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"I didn't go through all 210,000 objects, but I did go through a lot of them," Kalman told me as Muhly's song ended. "Then I had to create some kind of order. The idea was that we eat and we dress and we sleep and we live and we read and we die. In the meantime, we listen to music and dance and do other things."As we walked through the show, the grouping of historic pieces seemed odd at times. A velvet-bound book containing documents signed by Holy Roman Emperor Josef II in 1785, granting a title to composer Johann Ferdinand Richter, is displayed next to a bulb lamp from 1966.Read on Motherboard: Abraham Lincoln Would've Loved Drones"I'm not a curator or historian, so I didn't have any constraints," said Kalman. "I was just able to put things together by instinct and a sense of space."This approach reminded me of how Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall, described her own understanding of history on Fresh Air following her second Man Booker Prize win: "Instead of thinking there was a wall between the living and the dead, I thought there was a very thin veil. It was almost as if they'd just gone into the next room."
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"There are some things I completely adore and went very well with the room," she said. "Like that ladder, which is so beautiful. Toscanini's pants had to be in there, because of the importance that I own Toscanini's paints, and they're antifascist pants, and then the shoes."What makes Toscanini's pants antifascist? "As far as I know," Kalman said, "these pants were the pants he wore, or could have worn, in 1936 to conduct the then Palestine Orchestra in their inaugural concert. He was invited by Bronisław Huberman, the man who created the Palestine Orchestra/Israel Philharmonic. Toscanini was really antifascist; he was anti-Mussolini, he wouldn't perform in Germany, he was anti-Hitler. His coming to Palestine at the time, to Tel Aviv, was really making a statement: I'm with these people, not with you.""So I call them my antifascist pants," explained Kalman. "Because I'm from Tel Aviv, and mother's family came to Tel Aviv in the early 30s, I imagine [Toscanini] meeting her and falling madly in love. But I don't call them my 'Falling in Love with My Mother Pants.'"I wondered how Kalman lives with all of these things, these artifacts accompanied by narratives both real and fictional, at home. "My living room is where I keep my ladders," she explained. "It's not as if the living room is filled with ladders, but sometimes it is. The pants are hanging on a hanger on a shelf in the living room. Really, the room is about time and memory, and those things represent a very poignant way of living with time."It's through the presentation of small things Kalman gets at a big thing, the big thing: death.
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