Author: Raul Rodriguez

Does anyone still listen to Julio Iglesias? He is the Latin artist who has sold more records in history. When he was 20 years old, he was in a car crash that damaged his spine severely. Everyone was convinced he would never walk again. I was never a fan of his, but this must have impressed me because I kept a clipping from Interview magazine on my journal:

“It’s all about making a disadvantage an advantage,” the Spanish heartthrob told the reporter in 1992. “That accident showed me for the first time that there is a connection between my brains and my body. I couldn’t move, so I opened my eyes more, I listened more, I was more alert for signs, smells, thoughts, and motivations that I never would have discovered without the accident. I started developing my mental powers. I discovered I could write something, how to put the songs and the words together. Little by litte,
I found I could move my toes, that with my brains I could move my muscles — that my brains were the motor of everything in my life. And I developed that sense every day for three years, even when I was sleeping”

While at the hospital, his nurse gave him a guitar to practise finger mobility. He wasn’t a singer then, but was studying law. The Spanish newspaper El Tiempo called it “un accidente bendito”. Yes, quite a happy accident!

—Raúl Rodriguez, NYC, 12.18.2018

I love Prokofiev’s music. As a kid, I was mesmerized when I heard Svatoslav Richter (or was it Emil Gilels?) play the initial exciting chords of his Third Piano Sonata—which I always wanted to master and failed. Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938), with Prokofiev’s splendorous soundtrack, is one of my Top 10 movies: a highlight of perfect collaboration between director and composer.

But Prokofiev’s suite Lieutenant Kijé (or Kizhe, in Russian) also composed for film, is still my favorite. For the past year, I’ve been carrying the Boosey & Hawkes pocket orchestral score in my corduroy jacket. I peruse it during subway rides.

“The suite’s satirical plot, set during the reign of Tsar Paul I,” Kevin Bartig tells us in www.sprktv.net, “concerns a scribe’s slip of the pen.” “The Lieutenants” in Russian is Poruchiki zhe. The scribe miswrote those two words into Poruchik kizhe which translates as “Lieutenant Kizhe,” creating a non-existent extra lieutenant. “None of the tsar’s courtiers had enough courage to reveal this mistake to Paul I, one of the most dictatorial Russian rulers,” continues Bartig, “so they continued the make-believe bureaucratic story inflating it with a banishment to Siberia, a triumphant return and marriage, and a post-mortem recognition of a fictitious member of the Imperial Army. There was even a funeral with an empty coffin!” Sometimes typos are not that evil. (I hope my proofreaders don’t read this!)

—Raúl Rodriguez, Manchester, VT, 12.10.2018

Accident is a relative term,” Anton Ehrenzweig tells us in The Hidden Order of Art, published in 1967 by the University of California Press. Six years later, I was devouring it in Spanish, highly recommended by my mentor and art teacher Luis Felipe Noé. It was the first time I had heard the concept of happy accident in art.

“The accident is incorporated into the artist’s planning and to this extent becomes indistinguishable from his more intentional design,” continues Mr. Ehrenzweig, an Austrian-born British art theorist and psychologist born to an eminent Viennese Jewish family. Living in London, he was arrested for suspicion during World War II and sent to prison camps in Australia. After his release in 1942, he returned to London and continued his work in art and psychology.

“It is the subjective relation to the artist’s planning that decides the character of the accident. Accidental in this sense is anything in the medium that does not conform with the artist’s preconceived planning, something which is felt wholly extraneous and not controlled by him.[…] The same unpredictable incident which may severely disrupt the planning of a rigid student and appear to him a frustrating ‘accident,’ will come as a welcome and indeed invited refinement of the more flexible planning of the mature artist.”

—Raúl Rodriguez, La Bergamote, NYC, 11.4.2018

I love Mars Attacks. When I was a kid, I collected the Topps cards that circulated in Latin America in the 60s. I have the complete collection in Spanish. Then in 1996, came the Tim Burton movie based in part on the stories from those cards.

When my neighbor and friend Oliver Sacks was finalizing his Musicophilia, I mentioned a scene from the movie, actually not based on the cards. Humans, by chance, discover that an atrocious, schmaltzy music (Indian Love Call) is the only weapon capable of destroying the Martians. Dr. Sacks decided to include that anecdote in the chapter about the dangerous power of music. Although it was a mere footnote, he was kind enough to mention me in the acknowledgements.

When the book came out I discovered that my name had been mispelled: Paul Rodriguez, instead of Raúl Rodriguez. Oliver was somewhat mortified, but I took it as a happy accident: not only he dedicated the copy that we still cherish, but he added, in his favorite purple marker ink, a diagonal line, back-slash like, to make the P in Paul an R. I mentioned to him I didn’t mind being called Paul. Since Raúl is not a common name among Anglo Saxons, Paul was a favorite misnomer. Raoul, Rahul, Ravi were close contenders.⁽¹⁾ Dr Sacks liked to call me Raül, trilling the R and adding the diaeresis to the second vowel in an unnecessary diacritical situation in Spanish. It made my name sound more Estonian, exotic. Or whimsically quixotic.

—Raúl Rodriguez, Hector’s Coffee Shop, NYC, 11.20.2018

(1) I once received a FedEx package and it was addressed to Ravel Rodriguez. Needless to say, I smiled and felt unfairly honored. Ravel is one of my Top 10 favorite composers, if not number one. Oliver was fond of Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin, each movement of the suite dedicated to friends who died in World War I.

On my first interview with a prospective client in the Flatiron district here in NYC, I was to meet with not only all the company’s VPs here in Manhattan, but via speaker phone with editors and art directors working at their headquarters in upstate New York.

I was interviewing for a full-time job as Creative Director of their Bilingual and Spanish divisions. That meant the in-house employees would have to route the material produced in English to R studio T so we could implement the Spanish layers. Everyone seemed charming. Everyone was more or less accepting of the plan—except one, lovely but somewhat hesitant female voice, who said to me on the phone: “We worry about surrendering.”

Funny she mentioned that. Earlier that day, I had been listening to Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, a favorite of mine. This opera has one of the most difficult, legendary arias, although it’s technically a simple rondo.⁽¹⁾ At the climax of the aria, Zerbinetta, a soprano, sings her inconditional devotion to all lovers: “ . . . hingegeben war ich stumm!” which in English means “I surrendered without a word.” Not to compare love with work
—or apples with oranges—but this sounded like a red alert to me. I think it was a happy musical accident! I never got the job so she, the unknown, nervous Beckettian mouth from Binghampton, never had to surrender.

—Raúl Rodriguez, Abingdon Square Park, 11.13.2018

(¹) Zerbinetta is the “lite” character of the opera when compared to Ariadne, the title role, who is dense and tragic, lamenting that her lover Theseus abandoned her. She tries to cheer Ariadne up by singing a lovely aria, Großmächtige Prinzessin. Although Kathleen Battle was unsurpassed in that role for a while, my favorite performance now is by the French soprano Natalie Dessay. The recording in our library features her as Zerbinetta (Deborah Voigt is Ariadne, Giuseppe Sinopoli conducts the Orchestra of Staatskapelle of Dresden). Check also a YouTube version of her Zerbinetta in modern, almost punk costumes. She’s hilarious.

Berlin, Winter 1903. Hotel Bristol, sunset. Josef Stransky, a famous opera conductor, is having a drink with the Italian tenor who originated the role of Cavaradossi in Puccini’s Tosca, three years earlier. The tenor is approached by a young woman who fearlessly asks if she could have a free ticket to the opera. In bad German accent, he refers her to the conductor mispronouncing his name as “Straussky.” The conductor flirts with her and promises a ticket, but forgets about it afterwards. When she goes home, resolute to get her reward, she looks up his address (“Straussky”) in the telephone directory but can only find “Richard Strauss,” the composer.

A few days later, a note arrives at the Strauss residence. Strauss was not home. Pauline, his wife, opens the envelope: “Dear Sweetheart, do bring me the ticket, please. Thanks for your “pleasant” time at the hotel. Your faithful Mitzi.♥ My address is Mitzi Mücke, Lüneberger Strasse 5.”

“By the time Richard Strauss returned home from a concert tour,” Charles Osborne tells us in his Complete Operas of Richard Strauss, “his wife had already consulted a lawyer to start divorce procedings. For days the composer had to endure his wife’s stridently delivered accusations until a friend convinced Pauline it was a mistake. This was the incident that inspired Strauss to compose his domestic drama Intermezzo […] completed in Buenos Aires in August 1923, when he visited that capital as a conductor.” Incident or accident?

—Raúl Rodriguez, La Bergamote, NYC, 11.6.2018

The chef Massimo Bottura is one of those food artisans who use tweezers to place a fennel frond on top of a bonsai lasagna. The menu of his 3-Michelin-star restaurant in Modena, Italy, features 10-part-course dinners worth $500 a pop. Mr. Bottura’s creations are sculptural, witty, and are meticulously laid out. But he also relies on chance. One of his famous happy accidents involves dessert.

A sous chef in the restaurant was ready to serve a tart with a luscious lemon-zabaglione filling. Plated and on his way to the table he slipped, and both tart and dish fell to the floor. The plate smashed in pieces and the tart splattered in a mass of yellow custard and crumbs.

Bottura had an epiphany. He came to the rescue, photographed the accident before it was cleaned up, and spent the next few days reconstructing the chaotic mess to the utmost detail. He even had a dishware manufacturer design a plate that had a smashed-and-put-together effect to serve the tart on. From the moment he conceived “Oops! I dropped the lemon tart,” as the dessert was baptized, it became a bestselling item in the menu. What a happy­—and yummy—accident!

—Raúl Rodriguez, Prêt-à-Manger, NYC, 10.22.2018

My sister and I learned to play the piano at home, when we were kids. My mother taught us. She had been a pianist when she was young but no longer played. We had an upright in the living-room.

We both learned the Chopin waltzes from a 1911 C. F. Peters edition that was already yellowing and crumbled each time we placed it on the piano music stand. I remember my sister playing the “Minute Waltz” quite proficiently. I only play the so called Valse de l’adieu, the saddest piece in the set, although it’s in major mode. I brought the score with me when
I emigrated to the United States

The other day, rearranging our bookshelves, the fragile score slipped out and its pages scattered all over the floor. Our Calico cat Cabiria immediately laid on top of the cracked and badly taped pieces. I photographed the resulting accident. “A Chopin archipelago!” I thought. On the floor, the waltzes looked like a bunch of islands populated by thousand of black notes, a huge feline volcano (Cabiria is known to hiss up loud) and water surrounding everything. Didn’t somebody equate music with water? I love happy accidents!

—Raúl Rodriguez Gibson, NYC, 10.16.2018

Bicycle riders are like centaurs: half human, half vehicle. Centaurs were liminal beings, from the Latin limen, or “threshold.” Bikers share pedestrians’ rights and drivers’ rights.

Coming home one night a few summers ago, I was hit and almost run over by a biker right at a park called Abingdon Square (although it’s technically a triangle.) I remember his bicycle vividly: a bright red color that I identified as PANTONE 185, one of my favorite reds. I was upset but unharmed so I didn’t pursue any charges, nor asked for help getting up. The biker was profusely apologetic.

After I stood up —it was almost midnight and the park was deserted— a lady walked by with her small white fluffy dog. I thought the dog was a shih tzu and she seemed friendly so I asked her how old the dog was. “Nine
years old,” she said in a low, contralto voice, “and he’s NOT a shih tzu, he’s a Havanese dog, the only breed native to Cuba.” I looked up and realized who I was talking to: the actress Glenn Close. Having noticed I recognized her and avoiding any eye contact, she yanked the dog’s leash and, turning a bit Cruella DeVille-ish, fled immediately. I love happy accidents!

—Raúl Rodriguez, Abingdon Square Park, 10.9.2018

⁽¹⁾ These are two true stories combined in one, like a centaur.

Most of you know Strip Tease, my previous blog. After finishing seven volumes (or 84 strip teases!) I decided to print a short selection of my favorites in the form of a 12-page booklet. It was a free-of-charge premium for all my loyal readers.

Honest encouragement and feedback are always beneficial, even an impersonal “like” in facebook. George, my life coach, always pushed me to keep writing to fight depression. And I cherish when readers add their own “stripping” to my stories. Luckily some even correct my grammar, for which I’m always grateful.

Perhaps because I was rushing or I didn’t have another pair of eyes, I failed to check the final files for the above mentioned booklet cover. When I received the shipment, the real cover was swapped with the inside cover! It looked awful! Solution? Reprinting it at my own cost (the printer was not held accountable). Or dumping the whole thing in the shredder and disappoint my audience. I chose a third option: to unstaple the lot, reverse the cover to look right, and insert a small piece of paper, an addendum that read: NO STAPLES?!? This booklet has been left intentionally unstapled to entice you to cut out the strips after reading the stories.

I love happy accidents!

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