Silverlake Blvd.

Anohni @ Disney Hall

 

It’s a shame Robert Graves wasn’t around to see Anohni at Disney Hall last week. The author of “White Goddess” would have recognized the Deer Woman sanctifying the stage before the show began and after it was over. He would have applauded Anohni’s painstakingly stylized performance. He would have cheered on her denunciation of patriarchy as the source of all our environmental, political and personal problems.

Anohni was strange, but the strangeness is 100% authentic. It is not a gimmick, not a mode that she puts on then takes off. Nothing was for effect, though everything was done for maximum dramatic impact. The “show” is Anohni being herself: in succession defiant, frightened, angry, thoughtful, intimate, and philosophical. It was weird and exciting.

It began with her singing “Why Am I Alive Now?” so intensely, I thought to myself, “Oh no, she’s not going to make it through the rest of the evening!!” Not to worry: if anything, her voice got firmer and stronger as the evening went on.

Her previous appearance at Disney Hall is one of my personal top ten rock concert experiences – though I’m not positive a rock concert is what it was.

This time she and her ensemble slipped between soundscapes with impressive nonchalance. She composes, delicately mercurial music.

There was some avant-garde cabaret (the tremendous “Man Is the Baby”).

There was chamber music (the Erik Satie-y “Manta Ray”).

The music for “Can’t” could be by Van Morrison - earnest, heartfelt, upbeat – but the words are resolutely downbeat.

She prefaced “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” with reminiscence of going to see Jimmy Scott in the early 80s “when there would be three people in the audience”. Very interesting to know that she’s a JS fan, but her version wasn’t like Jimmy Scott or like anybody else in the world who has ever sung this song. She can’t do this song or anything else straight. She rescued it from being a famous standard by restoring the heartbreak and drama. She didn’t conclude the song so much as cut it off: the band stopped, the lights went out – total darkness. Yikes!

There were also other speeches to the audience. It was illuminating to know she had been a study of Vito Russo.

She ended with an encore of “Hope There's Someone”, accompanying herself no piano, but building to a glorious cacophony.

Memnon @ the Getty Villa

Who?

In ancient times, he was a familiar character, a soldier who died for Troy. Though the Trojan War was not his fight – he’d come from Ethiopia to help his uncle, King Priam. So it’s a tragedy of a brave, good-hearted young man’s destruction. And yes, the Greeks, despite their chauvinism, always identified this noble hero as Black.  

If the plays concerning him by Aeschylus and Sophocles had survived, we would know all about Memnon. There was also “Aethiopis”, an epic poem in five books, which we know existed, but don’t have. Perhaps one day a charred scroll will get deciphered and we’ll regain the full story.

But, in the meantime, with not many clues to go on, playwright Will Power and the Classical Theater of Harlem undertook a daunting job of reconstruction.

It worked. The characters and conflicts burst out of myth to illuminate the here and now. To whom do we owe loyalty? Our lives? What do those people and places owe us?

The Memnon, Eric Berryman, had an imposing presence and a repertoire of glares, exasperated stares. He vibrated with internal conflict.

Like lots of Getty Villa productions, the artists had fun with the classical antique bric-a-brac.

There was a Homeric catalog inventorying all the African troops under Memnon’s command and an epic description of Memnon’s shield based a similar one in the “Iliad”. Both were delivered by Daniel José Molina in vast, breath-defying narrative monologues peppered with tongue-twistingly-named gods, heroes, and places.

The dialogue had the cadences of verse, growing more emphatic till the play ended with characters speaking in rhymed couplets.

The production was stolen by the two old men – King Priam and the senior Greek warrior Nestor – embodied forcefully by one actor, Jesse J. Perez. His Priam was a corrupt self-absorbed political boss; his Nestor was a hypocritical, manipulative hysteric. Both takes were novel and provocative.

In addition to being identified as Black, the ancient references to Memnon also typically identify him as outstandingly good-looking. In the “Odyssey”, Memnon’s murderer, Achilles, describes another solider as the handsomest man he ever saw – except for Memnon. This production did not focus on that element of the story. Though at one moment Jesse Corbin – playing Achilles – peeled his shirt off and the wolf-whistles and hoots of approval probably exceeded the Getty’s neighbors’ request for decorum.

 

Image: “Memnon”, Abraham van Diepenbeeck (1655)

November – December ’23 update

 

November 2023. Suddenly without any novel to read, I started H.D.’s “HERmione” – Wow! It’s really eye-opening. H.D.’s poetry can be so impersonal. But this positively luxuriates evoking the milieu, the concrete feelings and situations from which the poetry arouse. The tensions and pleasures of a cultured suburban Philadelphia household opened a portal to archaic Greece. Henry James and Maurice Prendergast.

Reminding me that I enjoy using those brain-muscles on a challenging text. It is certainly delightful. But it’s something I can enjoy only by the teaspoon, not big gulps.

…“You’re so intense, so oddly intense, dear. You’re like George so intense about things. We live in an odd bustle, a crowded gaping universe,” she spoke as if she had read it; little distinguished waxwork making a little speech, a little speech made up for it by someone else but taking on distinguished quality when the wax mouth pronounced the wax words written for it.”

 

11/5/23. Re-reading “Red, White & Royal Blue” again, of course, because I can’t stop. But also getting very excited about Percival Everett’s “Erasure”. It’s rich, acute, combining drollery with white-hot fury. It’s been made into a movie? How?

… “Thelonious Ellison: Author of five books. Widely unread experimental stories and novels. Considered dense and often inaccessible. Best known for his novel The Second Failure. A lonely man, seemingly having shed all his friends. Visits his mother daily though she cannot remember who he is. Cannot talk to his brother because he is a nut. Cannot speak to his sister because she is dead. Too mystified to actually be depressed. Likes to fish and work with wood. Looking for single woman interested in same. Lives in nation’s capital.”

 

11/10/23. West Adams. Marisa & Sean’s pre-wedding dinner. When the discussion turned to what people were planning to wear tomorrow, Sean’s younger brother mentioned that he was thinking of dressing as Moses. His timing and delivery were perfect – all conversation came to an abrupt halt. I asked his sister, “Is he serious?” and she replied, “I have no idea.” (He did.)

 

11/18/23. Yesterday I went to the first meeting of the SCI-Arc “Pride affinity group”. Within a half hour a student proposed as a goal having a SCI-Arc float in the next L.A. Pride Parade. Everyone shouted, “Yes!”

I was relieved to hear that students had positive experiences of the school in terms of their queer identities. They felt safe and supported. The problem was that for many their home countries were not, creating a division in their lives.

 

11/21/23. Isherwood, “Christopher and his kind”. I’ve read it several times, but now, having read “Lions & shadows”, I get what these revisions mean. He retells a story told in a previous book, but now with all the gay sex included, rather than edited out.

 On one hand, the incessant self-revising is a deliciously modernist practice. But on the other hand, it suggests that CI was essentially a memoirist not a novelist. Why didn’t he just make up characters and situations that didn’t raise questions of accuracy?

There’s all this hot air about autofiction and none of it I’ve read ever mentions CI, which seems incredible. But maybe younger writers and critics don’t know him.

 

12/8/23. Edna O’Brien, “The Country girls” Breathtaking. No wonder it was banned in Ireland.

And yet, isn’t this the kind of thing Everett’s “Erasure” teaches us to be wary of? The kick of wallowing in unseemliness, with the excuse of “realism” and “honesty” – which could just be another bag of unreal clichés?

EOB could be part of the Irish variant, inaugurated by Behan, and continued today by Martin McDonagh (and Shane MacGowen until last week)? Picking up Irish rocks to show the nastiness underneath.

But what’s impressive isn’t reportage but EOB’s art. No words wasted in sentiment or self-pity. Her girls are ignorant and foolhardy, but they’re resilient. Probably that was what infuriated people, more than images of rural wretchedness. And their observations of the men around them: “He had no insight into the small irritations that could drive people mad.”

 

[Image: Charles Demuth, Seven Plums in a Chinese Bowl, 1923]

August – October ’23 update

 

8/3/23. . “2001” with live music at the Hollywood Bowl. One of my top Bowl experiences. What a treat to hear the Phil (under Caleb Young) and the Master Chorale perform György Ligeti! You don’t get that often.

At the intermission, JK and I went to the bathrooms and – for the first time ever – there was no line for the women and a long line for the men! 

 

8/8/23. Laguna Beach’s contribution to visual art is (1) the guys, and (2) surfboards. But The Pageant of the Masters was even weirder than I imagined.

 

9/10/23. I watched “Red, white and royal blue” … A M/M romance about public people trying to have a private life. An alternative reality in which a progressive woman was elected President in 2016, and COVID didn’t happen.

The idea of Uma Thurman as the POTUS was delicious, and she was game, with a twangy Texas accent and a doing-her-best stressed-out Mom/Chief executive demeanor. She might have been imitating Jerry Hall. The funniest zingers of the movie are given to the Chief of Staff (Sarah Shahi), when she discovers the guys together. (“If anyone sees you leave this hotel I will Brexit your head from your body. [Curtsies] Your royal highness.”)

Good music. It began with the joyous blast of Joan Jett’s “Bad reputation”, and featured Vagabon’s version of "If I Loved You".

 

10/1/23. Restored and remastered “Stop making sense” (1984) at Alamo Drafthouse. I haven’t listened to the Talking Heads in a long time, but will start now. A blast. There’s a lot of David Byrne – which is challenging – but ultimately he wins you over out of sheer manic energy. They all do. The non-seniors in the audience need to understand that this is not merely Jonathan Demme’s editing magic. When I saw them just before the performances filmed here, it was a non-stop dance party with no sitting down. I remember Tina being so pregnant that she played her bass on the side of her hip.

 

10/8/23. Just back from the double feature of Pedro Almadóvar shorts at the Alamo: the new “Strange way of life” plus “Human voice” from 2020. I can’t say I immediately loved “Strange” but paired with “Voice”, they resonated. They stick in the mind.

I don’t get Pedro Pascal’s appeal, but definitely do get Ethan Hawke’s. Manu Ríos – the (lip synch) singer – is so beautiful that people laughed out loud when he first appeared. Ditto Jason Fernández and José Condessa (young Jake & Silva). I suppose they’re part of the reason “Variety” calls it “a glorified fashion commercial” because it was produced by Saint Laurent with clothes by SL’s designer Anthony Vaccarello. If so, it’s very, very glorified. And it’s not as if PA has been immune to stylish clothes.

“Voice” swanks even harder than “Strange”, but its seriousness is not a question. Tilda Swinton ignites the screen with outrage, anger, hurt, despair.

It’s not an adaptation of Cocteau’s play “La Voix humaine“ from 1930. A film adaptation was made in 1948, “Una Voce Umana” with an unsurpassable performance by Anna Magnani, filmed with incisive tact by Roberto Rossellini. There was no need to do it again. This is more like an “imitation” in the sense of employing the situation and spirit of a venerable classic to address situations of the present day. An update, something Swinton and Almodóvar devised together, combining her history and his history, her punk youth and his punk youth, her daring to look back on her life and his daring to look back on his life, her daring to face her present situation and his daring to face his present situation.

The phone, the medium of communication, as a device for separation, disconnection.

Almadóvar’s theme remains the pain of hopeless love. But these shorts are in a new mode: sparer, more evocative, less explicit. Both shorts would have been prologues to one of his older epics. We would have learned all about Silva’s and Tilda’s parents, neighbors, work colleagues, their childhoods. The hell with all that.

 

10/15/23. CicLAvia. Down to 6^th Street, and over the new (to us) 6^th Street Bridge. Fumbling, inept. But I didn’t fall down, or crash into anyone else. And instead of feeling wrecked afterwards I was glowing.

I Instagrammed my first images since April 4. Why? Seemed stupid e-mailing images to people individually. Am I OK, then, with social media again?

 

[Image: Charles Demuth, Eggplants and Pears, 1925]

April – July ’23 update

 

4/24/23. Chicago. I bought a marked-down Karl Lagerfeld sweater at Bloomingdale’s. While the clerk was ringing it up, he asked, “So what are you guys doing during your visit?” JK: “We’re going to Rockford.” The clerk gulped and looked down to the cash register.

 

4/27/23. Art Institute of Chicago. We had just stepped into the Impressionist galleries when I got a text to proceed immediately to the Dalí exhibit. We had 10 minutes. We ran through room after room of incredible masterpieces from Caillebotte through Cezanne, muttering, “Don’t look at anything!”

 

4/30/23. Rockford. In Frank Lloyd Wright’s Laurent house, we look out the arc of windows at a family of turkeys crossing the lawn.

 

5/14/23. Fleur Jaeggy, “Sweet days of discipline”, “Many of the girls possess diaries. With little brass studs. With keys. They think they possess their lives.”

 

6/6/23. I have been binge-reading gay male romance novels since the middle of May. I started the year intending to “do” the Romantics, but other than the Bs (Blake, Burns, Byron, & the Brontës) they are unbearable. Not wanting to waste another minute with Shelley’s toxic fumes, I cast around for something else to read in that tradition and  realized there was a living tradition of Romanticism that I had no direct experience of – Romance fiction. And, while I’m at it, why not explore gay romantic fiction?

After almost 50 years of unwavering devotion to capital-L Literature, I’m discovering a genre of pop fiction that appeals to me. And within that genre, I am – no surprise - attracted to stories in the “Pride and Prejudice” side of the spectrum rather than “Wuthering Heights” end: comedies not tragedies. Rom Com screwball comedies with happy endings. E.g. Lauren Blakely, “A guy walks into my bar”, Sarina Bowen, “The Best men” and Casey McQuiston, “Red, white, and royal blue”

… What does it mean that most of the books in this genre seem to be written by women?

 

7/16/23. Wes Anderson’s latest, “Asteroid City” I can’t wait to see it again. Jason Schwartzman giving Edward Norton a spoonful of ice cream was the most erotic thing I’ve seen in a Hollywood movie in eons.

 

7/23/23. I read Andrew Holleran's "Kingdom of sand" and then everything else he's written. I didn't know “In September, the light changes” (2000) and wish I had.

All the stories are lightly fictionalized memoirs or personal essays. He doesn’t even bother to invent new details, but reprises the characters, situations, jokes already familiar from his novels. He’s deeply uninterested in making anything up. Often there’s only a hint of a story, and the only momentum is the acuity of his perception. A dangerous method, but he can pull it off. It can be searing, acute, breathtaking, hilarious.

AH has been conscientiously trying to get y life in the U.S. since Stonewall down on paper for 45 years. Is it too much, or not enough? Proust, for one, was primarily concerned with time, memory, love and art; it was only by the by that he produced the essential study of the Belle Epoch hurling into the Great War. All of Holleran’s books have the same tone. His bleakness is so absolute it risks become a lapse of taste. He’s incapable of presenting bliss - or even equanimity - without slathering momento mori all over it.

 

[Image: Charles Demuth, Eggplant, 1923]

November ’22 – March ’23 update

 

11/3/22. My 200 words for “The Architect’s Newspaper” …

“The Mike Davis I have been remembering is the fan of Lady from Shanghai and Starship Trooper. The collector of valueless currency issued by defunct revolutionary regimes. The acute – if hard of hearing – listener (“Are you talking about pornography or geology?”)

The lifeguard whose book projects needing my urgent assistance were really about the urgent assistance I needed to survive the AIDS catastrophe of the ‘90s. They were also a pretext for unforgettable lunches and dinners. E.g. the meal with Mike and Alessandra where his conversation consisted entirely of news stories about human parasites.

At the height of his celebrity over City of Quartz Mike decided what I needed was a boyfriend and he would fix me up. I got taken to a lot of parties where I met a lot of interesting and totally inappropriate people (straight, leaving town). I reminded him of it this summer and we laughed. Laughing about that era is an accomplishment.

When I complimented him on how he and Jon Wiener crammed Set the Night on Fire with A+ anecdotes (the connection between Barefoot in the Park with Wattstax), he responded, “You should see all the stuff we had to leave out.” Indeed.”

 

12/10/22. San Francisco. Dude in the bathroom at the St. Francis: “My Christmas gift this year from my parents is they’re paying my SantaCon tab.”

 

12/16/22. Out of desperation I turned to Wayne Koestenbaum’s “Circus”. Boring it is not. Sentences that make your eyes pop out of your head. The hyperventilating high faggotry aestheticism is like manna from heaven. I’m getting a bit sea-sick, but it’s worth it. An evening that justifies the hangover.

 

12/28/22. Chips Channon’s diaries are instructive. When I got to the 1930s (his married life, his start as an MP, etc.) I was tempted to stop reading. I missed the outrageous escapades of his circle’s 1910s and 1920s (“Dined with comtesse d’Hautpoul … it seems she takes drugs. I must find out what kind.”)

But, I persevered and eventually realized that this transition was the big story. This is what Anthony Powell was writing about. And Waugh. This diary is changing my appreciation for them. They were not as inventive as I thought. They weren’t making anything up. All their mad characters and stories were waiting for them like absurdly bizarre shells on the beach.

 

2/7/23. Derek Jarman’s “Caravaggio” I haven’t seen it in years. I remembered the cute guys. They’re there, but DJ doesn’t let you relax in pleasure for long. Astringent and constantly knocking you off balance. There are a few gorgeous images, but mostly its tacky and ugly. Good god the hideous slick daubs used to stand for his paintings! The cinematography is mostly like a bad TV production. I credit Jarman with doing this deliberately. Like Pasolini, denying audiences the bawdy fun they expect. And what’s the point? A hymn to unwashed hands? It’s not Caravaggio, but any artist’s life: their loves, their hangers-on, their patrons, their critics, …. People may be false, the work may fail, but the experiences make a life.

 

March 2023. James Hannaham, “Didn’t nobody give a shit what happened to Carlotta” is the best novel I've read in a long, long time.  … “His wordplay seemed to amuse him, like he’d stirred up the bubbles in a Jacuzzi full of haughtiness.”

 

[Image: Charles Demuth, Tiger Lilies, 1920]

August-October ’22 update

 

8/20/22, Saturday. Cento. The beet spaghetti was the best tasting and most visually beautiful pasta I had had in a long time.

 

September 2022. Preston Sturges has always been a puzzle. I read that he’s the apex of screwball, but when I watch, I feel him expend enormous cleverness on shabby Abbott & Costello situations. A sensibility that seemed, at heart, pure Norman Rockwell corn.

But I’ve been watching and re-watching “Palm Beach Story”. OK, I’ve converted. There are scenes of breathtaking elegance and wit. The hilarity and insanity builds and builds to the end. But the beginning is misleading – a bore, with everyone standing around like mannequins mouthing dialogue that is not even vaguely interesting.

But I suspect this whole prologue is something the studio forced Sturges to add after his film was shot because they thought starting with Claudette Colbert sticking a pin in Joel McCrea’s ass – the real start of the move – would confuse the dopes. In general I’m getting a sense that Sturges did wonders with scenes he cared about, but scenes he didn’t, he let slide.

 

9/17/23. “Gospel at Colonus” last night. After waiting 30+ years. Meeting expectations? Yes! Not every moment was perfect, but the it was the most alive production of a tragedy in the whole Getty series. Easily the most thorough-going re-imagining of a tragedy. The over-all best cast. The performers were electrifying and on, on, on.

It presented the emotions of Sophocles’ play: the despair, the jubilation, the cruelty, the kindness. For example, Michael Adkin’s acapella solo of “Fair Colonus” from the museum balcony, presenting a version of the “nightingale” chorus. Not a word was intelligible. But it was heat-stopping, and made the point Sophocles meant to make at that point.

The one fault was that it didn’t do a good job of conveying the story. The dialogue could have been more on topic. It tacked from Baptist sermon to undigested lumps of Loeb, rather than finding a perspicacious presentation of backstory and action.

This was the Getty’s 17^th production. It’s the reason the drama has become for me the most important part of Greek and Roman antiquity. I didn’t used to feel that way. The Getty series has kept my interest focused. And kept reminding me it’s alive.

 

October 2022. Louise Brooks. “Prix de beauté” (1930) … The concluding episode where André shoots Lucienne at the premiere of her movie is tremendous. The killer’s approach is intercut with scenes of film being looped through a projector. The image of LB dying underneath herself projected on the screen is a adumbration of “Persona”. I’m astonished that it’s not on the cover of every history of the movies. Not even the terrible song can spoil it.

 

10/22/22. Lydia Millet, “A Children’s Bible: A Novel” … “He kept a private journal in which his feelings were recorded, possibly. The possibility was widely mocked.”

 

Halloween 2022. Jury duty. When I came back from lunch I noticed a crowd of armed court officers and lots of extra people milling around Dept. 16. Long delay. Juror 15 explained that Juror 14 had been waiting – as she always does – on the bench at the end of the hallway and the man sitting next to her exposed himself and started masturbating. She ran up to some officers who were outside Dept. 15. They informed her that she needed to contact LAPD, as they only dealt with issues inside the courtrooms.

By that time of course the flasher was long gone. What the fuck? If this happened in Disney Hall or Our Lady there would be an army on hand, plus an army of people falling over Juror 14 offering her assistance. But this took place at the Mosk of Injustice. Inside the courtroom, Judge X. replied to our outrage, “If you don’t want to sit in the hallway you can always go to the juror waiting room.” Fuck you. Why don’t you maintain order in the spaces you make us spend half the day? 

[Image: Charles Demuth, Church Street El, 1920]

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”?