In between two bouts of the plague, I inhaled Vladimir Sorokin’s “Day of the Oprichnik” (2006) and then – during the heat wave – “The Ice trilogy” (2002-6). No wonder he’s in exile. Science fiction that is not fiction about how people can make themselves into monsters. Post-Soviet Kurt Vonnegut?
Image: Nicholas Poussin, Summer: Ruth and Boaz (1664)
7/1. RIP Richard Taruskin (1945-2022). Since getting the searchable Kindle edition of his 2005 “Oxford History of Western Music” it has functioned as my music encyclopedia. I can’t follow the analyses, but the commentary is always stimulating, even when it seems outrageous. It set me on the path to the systematic listening. His reviews and essays have also left an indelible mark, often on surprising topics:
“The movies did not only preempt the operatic audience. At a profound level, the movies became the operas of the mid- to late-twentieth century, leaving the actual opera houses with a closed-off museum repertoire and a specialized audience of aficionados, rather than a general entertainment public hungry for sensation. With the advent of sound film, opera found its preeminence as a union of the arts compromised and its standing as the grandest of all spectacles usurped. The kinds of subjects that had been its chief preserves—myth and epic, historical costume drama, romantic melodrama, fast-paced farce—suited the new medium even better. Actors and actresses on film were literally, not just metaphorically, larger than life. The mythic aura of the diva attached itself irrecoverably to them.”
7/14. Tony Smith at Pace Los Angeles. (See image at the top) Thirteen pieces? That’s the most Tony Smith I’ve ever seen at one time. I’m still buzzing with delight. What a treat! The pieces were immaculate. I don’t know if they have to be. But it helps with the shadow-play; the masses disappearing into shadows, or masses emerging from shadows. They’re good company. They seem very straightforward at first sight. But as you walk around, play attention, they start to perform.
7/17. Francis Beaumont’s “Knight of the Burning Pestle”, presented by the Independent Shakespeare Co., for free, next to the old zoo in Griffith Park.
What an extraordinary gift this performance was. A rarity presented with wit and ingenuity.
It’s a crazy thing. A romantic drama no sooner begins on stage when a Citizen and his Wife and Assistant in the audience interrupt, and re-direct the action widely off course.
This is all in Beaumont’s text, though he doesn’t provide any instructions about how the actors are supposed to respond to the Citizen and his Wife. ISC had them impersonate rude attendees to an ISC performance: arriving after the lights were turned off; yacking too loud; carrying too much food, drink, blankets and chairs; tromping people who were already settled in their spots.
When the Assistant joins the actors on stage and plays many parts – none called for by the plot – the show really takes off.
The comedy is also live theatrical criticism, mocking clichés of contemporary rowdiness (giants, battles, death endings) and gentility (frustrated lovers, happy endings).
And there’s even more to it. A demonstration of the necessity of impropriety (Citizen & wife) and disobedience (the separated lovers in the romantic drama) and irresponsibility (the impossible Mr. Merrythought). The reconciliations at the end are moving. We’ve been through a lot together, let’s give each other a break.
I assumed it was a very free interpretation. But re-reading the text afterward, I realized ISC kept amazingly literal. I.e. the arrow-through-the-head prop that the Apprentice wears for his melodramatic death scene is the “forked arrow” specified by Beaumont.
(A sign of civilization)
May, Catalina:
June, The Outer Banks:
June. I discovered Sybille Bedford. “Jigsaw” – “Tender is the night” from a child’s point of view:
To me she said (in front of me, rather than to me; most of the things she told about herself came out that way), Never marry to run away from something.
Even better, “A Legacy”. So much for the Belle Epoch. The world of the Merzes, Von Heldens, and the Sigmundshofens is so artificial that realism is not appropriate. Hence the conversational not chronological presentation. Also, striking, are the fantastic animals – Julius’s chimps, and Francesca’s circus donkey, whose trick brings their world to an end.
I also discovered Machado De Assis’ “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas” (translated by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux). Superior to Diderot, and the other followers of Laurence Sterne. Perhaps even Sterne:
It’s a pity about the nonsense. The man is still leaning over the page with a glass in his right eye, entirely devoted to the noble and grim undertaking of deciphering the nonsensical element. He has promised himself that he will write a brief article in which he recounts finding the book and discovering the sublime meaning, if there is any, behind that obscure phrase. In the end he discovers nothing of the sort and contents himself with possession. He closes the book, examines it, reexamines it, goes over to the window, and shows it to the sun. The only copy! Just then, a Caesar or a Cromwell passes by beneath his window, on the road to power. He shrugs, closes the window, stretches out in his hammock, and leafs through the book slowly, lovingly, sip by sip … The only copy!
Since mid-June. My favorite painting: Katie Herzog’s Arroyo Seco Regional Branch Library (Ketamine) circa 2014. Monet plus Howard Hodgkin:
4/9. Finished Yevgenia Belorusets, “Lucky breaks” (translated by Eugene Ostashevsky). Brief portraits of women from Ukraine’s east. The tone varies from unsparingly acute reportage to droll absurdity. But no whimsey. Hurt, injustice and unease are never the topic, never in the foreground, but never out of sight in the background:
What is this story I am telling really about? Does it make any sense to continue? In fact, the story doesn’t exist, the narrative doesn’t continue, it breaks off. The florist disappeared. The house where she lived was destroyed. Her store was refitted into a warehouse of propaganda materials. Her regular customers left Donetsk long ago. Recently and purely by accident I bumped into one of the people who had often bought flowers from her, and he confessed to having heard something about the florist. He said that she went off into the fields and joined the partisans. That’s exactly what he said: “Went off into the fields.” But on what side her partisan unit was fighting and where those fields were, he had no idea. The florist, he reminded me, never had a nose for politics. She was a flowerworm of sorts; she even classified people into different kinds of flowers. She had never occupied herself with anything in life other than flowers, he lamented. “She must be fighting on the side of the hyacinths,” he suddenly declared, and broke into laughter. We fell silent as he stared at me and waited for me to give his sense of humor its due. “Time is passing, I’m growing smarter; I am beginning to understand which way the wind is blowing and where we’re heading,” he added. “I am not the person I was. You can’t fool me at one try! Kyiv has taught me a thing or two. This isn’t our naive Donetsk. But I still have my sense of humor; I don’t have to sift through my pockets for it.” And again he broke into laughter and then walked off with a triumphant gait, following his own business.
4/29. Heard Thomas Adès’ “Dante symphony” at Disney Hall.
Three summers ago I heard “Inferno” on the radio and then saw it performed with the Royal Ballet. Intensely disliked it. But this was different. I liked the “Inferno” more as an orchestral piece, without dancing. I liked watching the seven percussionists handling their beautiful instruments and making odd sounds – clappers, a giant freestanding drum skin in a frame. Also the bizarre sounds everybody else – double basses, contrabass clarinet, strings, tubas – was making. It was fun trying to figure out where a sound was coming from.
As an orchestral piece, it was possible to forget about the “Divine comedy” aspect entirely, and take it as a series of 13 colorful, varied tableaux.
I did not detect the voice of a prophet confronting us with the emptiness of our lives and our reprehensible sinfulness.
The mood was satirically grotesque rather than prophetic. Themes would start in an affirmative mode – jubilant, merry, serene, grand, tender – but would warp as they went on. Straightforward themes would merge and decay into polyphonic noise (Ligeti, Foss). The default mode was wrong-note neoclassicism (Prokofiev, Shostakovich), but also episodes of wrenching conflict (Ives, polyrhythm, conflicting tempi). Plus Adès integrates his basically tuneful, comprehensible material with free use of all the noisy, disruptive techniques of 20th century modernism (shrieking glissandi à la Xenakis, a bit more Ligeti).
Episode 12, “The Thieves – devoured by reptiles” is the high point. A boisterous romp by Offenbach distorted into a nightmare. Tremendous applause. But there’s one more section – “Satan – in a lake of ice” – that’s quiet and eerie.
The U.S. premieres were of the two other sections, “Purgatorio” and “Paradisio” (premiered in London, October 2021).
I immediately loved “Puragatorio” without any qualifications. The eerie, gripping recorded voice of a Khazan (cantor) singing a Baqashot prayer. The slightly tinny recording contrasting with the hyper-vivid droning of the double-basses and the bassoon.
“Paradiso” ended spectacularly – the ear-shattering kettle drum crescendo! – but the slow and steady revolving cycles went on past the stage of being mesmerizing to sleep-inducing.
Huge enthusiastic ovation for Adès, Dudamel and the orchestra.
Image: Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with St. John on Patmos, 1640
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.
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.
See my essay on on the Academy's new museum, published in the L.A. Review of Books.