Over all I spent two days in the Art Institute, five hours each day. That’s a lot of seeing and quite exhausting, but fabulous.

Delightfully absent from the Art Institute are the endless salons of Christian art one see throughout Italy and France. It’s a relief not to see that old stuff over and over again. Thank God for the new world.

Chicago Reflections

Posted on December 6, 2013 by admin

9/24/2011

I came to Chicago to perform a wedding on Saturday so I arrived late Tuesday to spend a few days touring Chicago, and in particular to see the famous Art Institute of Chicago. I came to practice the ways of Le Flâneur. It takes a substantial effort to travel; it would be much easier to stay home, but I want to see things, particularly the great beauties of the world.

I must admit arriving in Chicago with a negative attitude about American cities, particularly northern American cities; they are dangerous, rundown and desolate. This is a typical Canadian perspective. What I instead discovered was a vibrant and exciting place. Yes, its cold, but Chicago has an excellent transit system, a beautiful downtown and people actually live in the downtown core. It was a pleasure to have my Canadian attitude challenged. One of the yard sticks I use to judge a city is whether it’s transit system reaches out to the major airport. In Los Angeles no airports are served by a transit system. In fact there is no viable transit system, but Chicago’s O’Hare airport is beautifully served by its transit system. Architecturally Chicago has fabulous skyscrapers and what makes them even better than Manhattan is that you can actually see them. They are not densely packed in as they are in New York. In Chicago it’s easy to step back and see the city from a distance even when you’re in the city, therefore I was able to appreciate the shaping contours of these fantastic skyscrapers. I liked Chicago; I certainly wouldn’t like to live here; I’ve taken the palm tree vow, but it’s a good place to visit and I want to return. Southern California with its deserts is my home, yet from this place I can reach out to anywhere in the world

Opera in San Francisco

Posted on November 21, 2013 by admin

Last night I went to Rossin’s Barber of Sevilla in San Francisco. I flew up just for this show, which in it self is amazing. In a word, the opera was awesome! This was my first live operatic experience and I was completely overwhelmed. In fact I’m still processing what I witnessed. It’s been years since I’ve seen any stage performance, and I’ve never seen one of this quality, not to speak of an opera. It was not what I expected at all. The singers were young and thin. I expected old and ‘big’. Lol. And I was able to easily understand. Again I anticipated total incomprehension. Yet with the subtitles I understood. The theater did a nice job with the subtitles. They were up high, so as to not distract and they were brief, almost like twitter messages. They just delivered the essence and then let the music do its work. It was wonderful.

My interest in opera stems from my interest in Indian aesthetics, particularly Bharata’s Natya Shastra and even the Vaishnava rasa theory of Rupa Gosvami. My old Sanskrit kavya classes with Professor Warder were finally being activated in this unexpected way. There we learned some of literary rules which govern how Sanskrit drama is composed according to rasika principles. From my perspective The Barber of Seville is simply a performance of shrigara and hasya rasas, the love and comedic moods. Rossini has drawn upon all the elements of Western aesthetics to achieve virtually the same effect as any Radha Krishna rasa lila play one might see in Vrindavan. The universals are the same in spite of the huge difference in the cultural particulars. No doubt many people would frown heavily on my comparison of the Barber of Seville with Radha Krishna Lila plays, but it’s there loud and clear.

On an amusing side issue, anyone of my generation, who grew up on a diet of Warner Brother’s Bugs Bunny cartoons, will be amazed how much operatic knowledge they have. I already knew so many of Rossini’s songs just from watching Bugs Bunny!

Using LA transit

Posted on August 23, 2013 by admin

08/23/13

Yesterday Radhika and I went by train to Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. Driving on the way to the train we stopped at Victoria Gardens in Rancho Cucamonga and had breakfast, just the two of us. It was fun. Our real purpose was to take Radhika to meet Kandarpa and so we decided to try public transit instead of using the standard Los Angeles method of travel, the car. We took the public transit system just for fun and to see if it had any future use for us. Once we reached Union Station we went out and visited the area just in front of the station and saw those first cradle places of Los Angeles, the first house, it’s first church, its first barrio, and the first homeless. From there we went to Hollywood on the Redline to meet Kandarpa.

The Redline is a real-live underground subway! I never knew Los Angeles had an underground. It can’t be more than a few miles long, but hey, if it’s all you have, you must extoll its glories. It functions fabulously! All other parts of the LA transit system are aboveground LRT rail. Considering that public transit in Los Angeles has been subverted for a 100 years by oil and car companies, and considering that mass transit was not actually begun until the 1990s, it’s a fairly good system. That’s a lot of considering. The truth is public transit in Los Angeles is a work in progress. In my view any city that has a transit system that fails to reach its airports is an incomplete system. This includes St. Petersburg Russia and Toronto Canada, so-called mature transit systems. If Los Angeles could just connect its transit system to LAX that would be a huge step forward. I’d move the rating of the system from C- to B immediately.

The one thing to remember about Los Angeles is that it has no center, no defined core, no focus. In fact the expression ‘downtown’ as it relates to Los Angeles is misleading. The downtown is just a mass of government and financial buildings. Nobody lives there. There’s no soul. And no one should go there expecting to be in Manhattan or San Francisco or any other city that actually has a core. From a mass transit perspective, the only thing that makes ‘downtown’ necessary, is Union Station. That’s the place where you are forced to go for connecting routes to useful places. The only true reason you would go to downtown Los Angeles is to a government building for immigration or because you are a witness in a high profile trial.

Unfortunately the transit system of Los Angeles is slow, frustratingly slow, yet it feels blazingly fast. This is because in many places it travels right down the center of some important freeways, which means you have a spectacular view of both sides of the traffic flow. And they’re not moving! You feel as if you are blasting through the stopped cars on both sides of the freeway. Don’t they call this relative motion? And, while you race your way through all the stopped traffic, you can relax and read Wikipedia articles about the future expansion of LA’s mass transit system. There you will learn that in perhaps two decades the system might be useful. Maybe.

In spite of everything we had a great time. I’m told our next trip will be to old town Pasadena. Cool. But it will be like touching your nose from around your head as we are forced to go through Union Station!

Oh, and one more thing, and its a secret: The system is a ghost town. Nobody uses it! You can actually have a seat.

A short trip to the past

Posted on August 21, 2013 by admin

Yesterday I took a tour of the Campbellford area to visit all the places I used to frequent as a boy. I started with a stop at the cattle auction in Hoards Station and sampled cheese at the English Line Empire Cheese Factory. I was pleasently surprised to see how easy it was to talk with the farm people and generally fit in with the country people of Eastern Ontario. When it comes done to it there’s not a lot of difference between rural California and rural Ontario. The values are similar. I finished the Hoards trip with apple pie á la mode. Later I drove to the old cottage, then onto Warkworth and Norham. There we saw the old house. It’s abandoned and ready to fall down. It was sad to see how fast thing degrade if not maintained. Yet on this trip I did not feel any of the old feelings of depression seeing all the changes like I did last time. Perhaps I’ve moved on since the last time and I happy to see the changes, which are mostly positive. For the most part the trees are all taller and new people and businesses have moved into old houses and shops.

The New Parisian

Posted on August 20, 2013 by admin

If there is anything I have learned in recent years, it is to dine like the French, that is to say, to sit in a café and slowly and peacefully enjoy one’s meal. And what makes this even more enjoyable is a tablet computer and a high-speed Internet connection. Yes, it’s true! On my iPad mini I have access to all the newspapers and magazines that I enjoy. I have access to all the world’s libraries. Any piece of information or any piece of art I desire is instantly at my fingertips. One can spend hours sipping coffee, poking away at a fruit salad, or communing with the largest pasta dish at one’s total leisure. This is the life of the new Parisian, and in California it is always smoke-free!

French Culture in Canada

Posted on August 15, 2013 by admin

Let me expand on the French success occurring in Québec City. It hinges on Bill 101, The Quebec Charter of the French Language Act of 1977. The preamble of this Charter states that the National Assembly resolved “To make French the language of Government and the Law, as well as the normal and everyday language of work, instruction, communication, commerce and business.” It also states that the National Assembly is to pursue this objective “in a spirit of fairness and open-mindedness.” I remember the controversy this bill engendered only too well. English Canada felt the intension of this act as treasonous. René Levesque and his Parti Québécois were vilified. I even agreed, not from any reasoned perspective, but because that was the flow of things in my anglophone world. Bill 101 was just one part of what the French in Quebec wanted; the other part was self-rule, separation from the rest of Canada! This woke English Canada up. In those days it was safe to call English Canada, British Canada. There was no Canadian constitution. There was no Canadian flag. There was no Canadian identity. In school I sang “God Save the Queen”, not “O Canada”! What was happening in Québec rattled the very foundations of English Canada. And we needed that.

English Canada’s reaction to Québec independence was to acquiesce: We’ll do anything, just don’t separate. We’ll have two founding cultures, we’ll make the country bilingual, we’ll give French a special place, anything, just don’t separate. So in my lifetime I had to learn French in school, airports started to announce everything in French and English. I saw French put on all cereal boxes. I witnessed the francaphonization of Canada. And I hated it!

As I write this I am in Ottawa. I have left French Canada and have come to English Canada, and as I was standing on a bridge over the Rideau Canal looking across the Ottawa river back into Québec I heard and English speaking Canadian in his mid forties tell his friend: Those French bastards upset the whole country! Similarly on my taxi ride to the rail station in Ottawa my English-speaking taxi driver told me it was time for the English to divorce the French. So there it was in a nutshell a generation after the turmoil, the resentment is still there.

But now, a generation later I am returning to see the results. And I’m delighted! I’m happy to see how bilingual the country has become, I’m happy to see French culture thriving in Québec, I’m happy to experience the diversity of this new Canada. But I’m a totally different person than I was in those days. I approach this new Canada with a wealth of world travel, including a huge helping of France, I have even learned French in recent years, and because I have worked intimately with Indian Hindu culture, I have become a transcultural globalized personality. What I see happening in Canada is not a threat at all. Yet I am worried by what I heard on the Rideau bridge, “those bastards upset the whole country.” He was not that old. He was not of my generation. So do these feelings still exist in his generation, a person born in the early 70s and coming of age in the late 80s? What are the feelings of those born in the 90s? Will they still hold the old grudges?

It all comes done to economics. If people are making money and can live comfortably, they will be peaceful. And this applies most to the Québécois. If they are prospering as francophones within Canada they will be satisfied and the union will continue, but if they languish, by God, the ghost of René Levesque will resurface once again, but this time English Canada may not acquiesce. They may follow the course of my taxi driver and just divorce the French. What I saw in Québec City on this was encouraging.

Postscript on Russia

Posted on August 12, 2013 by admin

August 12/13
Crest cafe RS

Why the hell is Russia so damn different than the rest of the West? It annoys the hell out of me.

Since my trip to Russia I have become a Russia observer of sorts. The recent Snowdon issue regarding US intelligence secrets and his protection by the Russian Federation didn’t help relations between Russia and the US one bit. Now the question of gay rights in Russia and the upcoming Winter Olympics is becoming a hot news item across the world. Obama has even canceled a meeting with Putin over these deteriorated relations.

But Russia has been out of step with the West at least since the time of Peter the Great. Yet it is we who have the problem of what we expect Russia should be. That Russia is in proximity to Europe, that its language is Indo-European, that there are racial similarities between Western Europe and western Russia, so we have an expectation that it should be like the West, like the rest of us.

But Russia has never been like the rest of us. Now we have 80 years of communist rule along with the suppression of religion to contend with. There is little doubt that this has led to a revival of religion in Russia. Religion is like a spring. Compress it and eventually it will rebound with a vengeance. The Russian Orthodox Church is seeing a huge revival since the fall of communism. So, of course, Russia is moving in the opposite direction to much of the world in terms of gay rights and other issues. They are three generations behind. They have 80 years of independent development as well as 80 years of being cut off from the rest of the world, which has created their present place in the world and which shapes their future.

The problem is I enjoyed my visit there and I’d like to return. But I’d also like to see the country join the rest of the modern world. At the moment I’m seeing a lot of regression and it saddens me.

Arrival in Quebec

Posted on August 2, 2013 by admin

Yesterday we arrived in Québec City on a tiny United Airlines jet. I’ll take a small jet any day over a large one. It was a relaxing flight compared to the red eye from the night before. That was nightmarish. Coming into Québec City I was reminded of my arrival into Saint Petersburg, Russia, a few months earlier. The first view of a new land is always special. Only this time it was my janma bhumi and even though it was the French part of Canada, it felt like home. I had tears. A part of me is always homesick. I’m sure this must be the case with every person who leaves his home for a new land.

Quebec City is French Canada par excellence, and I’m glad for it. Growing up English Canadian in the 1970s was the time of near Quebec separation. Groups like the Parti Québécoix demanded French language and culture, and even national sovereignty, the separation of Quebec from the rest of Canada. There was a great struggle. And they nearly got what they wanted, yet what a loss had they obtained that separation! But they did get official and protected status for their French language and culture. And I’m glad for it. However, I remember how much we chided and disparaged the French. We called them frogs. In those days, English Canadians felt threaten by French Canadians. Yet what a fabulous and rich culture the French have. Canada as a nation is enriched by it’s two cultures. So here I am in Québec City, the heart of French Canadian culture, and only now am I appreciating the French culture, which is actually apart of my heritage. I’m partly French! I never grew thinking that. In fact, that would have been a repugnant thought. Sometimes you have to go away in order to appreciate what you actually have.