Silverlake Blvd.

Counting down 10 Buildings that Changed America on PBS

When I first heard about this I thought, “About time!” It's been twenty-seven years since Robert Stern’s Pride of Place--which, admittedly, was not an encouraging precedent. But I was optimistic: I even liked the idea of focusing on ten specific buildings, even though it’s gimmicky, and they wouldn't be the ten buildings I would choose.

 

And the idea of an hour devoted to a single building, with lots of clever camera work to convey something of what it feels like, supplemented with lots of lively argument about what it is and what it means: how could it go wrong?

 

Well, by being a single show, rather than a series. Instead of an hour, each of the lucky buildings got about 4 minutes. Just enough time for Geoffrey Baer to spew a couple of Dan Protess’s inane Power Point bullet points over an incoherent jumble of images. Pride of Place at least had the intelligence to budget eight hour-long episodes to cover the same time span.

 

Intercut in this rubbish were talking heads contributing sometimes apt and intelligent remarks (When’s the last time you saw Denise Scott Brown on TV?), but their quaint scrupulousness was lost as the tour group crammed in way too many masterpieces.

 

Indeed instead of conveying any experience, Protess & Baer fell back on the hack tour-guide’s gimmicks of (1) irrelevant personal gossip (Wright ran off to Europe with his mistress! Henry Ford was an anti-Semite!) and (2) historical assertions that would be interesting if examined and carefully parsed (Thomas Jefferson made neoclassicism the official style of the early USA)—which of course there was no time to do.

 

Chris Hawthorne’s inexcusable thumbs-up L.A. Times review betrayed an appalling de haut en bas “It’s good enough for them” attitude. But it’s not good enough. The tour-guide approach undermines the whole idea of aesthetic value, reducing art to a pretext for personal gossip or pedantic tittle-tattle. I hope nobody else watched it.

 

Giulio Cesare Live in HD

 

 

Giulio Cesare was quite a feast: I wish I had been up to it. I started nodding off after a few hours. But even so, I was intermittently alive to its amazingness.

 

The work comes from a theatrical tradition that is Baroque at its Baroquest: it is colorful, it is overwhelming, it is completely mad. The action unfolds in exclamations of lust, anger, despair, and triumph presented one at a time. Almost every genre is mixed in—tragedy, historical drama, farce, musical comedy—there’s even a violin concerto. The music is a parade of hits, as Handel tosses one magnificent number after another. The plaintive arias are especially shattering.

 

There was nothing wrong with updating the setting to a vaguely-Passage to India 1920s, and letting loose some Bollywood dance numbers, but the real heroes of this production were set designer Robert Jones and costume designer Brigitte Reiffenstuel, who provided a visual style that unified the action. And the retro stylized stageyness provided wit without subverting the drama.

 

As often happens, after it was over it seemed that everybody except the title character had had multiple show-stopping moments. Natalie Dessay definitively proved that Cleopatra must have been a flapper. Patrica Bardon and Alice Coote, as the grieving mother and son were tremendous (“Son nata a lagrimar”). Christophe Dumaux camped like mad as Tolomeo while racing through his impossible arias.

 

Speaking of camp, the supers and dancers added a distinctly gay cast to the evening, e.g. Justin Flores & Kei Tsuruharatani acting up with Rachid Ben Abdeslam during Nireno’s hilarious big moment, and gymnast-hunk Matthew Cusick, famously fired by Cirque du Soleil for being HIV+, striking statuesque poses.

 

Musica Angelica @ the Austrian Consul General's house

 

The Generalkonsulin wasn’t there—she had to attend some other event—but she let Musica Angelica perform in her yard.

 

It was a treat to be liberated from boxes and listen in the open air. It was a nice, clear, cool night in Brentwood. A bird chirped along with Bernarda Bobro, and the little ensemble. Very focused but informal.

 

I admit I was disappointed Musica Angelica postponed their production of Handel’s Acis and Galatea until next year. But it was possible to make do with arias by Vivaldi, Telemann and Handel, and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

 

Authentic practice baroque music will never catch on with lowriders: the antique instruments don’t have any bass.

 

And instead of the modern violin’s piercing, clarity, the old versions produce a sound that’s soft and mild. The whole evening was an education in listening to music without the support of lively acoustics, without amplification, without the aggressive volume of modern instruments.

 

Plus there’s a wobbliness to the tuning that sounds sometimes like a beginners class. But they were far from beginners. Instead of blasting away like a simpleminded Popular Classic, The Four Seasons twanged like an intricate and rowdy squaredance.

 

[Image: Male & female Yellow-fronted Canary (aka Serin de Mozambique), from Buffon’s Histoire naturelle des oiseaux, 1771-86]

Bette, Babs & Beyond @ the Cavern Club Theater

 

 

I had a really good I’m So Completely Out-Of-It experience at last night’s benefit to support Brad Grifith’s AIDS Lifecycle ride. Performers kept prefacing their numbers with remarks like, “This is my favorite song, from the album that has meant the most to me since I was nine …,” and then launched into ballads I had never heard before. I needed a program with extensive footnotes. I only retain my Gay License because of irrelevant technicalities. That being said, I didn’t have any trouble appreciating the strange and witty Connie Kim. 

Jephtha @ Disney Hall

 

The Handel and Haydn Society (Beautiful name! Sign me up!) presented Handel’s last original composition last Tuesday. 1751: the same year as Hogarth’s Gin Lane, and the first volume of Diderot’s Encyclopedia, among other diverse events.

 

It’s instructive how a period of presumable orthodoxy and conformity permitted Sacred History to be revised to provide a happy ending. Why Jephtha? What’s the point? Is it a demonstration of admirable piety, or damnable paganism? The theological and ethical questions are downplayed in favor of the drama.

 

“Drama” in the sense of a very stylized, non-naturalistic dramaturgy. It’s a succession of soliloquies in contrasting moods. It is formal, stately and grand. It doesn’t grimace or strain. It is a dramatic situation atomized and distilled into distinct parts, each of which is examined carefully, one at a time. H&H made every nuance crystal-clear. There is no bustle, no hurry. It’s animated, but without action. There is no mugging or hair-pulling. Instead we get the pathos of contrast: Iphis sings a thrilling song of jubilation, which is matched, later, by a shattering lament. Joélle Harvey had the intricate vocal acrobatics entirely under control, and concentrated on producing ravishing drama.

 

The Chorus of Israelites was glorious.

 

A long, intricate, but carefully-plotted feast.

Alan Bennett’s People, via National Theatre live

 

 

Bennett raises questions that are provocative and important: What do National Trust houses mean? What does preservation of a house mean? Doesn’t it inevitably involve transformation of the thing allegedly preserved into something completely different? And, frankly, what is behind this urge to preserve? It seems to involve dubious notions of “England” and “heritage” and “history”.

 

Heady stuff. Certainly material for a good comedy. It can even be seen as a continuation of Bennett’s The History Boys, where the past is a pretext and raw material for present-day class and sexual conflicts. However, where History Boys extracted full dramatic value from these issues in all their personal and political richness, People merely indicates them verbally. The action is novelty-free and void of drama.

 

Of course Bennett provides some brilliant lines. The most thrilling moment occurred when Francis de la Tour as Lady Stacpoole, turned to the representative of the National Trust--dithering on about how her house represents England--and declared,

 

I would be deceiving you, Mr Lumsden, if I said I had not heard such twaddle before. I particularly abhor metaphor. Metaphor is fraud. England with all its faults. A country house with all its shortcomings. The one is not the other, however much the Trust would like us to think so. I will not collaborate in your conceit of country. It is a pretend England. … England is not my problem. This is not Allegory House. England not. History not. Bring it on.

Jacaranda presents Curlew River @ Santa Monica First Presbyterian

 

Britten’s experiment is at first off-putting and hard to take.

 

It’s a play within a play, performed by priests, so we have to contend simultaneously with, on one hand, extreme churchy seriousness plus, on the other hand, a female lead played by a man with a shawl over his head. The mash-up of stylized Japanese Noh and stylized medieval Mystery Play teeters on the edge of camp.

 

The music is also challenging: mostly austere vocal solo cantillation accompanied by a few bongo taps or French horn bleats. It’s a million miles away from Britten’s popular mode of Noye’s Fludde. Sonically it traverses centuries and the globe, from plainsong to Sixties avant-garde to Westernized East. It seems extremely out of step with the era of Mad Men, but at the same time Stravinsky was also working in a Biblical medieval/high-modernist vein, with his Sermon, Narrative and Prayer (1961), Flood (1962) and Abraham and Isaac (1963). Something going on there.

 

There were some ravishing moments when the singers stepped up to the plate. Reid Bruton was an appropriately sententious Abbott/Narrator. Almost exactly a year ago, Abdiel Gonzalez stopped the show with his devastating lament in Gabriela Lena Frank’s The Singing Mountaineers at Disney Hall, and here he basically did the same thing as the Traveler.

 

But the whole thing didn’t really come alive until Dean Elzinga’s extended solo, when the Ferryman tells the story of the little refugee boy who died at the riverbank a year earlier. Suddenly the strangeness faded away, and the drama took hold.

 

Of course the Madwoman riding in the Ferryman’s boat turns out to be the poor boy’s mother. Her shock, at hearing the news is so extreme that it renders her sane. Steven Tharp managed the impossible Madwoman part heroically.

 

From this point on, there was no camp distraction. It became a wholly earnest dramatization of forgiveness and peace.

The Albright Knox

My last day in Buffalo I took a cab first thing in the morning to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. And it’s “Art Gallery,” not “Museum,” as the hotel valet tactfully but clearly corrected me. Out in the northern suburbs, it’s a medium-sized Greek Revival gem with a 1960s corporate modernist gem stuck on one side.

 

I had a vague sense that there were pictures I would be familiar with, but—oh man! Miró’s Carnival of the Harlequins! The gallery with seven Clifford Still paintings was worth the trip to Buffalo. Balla’s Dog on a Leash! 

 

 

And then everything else. Not that there are such vast quantities, but that each thing is a perfect A++ specimen.

 

 

David Smith's Tanktotem IV (at the end of the hallway in the picture above) stands guard, solidly rooted to the ground, but ready to leap.

 

Smith faces Joan Mitchell's George went swimming at Barnes Hole but it got too cold, 1957. While I was there, an over-eager docent tried to get a little boy who was giving his mom trouble excited about the picture by telling this story about how it’s actually a realistic picture of Mitchell’s white dog George shaking off the water after a dip in a woodsy pond.

 

Confronting Warhol's 100 Soup Cans of 1962, it takes a few minutes of conscious effort to actually see the painting. I mean, instead of just registering Classic Warhol! like an art dipshit. The big impediment is no longer the tawdriness of the subject matter, but the prominence of the Soup Can series as an icon and index of Warhol, pop art, the Sixties, contemporary art, contemporary culture, etc. So you just have to stand your ground and look really hard. After a bit of time, it becomes clear that it's a very tough, gruff, in-your-face abstract painting—a Barnett Newman, an Agnes Martin, a Stella—disguised as a stupid, sloppily executed prank. I was particularly taken with the flicker effect, in which different cans of Beef Noodle acquired animation and flashed like electric signs.

 

In the main stairway, Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #1268: Scribbles. It’s really a trick piece: from a distance, it’s a hideous exercise in chiaroscuro. But up close, the actual scribbled loopy lines were lovely. They had LeWitt’s ceramic bowls in the gift shop! But only navy blue and black—the outgoing director bought their last yellow one!

 

 

Upstairs there was a mini-Young British Artists exhibit in the atrium in the Greek Revival building dominated by the best Rachel Whiteread I’ve ever seen—a negative cast of a stairway, and a Tracy Enim white neon sign proclaiming, “Only God knows I’m good.” And suspiciously straight-faced signs above two locked doors, reading “Beauty, Life, and Spirit: A Celebration of Greek Culture.” Is this an art-prank? No: an exhibit that just closed.

 

 

The special exhibit was of the very earliest Anges Martin paintings from the late 1940s and early 1950s. It began with a 1947 painting on Masonite that was the best thing of all. A dark olive background, on which sits a dark red oval. Inside the red oval are three smaller ink-black ovals. Inside these black ovals are scratched thin, tense, curt lines: ideograms vaguely suggesting a doorframe, a mountain, half a pine tree. It radiated the poised intensity of her mature work, without looking anything like it. It was interesting to compare it with a big almost-grid painting in the opposite corner, which didn’t have half the power of the Masonite panel. Other than this, a bunch of really painful student work: pastiches of Derain, Marin, Miró, Rothko, even Cocteau. A demonstration of purging ones work of everything merely borrowed from her contemporaries. Everything not authentically ones own ultimately reads as “period” kitsch. 

 

Outside, at the entrance was a lovely Nancy Rubins explosion of silver canoes ...

 

Western New York Book Arts Center

 

The best new addition to downtown Buffalo is this terrific place where you can learn how to use traditional printing equipment. Besides the fascinating and pungent workshop ...

 

 

... there was a gallery and a shop. I couldn't resist their most popular item:

 

Society of Architectural Historians @ Buffalo

 

The conference was terrific. Everybody acted so surprised that our panel on archives was so much fun. Don't they know? I showed clips of Pee Wee Herman, and a glimpse of Buffalo in 1901:

 

 

 

The Buffalo of today was very familiar; it reminded me of Rockford.