Wiest’s performance was like what people told me about Yo Yo Ma playing Bach solo at the Bowl: two hours of utter exposure, utter nakedness, reckless risk for a “star”. But she illuminated the text, getting laughs from the running gag of the toothbrush, and demonstrating how all of Beckett’s intricate stage instructions can not only be realized, but are significant, moving, and important. And the thrill of hearing and seeing such a skilled craftsperson shift from whining to nagging to needling to exclaiming in exasperation to reaching out in tenderness. And the refrains: sudden realization of hopelessness, followed by determination to cheer herself up.
The text is music in which Winnie returns again and again to favorite motifs: “… in the old style …”, “… I always say …”, “… that’s what I find so wonderful …”, ….
Yes it’s a joke, a stunt. Beckett is having a laugh. But it also serves a purpose. Setting Winnie in a mound of dirt instead of a naturalistic rendered rest home keeps attention focused on the heart of the matter. In a presentation playing the realism game, the audience could resist Winnie’s account of herself by disputing her situation. “She could have avoided this all if she had exercised, saved more money, had children to take care of her, etc.” Those are all dodges, ways the audience could avoid the real situation: Winnie’s boredom, helplessness, and hopelessness.
Also to maintain focus, Beckett doesn’t permit Winnie to live entirely in memories, in nostalgia. We are given a few hints, bare phrases, but they are not dwelt on. Any other playwright would have made all of Winnie’s speeches vivid recollections of the good old days. Not here. The old times are merely noted. The memories are frayed to single threads.
There seems to be a competition going on up at Bunker Hill. The Taper audience managed to misbehave even worse than Disney’s: cell phones ringing, manaical program-rattling, the old ladies next to me chattering away during the performance (Wiest was three yards away), people leaving their seats and arriving during the performance, etc.
I ran into an old friend at “The Renaissance Nude”. It was by Raphael until it was attributed to Raphael’s teacher, Perugino. The pipe-player was Marsyas until experts started to i.d. him as Daphnis. Moreover, the Getty hung it in a LGBT corner, implying that Apollo and the piper are a couple. Does it make a difference?
If they’re a couple they don't seem to be having a good time. Apollo looks down – in both senses – on his companion. The piper is so absorbed in his music-making that he isn’t paying attention – despite the fact that Apollo is making an exhibition of his physical splendor. The piper is bald and not at all a Greek god, but Perugino (or whomever) has given him the beauty of someone wholeheartedly engaged in an absorbing task. He's the one you focus on.
Here’s where the name becomes significant. If he’s Daphnis, he’s going to be caught up in love triangle with some local nymphs which ends so badly for him that he devotes the rest of his life to sad songs. If he’s Marsyas, Apollo will take offense at his presumption in being a musician, and skin him alive. A lot going on in a 524-year-old, 15” x 11” rectangle.
The exhibition was such that it is possible to mention “the other Peruginos” on display, i.e. the big decoration with scenes from the Metamorphoses in the background and a “Combat between Love and Chastity” in the foreground; and an electrically charged “Baptism of Christ,” with Christ’s feet seen through the pale blue water of the Jordan.
But before the naked people from the Renaissance, we experienced how Rococo ladies got dressed at Maxwell Barr’s brilliant lecture/demonstration. He took us through the mechanics and logistics of how aristocratic Frenchwomen dressed throughout the day. I will never look at eighteenth century lace again without thinking about the extraordinary quantities of labor they embody, and their consequent function as a signifier of wealth.
Not to mention the labor of the women who put on and took off these signifiers! Barr encouraged our patient model to give frequent updates on how she felt at different stages - under the corset, the layers of heavily embroidered fabric, balancing on un-sensible shoes, ....
Last Friday Alison Knowles rebuked – in the friendliest and least self-important way – pretty much everything that has ever happened on the stage of Disney Hall.
For the duration, nobody knew what Disney Hall was for. Nobody knew why they were sitting in the audience. To watch a salad be prepared?
AK transformed the stage into a kitchen, and Disney Hall into a dining hall. It was performance without any of the things that are the justifications of conventional performances: no virtuosity, precision, intensity, seduction, drama, surprise, communication, ….
Instead of all that, we were suspended in uncertainty. Anxiety, but also curiosity. How long was it going to go on? Was the salad being made to eat? Were we going to get to eat it? How was that going to happen?
The audience – always the wild card – was mostly up to the challenge. There were some shouted out remarks. There was a mass dash for the exits as servers started distributing salad bowls to the audience. But, near the end, an outburst of “Thank you”s.
What other orchestra but the L.A. Phil would give Knowles a stage? Works conceived so far from the usual routines being given a chance to unsettle again, after 50+ years? Thank you, indeed.
Sleek, sharp-edged, sassy “What Price Hollywood?” We’re spared earnest “before” scenes: Mary (Constance Bennett) is an illusion-free waitress at The Brown Derby, and schemes to meet her future mentor Max. We’re also spared scenes of her raw talent, as she blows her screen test with an awful performance. The grotesque funeral in the two later versions, here is a wedding. It’s grotesquery squared, with the fans ripping Mary’s bouquet to bits, pulling her veil off, and Saxe, the studio head, delighted by the publicity. Also different is the signature farewell line: “Mary!” “What?” “Nothing. I just wanted to hear you again.”
All the essential elements of the myth appear in their proper place: the cute meeting, the prestissimo romance/career launch, the award ceremony humiliation, the failed sobering up, the final bow, the brave widow. Great, but Janet Gaynor is so annoying that the first 30 minutes are almost unbearable. But then Fredrick March, handsome and full of beans, arrives the save the day. But Lionel Stander (Libby) pretty much steals the picture, with his hyper-articulate bullfrog voice.
Has any classic musical ever had worse songs? The exception is “The Man Who Got Away,” which significantly occurs before Esther is discovered. Judy jams with her colleagues for the fun of it, rather than being imprisoned in idiotic “numbers”. There’s a distinct lack of interest in the original plot. It’s all there, of course, with scenes copied from 1937 down to the poses. But that’s for business that nobody could be bothered to think about. George Cukor’s chilly, movies-within-the movie artifice beautifully conflicts with Garland’s intense improvisational breakdowns. Speaking of breakdowns, there’s a whole disassociation between image and sound thing going on here (all those montages of still images, Maine’s marriage proposal, etc.)
Torture. For the first hour I thought it might be the quintessence of camp, but it goes on another hour and 19 minutes; it’s too boring to be camp. The best thing about it is Kris Kristofferson as sex object. I’m totally on board with this. It turns the story upside down: instead of tragedy, this is a story of triumph. Tears and heartbreak, but triumph nevertheless. It ends with an anthem – a medley of several anthems. The 1954 version pointedly ended with no song – even though Judy Garland was on hand, for whom a tear-soaked ballad was the air she breathed. Anyway, the songs are blackboard scratching terrible. “Evergreen”? Yikes! The banshee-screech of the ‘70s.
A remake of the 1976 version, but infinitely better. For one thing, both of the leads act rather than pose. Gaga is a convincing young woman overwhelmed by events, Cooper dials down his cuteness to portray a wreck. But once the tragedy kicks in, there’s an inevitable tediousness. We all know exactly what’s going to happen.
A well-composed Bucket List contains activities that, given dedication, time and resources, can really be realized by individual effort. Less good are activities dependent on others. The obstacles to walking the Great Wall of China are nothing compared to the obstacles to hearing all of Charles Ives’ orchestral works. One is possible, the other is not (so I've learned).
But miracles happen. Just before the holidays one occurred at Disney Hall when Michael Tilson Thomas visited to lead the Phil in Ives’ “Holidays” symphony.
It was different from the old Leonard Bernstein recording. That was manic and terrifying: the holidays seen in a nightmare. With MTT the extravagant pile-ups of incompatible musics playing simultaneously were not representations of the world gone mad.
Quite the contrary: those explosions of noise came as welcome blasts of activity. The first three Holidays (Washington’s Birthday, Decoration Day, 4th of July) start with dim, static gloomy fogs. Then, in each, the gloom is sundered by a thunderclap.
The pile-ups, cacophonous and blatant, are never too much. It’s possible to discern the parts. They’re finely made, subtly calibrated. Representations of chaos, not examples of it. MTT was in his glory with them.
The performance suggested that the real challenge here isn’t the pile-ups, but the quiet, static sections. The fogs require exquisite playing – like Morton Feldman.
It ends with a Thanksgiving far from Norman Rockwell, passing from gloom to a genuinely exuberant dance, and – after a grandiose introduction – the chorus declaiming, “O God, beneath Thy guiding hand / Our exiled fathers crossed the sea, / And when they trod the wintry strand, / With prayer and psalm they worshiped Thee” with wobbly syncopation. Then it subsides, dis-integrates, and a chime chimes.
MTT was in a pedagogic mood, and before each section paused to recite Ives’ notes on the piece, and lead the chorus in some of the hymns and songs that Ives collaged. At first I was exasperated: just play the music! Sixty years ago Stravinsky commented that tune-identification was a waste of time. But it actually succeeded in giving these pieces the context that Ives would have expected. Not that they are by any means naïve evocations of The Good Old Days. Far from it. But that’s the background, and it’s important to feel it. That was what the music was about, for Ives, rather than compositional strategies.
Ives is not making bold gestures, but representing bold gestures. It’s all program music. Ives is making a representation of a scene, landscapes of 1870s Danbury, CT, recalled on the eve of the first World War.
The small scale, and unfussy – but careful – craftsmanship steer the Tim Burton bric-à-brac (tombstones, towers, ruins, grotesques, storm-tossed crags) safely clear of cliché.
Doodles, but ones that anticipate abstract expressionism, conceptual art (the signed rocks!) and Raymond Pettibon.
The extent of the work was a surprise, suggesting that this activity was more than an after hours amusement.
The silhouettes of towers emerging out of violet horizons were not just words for him.
In one week, two alternative operas, two visions, two extraordinarily good productions.
For L.A. Opera’s “Satyagraha”, Phelim McDermott provided just the right amount of stage business to provide something to look at during Glass’ rigorous pattern-spinning without becoming a distraction.
Julian Crouch’s sets – the puppets! – were attractive and clever. Big effects generated by simple means. Except for a few characters ascending into the sky, all the special effects were done by hand.
The music fits the libretto perfectly: abstract states rather than personalities and conflicts: joy, terror, ecstasy, meditation. Glass does not bother trying to “express” running a newspaper, or civil disobedience. Rather, what’s behind them. The thread through all the noise and distraction. And so with all the other tableaux. The effect is always the same: the discovery of the permanent within the ephemeral.
McDermott’s puppets, coming together and splitting apart, visualize a sense of the world and ourselves as temporary situations within a longer process. Glass’ music made the longer process audible. The flow and fluctuating changes. Coming together and falling apart.
Then, a few days later, L.A. Phil’s production of “Europeras 1 & 2”.
We were seated in bleachers inside Sony’s soundstage #23. The bleachers took up half the space. In the other half, all the elements of the performance were visible: a freestanding structure from which the curtain and backdrops rose and fell. The orchestra faced the audience, divided in two groups on each side. (Dressed in their formal wear, appropriately, since they were also "on stage".)
The performance space floor was a square divided into a grid, each square of which contained a number (1-64?) but not in numerical sequence. All the space around the orchestra and the performance grid was filled with lighting equipment, large props, and a long table on which smaller props were organized. On each side, and behind the audience were large monitors that presented digital clocks, counting the time: 90 minutes in the first part, Europera 1, 45 for Europera 2.
It was structured like a vaudeville review. Singers sang arias from 50 operas, Aleko to Zauberflöte, Handel to Britten. Instead of the originally intended instrumental accompaniment, the arias were presented as a self-contained a cappella performance, while the orchestra played unrelated fragments from other operas.
The other elements of the staging were similarly reshuffled:
The singers wore costumes that had nothing to do with the aria they were singing. This being Hollywood, the costumes were more cinematic than operatic: a cowboy, Fifties housewife, an astronaut, a drum major, samurai, a football player, 19th century ship captain, motorcycle racer, the “Scream” villain, Nosferatu, a high school student, Wonder Woman, Dorothy from Wizard of Oz, even the The Dude Lebowski …. But I think I also saw Lulu and Princess Turandot. (The program thanks Western Costume and the costume departments of Warners and ABC, among others.)
While singing, the performers engaged in activities that had no connection with the aria. Sometimes it just seemed like yet another non-traditional staging gimmick. But most of the time the effect was both comic and poetic:
A woman taking a yoga class sings the Queen of the Night’s “O zittre nicht, mein lieber Sohn”
“Remember me” from Dido and Aeneas while walking with a book balanced on her head
Toreador Song from Carmen while videotaping a hair restoration video (Honest!)
Sometimes the activities did not seem to involve singing at all:
An astronaut lies down in a hospital bed
A hunk in pink pants, floral shirt, and bright red cocktail suns himself on a lounger
A woman in Tyrolian dress gets a dental examination (in a dental chair)
Dorothy from Wizard of Oz strapped into a noisy vibrating strap machine, while sipping a Coke …
At the same time, scenery came and went. Backdrops were constantly dropping down and rising. Sometimes they only descended half-way. Often they blocked the view of singers engaged in an aria. But not necessarily. There was coordination enough to keep them from knocking people on the head.
Also dancers would bring out bits of scenery. It was beautiful to see a woman carrying a streetlight out and stand it up. Then two flats of tall grass.
Even the program participated: it included a hilarious “Synopses” of operatic tropes: “He ignores the warnings at one of her brilliant supper parties when an astrologer arrives terrified by pangs of conscience….”
The performances were engaged, accurate and – it seemed – complete.
The singers were marvelous. They presented fully-realized performances, despite the obstacles put in their way. Despite the absence of the usual musical and visual support. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the event was the way the singers were able to focus and create a distinct episode. This focus was the triumph of the production. It gave the whole an intensity and earnestness that kept it from collapsing into improvised goofing around.
Yuval Sharon, the director, kept an extraordinary number of balls up in the air, with grace and style. Everyone had exactly the right mix of focus and grace necessary for a successful John Cage performance.
In the end it was not a recital or review. Often it was impossible to hear the singing. There could be three or more singers on stage at the same time.
The orchestra never got loud enough to drown out the singers, but there was a prerecorded tape – “Trukera” – that periodically obliterated everything. It was a roar that made your innards vibrate.
The singers and dancers proceeded from task to task in a manner that was meticulously choreographed for maximum efficiency, but also graceful. Event followed event with an unhurried but steady and insistent pace. It was the opposite of a scratch performance; the whole was impressive in its discipline and harmonious efficiency.
The flow became the theme, the unifying thread. One thing after another. But in a way that was entertaining rather than depressing.
And so, in the end, it was not a satire of opera, or a spoof, but a satire of the lives we lead.
It wasn’t making fun of the Queen of the Night or Princess Turandot, or Mozart or Puccini, or the opera world. It was observing with bemusement the blind fury with which people go through their days. Absurdist comedy – light rather than dark – in the tradition Aristophanes, Shakespeare, and Molière.
The sixth and final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle is 1152 pages long: exactly the same number of pages in my copy of the KJV Bible.
1.
But instead of old and new revelations, this book continues KOK’s story through the publication of the first volumes of the cycle, stressing, as always, his experiences of guilt and shame. Here he describes how the publication of the first volumes variously outraged, disconcerted, infuriated, or moved the family and friends who appeared in them, under their own names.
KOK’s project of self-analysis would have been incomplete without an account of this apotheosis of all his previous personal and literary crises.
As in an epilogue, characters from the earlier volumes reappear to comment on their portrayal in his books. The responses range from equanimity (I see you use my name but that character is not me) to rage (I am not only suing you and your publisher, but assisting the media in defaming you).
A 21st century Scandinavian Six (or more) Characters Pestering Their Author.
2.
KOK interrupts this story with a 400-page literary/philsophical ramble through the question of proper names in literature, Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, poems by Rilke and Celan, Hitler’s My Struggle, The Death of Virgil, Leonardo’s anatomical dissections, Cain and Abel, the tribes of Israel, the rise of Nazism, Victor Klemperer’s Lingua Tertii Imperii, the holocaust, the Utøya massacre, the distinction between “we” and “you”, ….
Perhaps the exasperating horribleness of this part is deliberate. Faced with the biggest crises of his life, KOK retreats into book-talk and meditations on the devil.
3.
The concluding section leaps back to life. It’s harrowing and unsparing. Like like all the best episodes in the cycle, the accumulation of local, alien details paradoxically renders the the story universal. The alien world of a Norweigian expat in Malmö, trying to take care of his kids, work, and deal with Swedish psychological services for his wife, in all its horrifying specificity becomes a story everyone knows.
With the twist that this volume was written as these events unfolded. Rendering the reader uneasy with the literary pleasure it offers.
The result is a very grim satire on writers, artistic ambition, and the unhappiness produced in the world by irresponsible monomaniacs. Think of O. Henry’s “Confessions of a Humorist" rewritten in grim earnest.
It’s also an ars poetica, arguing at first for an absolute and unyielding need to write, and the ambition to excell. But in the end, it’s abandoned.
It might also be a plea for privacy against publicity. KOK’s story is unique, but the situation couldn’t be more common. Most of us aren’t publishing six-volume memoir/novels, but quite a few publish on social media, with mixed levels of care about the privacy of ourselves and others.
4.
And so? What does the whole cycle add up to?
The swim cap episode is permanently fixed in my brain. Even though it happened to someone else, in a place I have never been and know nothing about, it pinches like memory of my own life. Likewise KOK's account of his father’s wedding party, cleaning the house after his father’s death, and this volume's story of his wife’s breakdown and recovery.
KOK insists that the cycle is about his relationship with his father. Yes, but much more present are his wife and kids. How it came about. Why he is the way he is. Hence how they became what they are.
To tell this story he employed a dangerous technique: no fictional situations, no fictional settings, no fictional characters. Not even fictionalized names. As if he couldn’t write frankly about his world if he made things up. I don’t think he could have found the will to write otherwise.
Is there result a novel at all? It’s a work of art. Scenes are composed with artistic skill.
Perhaps the most searing of all comes near the end of the final volume. His wife is immobilized in bed by depression while he is having dinner with his kids and their grandmothers in the next room. Silence. Then his mother-in-law speaks:
“Without looking at me, Ingrid said: ‘Have you considered the consequences of writing about your children? … How it will be for them when they grow up? Everyone knowing who they are? Have you taken that into account? That they’re vulnerable?’”
He responds …
“I don’t think that any of what I’ve written is dangerous,”
… but notes that …
“It sounded hollow, she looked at me, we continued to eat, the children slipped down from their chairs, they hadn’t noticed anything unusual, there hadn’t been any raised voices.”
KOK is rebuked, and he knows it. He has no answer. He has trifled with his family, what matters most to him in the world. Or does it? His wife’s recovery is gradual, intermittent, unspectacular, with ups and downs. Again the writing is KOK at his best. But the fact that he was writing about it while it was happening, gives the literary triumph an unsettling aftertaste.
