Return to principles

A typical scene from the San Diego area. I love the topography, but I understand that the coyotes are finding it harder to scrounge for food. We wake up here to a bell-like bird sound just before dawn. And the other day we went to the San Elijo Lagoon where I saw a hummingbird for the first time in my life. I imagine its colours are beautiful (blue, red, yellow), but I could barely tell as it was a whir.
Today we caught the train back to Los Angeles and talked to a Nigerian cardiologist and Korean journalism student. The cardiologist was most impressed by San Diego. He thought it was very clean and didn't 'know how they do it'. And yet, US cities are cutting services. The mayor of San Diego (Sanders) announced his budget measures the other day, and they include reducing library hours to two days a week. Can you imagine if you went to London or Paris and the libraries were only open two days a week?
Funny how easily we talk to people. I helped a woman take her suitcase downstairs and onto the platform at Union Station. In the two minutes it took to help her down, she told me how she'd had a life-threatening illness and her husband had been told to prepare himself. I hugged her on the platform and got back on the train to go to Van Nuys. But it is amazing how often here we have hugged people we have just met.
Now we're back in the San Fernando Valley. We walked to the Sepulveda Basin Dog Off-the-Leash Park in the early evening - hundreds of dogs and their owners enjoying the dedicated area by the side of the concrete river, in the distance the magnificent serrations of the surrounding mountains. Then we went to Lake Balboa where families were fishing. I realise Los Angeles is restoring infrastructure and community and wish them well. I remember being impressed by the bicycle path I saw a couple of weeks ago. And this a city built for cars!

Lyrical lessons from Der Rosenkavalier

Sometimes I despair of the endless recitativo of modern opera, this fallacious idea that the music should underscore the words. These passages remind me of Kenneth Hince's phrase: 'acres and acres of interminable mudflat', which he applied unfairly to Brahms, but which describes much contemporary opera better. I think this 'unending recitative' (which is not what Wagner asked for; he asked for 'unending melody') comes from a mistaken belief that words are the primary element in drama. They're not. It's the pyschological beat.
I believe that librettists can play their part to remedy this by creating events and situations that cannot fail but inspire melody, and instruct the composer not to follow the words, but to follow the metre, motivation and action.
I was intrigued by Der Rosenkavalier the other night because a lot of the vocal part is recitativo. Certainly Baron Ochs's part is mostly parlando. And yet the impression is not that dreary sub-lyrical sensation of contemporary opera. Why not? Because there is the constant lilt of waltz-time underneath, a frequent rising to peaks of melody. Opera situations have to rise to melody, or why bother?

Noblesse obliges and spreads

We went downtown (San Diego) to the opera last night. I find myself mostly these days appreciating turns of the plot and trying to remember how turns are affected. (I haven't SEEN Der Rosenkavalier since Opera Australia's production in 1973.) How do they get Ochs to the tavern at the beginning of Act III if we're near the end of Act II and he is left onstage alone remembering his favourite song? Why would he go? How is it explained? Is there a jump? No, Annina, the intriguer, comes back in having been hired by Octavian offstage to arrange an assignation. 'Offstage' is so useful. And these days I also enjoy the way the music weaves in further details - the morning music that had accompanied Octavian and the Marschallin in bed now accompanies Octavian and Sophie's getting together.

On the way back to the venue, however, after a coffee at Starbucks, we noticed that there was a banner on the grand old 1910 Hotel US Grant which said, 'Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation'.  I wondered why this was there. Then, before the performance, the 'please turn off your cell phones' message was sponsored by the Sycuan Casino.  I looked this up on Google and yes, it's a casino owned by the Sycuan (pronounced: suh-KWAHN) Indians, who now also own the downtown hotel named after President Grant, who granted them (no pun intended) land north of here in 1875, and seem to be benefitting ultimately, as many Native American bands now do, from the assertion of Indian sovereignty in Chief Justice Marshall's decision in Worcester vs Georgia. The Sycuan seem to be quite a success story. According to the Sycuan's website, there are only about 120 Sycuan, but who support - it must be - around 400 organisations, including 911 for Kids Foundation, Adopt a Block, American Indian Film Festival, American Parkinson Disease Association, Amputees in Motion, Back Country Square Dance Association, Bonita Vista School District, the Braille Institute, the Burn Institute, the California Association of Hostage Negotiators, North Coast Repertory Theater, Patrick Henry High School, Pauma Indian Reservation, Parkway Bowl's 200 Club... and that's not even really scrolling down! I find it interesting to consider how this sovereignty works within states and how it doesn't conflict, but I dare say it's a bit like having the ACT in the middle of NSW.

Connections familiar or otherwise

I took this photo in Balboa Park in downtown San Diego yesterday.

The trunk to the right, by my reckoning, belongs to a sideroxylon, that species of red-flowering eucalypt that is endemic to Goulburn, NSW. It was flowering red yesterday.
I muse over this. Throughout California, you find native Australian plants. It took decades to get Australians to plant Australian natives. And are Californians planting Californian natives? This planting of exotics seems to express a constant longing for somewhere else.
I'm more heartened when the natural networks are all still in place. One of the other features of San Juan Capistrano that I forgot to mention the other day is that each year, on or around the 19 March, cliff swallows still arrive on their annual migration from Argentina. It is good to see some links not broken.

From sea to shining sea

I was interested to read on the plaque below these bells at San Juan Capistrano that they were rung by the president of the United States, 'Mr Richard M. Nixon' and his wife, "Mrs Richard M. Nixon' in 1969. What struck me was the use of the 'mr' and 'mrs' prefixes. They are certainly less grandiose than what I was expecting, and I wonder if that has something to do with the times in which this plaque was struck. Apart from the glaring contradiction of Vietnam, were those times at least in some sense less imperial?
I enjoy being in this most southwestern corner of America. There is a prevalence of Spanish, as we seem to be wearing through to the deep-set footmarks of Portola, Fr Serra and others. As we booked accommodation in New York next month and were talking about things going on in faraway rocky Maine, I wondered how imperial and united this country really is these days. I remember thinking, when I watched some mayors debating on TV a couple of weeks ago (from memory there were the mayors of Atlanta, Washington, Cleveland, New York...), that each city may find its own solutions to the country's infrastructure shortfalls, and that maybe the country will devolve into city states. I am aware that in places Lakota may be as prevalent as Spanish, or Chinese or Vietnamese (though are there still Acaghchemem speakers - pronounced A-harcha-mum - around here?). There is far more variety and mass packed into this continental space (a factor certainly in squeezing up excellence.)
Outside the walls of the former mission was a plaque explaining that the mission was returned to the Catholic Church from the Forster family by proclamation of President Abraham Lincoln on 18 March 1865. Another thing struck me about this. Lincoln never made it this far west. But in the dying days of the Civil War, back east so, so far from here, such was the extent of his continental reach.

Two footnotes:
1. I found on Wiki-pedia that the Acagchemem language was recorded by Anastacia Majel and John P. Harrington in 1933 and that the tapes resurfaced in 1995. The language is being re-learnt by a number of members of the tribe whose number of enrolments now stands at 2,800.
2. During his presidency, Nixon maintained a 'White House' not far from here, at San Clemente. It's out on a headland which was pointed out to me the other day.

City views

Bear in mind, this between Ventura Boulevard and Santa Monica.

A daily reminder

LA gets such a bad press. A shop assistant in Van Nuys even said, 'You came from Australia to Van Nuys!!?' And yes, parts are obviously barren - concrete and trashy shops.
But there are beautiful pockets. There is still an orange grove on the university campus at Northridge. We went walking up in the Santa Monica mountains at the end of Reseda Boulevard. You can reach the sea from here. It felt familiar to me as desert, hot, dry and scrubby, and yet, look closely at this picture and you'll see snow-capped mountains in the distance. This is a real buzz for me.

I know people love to knock LA, but out in the suburbs in the San Fernando Valley where we stayed, I would sum it up as 'birdsong, grapefruit and sunshine'. Don't forget that that when someone once couldn't understand how the arch-European intellectual Arnold Schoenberg could live in LA after Vienna, he said, 'I get to play tennis every day.'