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"I have nothing to write. There is no news that I have heard, and all your letters
I answered yesterday. But as a sick heart not only robs me of sleep, but the
greatest pain, I have begun to write to you something or other without any
definite subject, that I may have a sort of talk with you, the only thing that
gives me relief.”
A hilarious
Much Ado
by ISC last night.
Presenting
it in two parts emphasized the fact that nothing that happens before the
wedding is very absorbing. Though David Melville (Benedick) and Melissa Chalsma
(Beatrice) made the eavesdropping scenes hilarious, romping through the
audience and the set.
But
the story doesn’t really start till Claudio denounces Hero. And then comes the
extraordinary scene where Benedick and Beatrice reveal to each other their
affection. I think of this as a moment of quietness and seriousness that comes
unexpectedly after the screaming and shouting. I probably get this from growing
up with Joseph Papp’s 1972 production on TV, which translated the scene to a
Currier & Ives small town America. Melville and Chalsma, on the contrary,
did it very loud.
Fair
enough. It provided a jolt of energy that carried through to the final dance.
Danny
Campbell had a ball playing Dogberry.
“You
insert one of the Great Books, for instance Moby Dick, into the reservoid. Then
you set the controls for long or short. Then for funny version, or same-as-book or sad version. Then you set the
style-indicator as to which classic Great Artist you want the book animated
like. Dali, Bacon, Picasso … the medium-priced Great Books animator is set up
to render in cartoon form the styles of a dozen system-famous artists; you
specify which ones you want when you originally buy the thing. And there are
options you can add later that provide even more. … I was going to suggest
Augustine’s Confessions in the style of Lichtenstein—funny, of course.”
The door is flung open. Silence. Mr. Antrobus—face of a Keystone Comedy Cop—stands there in fur cap and blanket. His arms are full of parcels, including a large stone wheel with a center in it. One hand carries a railroad man’s lantern. Suddenly he bursts into joyous roar:
“Well,
how’s the whole crooked family?”
Relief.
Laughter. Tears. Jumping up and down. Animals cavorting. …
“Every war is ironic because every war is worse
than expected.”
“The Field Service Post Card has the honor of being
the first wide-spread example of that kind of document which uniquely
characterizes the modern world: the Form.”
Wilfred
Owen writes to Osbert Sitwell July 1918 about training troops:
“For 14 hours yesterday I was at work—teaching
Christ to lift his cross by numbers, and how to adjust his crown; and not to
imagine he thirst until after the last halt. I attended his Supper to see that
there were no complaints; and inspected his feet that they should be worthy of
the nails. I see to it that he is dumb, and stands at attention before his
accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him
familiar with the topography of Golgotha.”
“They
decided not to say much about it after it was over, if they lived to see that
day. It was too far below the level of what other people recognized as courage.
Their having been able to bear it would be nothing to boast of. They thought of
it as having been embodied in themselves like a disease all through them, like
vermin all over them. That would be the story and they would be ashamed to tell
it.”
When
asked the other day if we should get tickets in advance I responded that nobody
would be there. Who would be interested in ancient musical shorts by completely
forgotten vaudeville performers?
Well,
obviously a lot of people. We arrived to discover tickets had already been all but sold out online,
and a line had formed for what seats remained. By the time the box office
opened, a huge crowd had gathered.
And what a crowd! There were a considerable number of people who might have actually seen vaudeville in person. But there were even more were younger fans, many dressed in antique costumes from the 1920s through the 1940s. Or if not in costume, at least wearing distinctly pre-21st century hats.
And then there were Vitaphone fans, and old movie fans avid for novelties.
And then celebrities
like Leonard Maltin and Robert Downey, Jr. and entourage arrived, and the
atmosphere really got festive.
And
rightly so: it was a beautifully put together program. It was a history lesson
in the history of American vaudeville and its overlap with the history of
American movies.
And
it was also a lesson in aesthetics. The period 1927-9 brings to mind Al Jolson,
Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, Louis Armstrong & His Hot Five, Fletcher
Henderson, Bessie Smith, and movies like The Jazz Singer, St. Louis Blues,
Hallelujah, Black and Tan Fantasy, and Disney’s jazz cartoons, etc. …. But that
is only if you look at pop culture as art, and focus on significant individuals
and works.
This approach tends to ignore activity such as
Watching
these performances captured by Vitaphone made me appreciate how far back in
time American the freak show extends. And just how vast and varied is the
American tradition of bizarre humor, outrageous gimmicks, folk dada/surrealism,
attention-getting stunts and public silliness. Marilyn Manson, Lady Gaga and Rush
Limbaugh are merely the latest editions.
This
was an overwhelming program, almost too much to take in.
My
favorite was probably the slapstick musical routine of husband and wife Myrtle
Glass and Jimmy Conlin, (before he became a Preston Sturges regular). Myrtle
tries to sing and keeps pushing Jimmy to the piano to get him to play. Pushing
him into the piano and all over it. Meanwhile guys behind the curtain shout
nonsense and push the piano around the stage. There’s lots of banging and
crashing and pratfalls, and it achieves delirium. This was perhaps the
highpoint of an evening filled with performers abusing their instruments. Among
other things it seems a path that connects John Cage, Harry Partch, and Nam
June Paik with Jimi Hendrix.
P.S.
See my single-page online poster about music in the Vitaphone era, Jazz Discovers Sound.
I
didn’t love every work, but every room, from first to last, had wonderful
things. He’s the Cole Porter of conceptual art, and even his lesser efforts are
still entertaining in a way that almost no other contemporary art is.
The
entertainment comes not just from the jokes. All of his work, without
exception, is visually appealing. The 1966-8 word paintings, displayed
altogether in one room, were unexpectedly lovely, in pastel mint, butterscotch
and a variety of slate grays.
It
was a pleasure to see a few of his earliest paintings. He was a good painter.
The examples demonstrated that from almost the beginning he was interested in
jokes, arbitrarily cropped images, and noses.
Is
it just me, or was this show a bit too tightly
edited? I kept getting the feeling that the selections were making too much of
a case of the consistency and longevity of certain ideas, certain gimmicks.
The
next year he made the videotape where he sang some texts of Sol Lewitt. It was
a positive enhancement to the viewing experience to have the sound of JB’s
croaking fill the gallery.
Around
the same time he did several movie storyboard pieces, in which he plays with the
different visual and conceptual ways two or more images could be related to
each other.
Then
in 1976, in Violent Space, he began juxtaposing flat shapes with people in
found photos. It was material he would continue mining for the next 40 years.
But
it was delightful to come across a work like the 1974 Portrait, consisting of seven
photographs of JB hiding his face behind different hats. It didn’t have much to
do with the exhibit’s Big Story, and I liked it all the more.
Among
the late works I liked the Goya Series paintings (1999), the six color samples of Prima
Facie
(2006), and the seriously absurd Green Knee/Red Elbow of 2008.
The
frightening Daintry encounters his more frightening ex-wife at their daughter’s
wedding:
“I’m only up for the day myself. From Brighton.
Edward drove me up.”
“Who’s Edward?”
“He’s been awfully helpful. Ordering the champagne and things. A woman needs a man on these occasions. You haven’t changed a bit, darling. How long is it?”
“Six—seven years?”
“How time flies.”
“You’ve collected a lot more owls.”
“Owls?” “She went away calling …
“Dr
W.C. Minor … was one of the early readers for the Dictionary and in the Preface
to Volume I he was named among those who had already contributed between 5000
and 8000 quotations. …
When
James [Murray] invited him to the Dictionary Dinner, urging him to spend a day
or two at Sunnyside, Dr Minor said that, owing to physical reasons, he could
not accept, but instead invited James to visit him at Crowthorne in Berkshire.
James
was impressed to find a liveried servant and a handsome brougham with two fine
horses to meet him at the station. At the end of a two-mile drive, through the
country the horses turned into the courtyard of a large brick building of
forbidding appearance.
A
little puzzled, James followed a servant up a gloomy staircase and along
corridors to a well-furnished office in which an official looking man was
seated at the desk. James advanced to greet Dr Minor, but the official hastened
to say that he was not Dr Minor, but the Governor of Broadmoor Criminal
Lunatic Asylum.
Dr
Minor, he explained, was an inmate. He was the son of a wealthy American and
had joined the Army of the North as a surgeon-captain. he had been much upset
by an order to brand a soldier who had deserted, and later, after an attack of
sunstroke, he developed a mania under which he believed that Irishmen were
pursuing him to take revenge. …”