Silverlake Blvd.

 

 

Hiding out

For the last week—since finishing my UCLA coursework—I’ve been sick with a cold. Hence not doing much other than reading novels: Molloy, This Side of Paradise, Pal Joey, Utz, The Immoralist, Malone Dies, Madame Bovary, An Unsuitable Attachment, The Unnamable, Castle Rackrent, Ennui, The Pat Hobby Stories, Wittgenstein's Nephew, ... and just started The Adventures of Augie March. 

The image is the fantastic--that's the only word for it--library at Trinity, in Dublin.

 

Souvenir plaster Milan Cathedral paperweight + Silvio Berlusconi = ?

OK, I'm stunned. Thinking of Tristan Tzara, almost a century ago:

We took an oath of friendship on the new transmutation that signifies nothing, and was the most formidable protest, the most intense armed affirmation of salvation liberty blasphemy mass combat speed prayer tranquility private guerilla negation and chocolate of the desperate.

 

Barber of Seville @ Dorothy Chandler

 

L.A. Opera’s ad campaign focused on Peruvian heartthrob Juan Diego Flórez (the Count Almaviva), but my favorite was Bruno Praticó, who played Doctor Bartolo as if he were an assemblage of grunts, weazes, hypersensitive complaints and self-absorbed miscommunications, i.e. Little Sid. He even walked a runty mutt on stage (above).

 

The staging was graceful and attractive, though there was a bit too much of a good thing in the way the people of Seville tended to break into flamenco spins ad lib. The quieter moves were funnier: Figaro and Rosina (Nathan Gunn and Joyce Di Donato) extracted laughs from kicking their legs off the beat.

 

I totally dug the weird, raspy, tinny sound of the fortepiano.

Another terrific show. This has been a good season. Naturally they are broke now, and just had to get a $14 million loan from the county to keep the doors open. 

Attending a U.S. citizenship ceremony @ Montebello

 

I was completely unprepared. I was expecting to watch a couple dozen people recite the Pledge of Allegiance in a post office. The actual 8:00 a.m. event in a Montebello country club ballroom was more like a rock concert, complete with chaotic $15 parking. 871 people were taking the oath, and almost everybody had family and friends. The ballroom was packed to the rafters.

 

The cheerful old judge forgot to turn on his microphone, rendering his frail voice completely inaudible during the hard part of the oath, when everyone is required to

 absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen

 

--which wasn’t much help for the people in the crowd who might have appreciated some help with the 18^th century diction.

 

The crowd was literally from everywhere, just as in the stories. It was moving (everybody crying) and also festive (everybody cheering and applauding). Amazing.

Tamerlano @ Dorothy Chandler

This was terrific. The silly exoticism of the drama and ceremonious manners (every speech is repeated a dozen times) would seem to authorize campy levity, but this production took its cue from Handel’s music, and presented a clear and steady path into darkness. David Zinn’s scenery and costumes placed the action in a menacingly swanky Fascist headquarters circa 1935, with Tamerlano/Mussolini (Bejun Metha singing the impossible falsetto filigree) holding P.O.W.s Bajazet (Plácido Domingo) and his daughter Asteria (Sarah Coburn) as hostages. Jennifer Holloway as the scheming Irene provided a comic relief. 

 

The principals were not only expert musicians, but perfectly cast. And PD was terrific in the scene when he is thrown on the ground for his daughter to step on, and in a terrifically moving death scene.

 

I guess all this is a demonstration of the kind of production you can put on when you feel like pulling off a star turn and you’re Plácido Domingo in addition to being the General Director of the company. Well, good for him and lucky for us. A century and a half ago the actor/manager-run theatrical company was the norm, and Shaw and every other serious critic ridiculed it as a playgroud for ego trips. Perhaps, but it obviously also has its advantages.

 

Los Angeles Plays Itself @ The Egyptian

 

The Saturday after Thanksgiving I had to crash through the insanity of the Hollywood Christmas Parade, of all things, to get to a screening of Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Andersen’s 2003 video essay. Almost three hours of glimpses of Los Angeles from Hollywood movies, with commentary.

 

Research. Chinatown, Blade Runner and L.A. Confidential go without saying. Likewise Point Blank and Kiss Me Deadly. An Angelino academic would be expected to know about Bush Mama, Model Shop, Bless their Little Hearts, Man Outside. But Andersen doesn’t stop there; he not only discovers but finds interesting and relevant material in antique gay porn—L.A. Plays Itself—and in trash like The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, and Death Wish 4!

 

Script. The analysis is Zhdanovism for Dummies, “Los Angeles” being a synecdoche for the “working class,” whose absence from a film, or negative representation = unreality, self-hatred, mystification, delusion, … etc. Now and then the narrator interrupts the flow of correctness with a “personal” confession of affection for something politically beyond the pale (he compares Dragnet to Bresson and Ozu).

 

Nevertheless some of the specific case studies are winning. In the first section, City as Background, there is a wonderful anthology of how L.A.’s modernist houses always seem to be used as the lairs of unspeakably creepy villains, from Wright’s Ennis house (House on Haunted Hill) to the Neutra’s Lovell house (L.A. Confidential). The one exception seems to be Koenig’s Stahl house, which usually figures as the home of a likeable protagonist, but where bad things happen.

 

Visuals. The video's ugliness is so extreme it’s polemical. Some of the old movie clips look like they have been faxed in. The clips are treated as illustrations of the thesis, not as artifacts that might have their own qualities. The visual nuances are treated as irrelevant. Curious, for a film about seeing.

Let's do the time warp

OK, I've finished Fall 2009 @ UCLA. I just turned in the last of 3 papers, "Fans & Funerals: the crowd re-constituted at open-air big-screen events." 

To celebrate, I bought Little Sid a giant chew bone whose main ingredient is rice. I was skeptical; he was not. 

Otherwise it's as end-of-terms 30 years ago: a drink, Bruce Springsteen's "Crush on You" and big pot of chili.