Silverlake Blvd.

Goofing off at LACMA 5: The 39 Steps

There was a big Black Friday crowd for The 39 Steps. I missed Hitchcock's cameo in the beginning, but enjoyed seeing all the rest of the tropes he would continue refining for the next couple of decades: the innocent man pursued by both the police and the bad guys, an unreliable, beautiful blonde chance companion, deviltry going on behind a façade of impressively respectable domesticity, life-and-death battle happening in a place of public entertainment with most people being oblivious, the audio/visual joke rhymes, etc. ....

 

Goofing off at LACMA 4: Luis Meléndez

Another one of curator J. Patrice Marandel’s odd but clever choices, I guess. I went through a complete educational arc: at first I was delighted—oh how fantastically ancien régime! But by the time I had looked carefully at every picture, I was thinking: He’s clumsy, trivial and the same thing over and over. But spending some more time in the two rooms, I began to appreciate him again. 

The strangest—and my favorite—was the heap of peas and artichokes writhing in the rococo manner in a threatening landscape. What?! 

But he also made pictures where a melon leaped out of the picture plane in a way that it did not at all share the same space as the pears ostensibly sharing the same tabletop with it. Or painting the jug in the background in such a way that it seemed flat as a theater décor. A watermelon cut in a way that uneasily reads both positive and negative. 

And lots of the pictures were calm except for loaves of bread that seemed electrically illuminated. 

The fact that some of the pictures formed harmoniously composed wholes and others didn’t is not in itself an indication of value. Harmonious unity is not an absolute value, it’s just an effect, one of LM’s effects. Dissonance isn't ineptitude, it’s LM’s dramaturgy. 

 

Goofing off at LACMA 3: Franz West's installation of Pacific Island art

 

 There's some crazy stuff there.

Goofing off at LACMA 2: Joseph Beuys multiples

Even without having seen a lot of his sculpture, I always feel I have DONE my time with Beuys, having spent almost my entire first visit to the Museum of Modern Art going through an endless exhibit of his work on paper. This had a lot of the same stuff, but more:

First impression: Oh, great, souvenirs of a yet another creepy German egomaniac. 

Second thought: A lot of this stuff is genuinely strange and beautiful. 

Third: WHAT an egomaniac! But even so ….  

Goofing off at LACMA 1: The New Topographics

I didn't know about Nicholas Nixon's views of Boston. Yikes. 

 

Rock star dell'anno

Rolling Stone Italia dubs Silvio Berlusconi Rock Star of the Year.

Complete with Shephard Fairey image.

"The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs, is to be ruled by evil men."  (Plato)
 

Albert Herring @ USC

 

USC’s production of Benjamin Britten's Albert Herring last night was a treat.

(Getting there involved the madness of dinner at Bodega Louie, getting turned around en route to USC, dealing with some festival happening on campus complete with ferris wheel and girls all wearing white tops and white hot pants, getting directed to Bing Theater by a student who told us to cross “the f**king enormous park,” discovering that the box office didn’t take credit cards, then being handed two complementary tickets by the sympathetic staffer.)

 

Albert Herring is a fable: the moral guardians of an English village honor dim Albert for his docile virtue, the celebration of which results in him roaring off on a spree and returning to tell them what they can do with their oppressive sanctimony. Albert is the mouse that roared. He’s not very bright and too awkward to be connected to anybody else: he’s Peter Grimes’s cousin. But his story is a told as a farce rather than a tragedy.

 

The plot comes from that unlimited natural resource for adaptors--Maupassant. There’s a French modernist breeziness at work here, though the characters are all pure Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse: the Vicar, the Police Superintendent, the Teacher, the Mayor, the imperious local Titled Lady, and the gang of brats.

Britten gave them music that’s sharp and lively. The USC students not only managed the singing but pulled off the comedy, especially Caitlin Beam as Lady Billows, and Marina Harris as her housekeeper/lieutenant Florence.

 

Sid the Butcher (Travis Sherwood) and his girl Nancy (Shoushik Barsoumian) provide Albert a with a glimpse of what he’s missing, and divert the story into seriousness for a bit. Albert (Timothy Gonzales) begins to wonder what his life of compliant dutifulness is for: it’s not comic and not meant to be.

 

The seriousness climaxes the next day, when Albert’s apparent death prompts a moving lament from everyone. That is, until Albert strolls in, delighted to talk about his night of drinking, fighting and screwing. Everyone is horrified; he laughs, and even steals Nancy from Sid. 

The audience roared, and shouted approval of their friends and family members in the cast.

Berio-d fragments @ Disney

According to the program, Berio claimed his 1989 Rendering of Schubert sketches was 

“not a completion or a reconstruction. This restoration is made along the lines of the modern restoration of frescoes that aims at reviving the old colors without, however, trying to disguise the damage that time has caused, often leaving inevitable empty patches in the composition ….”

 

Beyond the characteristically pretentious and literary conceit, Berio’s interpolations aired at last night's L.A. Phil concert proved to be empty patches indeed. Poor Schubert’s notes came and went, as if we were listening to the stereo of a car that was circling the block. It made me seasick.

 

Berio’s Folk Song arrangements from 1964 were, on the other hand, appealing. Berio wrote the piece for Cathy Berberian, during a period of difficulties in their marriage, and the work conveys tenderness and tension. Dawn Upshaw, the Cathy Berberian of our times, carried off all the moods and languages of the different songs without any effort. The only problem is that it didn’t seem worth any effort. It was nice, but a bit of a waste of her time and talent. "Even Cathy Berberian knows,” Steel Day observed, “There’s one roulade she can’t sing.”

 

Dudamel ended the evening with straight up, uninterpolated Schubert. The L.A. Phil sounded terrific. The audience, however, was one of the noisiest on record. Dudamel paused a moment at the end of the "Unfinished" symphony, and, instead of a silent meditation on the tragic life of Schubert, the audience listened to two ladies gabbling like they were at Dennys. When are they going to install that death ray?

 

The Wrath of Khan @ Paramount

 Thursday I’m glad I took the opportunity to see the new version of Star Trek 2 at the posh theater on the Paramount lot. Interesting discussion of how older film needs to be transfered to high definition formats with hands-on care. The old-school special effects are precious, and lovingly preserved for future generations. Nostalgia trip.

"... meaning motion fans fresh our wits with wonder" (Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Veterans Day there was a tremendous all-Purcell concert by the SF Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra at Disney Hall.

 

Everything in Purcell is a conversation, sometimes joking, sometimes earnest, sometimes grave—but it is always a human conversation, not a speech, not oratorical display. He doesn’t puff himself up to fill large spaces. He keeps it brief, blunt. He can be rowdy and fun, but for all the lovely swirls of ornament, there are eddies of panic.

 

Their performance of Dido and Aeneas stressed the Pythonesque humor: the campy, cackling witches (Jill Grove, Cyndia Sieden and the completely over-the-top Céline Ricci). But then it also seared—Susan Graham doing Dido’s lament. And William Berger was amazing; his voice was so powerful it was almost too much.

 

By the way, I would not recommend John Osborne’s historical bio-pic of Purcell, England, my England, to anybody unless they are avid for yet another movie-about-a-movie-about-18th-century-England starring Simon Callow, this time with a play-within-a-play also interpolated in between. Simon strutting around in a Charles II wig and shoes with white satin bows while talking common and smoking a cigarette is a joke that does not remain evergreen. Osborne’s point, I guess, was that while Charles II might have led to Ian Paisley, the death of Queen Anne led to Harold Macmillan and the Common Market, which he considered even worse.

I don’t know. It was rubbish. Listen to Herpèrion XX’s Purcell album instead.