Faculty Ken Ueno

SIX MEMOS FROM A YEAR IN ROME
Fourth Memo: RANDOMNESS
By Dr. Ken Ueno

Yesterday was Easter.

Everything was closed. There was no food service at the Academy. I walked down to the Pantheon and sought food where I knew even on this holy day a vendor would be open. I got two Big Macs at the McDonald's there.

For the first time since being here, I broke down and got me some good ol' American fast food. I must be starting to get homesick.

After getting my fill, I walked back across the Tiber and up the Janiculum (the hill on which the Academy resides). On the way, I began to feel sick in my stomach. My body was reminding me how bad it feels when I eat junk. But I had craved it so badly. Or, was my body becoming acclimatized to organic local produce?

Am I unable, now, to digest junk?

One of the monumental changes that have occurred at the Academy over the last couple months is that the food service has changed. Previously, we had an Italian company heat up half-prepared meat and boil frozen vegetables. Now, we have Mona. Mona Talbott.

Mona is a chef from Chez Panisse, the great Californian establishment (www.chezpanisse.com) known as the birthplace of California cuisine, co-founded by Alice Waters. Before taking over the food service, Mona, spent months researching local materials, farms, and vendors. Now, everything is fresh, tasty, simply genius.

It's had an impact on our community. We are no longer embarrassed to invite guests over to dinner (for example, for my lecture last week, I had invited the Japanese Ambassador to the Holy See - i.e. Vatican), more families come to dinner, more fellows regularly attend meals, everyone hangs out longer after meals, and we just generally feel better, overall plus for morale.

By the way, Mona used to be the executive chef for President Clinton.

Don't know if it was just junk making me sick, though.

On the way back from the Pantheon, I saw an old woman get run over by a bus. She got stuck underneath it. I saw the bus driver first try to go forward to clear her. Then people shrieked to let him know that he was doing more damage. I then saw people get off the bus. Then, the crowd of 50-60 people pushed against the bus to lean it over to one side, in order to gain enough clearance to be able to pull the woman away from under the bus.

I was at once struck by the horror of the endemic lunacy in driving here and the instant generation of communal spirit to help.

As I walked away from the accident, I saw people walking and driving...all about me, life was going on normally. I thought of Breugel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, and William Carlos Williams' poetic response to it.

Spring is always a period of contrasts for me. It's beautiful here. Flowers blooming everywhere. Green, reds, pinks, yellows. As much as I am inspired by the external world about me, I suffer. I am congested, cough, eyes itch...spring kills me every time. Spring also marks the general mid-way point of my time here. I am beginning to feel the pressure to get my projects done, and to begin preparing for next year. When I go back I'll have find a new place to live, get a new car...August is not going to be such a fun month.

In the meantime, between working on commissions for orchestral and chamber works, traveling to present lectures and concerts, I have been collaborating with a team of fellow fellows of the Academy on a one-night spatial intervention.

There is an interesting space in the Jewish Ghetto called the Rialto Sant' Ambrogio. It was originally built as a convent then was later used as a naval school. Today, it is a gallery space. On Saturday evenings, a group called Blueroom hosts art events in the space. They curate video art projects on those nights, but what is interesting is that as the night progresses, the space transforms from a gallery into a dance club with djs.

So, along with a couple landscape architects (Jose Parral and Willett Moss), an architect (Thomas Tsang), and an digital animator (Josh Mosely - he was recently selected to show at the Venice Biennale!!!) I will be working on multi-room, site-specific installations with physical constructions, video projections and sound to be shown on April 21st.

What Jose and I will create will be a spatial analysis to investigate movement density within the Rialto Sant'Ambrogio space over the course of the Blueroom evening. While guests participate in the evening, their own movement and interactions in fact determine its course.

The central audio/visual element of this project utilizes the real-time movement of guests as the source of its own audio/visual output. A ratio is created from the movement density recorded in real-time and data recorded from a past Blueroom evening; this ratio is then projected as a function of the changing densities in the evening of April 21st.

Willett will create an environment created from found materials whose visual presence depends on the flow of inhabitants within the space as well as an installation in the Rialto Sant'Ambrogio main bar area that visually records movement density through light. Thomas will create a free poster that maps the spatial interventions and can be cut-out to form an architectural model. Josh is going to make 60 frames/sec videos of black and white dots, the patterns of which will leave an impression of color on the human eye.

What else has been going on? Let's see.

My friends the drummer Joey Baron and the percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky visited me. I'm writing a piece for Robyn to play with the violist Kim Kashkashian. In it, there will be a cadenza for her to perform sounds with playing cards on an amplified table. Fortunately, Joey's a card shark, knows many different shuffles, and tricks. So, Joey was able to coach Robyn on my cadenza.

Life often seems random. But there are different orders of chaos. Is there a consistent thread between the juxtapositions of narrative accounts of Easter in Rome, food service at the Academy, accidents on the way back from the Pantheon, a description of upcoming events/works, and friends playing cards?