Silverlake Blvd.

Songs & dances : Wynston Marsalis, Roxy Music, Florence Price, & Margaret Bonds

 

9/8/22. Winston Marsalis's "All Rise" at the Hollywood Bowl

 

My mousepad melted to my desk. Even at the Bowl it never cooled down. But Wynston Marsalis’s “All Rise” (1999) was the most enjoyable and moving concert I’ve heard in a while. It’s a big (he Phil, five soloists, five choirs, and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra) modernist collage that proceeds by contrast rather than narrative. The sections jolt with opposing moods and sonorities.

 

Marsalis himself didn’t make an entrance. We wondered if he was there – until the big screen camera caught him at work in the trumpet section. Part of the team, exactly like the music: MW working with multiple musical traditions of North and South America, plus extended conversations with Stravinsky and Bernstein (“Jubal step”), Copland (“Wild strumming of fiddle”), Ellington (“Expressbrown local”) among others.

 

 

 

9/28/22. Roxy Music at the Kia Forum

 

Still beastly hot. Instead of partying all afternoon – as in the old days – in preparation for the Roxy Music concert, we napped and had a bowl of cold leftover pasta and slices of half of a tomato.

 

The Forum was lit all lavender and dark rose. The crowd seemed to be mostly people who had seen Roxy at the Palladium in 1972. I can only boast to have seen them at the Greek at the turn of the century. I remember that they really rocked out and ignored the ballads (also that there were Las Vegas style showgirls and one of my party slipped on a syringe that rolled down the aisle).

 

I hadn’t been at a big rock concert in a long time (Pearl Jam, Milwaukee, 2006) and marveled at the continuity of traditions (indoor clouds of smoke) and the novelties (roadies breaking down one set and installing another efficiently with a gleaming mini-forklift, digital panels so delicate that the screens were invisible in normal light).

 

The show began with a seductive instrumental (“India”) then blasted off with rousing audio and visual cacophony (“Re-Make/Re-Model”).

 

I’ve always dismissed “In Every Dream Home a Heartache”  as a novelty song, but in person it’s impressive and audacious.

 

“Tara” was perhaps my favorite moment. Andy McKay on sax, with thundering piano by one of the back-up kids (each member of the original team was spotted by sharp younger musicians: two keyboardists, a woman on sax, three glorious back-up singers in spangles, two extra guitarists).

 

The credible performance of “Avalon” was an unexpected treat.

 

 

 

11/5/22. “A Musical Portrait: Price and Bonds” at Disney Hall

 

The most adventurous program of the season and it was thrilling. My take-away was that while Bonds may be a more polished composer – and perhaps had more advantages – Price (1887-1953) is more inventive and idiosyncratic. She’s a valuable neoromantic voice.

 

This presentation also highlighted Price’s wit. The finale to her Symphony No. 1 in E minor (1932) was animated fun. Her wonderful “Four Encore Songs” began with “Tobacco”, with words by Graham Lee Hemminger: “Tobacco is a dirty weed. I like it. / It satisfies no normal need. I like it. / It makes you thin, it makes you lean, / It takes the hair right off your bean. / It’s the worst stuff I’ve ever seen. / I like it.”

 

I hear Bonds’s “Troubled Water” fantasia for solo piano on KUSC pretty often and it makes me want to hear more of her music. We should know all about it. She even lived the last part of her life in L.A.

 

At this concert she was represented by a generous selection of songs, and the second, fifth, sixth and seventh parts of her orchestral masterpiece “Montgomery Variations”. Fifteen months earlier the Phil played the first, third, fourth, and seventh parts at the Bowl. So in a sense I’ve heard the whole piece. But may I be outrageously greedy and request the Phil play the whole work – all seven parts – in one go? Is that asking too much? The publishers say it’s only 28 minutes total.

 

Chopping “Montgomery” into pieces was part of the problem of this concert. In the bad tradition of programs that try to make up for the neglect of worthy composers it sabotaged itself by going on too long, featured excepts rather than whole compositions, sequenced things for variety rather than chronology, presented arrangements rather than original versions (why?), and wasted space in the program with PR puffery instead of information.

 

The complicated stage management challenges were not handled efficiently. After the “Montgomery Variations” there was an ovation, the house lights went on, and the orchestra musicians left the stage. Show’s over, right? But then Nathaniel Gumbs started playing Price’s Organ Suite No. 1. People in the audience who had started filing out paused – and if they were smart, they sat down to relish one final treat.

 

[Image: Composition 10, 1939, Kandinsky]

“Regeneration : Black Cinema 1898–1971” at the Academy Museum & “Cy Twombly : making past present” at the Getty

Two recent exhibits offered – beyond the delicious items on display – a demonstration of different approaches to the past.

 

While both created new contexts for the lost/forgotten/ignored to resonate, “Regeneration : Black Cinema 1898–1971” deployed scholarship to document, while “Cy Twombly : making past present” reveled in aestheticism for the fun of it.

 

The former said, “Here is the evidence. You cannot deny these realities,” while the later said, “This is what survives. Make of it what you will.”

 

You could make a list …

• A topic / An individual
• An essay / A retrospective
• Partisanship / Ambivalence
• Marginal / Central
• Moving / Static
• Celebratory / Elegiac
• Recovering personal stories / Editing personal stories

 

 

“Regeneration” was a delight. It emphasized Black agency and self-representation and self-creation. The heart of the exhibit was two rooms devoted to music – Black jazz artists and Black musicians in movie musicals. I thought I knew this stuff but left with a long “To see” list: “Carmen Jones” and the Sammy Davis Jr. “Porgy and Bess” and “I dood it” and much more.

 

One aspect that contributed to the pleasure was the installation. This is the Academy Museum’s second big special exhibit, and they have learned. They have found a better balance of objects, texts, and monitors and/or projectors.

 

Each room had sufficient quantity and variety of things to be intriguing. But never too much; you never felt overwhelmed. In the museum’s first installations you were often bombarded by movie clips. It was counterproductive. Here the effect was less noisy: often one main screen supplemented by discrete, smaller screens. Clips take up a lot of mental space, and here they were given room.

 

And I very much liked having actual works of art (by Greg Ligon, Kara Walker and others). It provided something direct and visceral in rooms full of representations.

Especially helpful was the associated installation of Isaac Julien’s “Baltimore” (2003) – a cheekily deep demonstration of seeing Black representations and deriving power from them. I’m glad we started our visit there.

 

 

 

The Twombly exhibition prompts its own list of contradictions:

• Chi-chi / Ugliness
• Preciousness / Irony
• Chaos / Arcadia
• Mindlessness / Erudition
• Forgetting / Remembering
• Epitaphs / Erasures

 

The subtitle of the Twombly exhibit was misleading. Is it possible to take seriously the notion that these scribbles and post-it memos are evidence of a significant engagement with the classical heritage? What have these to do with the study of the antique engaged in by Masaccio, Raphael, Poussin, Puvis de Chavannes, Lawrence Alma-Tadema or even Picasso or De Chirico?

 

The exhibit made a fuss about CT’s residence in Italy and his life there. The romance of the American artist in Rome, like Hawthorne’s “Marble Faun”. Not that this doesn’t raise more questions than it answers. I suspect the whole story – if we ever get to learn it - is pure Henry James. An inverted “Portrait of a lady” overlaid with “The Aspern papers”?

 

Even so, the work is thrilling and exhilarating, and the exhibition unforgettable.

 

I’ve loved “Synopsis of a battle” since seeing it in an ad in “Artforum” in the ‘70s. Trying to make sense of the senseless. Diagrams of lines of force, not attempts to suggest that force. Traces, after-effects.

 

CT was not engaged in any sort of revival. He wasn’t even translating ancient motifs into a modern idiom. His classical words and allusions are all epitaphs. What’s left of Virgil? A name, for most people. And for the minority for whom Virgil is more than that, CT’s gesture provides a mournful monument.

 

It was the sculptures that really got me. Certainly the work of the 1990s what matters is the sculpture, not so much the paintings. Giacometti plus Oldenburg.

September: Oedipus at the Getty Villa

 

The most audacious production of a tragedy the Getty has hosted. The comedies have been pretty free and far-out, but for a drama this was something else.

 

It was an explicitly political drama, with Oedipus’s accusations of treachery against Creon – and Jocasta’s attempts to mollify the conflict – being the main thing. Oedipus’s tragedy seemed the tragedy of a vain and hotheaded politician, rather than the fate of Everyman.

The mood was violently haunted rather than dispassionately relentless. The conclusion, after Jocasta’s exit, was a frenzied Expressionist free-for-all, rather than a orderly march into hell.

 

It was not a translation from Greek to English. The primary language of the production was American Sign Language. There were usually English-language voice-overs and supertitles, but not always. The choruses were a quintet signing in unison, without any interpretation. It underscored the event is an occasion of translation, interpretation.

Gestures were repeated so that even un-signed idiots like me began to note the repetitions. E.g. rubbing palms together, then extracting from a palm a stream and tossing something over a slightly bowed head.

But this was not decorative dancing. It was often beautiful but it was often brutal: abrupt, harsh, ugly. Indeed, the actors seemed to strive to make each speech end with a big, abrupt gesture. A gestural exclamation point. Is this Deaf West’s house style, or is it a feature of ASL? Either way, it was expressive of conflict and turmoil.

The signing was not silent. The performers thwacked their chests with resounding thumps, clapped, squeaked, slapped and – most disturbing of all – grunted, groaned and howled.

 

Russell Harvard delineated a clear trajectory from an everything-is-under-control CEO to paranoid inquisitor, to human wreck. He didn’t waste any energy in imitating a Greek statue: no nonsense about being stately and calm.

Ashlea Hayses was an appropriately strange Tiresias. She evolved from being too frightened to speak to the voice of doom.

Jon Wolfe Nelson played Creon as a martinet more concerned about his privileges than his country, or the truth.

Akia Takara’s writhing and shrieking and cowering made the Shepherd a bigger part than I remember.

Tany Orellana’s visuals had a tremendous moment when the frames between the Getty pillars became illuminated white rectangles.

Peter Bayne provided a nicely ominous electronic rumble.

 

A lot to think about.

 

A surprising choice. The Getty up to now has made a point of avoiding the most familiar items in the antique repertoire. Also, the program booklet, contrary to tradition, didn’t announce next year’s play. Could we hope for Deaf West doing “Oedipus at Colonis” next, then “Antigone”?

August

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)

July

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-June: Islands, books, a painting

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:

 

 

The rest of April

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 20^th 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

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.