Ever forward, hope to finish by the end of the week.

Part 1: Playing to the New York Crowd; Kavanah and Teshuvah in the Kabala; That Fantastic Red Handbag; We All Know That Conductors Hate Sopranos; Lunch With Elliot, or Tosker, Man!

Part 2: The Master Class; The Rules of the Game; Vita’s Novel

In Part 3:

  • The God Drug Tribe
  • Jacqueline du Pré (1945-1987) and Olga Metkina (2002?-????)
  • John Mauceri and the You-Don’t-Belong-Here Blues

THE GOD DRUG TRIBE

  • Shipibo-Conibo, of course. But first I want to tell you about my first musicology professor, Dr Johannes Riedel (1913-1993). What do he, I, and the tribe all have common? Ecuador.
  • When Dr Reidel was about 25 or so and in school in Berlin, he found out he was about to be deported back to his native Poland, which would’ve been bad for him of course, but for his young wife Judith as well, who surely would’ve ended up in Auschwitz. So to save his wife from being murdered in the ovens, he took a job in a faraway Catholic high school on the coast of Ecuador, teaching choir while studying the region’s Hispanic-based music in preparation for his longed-for-in-the-distance postgraduate work, hopefully in a free country.
  • When I met Dr Reidel I was 14, in a citywide high-school student arts program run by the city of Minneapolis, they were that rich in those days. The Minnesota Opera. The Minnesota Orchestra. Skrowaczewski, man! In college, my dorm (F only) was right across the common from Northrop Auditorium, so I ushered every week to get into the concerts free. Skrowaczewski brought us Karol Szymanowski’s Song of the Night.
  • I wish you and I had been in the Urban Arts Program together John, conductor of my heart. We would’ve had such fun together.
  • But back to the Shipibo-Conibo. More than once while Mister Grumble and I were hanging out in the Mariscal we’d run into hippie backpackers who’d ask us if we knew where the tribe with the god-drug—ayahuasca—could be found. When we told them they’d have go down south, way south, most of them balked and opted just to score crappy weed from the local dealers, which ironically all came down from Mexico anyway.
  • So—ayahuasca+the Shipobo-Conibo is a known thing among the heads among us, one of whom is, at it turns out, Lydia Tár herself.
  • LYDIA IS A HEAD—AND A HEALER. Pay close attention to how she treats Sharon’s dickey heart. I know all about this.
  • Pay attention too to her particular awareness of the energies of those people surrounding her, especially the ones she’s attracted to.
  • This is not a topic fit for the gwilo robots in our “civilized” places and Lydia is smart enough to know she’d be derided and condemned if she talked about it. So let me talk about it because I’m nobody so this won’t get back to me.
  • Ayahuasca is a psilocybin that comes in liquid form. Under close supervision by a shaman (that guy in the photo and in her dreams), you drink it from a bowl and it makes you throw up all the bad stuff in your body/spirit. Then when you’re nice and clean the channels are open and you are confronted with not only your true self, but the Divine.
  • This confrontation can break lesser minds but Lydia has a great, strong mind. I can understand her desire to share her experience with those she considered her equals, going up the Ucayali with Francesca and Krista. I’m sorry it didn’t work out for her. Some rivers you have to travel alone.

more soon…

Next: The Bernstein Tapes

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