From London....

I've been spending some time with my wife's family in the 14th C. walled small city of Trnava in Slovakia, thirty miles outside of Bratislava. Coincidentally, it is the 20th anniversary of the 'Velvet Revolution', when forty years of Communist control crumbled like a cookie in hot coffee under the weight of its own incompetence and the non violent protests of hundred of thousands of fed up citizens. Each Czechoslovakian town square on the night of the 17th of November 1989 was filled with protesting everyday folks, some of who became national and local 'heroes'. This unusual moment, this 'peak' moment was being celebrated in Trnava and throughout Czech and Slovakia during my time there.

At one commemoration in Trnava, before what was to be a much larger one in a few days, a few 'elders' (They were probably younger than I am!) spoke. The content of their talks was pretty consistent with what I've heard from those I've spoken with or heard on television. They spoke humbly of their roles and felt that while the change seemed inevitable looking back, at the time, the possibility of danger was sharing the Square with hope. Many from that era, however have said that they felt disappointed about how things have turned out and many in the now two countries, like Victor Havel, said that he was surprised that change would take so long. My wife, Viera, said that at a rally in 1989, a returning economist cautioned that change would take twenty years. He was booed. Love and freedom was felt and after all...all you need is...Yes? Now, prices are high, economic security diminished and the country seems to have posttraumatic stress from living in, or being the children of those who lived inside 50 years of either fascism or Communism. What happened to the hopes at the moment when the present was all there was and the fog of being separate individuals lifted, revealing connection and cooperation?

The relationship of peak moments to everyday life has recently interested me. My friend Tony, a history professor on the West Coast said that he wasn't really interested in them anymore. I argued, as Rebecca Solnit argues in her book, A Paradise Made in Hell', (See my last blog) that these moments (Ms. Solnit mostly refers to 'natural' disasters) are important because they can change both one's personality and one's government. Maybe it's also why I like the idea of studying 'underappreciated dates'... they reveal so much and can change so much.

Can the feelings of love, solidarity and equality generated at these peak moments last? Can governments created by these moments ever maintain the revolutionary fervor that gave them their life or are they destined to solidify into a bureaucracy that protects its own?

While I certainly would have rather lived in the United States during the era when Communism ruled Central and Eastern Europe, I think it is a mistake to deny that there were similarities. The Slovakian elders complained of censorship. What was the Black List? (This is on my mind from a 'Democracy Now' feature on Yip Harburg, blacklisted lyricist for the Wizard of Oz (Wizard of Oz a possible 'date'?) The elders complained of food lines. What difference does it make if there are goods but you can't afford them or if you couldn't even enter the stores because of your skin color? We say that Soviet era architecture mirrored the enforced sameness of their society. What of our urban housing projects and the 'gray flannel' suit? There was a saying in the Czechoslovakia, 'If you are not cheating the government, you are cheating your family'... Isn't Peter Galbraith (If people could spin in their grave, Peter's father, the liberal economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, would look like a whirling dervish) expecting to earn 100 million dollars from Kurdish oil development that was secured through his work for the US government helping to re-write the Iraqi constitution?

Would Tom Paine be disappointed in the United States today? Would Sir Edmond Burke say that these excesses are the payoffs for keeping order. It seems like an eternal question. How do you, to quote French writer Regis Debrays book title, keep a 'revolution in the revolution' and not become a Jacobin or a Chinese victim of the Cultural Revolution?

I'm in London now and just saw an exhibit at the Tate Modern of the works of John Baldessari, an almost 80 year old, often called, 'conceptual artist'. Mr. Baldessari famously took all of his paintings from the 1960's and in 1970 had them cremated (Another 'date'?) He was part of the upheaval of the 60's... the one that questioned war, materialism, hypocrisy and individualism. He was worried about becoming 'stuck' as a typical 'artist'. He questioned everything...all of the canons, all of the text books about what makes good art...perspective, authorship, 'ideas of beauty and even the image itself. So, he set out on a project to de-stabilize art and its audience. His was truly a one man 'revolution in the revolution' in the world of 'art'.

But, I do have to say, while I'm intrigued by his art, stimulated intellectually by his art, I'm not sure if I 'like' it, whatever that might mean. But he, who wrote thousands of times in his notebook "I will not make boring art', wouldn't care. He has decided not to allow himself to calcify and instead to make the lessons from his own peak personal insights, last. But, as the poet Steve Katz once said on seeing the avant-garde/political theater group, the Living Theater's production of their 'Paradise Now' (A third good moment?); 'They are interesting, but would I want them to be our county's leaders?" How does a country (or a person) keep fresh, responsible to its ideals and founding visions while insuring stability in the 'day to day', where most of us live?

I don't know the answer to all of this. I just know that the night of seeing Baldessari, I found an Arabic neighborhood In London and had, in an Iraqi restaurant, some wonderfully smoky babaganoush and hummus with bread just out of the oven and today, I went to an Anish Kapoor show that attracted a large general public to a fun and deceptively simple art. I keep thinking also of what the wonderful 55-year-old Slovak actor, Juraj Nvota said at the forum in Trnava. He told a gathering to celebrate the revolution of 1989 that he has come to understand that there are free people in any regime and that he could tell who they were, from the look in their eyes.

Marc Levitt