Silverlake Blvd.

Zulema Cusseaux on Soul Train, 1975

... who I know from Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance

 

 

The Numinous Has Many Shapes and Ways: On SITI and Aaron Poochigian’s "Bacchae"

 

See my review of the Getty Villa's production of Bacchae, published today in the L.A. Review of Books.

Stars That Have Been Born

 

1932. 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.”

 

 

1937. 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.

 

 

1954. 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.)

 

 

1976. 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.

 

 

2018. 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.

Ives' Holidays @ Disney Hall

 

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, 4^th 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.

Victor Hugo @ The Hammer

 

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.

 

[Illustration: Victor Hugo, "Stains," circa 1875, ink and wash on paper. (Bibliothèque nationale de France ©BnF)]

Satyagraha & Europeras 1 & 2

 

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, 19^th 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.

 

 

Our struggle concludes, for now

s

 

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 21^st 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.

Launching the centennial

 

9/30/18. CicLAvia in the morning. Starting from Koreatown – after extensive tire-inflating and cobweb dusting – we headed up Western to Melrose, and up Vine. Then back down Melrose to Wilshire & Western, as far as H.M.S. Bounty. Glorious bright, sunny, warm with a breeze. The novelty of actually seeing buildings and businesses that have been driven past for three decades.

 

 

The Bowl in the evening. Grabbed chips and To Go food and just made it to our seats with the 18,000 other lottery winners. There were also a million people on stage: all the YOLA kids were there sitting with their mentors.

 

After which it unfolded as an extremely miscellaneous concert. Kali Uchis provided an interesting retro-30s bombshell style. Herbie Hancock provided a gigantic jam on “Rockit,” perhaps the best music of the evening.

 

Katy Perry provided a tribute to CicLAvia: Queen’s “Bicycle”! Then she sang “Firework” as an amazing firework illuminated the sky. Who is she?

 

A surprise at the end: John Williams, conducting the intro to “Star Wars”.

 

The “visual experience” by Xitelabs animated the arch of the shell, the speakers, the sides of the stage, etc. with lines, patterns and colors. It was colorful and fun, appropriate for the festive occasion. It probably helped people tolerate the Paul Desenne premiere, which was a bit too acidic for a celebration.

 

The “Firebird” visuals provided prismatic chiaroscuro constructivism that was genial, but with Stravinsky’s music, who needs it? As visual accompaniment it wasn’t quite up to choreography by Balanchine.

 

And that Appix app …. First of all, it seems a funny moment to ask people to download an app that will take control of their phone. Second, the flashing light effect it created was only visible if you turned your back to the stage: is that what the performers want?

 

 

10/2/2018. Refik Anadol’s “WDCH Dreams”. There were absolutely breathtaking moments. At times Disney Hall disappeared, which is really something. It wasn’t an installation, but a movie, projected on the building, with each piece of the façade acting as a separate screen. I thought you would experience it by walking around the building. No: if you got too close you just cast a shadow, spoiling the effect.

 

10/4/2018. LA Phil’s 100^th season kick-off concert was broadcast live on KUSC. The big event was a premiere of Andrew Norman’s “Sustain”, in which arpeggios unfurled with deep-sea-like slowness and grace.

 

Tuesday, 10/9/18. “L.A.’s Newest Music” started in the garden, with Ellen Reid’s “Oscillations: One Hundred Years and Forever” in the Keck Amphitheatre: a choir and soloists cooing, ah-ing, and sighing in shimmering, shifting harmonies.

 

Carolyn Chen’s “The Sleeper and the Drinker” seems to have been the official Big Event, with Dudamel himself conducting. But the the work that has stuck with me was Natacha Diels’ “Laughing to Forget”, featuring tightly choreographed nervous ticks (Face right! Face left! Sway!), odd exhortations (“We’re here!” “Consolations of beauty”), and, joking aside, the richest, liveliest instrumental music of the evening.

Detour restored @ the Linwood Dunn Theater

 

 

Emmy Awards night we went to the premiere of the gloriously restored new print of the noirest of the noirs.

 

The song “I can’t believe you’re in love with me” prompts Al (Tom Neal) to review what has happened to him since leaving NYC. Hitch-hiking to L.A., the impossible-to-explain deadly accident, …. Later, Al picks up a woman (Ann Savage). She tells him to call her “Vera,” which is certainly not her name. Other than a cough, there is no backstory (we never find out anything about her). She falls asleep. He admires her. She wakes, and at the moment we expect flirtation to begin, she snaps, “What did you do with the body?”

 

At which point the movie becomes one continuous, accelerating fall down, and down, and down.

 

The intense concentration – the focus, the ruthless elimination of non-essentials – makes you sit up. It makes more carefully made movies seem gassy, lazy and doddering.

 

The restoration was another tale of decades of work, and global cooperation led by Michael Pogorzelski, Academy Film Archive, and Heather Linville, Library of Congress, with UCLA, MOMA, Cinematheque Française, Brussels, etc., etc.

Summer 2018 movies

 

2001 in 70mm at the Cinerama Dome, Fosse Fosse Fosse at the Billy Wilder (“On Broadway” and “Who’s got the pain?”), A Place in the Sun at Backyard Bijou, The Apartment (newly restored), and Kinemacolor shorts (rescued from oblivion by L’Immagine Ritrovata) at Reel Thing 2018.

 

And at home, festivals of Satyajit Ray, and Fred and Ginger. Rather than their famous adagio dances, I got into their swing numbers: together, Ginger singing solo, and Fred at the piano).

 

[Image: Reel Thing’s high point of hilarity: a presentation on subtitles good, bad and ugly by Bruce Goldstein (of Film Forum & Rialto Pictures)]