Silverlake Blvd.

Classic George & Mike Kuchar on dvd

Dubbed, out-of-sinc, filmed in $65 a month apartments, absurd, what makes life worth living.

Starring Julius Middleman as Ernie in Sins of the Fleshapoids:

 

And Donna Kerness (this is her big speech):

 

The dvd also includes Craven Sluck, which has to be the best movie title of all time. It's 20 minutes without a speck of sanity. In the end, Florine Conners is destroyed by flying saucers:

 

Also The Secret of Wendel Samson, starring Red Grooms, which is kind of an off-off-off-off Broadway Sunday Bloody Sunday plus Flash Gordon.

There's stuff on YouTube, but the dvd has commentary by Mike K. which is as unhinged as the movies: "He never worked in any other movies after this." And there's the story about Florine's attempt to make money in the hair-weaving business.

Ken Jacobs mixed results @ RedCat

Into the Depths of the Even Greater Depression is the most annoying movie in the world.

At least it has my vote. In it, Ken Jacobs employs a technique to get a 3-D effect that employs a rotating shutter that spins in front of the projector lens, creating a flicker/stutter effect. 

I definitely got moments of 3-D. But after 15 minutes of the flickering nightmare, my vision was so screwed up I was seeing all sorts of things. It might have been interesting if it hadn't given me a headache. It also made me nauseous. I closed my eyes and waited for it to be over.

What kept me from dashing out (like some others) was the fact that we had just seen his 1996 Disorient Express, which was beautiful and strange. Jacobs took a scratchy little scrap of primitive film and showed it, mirrored it, flipped it upside down, played it backwards. It was like Georgetown Loop,in generating fantastic images by a seemingly straightforward process. Elegant.

The Q&A session was not the usual headache because KJ is an intelligent man with a clear, unpretentious way of speaking about his work--generating depth and illusions with minimal means. OK, but I still hate the Greater Depression.

A Siegfried for closed eyes @ Dorothy Chandler

 

Sunday afternoon I gave up on LA Opera's Ring Cycle. The staging and visuals of Siegfried presented positive obstacles to following the story and getting into the drama. Achim Freyer has the cast sleepwalk nonstop, carting symbolic props, but whenever a thing is mentioned in the libretto, Freyer has no time for it. 

The stage picture was hideous. Freyer had an army of ninja-clad goons messing with light tubes that change color--the Concept of The Production, I guess. It was lame and ugly. The Lazy Susan gizmo squeaked loudly. 

And why did Siegfried look like a Smurf?

It's a shame, because the music, the playing and singing, were terrific.

The Peasants' Gala @ the Music Center Plaza

 

 

 

 

We spent Thursday evening partying in front of the jumbotron. They probably could have let a lot more people in, but it was nice that it wasn't chaos. 

The John Adams "City Noir" was a homage to classic movie music, and will probably become LA Phil's signature showpiece. Good. 

Then Dudamel did Mahler #1, followed by complete mayhem. Down the street, inside Disney Hall, they apparently sprinkled extremely posh confetti on everybody. We just cheered.

Medea @ UCLA

A Certain Person denies falling asleep Tuesday night during the UCLA production of Medea, but that’s only the beginning of our disagreements. After it was over, he called it, “Rubbish,” which is not fair. 

Granted, Annette Bening did not succeed in being truly frightening, and without a scary Medea, the play doesn’t make any sense. Euripides doesn’t provide much of a story, just scenes of outrage and confrontation, interspersed with moments of gruesome horror. The whole thing depends on Medea being Lady MacBeth¹⁰. If you have to ask “Why is she upset?” the game is lost. 

But I refuse to dismiss any halfway serious attempt to stage Euripides. I like that director Lenka Udovicki provided an actual singing chorus, though maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to make them look and act like the ninja girls in Kill Bill 1. 

Mary Lou Rosato stole the show as the seen-it-all chorus leader. The translation by Kenneth McLeish and Frederic Raphael followed the fashionable practice of alternating chunks of Attic/Modernist strangeness with outbursts of contemporary slang. The words were disturbing, if the sights and sounds only managed to be jarring.

Yvonne Rainer @ The Egyptian (Part 1)

I took a seat in the Egyptian's big theater last Sunday, and when the movie started I realized I had made a mistake. "Some Kind of Wonderful" seemed like a fascinating document of the Eighties (the hair! the clothes!) but I eventually found my way to the little theater--which had as big an audience as the John Hughes movie. 

The program began with 5 silent shorts from 1966-1969: 

"Hand Movie"--a dance piece consisting of a single close-up of wiggling fingers. Yeah, right, but after five minutes, it became a compelling drama.

"Volleyball"--a ball rolling into a corner, then cornered/stopped by the sneakered feet of somebody (YR). The grainy black and white was probably lush in the original film. 

"Rhode Island Red"--Ten minutes, mostly a single, static shot, inside a chicken coop. The action consisted of the twitchy gestures of the birds, who formed a shimmery abstract texture, like an early Philip Guston painting.

"Trio Film"--Steve Paxton, Becky Arnold and a big white balloon in a minimal apartment interior. This is what YR does best: a minimal structure within which the performers can't help but express themselves--flirt, stare, giggle.

"Line" Disorienting goof. Are we looking at the sky? A snowy field? A girl appears, writing, and turns to smile.

Question: Was it impossible to get film versions of these movies? Video is better than nothing, but I can't help thinking I haven't experienced the real thing.

Then there came her 2002 video, "After many a summer dies the swan: hybrid," which is made up of footage documenting rehearsals with Mikhail Barryshnikov and the White Oak Dance Project, with blocks of text creeping across the screen with dire messages about the decadence of Viennese culture 100 years ago. 

YR's work is better than her sources, but you have to put up with the raw material. The dance footage kept alternating from minimalism to slapstick. 

In her comments afterwords, she admitted that there was some deliberate teasing of Barryshnikov involved, "It's Barryshnikov! He's a celebrity! I can't just let that slip by without comment!"

The words of the evening: "foregrounding," "framing," and "animating inanimate things." All of this would be intolerable if it wasn't mixed in with her goofy sense of humor.

There's more Rainer screenings coming up. Can't wait to see "Lives of Performers" again!

 

CSN @ The Greek

 

Very nice. There may be a new album of covers of other people's songs. Last night's versions of "Ruby Tuesday," "Girl from North Country," and "Uncle John's Band" suggest this would be a good idea. Also enjoyed the hospitality suite. Need a nap.