Silverlake Blvd.

Cristina Monet Palaci, a.k.a. Cristina (1956-2020)

 

 

It's a blue Monday. See the NY Times, and the Guardian. 

 

 

 

 

Katie Herzog @ Klowden Mann

 

 

The new work at Klowden Mann lures you with funky, amiable gorgeousness: lush colors and textures. But then you begin to realize what you’re looking at. She doesn’t paint current atrocities, but artifacts of paleoconservative, libertarian, commercial or technological discourse behind it. “Discourse” literally: slogans, names, words.

 

The main series paints the covers of the paperback books distributed circa 1961 by the John Birch Society collectively titled “One Dozen Candles”. Each painting is heavily encrusted with melted candles. “Seeds of Treason” is the high point. It’s beautiful; but they’re all compelling.

 

The watercolors tend towards monochrome, highlighting the fact that she really can draw.

 

The “Ephemerisle” vinyl banners added a bright, crisp contrast, both in color and their genial spoofy mood.

 

The Malheur Refuge drawings take on another strain of utopianism: conservation. KH documents the gruesome, urban infrastructure that paradoxically comes with the idea of a nature preserve.

 

“Voting Booth Soft Sculpture” was my immediate favorite. Pathos, outrage, wit. It’s fabricated with an endearingly improvised directness. Goofy and alarming. I was not afraid of it, though I should be.

 

Monday Evening Concerts presents Morton Feldman’s “For Philip Guston” @ Hauser & Wirth

 

The tempo was the main thing. “Slow”, sure, but it wasn’t languorous. Some moments were animated, other nearly came to a complete stop. Christine Tavolacci (flutes), Brendan Nguyen (piano and celesta), and Jonathan Hepfer (percussion) registered micro-scale nuances of speed as well as attack, volume, and everything else. It never stalled, for the five hours it unfolded.

 

Five hours!? Five hours is nothing: an afternoon at work, a flight to New York, a drive to Las Vegas. But in terms of music, it’s longer than Götterdämmerung; it’s longer than a double feature of Don Giovanni and Rigoletto. What could possibly be the point? It disrupts the concert-going routine; it demarcates an event that’s unique. The point being the preparation of an opportunity to really hear.

 

I did not sit straight through. I had to take a break. I don’t know when – I didn’t allow myself to check the time. After maybe two hours. My mistake was failing to bring water. I made my own 30-minute intermission and came back and stayed to the end.

 

Why? It was the pleasure of sitting in dark stillness, catching now and then bird calls and traffic sounds coming from far away.

 

But landscapes are just one way of describing it.

 

It was also immersion in a tempo in which it is impossible to be willful, violent or sly. No racing, no jolts. Instead of statements there is a sounding-out. Not only no rhetoric but no syntax. Poignant without schmaltz. Not ascetic, either: discrete, voluptuous, urgent.

 

Image: Dial (Philip Guston, 1956)

“In Circles” @ The Odyssey Theater

 

 

A bit over 100 years ago, Gertrude Stein started writing plays. At first, they didn’t seem plays at all, but demonstrations of how liberated Stein was from syntax.

 

Later, Stein started composing them out of fairly colloquial bits of chatter. The phrases are conventional, but put on display without context or referents, they become strange and comic. “A Circular Play” from 1920 is an example of this genre. It’s a romp, hinting at comic goings-on between unspecified characters, and also making cheeky pronouncements about how to write a play.

 

Stein expected her plays to be produced. Since outrageously anti-theatrical things like Raymond Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique were actually getting staged in Paris a century ago the idea wasn’t absurd. But in fact it took Virgil Thompson’s Four Saints in Three Acts and Mother of Us All to get Stein on stage. Their success has led others to try and see what can be done.

 

In 1967, Al Carmines, adapted “A Circular Play” into a off-Broadway chamber-musical. The music and production is human scale – there’s just the one piano for accompaniment – aiming at intimacy rather than razzle-dazzle.

Carmines uses Stein’s words to create distinct episodes with distinct moods, from grave to larky. The overall impression is of a gathering of friends – one of the senses of “circle” – who, in the course of 80 minutes, flirt, fight, amuse each other, annoy each other, drift off into solitary meditations and re-combine in different combinations. They spin off into individual riffs, but always regroup, reaffirm their solidarity.

 

Carmines employs most of Stein’s text, but plays with it, so we have games on games. He selects sentences and phrases, and works them into opening lines of songs, or refrains. Since he has a good ear, they are usually arresting or amusing. Once he has found a good line – or set of lines – to set to music, his song consists of the lines repeated over and over. Repetition is feature of Stein’s work, but this way of using her words is different from the actual texture of Stein’s text. It’s an explication of Stein’s play rather than a performance of it.

 

The result is mostly delightful. But sometimes it seems like a docent “revealing” the people and objects “hidden” in an picture by the zany artist.

 

David Schweizer’s production was handsome and clever. The cast was enthusiastic, with especially admirable clowning by Aaron Jung and P.T. Mahoney and singing by Ashlee Dutson.

Michael Kiwanuka’s latest

 

 

Philip Guston @ Hauser & Wirth, L.A.

 

 

The Guston retrospective of 15 years ago omitted work from 1971 – the year all the work currently at Hauser & Wirth was done. It was worth the wait. It was like getting a tour of his studio. Or, rather studios plural, since the work was produced in Italy and in U.S. The homeland of antiquity and the homeland of Richard Nixon are reflected, distilled, caricatured, restored, and quarantined. As George Seferis put it, “I woke with this marble head in my hands; / it exhausts my elbows and I don’t know where to put it down.”

L.A. Phil diary in the L.A. Review of Books

 

Check out my “Open Bar: A Diary of The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 2018-2019 Centennial Season,” just published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Two dozen events in a bit over 3000 words.

 

[Image: Paul Klee, New Harmony, 1936]

Earnest @ the Clark

 

The end of August, Chalk Repertory Theatre presented “A Wilde Picnic: a reading of The Importance of Being Earnest” in the garden of the Clark Library.

 

What could be the Importance of The Importance?

 

One thing this performance revealed to me was how the famous aphorisms feel like logical propositions. Proposition that are statements of identity and non-identity, that are contradicted by other propositions in the play.

 

Functions:

“Babies go into handbags; manuscripts go into prams”

 

Names without Persons:

“Fictitious persons (Bunbury, Earnest) have real consequences, lives independent of their creators.”

 

Names and Persons:

Both “Names are significant” and “Names are not significant”

Both “Names are given” and “Names are chosen” (Corollary: “Ones age is chosen”)

Both “Christening is a physical ordeal” and “Christening is vaccination” – Altogether “grotesque and irreligious” as Lady Bracknell puts it.

 

But the propositions are just one element, a means to an end. The play presents children running around a garden. But children who hold themselves with grave dignity, and who speak with unreal clarity and decisiveness. It links Wilde with a stream of subtly worked out nonsense that runs from Edward Lear to Carroll, Wodehouse, Firbank, through Monty Python and beyond.