Silverlake Blvd.

Fidelio @ Disney Hall, with Deaf West Theatre

 

 

Still digesting the “Fidelio” I saw on Good Friday. The first opera - and first Beethoven - I ever cared for.

 

It’s seems more relevant now than ever. Will there come a time when audiences will not thrill to the scene of a tyrant collapsing because honorable people have the courage to stand up and say, “Enough”?

 

The singers and orchestra were superb. The music was bold, bright and clear. The first act quartet, Leonora’s solo, the chorus of prisoners, Florestan’s solo were magnificent, piercing.

 

The production in effect gave each of the principal parts to two performers – a singer and an actor signing in American Sign Language. They generally – but not always – kept close to each other. The singers tended to wear mostly white, abstract multi-part robes, in contrast to the signing actors, who wore interpretations of 18^th century costumes in colorful textiles. The actors signed and mimed as their counterparts sang. The spoken dialogue interludes were done entirely in sign, in silence. The signing chorus sat in the seats on both sides of the stage, with the white-robed Coro de Manos Blancas signing their words on stage.

 

The first few minutes were confusing. There was a lot going on: the orchestra, the singers, the signing, the supertitles projected above the stage, German, English, ASL. But all you had to do - all you wanted to do - was focus on the actors. You didn’t need to look at the singers – you could hear them loud and clear – and the signing and miming were articulate, even for illiterates like me. A glance every not and then at the supertitles sufficed.

 

The Leonore soprano Christiane Libor was tremendous. She filled the hall without harshness.

 

Russell Harvard, the signing Rocco, was so amusing he almost derailed the show. Likewise Gregor Lopez (Jaquino). I had forgotten that the work begins in a comic mode. But the comedy quickly turns sour, as soon as you realize that Fidelio (Leonora) is deceiving and manipulating all these amusing comic characters.

 

I wish I knew more about signing. It seemed to unfold in a broad, expressive and highly choreographed manner. Is this the signing equivalent of an aria? The actors did seem to be doing the repetitions of phrases that are a feature of the music. Also the ensemble pieces, when each of the principal is singing different words and projecting a different mood – they seemed to be presenting the conflict with vivid clarity.

 

The signing provided a solution to the problem of the spoken dialogue. Should it be done in German or English? Both are jarring. Here, it was done in beautiful gestures.

 

The doubling of the characters grew in significance as the piece unfolded. It’s a story of disguise and deception. Characters are divided. Characters also grow and change. It was electrifying to see this embodied on stage.

 

But what was the effect for the deaf audience? There were signing people all over the theater – probably a lot of first time visitors to Disney Hall. Without the music, I would suspect the story would seem absurdly repetitious and slow-moving. But there was a wild acclamation at the end, with the deaf audience members waving their wide-open palms in the air – the deaf “applause” sign.

Joseph Wright of Derby @ The Huntington

Wright of Derby’s “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” (1768) is currently at the Huntington, on loan from the National Gallery, in exchange for "The Blue Boy".

Can we keep it? It's a picture that's needed here.

Besides, we have Kehinde Wiley's brilliant "Portrait of a young gentleman" installed handsomely now in "The Blue Boy"s place. 

I first encountered “Air Pump” in the middle of the George W. Bush era, where it struck me of an alarmingly prescient allegory of my world.

But it is not an allegory; it’s a drama. The figures do not represent Natural History and Superstition or other ideas, but demonstrate distinct individual responses to the business at hand.

Which is what? Not an experiment in the sense of discovering new knowledge. Rather a demonstration a fact already established. But it’s also a theatrical spectacle – a magic trick.

The magician in question is demonstrating the creation of a vacuum with extreme vividness, by suffocating a lovely exotic bird. He is making concepts of air and vacuums concrete and impressive. He is imparting knowledge, first hand.

But if science is the pretext, but his pose, gestures and expression are of the stage. He looks like a veteran actor poised to emit a resounding universal curse.

His young assistant works away on the pump, looking over his shoulder doubtfully.

Two other young men look on, taking it in with earnest absorption.

Another pair – a young man and young woman ignore the experiment entirely, being intent on flirting with each other.

Two little girls recoil in horror from the sight of the bird being suffocated. They are gently chided by their father, who encourages them to focus on the important lesson being illustrated.

He’s an enlightened father, wishing his daughters as well as sons to have the benefit of this education.

Another old man sits at the desk lost in thought. He’s not looking at the experiment, but seems to be looking beyond it to all that will follow, to Watt’s steam engine, the power loom, the Luddites, railroads, mechanization, industrialization, electrification, digitization, … this.

All Season Brewing Co. in the Firestone Tire Building

 

 

February 18. Another first: meeting people for drinks at the end of the week for the first time in 100,000 years.

The Art Deco Society of L.A. lead the charge to save this swoop of late-1930s style. M. Winter Design led the meticulous clean-up and witty repurposing (as they did at Johnnie’s Pastrami and Manuela. Cheers to All Season for the Cloud Racer hazy IPA.

Anniversaries

 

 

Reza Monahan and his crew published this video about SCI-Arc's 50th birthday the week of my 63rd birthday, prompting me to realize I've spent more than half of my life in SCI-Arc orbit. Little did I realize what was up when I first entered the portal at 1800 Berkeley Street, July of 1984, to meet with Rose Marie Rabin.

 

Sparks at Disney Hall

 

February 8. First rock concert in four years and it was a blast. Never seen dancing in the aisles like that at Disney Hall. The classical music venue was an appropriate frame for 73-year-old Russell Mael’s voice, negotiating the tricky falsetto, voices and hairpin turns as if he was 23. Two hours without a break and no strain or roughness.

It was a 50^th anniversary concert. Fifty years since their first album. It was also a hometown celebration. Many in the audience seemed fans from 1972. There were also many whose parents hadn't been born then, and discovered the band in last year's terrific documentary. At the end, Russell and Ron paused a long time on the stage, savoring the roar of adulation and love.

The Art and science of movies : The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures

See my essay on on the Academy's new museum, published in the L.A. Review of Books.

Intermission might be over

 

 

September 18. First live theater since lockdown: “Lizastrata” at the Getty Villa. Live theater resumes with a BANG! Antique bawdiness comes to life. You kept thinking, “No, they can’t” but The Troubies did, and more: exploding balloon phalloi, the talking puppet phalloi, the squirting phalloi, the fireworks exploding phalloi.

 

 

 

 

September 26. First recital: a PianoSpheres marathon of Messiaen’s “Catalog of birds” cycle at the Audubon Center at Debs Park. I made it halfway. Magnificent and exasperating. Sometimes it actually sounds like natural phenomena – particles flying out of an accelerator. But it’s not just birds but traffic jams: stop/start, honking, squealing tires. There were crows cawing and other real birds singing their songs at the Audubon Center. Not marcato thumps, but threads suavely unspooling or witty castanet clacks. 

 

 

 

October 14. First L.A. Phil concert: Dudamel conducting Schoenberg’s “Transfigured night”, Richard Strauss’s “Death and transfiguration” and his four last songs with Golda Schultz. Beautiful voice and charming stage manner. During the instrumental passages she turned to look at the concertmaster, and the other musicians, really seeming to listen with ravishment.

 

 

 

November 20. First chamber music: The Schumann Quartet at The Clark Library. The ultra-intimate concerts at the Clark now even more selective with 60 rather than 100 seats. You're so close to the action that the sound is a shock - live music with a vengeance. It was searing. But with Ravel I started to find my way. The Mozart felt like the synthesis of every possible kind of sonic interest and pleasure, plus kindness. The Haydn was pure fun.

Looking out from Wrightian spaces in November

Taliesin West,

The Arizona Biltmore,

Residence "A" at Barnsdall Park

A wall & a shark at the Academy Museum

 

Edward St. Aubyn’s “Double blind”

 

A novel that feels like a masque, playing for three acts with serious things and abstruse things, and ending with Sebastian, the character most in need of reassurance, encountering “a very pregnant lady with a very nice face sitting on a golden chair” in a house “built as a temple to love, hospitality and the arts.”

 

Or is it a sleek, iPhone-era version of “The Tempest”?

 

Hunter, the freebasing billionaire (it's a St. Aubyn novel) is a Prospero who creates the court within which the action unfolds. As a schoolboy, he “invited his gang of reckless and clever friends to join him on the roof.” And we catch up with him years later, as his wealth transforms the lives of all the main characters.

 

But not the comic villains (Moorhead, Saul, Cardinal Lagerfeld, MacDonald) who dream of being him, but can’t. But in the end, Hunter, like Prospero, doesn’t want to continue being the person whose “fear of a heart attack, psychosis and the other discouraging footnotes to his gargantuan lifestyle was trivial compared to his horror at the idea of doing anything ordinary.”

 

The meditations on scientific method, genetics, biological determinism, the mind/body problem etc. can be exasperating, but they aren’t meant to be compelling arguments, but expressions of who the characters are – which is more often than not exasperating.

 

Indeterminacy is not only a topic the characters discuss, but an aspect of the novel's form. ESA denies readers the illusion of sensing the future of the characters. In the end, only minor matters have been resolved.

 

The answers that explain nothing are contrasted with the actions that matter: “What part of the brain lights up when the reader first encounters Mr Darcy and his odious pride? Can literary criticism afford to ignore what is happening to the reader’s amygdala when Elizabeth Bennet rejects his first proposal? It is a truth universally acknowledged that any topic in search of a reputation for seriousness must be in want of neuroimaging. … Not only was the brain not the mind, but an image of the brain was not the brain.”

 

The reader learns who Francis is by learning that he wonders, “Why did every generation of biology student have to amputate the legs of living frogs and spectate on the beating hearts of crucified mammals, as if they were trying to join a tough gang whose rite of passage was a random murder?”

 

We learn this and much more about what Francis thinks and feels, but the reader is never told what Francis looks like. It’s one of the games of the book. The mind/body problem keeps getting discussed by characters who are intensely embodied, but don’t have appearances. Hunter and Hope – both Californians! – are the only major character whose looks are noted.

 

[Image: the Palm room, Spencer House]