The Birds

This is a different exhibit than the one I saw, but it's by the same guy with the same birds and guitars. Does it no justice. Watch!

Magnificent Proportions

One of the most powerful things that art can do is to blur the boundary between reality and perceived truth. This is one reason that I struggle to enjoy flat representation; too often, a painting strikes me as a simple representation of virtuosity instead of something that applies to - something that changes - the human experience.

Four days ago, I noticed this article on the Boston Globe site. I didn't read it because I was at work and thus engaged with multiple conflicting other demands, all roughly related to the myriad and inscrutable demands of the parents of four-year-olds. But I made a mental note to see the exhibition.

Because we are engaged in a hectic race to find a new home, my girlfriend and I rarely get a chance to breathe, much less sit in a two-hour line for a ten minute experience. But as luck would have it, we got our chance on Sunday.

Our real estate broker, who had been so kind as to show us apartments preferable by shades to certain cardboard boxes, finally asked us to stop wasting their time and look elsewhere. It was a low moment that came when we realized that the initial fees alone (equivalent of 1600 loaves of bread, 760 large mochas, or 4.8 years of comic book Wednesdays,) equalled too much. The look on the broker's face was a mix of disgust, anger, and confusion. Where do people like this get off? it seemed to say. How do they think they deserve all of this? Or any of this? Ugh, I hope they leave soon, the urchins.

So we left, emotionally drained, defeated, and desaturated. The car, which has made strange noises since I drove it to Philadelphia in December, complained and groaned at the extra weight of our slumped shoulders, our heavy heads, our hearts.

There is one thing that any Salemite can do to feel wealthy: go to the Peabody Essex Museum. Admission to this world-class institution is completely free to residents of the city. You could go every day, and as long as you had an ID listing your residence as Salem, you would be greeted as an honored guest. Otherwise, tickets cost 9 loaves of bread per person.

It makes you feel special.

We were given pink collar clips and politely informed that the line was long. We settled in to wait - it seemed appropriate. Around us flocked people who would probably have passed the real estate broker's exacting standards, all wrapped in giant charcoal pea coats and adorned with hairstyles indicative of lifestyles. They chatted with us easily, and we with them. The broker's distorted ideas about the relative value of humanity meant nothing here. We were all lucky. We were all about to see something amazing.

Suddenly, we were close. The giant glass doors ahead offered a limited view of the interior of the exhibit. Things flitted. Something moved. Humans stood gaping at things invisible from our point of view. They looked nothing like people in a train. A docent was looking us all over when the head of the family before us suddenly spoke up: "There's only two of them." They pushed us forward. We entered.

Beyond the glass doors, beyond a chubby, well-dressed security guard in a vestibule, beyond a heavy silver curtain of hanging chain links, was a space.

It is hard to think of the exhibit as a room. The walls seem completely irrelevant. Feet stay to the neutral linoleum path by nature. Around it, a sea of very coarse, gravelly sand allows no dust to rise in the hot, still air. Rushes spring from this sand, but whether they are alive or dead, sleeping plant people or dry plant bones, is impossible for me to determine. The birds take them to use in nests that they have built despite the upscale wicker habitats hanging from the ceiling...and the guitars eager for the rake of the birds' tiny, undeniable talons.

The birds land on the guitars in fifths. Tones reverberate through amplifiers in asynchronous harmony, counterpointed by the sweet vocalizations and the beat of the wings of the flocks of their creators. Some of the humans are so shy around the birds that they jump when the tiny creatures come too close. But the music is not to be denied.

I need to spend a week here. I need to know the circadian rhythms and the cycle of feeding and the new chicks learning to fly and land and the teaching of their chicks in time. I'll sleep on the neutral linoleum and smell the sand and head single chords sound randomly in the night, excited cacophony resounding at daybreak, birds courting on the necks of Fenders.

Then, we had to go.

It's impossible to share an experience like that. Years would go into its full understanding. In another age, monasteries would have been built around that exhibit and generations of quiet people would think of nothing else. The sound was the one the human species lost when we started wearing shoes.

We're already talking about going back. It runs into April, though by then, we'll be long gone. Our own rhythms are taking us elsewhere. But maybe we don't need it. My girlfriend turns the pages in her book over the excited tapping of my fingers on the laptop, which emits a very high electric tone. The cats bump and sigh when we move. We talk about the future. The sounds we make for each other reverberate gently through the slow morning.

Three Scenes in an Absurd Cafe

Scene: Batty Woman enters Cafe. She is graying and plump, bedecked with a hand-woven shawl that still bears its tag. When she sits next to Audience, a powerful and completely unaccountable smell of garbage overwhelms. She remains for an hour, casting disapproving glances at Audience, who are calling around about apartments and muttering under their breath. When Batty Woman leaves, the Eau de Compost departs with her like a cloud of hauteur.

Scene: Audience has begun to pound out a blog post. Their vigor is infectious! Hipster Manchild, who now occupies the space recently vacated by Batty Woman, struggles to keep up. What is he writing? An essay on colonialism? How banal. Audience's lips curl into a tight, vicious smile. Hipster Manchild quails. Fingers spasming, each party draws upon reserves of bullshit as deep and broad as the great tar sands of Canada. Suddenly, Hipster Manchild cries out, blood trickling from his nose and ears! He has succumbed to the tremendous pressures. Audience leaps onto the table and promptly passes out from exhaustion.

Scene: Having transported Audience to the hospital and determined that they require no care, the Ambulance Corps return them to the Cafe. Audience thrashes and foams at the mouth, but it's a ruse! Barista pours cold tea onto Audience's head and Audience sputters to a halt. Cast stares at Audience, who now feels foolish for carrying on. After a long, awkward pause, Audience makes a weak, self-deprecating joke. This serves to break the ice magnificently. Cast roars with laughter and treats itself to 'nilla wafers and toast. Cast and Audience party down like total animals until dinner time, when they all go home and quietly prepare to go back to work on Monday.

THE END

This American Commons: A Night at the Opera

Recently, I've really enjoyed listening to "This American Life" with Ira Glass. I've also been reading David Bollier's upcoming book on the commons, "Think Like a Commoner", for ForeWord. (As I am wont to do.) The book is very impressive in many ways, and I found one particular anecdote about an Italian opera house especially inspiring. This is a "This American Life"-style article about an opera I'd very much like to attend.

...

They began as fifteen ragtag performers and a handful of out-of-work executives holed up in a giant, abandoned, unheated opera house. But within three weeks, most of Chipiquida City, which is located in upstate New York, has come to participate in what the papers are calling Occupy Opera. It began when the Chipiquida City Opera, after a long and depressing decline, finally ran out of money. Scott Simon, ex-CEO of the opera, tells me how it happened.

“We knew it was coming for a long time. People just weren’t paying anymore.” It should be noted that Scott no longer has a job. (He’s been out of work for most of a year now.) But he doesn’t seem unhappy. In fact, he seems galvanized. He’s hopping around the room, trying to show us what the opera has been up to lately. It’s hard to keep him on topic.

Yes, that’s right: lately. Bankruptcy didn’t end the Chipiquida City Opera: it renewed it. This is Scott again. “This is the classic problem with art: you’re supposed to pay an enormous amount of money for it, but what do you get? You get to sit in a row, stare at a screen above a bunch of histrionic vocalists, and think about how uncomfortable your shoes are. What a dumb idea for the age of the iPhone! It was never going to work.”

This seems like a pretty remarkable statement for an ex-opera director. In fact, Scott says, he was actually relieved when the CCO folded. At last, he could just face the truth: nobody cared about the opera. He could finally move on with his life. That’s probably what would have happened if it hadn’t been for the players.

When the CCO finally folded, the players - the actors who also sing the opera live on stage - had been preparing to perform the opera Carmen. For those of you who haven’t seen Carmen before, there are links on our website. You should really check it out. It’s one of the most colorful and beautiful works of art in the operatic tradition. The story is about a gorgeous woman named, as you might expect, Carmen. A soldier named José falls in love with her and in return Carmen kind of messes up his life. There’s another guy and some smugglers and even a bullfight. It’s set in Spain, sung in French, and it’s a whole lot of fun, with fancy costumes, huge sets, and music as catchy as anything you'd hear on a top 40 station. The performers at the CCO had been looking forward to performing this opera for an entire year.

“No way were we letting this go.” That’s Sarah McMaster, who played the part of Carmen. “They came to us and said that the building would be locked the next day and that they were sorry that they couldn’t pay us, and we told them we were still going to perform.” It was that simple: the players were just going to do it anyway. “It took a little convincing.”

The problem was that they still needed stuff, mostly in the costuming department, but also for the show's technical details. They needed people to operate the lights, people to help move set pieces, and even people to stand at the doors and look bored while taking tickets. (The usual crew, who handles this stuff for the actors, wasn’t interested in sticking around.) So the CCO’s executive board (which was now the ex-executive board) put out a press release announcing the opera's closing and the ongoing performance of Carmen. They also asked for volunteers to help out. They didn’t get any, probably because the news station, WRVV, didn’t actually read the release, but just mentioned the closing of the opera in passing.

Then, something fascinating happened.

Louis D. Freeman plays Carmen’s other love interest, Escamillo. But he’d been in public relations too, and for a long time he’d been bugging the CCO’s executives to start a PR department and put him in charge. “There’s just so much they could have done. Once we didn't need to make a profit anymore, I was like, OK! Nothing to lose, so, you know. I did it.”

First, he hit up Twitter. He pulled in friends, sewing circles, his mom’s church, teachers in the local school. Free opera, he told them. Just show up. No ticket required, no money accepted. Just bring a certain kind of hat that we need, or a belt for Carmen’s dress, or some food for the performers, and we’ll let you in. Crazy, right? Who'd even go for that?

The answer, apparently, is everyone. To say that Carmen was a landslide success would be dramatically underselling the situation the opera players encountered on opening night. Here's Simon: “We were filled to capacity. If we’d been selling tickets, we’d have sold out.”

Keep in mind that when we say everyone, we mean just about five hundred people showed up with random stuff and asked to see the CCO perform. Even in its heyday, the opera had never, ever seen a turnout like this. Not to mention that almost everyone in the crowd had something to donate. Most of it was small, but little things tend to add up. People brought bags of apples, bolts of fabric for the sets, old military equipment. (One guy brought an actual sword once owned by his great-grandfather, a lieutenant in the Spanish army.) But mostly people brought food. “A lot of it wasn’t exactly good food.” This is Sarah again. “We got a lot of cookies.”

Scott Simon had stuck around basically to manage the building until the performers left, but now he saw the opportunity to do something more interesting. “We ended up with way too much stuff for ourselves. There were probably less than twenty people in the show and about four hundred fifty people showed up to watch, and most of them came with, you know, food.” So what did they do with all that food? “Well, we distributed it.”

That’s right: the Chipiquida City Opera started passing out food to anyone who showed up. Scott grabbed some people who’d shown up with nothing to donate and turned them into the crew, made them set up tables and cover them with some donated cloth, and then got them to manage the edibles, all on the fly. “The tricky part was making sure there wasn’t a rush on the food once we had it out. We had enough people show up empty-handed, I just had them walk around and hand out food like servers, unless I needed them at the door. I had a few issues, but mostly people were OK with the deal if they knew they wouldn't get to see it otherwise.”

“It was pretty cool.” Louis smiles a lot when he talks about this part. “There was one woman who actually brought a chicken. I mean, she brought a real, live, clucking chicken. So we were like, ‘what do we do with this?’ and after we talked it over for, like, five minutes, which was basically all we had, we stuck it on stage and let it walk around. I mean, it’s Seville in, what, the 1700s? There probably were chickens. We actually incorporated it into the act, like at one point Sarah cradled it in her arms and sang to it, and characters would complain to it like it was their therapist or best friend or something. It was hilarious. The audience loved the chicken.”

So how did this happen? Is Louis some kind of PR genius? Some svengali of social networking? “Ah, actually, everyone at my old job agreed that I’m pretty bad at marketing. Yeah. Heh. I don’t actually really know how this happened.”

“I think it had to be ours before we started caring about it.” Lisa was in the audience at Carmen. She brought some wooden crates, which she’d seen on the registry that Louis had originally tweeted. “The soldiers’ uniforms didn’t match, and Carmen was wearing these crazy hot pink stiletto heels, and everything that wasn’t out of order was out of place except the acting and the actors and the audience, and we were all just having so much fun.”

In fact, they had so much fun that they decided to do it again with The Marriage of Figaro. Then again with Fidelio. For Fidelio, they started filming, not just the opera, but the audience and the things they would bring. These videos are amazing and you can see them on the CCO’s YouTube channel, all for free. You've never seen opera like this. People come in street clothes or dressed up in outrageous DIY costumes, which adds to the carnival atmosphere. The only donations not allowed are drugs and alcohol. (Until they can figure out some kind of reliable bouncer system, the performances are totally dry.) Every performance fills the house to capacity. They keep having to turn people away, which is bad, because people are now driving from other cities to see this thing. Various blogs and TV stations have picked it up. It’s turning into Chipiquida City’s big draw. People are talking about simulcasting performances to the web, as in, drop something off and you get a one-time code to log into a simulcast service through which you can watch a performance from home. They’re still working on that, and it might not happen for a while. But what's important is that the CCO is back in business.

In fact, they’re doing better than ever. Their heating and electric bills are paid - the benefactors get seasons’ admission, but apparently most of them still insist on bringing stuff - and though they don’t have water in the building and usually have to adjust the program to whatever the audience happens to come in with on the very night of the performance, they still refuse to take money directly.

“No. There’s no way we’re taking money. Never again.” Scott Simon is absolutely adamant about this. “People love it because they see their stuff and their contribution going right into the performance. They love how campy and thrown together it is, and how it has this...communal quality. People make friends here now. And frankly, this was...the people who come in now, they were never our demographic before. Most of our current customers could never have afforded tickets before we went bankrupt. We were...so...ready for something like this to happen. Opera was ready. Is ready. I want to see this happen everywhere.”

“We eventually just took out the seats.” According to Louis, this was a fan’s idea that everyone embraced. Why not? The old seats were uncomfortable and had antisocial armrests that made people feel hemmed in. “We just tossed them and started grabbing stuff off Craigslist ads and getting couches from whoever wanted to get rid of stuff.” They still don’t have any money - that’s the only problem that could trip them up in the near future. Nobody ever gets paid anymore and buying things for the opera is out of the question. Some of the performers are struggling, and of course things like bulbs for special stage lights, which need to be ordered online from a company in another city, can't be replaced on the barter system. For now, they just do without stuff if they can't jury-rig it.

But for the performers themselves, buying things locally outside of the opera is also becoming...less of a problem. The actors get recognized a lot. Local restaurants want them to bring that crowdsourced style, which the CCO is so famous for, into evening performance lineups. In this economically mediocre town, where most people have no education beyond a high school degree, opera is becoming enormously popular. People on the street hum the theme to La Traviata. Teenagers re-watch old performances on YouTube. And everyone, and I mean everyone, wants to participate.

“I was an opera singer for five glorious years!” It turns out that Lisa spent some time as an understudy in New York City in her twenties. “Though I actually spent a lot of time eating noodles and going to auditions, and eventually I married and came home, and that was that and I don’t have any regrets. But now I’m going to play Mrs. Cripps in May and I couldn’t be happier! God brought it back around for me. I always knew He would.”

“It really has been...amazing.” Sarah gets a little teary when she talks about this. “We don’t do this to get rich, and I don’t think we ever will, but I think we’re making more people happy now. Maybe it’ll work out and maybe it won’t. But I think we’ve really got something special here.”

Evidently the rest of Chipiquida thinks so too. Signs are appearing in local businesses and the windows of area homes: “Proud Participant in the CCO.” And the idea is spreading. Just this week, a small, beloved bakery is experimenting with the same model as the CCO now uses. For a few days - just to see if it works - they’re offering free bread to whoever does their taxes for them. Already, they have a few applicants, most of whom know them through the famous Chipiquida City Opera.