Holy Cow!

Last Saturday the cities from Geneva to Vevey hosted "Night at the Museum" - a 24 hr period of unlimited entrance to all museums for 10 chf, INCLUDING ALL PUBLIC TRANSPORT!

Kids are free anyway, so with just two of the below, we were in!

A green theme, Carolyn and I wore these around our necks & were encouraged to plant them - seeds inside the biodegradable ticket.

Lausanne's Natural History Museum - we'd been meaning to go here for years - houses geology, archaelogy, zoology, & a library. There was panning for gold...

Some old

and new friends.

Marie & Jack are somewhat an item.

I asked Michael to pose over the excavated ancestors of Vaud canton:

and the library featured some Pierre Viret manuscripts.

"On the Origin, the Difference, and the Place of Ancient and Modern Idols; True and False Images and Objects and the One True Mediator" (1551).

We could sure use him now, as Jeff Bezos launched Kindle Fire, moving the e-reader from book to video gaming.

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Many local restaurants offered promotions to the LA NUIT DES MUSÉES, including Holy Cow,

a new hamburger joint in town:

the Che Guevara reference was cute.

Tasty, fresh fries.

Only Jack did not finish his basket.

The ease of travel, the compactness of the city, really makes Lausanne quite a spectacular urban experience, and I hate it when locked indoors all day on course work. We're having a very unusual fall so far, as well. Nothing about the weather feels autumnal except

The constant turning of seasonal produce, like the quince fruit

and a rich basket of chantrelles!

Bunraku

The initial posting weeks ago about MI5 (btw, season 10 has begun!) and the formal nature of British acting inspired me to write about Bunraku, one of Japan's 3 classical theater forms, still active. Bunraku is puppet theater with orchestra and chanters who vocalize all roles stage right, while puppeteers manipulate the 3/4 lifesize dolls.

Striking are the high emotions these puppets create, as visceral experience links to language - script is authoritative

- and text animates wooden figures.

What you see is what you get, as the chanter sings all parts and visible puppet masters work the dolls; a theater parallel to interiors that make pipes and ductwork part of the design.

Bunraku accepts & visualizes brokenness, building a transparent theatre where the parts - actor, story, prop, stage, musicians, viewer - are woven into a multifaceted, yet textual, unity.

By contrast, the conventions of mainstream Hollywood film being humanistic, musical and verbal cues advance plots & characters in an unfolding, linear arc, requiring passivity, distance, & fragmentation in the viewer whose main role is to identify, emote, go along.

"The function of..Western theatre of the last few centuries has been..to show what is said to be secret ("feelings,""situations,""conflicts"), while hiding the very artifice of the show (stage effects, painting, powder, light sources)...The Western spectacle is anthropomorphic...the Western actor...the voice..the look..the figure are eroticized...like so many fetishes.

Bunraku exposes the sources of theatre in their emptiness. What..replaces [theater] is the action necessary to the production of the spectacle. Work substitutes for interiority...Emotion no longer inundates, no longer submerges, it becomes reading material."

Roland Barthes, "On Bunraku"

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Liturgical worship operates similarly; eg All Saints follows a prayer book (essentially, an updated script based upon the Book of Common Prayer),

where the minister reads plain type, the congregation responds the bold:

The Lord is here.

His Spirit is with us.

Lift up your hearts.

We lift them to the Lord.

Let us give thanks
to the Lord our God.

It is right to give thanks and praise.

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We break this bread
to share in the body of Christ.

Though we are many, we are one body,
because we all share in one bread.

Perhaps we are the lifeless puppets, animated chanters, & visible stage hands, bringing to life the Church Invisible, meeting Christ at the table -

"..if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you." Romans 8:11

- a Eucharistic Bunraku, if you will.

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Western theater largely stems from the Mass, although I went to Japan for the premodern precedent. And while imagining the world as a stage is not novel (!), bunraku's attributes uniquely merges the textual and theatrical.

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FYI, Barthes was a pioneer semiotician & highly influential literary critic. Although there is a long history of Euro-American intellectuals, usually French, who completely misread Asia - brilliant at home, utterly stupid abroad - Barthes, was generally reliable. Japan has been an aesthetic obsession dating to the 1870s, when Monet, Van Gogh, Degas, Eisenstein, Frank L.Wright, Pound, etc interpreted Japanese culture as an artistic antidote to Western rationalism, propelling its inventive arts & design practices into global currency most recently explored by the anime and the video gaming community.

(Image, Music, Text is a classic - the chapter where he analyzes an Italian spaghetti ad, pioneer in its day.)

Jeune Federal

Last Monday was a holiday, Jeune Federal, and our first extended weekend, so, strongly recommended, we went north to German-speaking Lucerne.

Jeune means "fast," having Reformation roots, as Protestant believers in Geneva called a day of fasting to remember fellow Huguenots slaughtered in France's religious wars. A bit like American Thanksgiving, if we were to honor the Plymouth Colonists who died (up to 1/3) that first year, rather than a sign of friendship with native peoples.

At any rate, with the exception of the sentence above, that tragic history is long gone. Case in point: the chocolate fiend in above photo, who knew the Jeune as a holiday (a fast from school). Lucerne, like Vevey, boasts an international classical music festival; the chocolatiers featured edible violins & pianos.

The famous wooden bridge crosses to the old medieval section. When we lived in Tokyo, the arson fire of the structure made the front page of The Japan Times; the city being a long favorite of Japanese tourists with their deep appreciation for classical music, striking scenery, especially bridges - a focal point in Japanese garden design.

Also known for the highest and most steeply angled funiculaire in the world, we are saving this for clearer weather another time. Given the topography and technical know-how, the Swiss are pioneers in funiculaire and gondola design, engineering San Francisco's first cable cars, as well.
Our trip focused on the Museum of Transportation, the most frequented museum in the country. Museums unleash considerable graphic, architectural design & financial power here; a Swiss designed Beijing's Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium in 2008:
The musuem has a theme of overcoming - poor resources, mountain barriers - with ingenuity and persistence, burrowing the first railroad tunnel with Italian workers,

turning historic trains into play equipment, essentially, while offering the set above. Jack could've stayed for hours.

Highway signs. Kids also invited to do the digging

but the highlight was an over-the-top display of maybe 40 significant automobiles along a wall on individual platforms,

which a moving lift retrieves one at a time, chosen by an audience vote:

our group voting for a vintage Rolls Royce. The scale & engineering grace was jawdropping, reminding me of upscale vending machines in Japan, which would display floral bouquets.

Speaking of cars, do you know which Swiss car designer and racer co-founded an American car company, celebrating its 100th birthday this year? Louis-Joseph CHEVROLET. His town will have a procession of 1000 Chevies in November.

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The famous lion commemorating the death of hundreds of Swiss guards (these died in the French Revolution), who have been protecting European monarchs since the 15th century;

anachronistic, the only remaining guards today continue to protect the Vatican:

ERS

Last Saturday we visited Edith Schaeffer at her apartment, bottom floor of a renovated 17th century chalet - a treasure trove of memories; wedding photo of parents in China (in traditional dress), old Chalet Melezes L'Abri bread board, favorite hymnals like Christian Praise, tea service, original wheelbarrow shipping china to Europe, etc.

Every wedding gift long broken after years of L'Abri ministry, everything seen is everything survived.

Michael and Jack entertained with their music,

while enjoying her BBC reception with wonderful children's programming.

This baby Steinway was the subject of the book Forever Music, reflecting the deep engagement with the arts and culture which was, along with a vital spiritual life, ERS' contribution to the Schaeffer household. Grandfather Seville,a Greek professor who also knew Mandarin, read his Greek NT 'til the day he died at 102.

I'll never forget the meal shared 3 years ago, Michael proclaiming his history, "I was born in China and Jack was born in China," to which Mrs S loudly added with back straightened, "And I was born in China."

Like Ruth Graham & Os Guinness, ERS was a child of the China Inland Mission, writing of her early years in Mei Fuh:
I'm unsure to what degree a less "settled" origin propels one to either accept or foster restlessness, although I see that in myself, certainly. At home everywhere, at home nowhere.

I sometimes wonder if Michael's strong desire to farm & plant gardens expresses an unsentimental longing for place.

Cathedral

Lausanne boasts a beautiful cathedral with much of the original facades and stained-glass windows intact (in contrast to the Notre Dame in Paris), for centuries, anchoring the city as a "go to" destination, before the bureaucratic organs of the global state - UN, UNICEF, etc - made Geneva the political centerpiece.

The last tower in Europe to feature a crier who climbs nightly from 10pm to 2am, proclaiming, "All is well..."

Rue Pierre Viret is a street circling the cathedral base

named after the reformer whose 500th birthday is being commemorated now (Calvin last year). Viret was based in Lausanne, forming a Protestant academy, and - in his day - was published and read second only to Calvin; largely overlooked as none of his works are available in English, but the Viret society is busily working to correct this.

Reformation Wall (Geneva); Latin for Jesus below

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You may know that TIME magazine named the "new" Calvinism "one of the ideas changing the world right now", undoubtedly owing to the influence of young, restless, & reformed, such as Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church fame. The movement is not without controversy, but seems more-or-less healthy, while a testimony to the new technologies that have spawned and authorized a new set of figures - a virtual eldership, if you will - adding pizazz and outreach, while pulling resources from existing churches; ie the Amazon.com version of "doing" church, the DrudgeReport way of doing news, and, as former senator Anthony Wiener discovered, a Twitter way of doing scandal.

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Back to church. A Catholic cathedral turned Protestant, the site of the famed Disputation where Calvin critiqued the official church teaching, there is an aesthetic stoicism centering the service from iconography to teaching. One of the most expensive instruments in the world ($4.2 million),

this magnificent pipe organ was made in Massachusetts and is the first European cathedral with a Made in the USA label! I am committed to not leaving CH without having the family attend an organ concert, which, like rock concerts, the heavy bass reverberates through the body of the listener. I, like many, have been turned off by the mortuary-style, wall-to-wall carpet organ music; a stone church setting was an acoustic revelation.

The front entrance features a famous rendering (in medieval European art) of Moses whose head is studded with horns, commonly ascribed as an error in translation from Hebrew to Latin when the word for "light" was rendered as "horn."

Could be. But I am far more intrigued by the possibility that light and horn are cleverly punned to register multiple meanings of godly radiance with legal justice & power, as in Christ the lamb with 7 horns in Revelations. Horn as symbol for legal, kingly power - Solomon's ivory throne - evoking blood and righteous sacrifice (eg Lady Justice and her sword). See Michael Bull.

Back to Viret. I got excited to see one of the many exhibition placards stating that singing was one of the liberal arts featured in the academy, confirming Christopher Page's thesis in the book below.

The Neighborhood

I brought my Canon G12, walking the boys to school the other day - about a 12 minute trip without Jack's stroller. Starts at the elevator - floor 5 - down to -1, where we exit the parking area onto the bridge over the tracks.

Turning left,

zigzagging down Fontenay

and backtracking through a residential street, "bonjour"ing everyone along the way. (Not necessary on faceless city streets, but defined spaces like this or neighborhood cafes).

These houses are somewhat designed after the distinct rooftops of Bernese farmhouses, with their graceful overhang:

Not sure when uniforms were discarded, but children come in all colors and clothing with personal gear for their school work.

Japan may be the only place where you could see the old-style French school gear - thick and heavy - having adopted these from FRand military style, black uniforms from Prussia in the 19th c - still standard issue:Japan as "museum of the world," as it came to be called; cultural artifacts fossilize there long after extinction in their original context. (Tang Court dancing - long gone in the PRC, but still performed in at the Imperial Court in Kyoto).

Back to the walk.

This fountain is the convenient waterstop, before crossing onto the street towards school.

The scooter rack.

Living in a small, wealthy city with an advanced artistic heritage, there's a LOT going on for kids: children's theater, children's opera, and "The Magic Lantern," a movie club we're really excited about.

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Not sure about this blue elephant mascot, but La Lanterne Magique hosts workshops on the theatrical, literary history of film and how to critique images, screening films to an exclusively child audience.

Charlie Chaplin's The Circus - a silent - will kick-off the monthly series in October accompanied by a 37 piece orchestra. Chaplin! Not a kid's movie!Chaplin escaped anti-red sentiment in the US by moving to Vevey, where he is buried; his secretary long attended All Saints Church.

Being integrated into public schools means being the recipients of a highly cultivated Swiss culture; largely due to its position of neutrality, a level of uninterrupted education permeates the system.