Silverlake Blvd.

Jack Spicer

 

From My Vocabulary Did This To Me

Pause. Buster Keaton ineffably crosses the rushes and little fields of rye. The landscape shortens itself beneath the wheels of his machine. The bicycle has a single dimension. It is able to enter books and to expand itself even into operas and coalmines. The bicycle of Buster Keaton does not have a riding seat of caramel or sugar pedals like the bicycles bad men ride. It is a bicycle like all bicycles except for a unique drenching of innocence. Adam and Eve run by, frightened as if they were carrying a vase full of water and, in passing, pet the bicycle of Buster Keaton.

 

+++

 

Because they accused me of poems

That did not disturb the young

They gave me a pair of glasses

Filled with tincture of hemlock.

Because the young accused me

Of piles, horseradish, and bad dreams

They gave me three days

To burn down the city. What dialogues

(If they had let me)

Could I have held with both of my enemies.

 

+++

 

Actually, L.A. is Los Angeles and there was a motion picture that showed everything.

 

+++

 

Sentiment is not to the point. A dead letter is there because it has no longer real addresses.

 

+++

 

One does not discover yesterday remembering.

 

Shostakovich @ Santa Monica High School

 

Last Sunday was full of contradictions, but not unpleasant ones.

 

1. LB in SM. Long Beach Opera was performing Shostakovich’s Moscow, Cheryomushki (1959) in the Santa Monica High School auditorium. At least that's what they said the building was. I'm not sure about that. It was way too clean to be a high school.

 

2. Cheery tunes in the era of noise. Cherry Town is an operetta in the style of Offenbach from a year other classical-minded composers and jazz musicians were producing ferociously dissonant and aggressive music (Messiaen’s Catalog of Birds and Ornette Coleman’s Shape of Jazz to Come). 

 

3. A topical comic opera. A topical Soviet comic opera. LBO’s production kept to the Khrushchev-era Moscow original setting, but would it possible to stage it without reference to the Soviet Union? Imagine a production set in 19^th century London, or L.A. in the 1980s? Could it survive outside of the specific conditions of its origin?

 

3. Unironic Shostakovich. I kept listening for moments that might signal Shostakovich really was being ironic about all this, but there really weren’t any. Cherry Town had some acid touches, but it was Kurt Weill recollected from a position of serenity. This hangup with only oppositional culture being valid is really tired.

 

4. Pop music by Shostakovich All week I’ve been listening to his string quartets—gloomy, agitated, with moments of bitterness for relief. When I think of bouncy, light, effervescent … Dimitri Dmitriyevich is not the first name that comes to mind. Well, I just have to adjust—the problem is my misperception.

Check out the apparently classic movie version. After overture and the credits come architectural models and the theme song. It's worth it. Dig it:

 

 

 

Joseph Brodsky describes Auden's routine circa 1972

 

W. H. Auden drinks his first martini dry at 7:30 in the morning, after which he sorts his mail and reads the paper, marking the occasion with a mix of sherry and scotch.

 

After this he has breakfast, which can consist of anything so long as it’s accompanied by the local dry pink and white, I don’t remember in which order.

 

At this point he sets to work. Probably because he uses a ballpoint pen, he keeps on the desk next to him, instead of an inkwell, a bottle or can of Guinness, which is a black Irish beer that disappears in the course of the creative process.

 

At around 1 o’clock he has lunch. Depending on the menu, this lunch is decorated by this or that rooster’s tail, or cocktail. After lunch, a nap, which is, I think, the only dry point of the day.

Hercules @ Getty Villa Theater Lab

 

Wild. John Farmanesh-Bocca and his crew took Seneca’s grim and static Madness of Hercules by the neck and shook it back to life.

 

What a lesson for scholars, when stage professionals take on these antiques as opportunities for a good show, … and no nonsense about respecting a classic, thank you very much. This was a show—not the least bit shy about being closer to Vegas than the classroom.

 

It started with Hercules and the three Watchmen standing on their heads. The Watchmen were the chorus, looking kind of Blue Men except they were dusted with white powder (Butoh Men?)—maintaining the venerable tradition of beefcake in these Sword and Sandal things.

 

They and everybody else on stage danced throughout. An aggressive kind of mime/capoeira that was completely appropriate to the violent story.

 

Everything happened double-quick and we passed from adventure to eeriness to laughs to horror in about an hour. Tricky business like Hercules discovering that he has mistakenly killed his family was efficiently stage-managed.

 

But it was not all action. Whatever text they were using worked theatrically. There were a few bits where the dialog balled up into the usual classics-in-translation knot of Greek names and 19^th century English, but Jamie Rose playing Juno was able to make a terrifying impression when she roared about her hate turning to rage.

 

And the scene when King Lycus asks Hercules’s wife to marry him was played for laughs (Randoph Curtis Rand was hilarious) in the dialect of 21^st century full-of-himself jerk.

 

Christian Marclay's Clock @ LACMA

 

 

I liked The Clock, and I want to see as much of it as I can (I only only caught 7:30 to 9:15 last Monday) but it looked drab projected on a screen. It probably wants to be seen on a nice new monitor.

 

Well, it really wants to be on a digital billboard outside in some public place where it can function as a timepiece. 

 

Flaming Werner Herzog at the Lucky Cave Bear 3D Hangover

 

 

 

Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams begins in a scrubby vineyard, and some of the most compelling scenes are of the rocky and wild Ardèche countryside. The startlingly lifelike way the 3D shoves lowhanging branches of trees at you impressed me more than the CGI effects of Avatar. It isn’t pretty country, but it’s romantic as all get out.

And then you go down into the cave. The 3D is extraordinary. The wildly irregular 3D surface of the cave interior pops to life.  There are extended surveys of cramped passageways, sudden open spaces, glistening darkness. In 2D is would be boring: the 3D was absolutely justified. The movie is a rhapsody of claustrophobia. 

 

Only slowly do you notice the horses, bison and lions painted on the walls. They’re extraordinary—not only perfectly “correct” but fully of life. At the risk of being completely anachronistic some of them seem cheeky, even comic: more like cartoons. Of course the über-serious Herzog will have nothing to do with that. 

Herzog narrates, which means besides the 3D technology, we have to contend with the disorienting stereo effect of watching images selected by the acute eye of Herzog the film artist while listening to the Bavarian mythopoetic blarney of Herzog the camp icon.

Herzog is by far Herzog’s greatest cinematic creation. Moreover, he is absolutely up-to-date in the way he deploys his celebrity as an attention-getting wacko as a serious artistic vocation. Since the death of Maria Montez, I can’t imagine anybody else getting away with the soliloquy in which he wonders if we, after all, are not just like this albino crocodile, searching for its past?

Like all lunatics Herzog shines a light on the lunacy of others, and so otherwise sober archaeologists turn out to have had previous lives as a circus juggler and unicyclist (Julien Monney), or else dress in reindeer skins while playing The Star Spangled Banner on a bone flute (Wulf Hein). Then there’s the professional perfumer who wanders the countryside sniffing the ground for whiffs from still-hidden caves.

Herzog, not Oprah, should have his own Channel.

 

 

Mark Morris @ Dorothy Chandler

 

 

While it is certainly possible to dance for the fun of it, is it possible to watch others dance for the fun of it? If so, how long? All evening?

This came up two weeks ago when the Mark Morris Dance Group presented their evening-length L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (1988).

By intermission A Certain Person was getting tired of it. It seemed so unsubstantial.

 

According to Joan Acocella:

In the course of its thirty-two sections, goddesses give birth; birds fly; two little foxes outrace a hunt; people have nightmares and dreams; they sit by the fire and listen to a cricket on the hearth; they visit a field of flowers, then a great city; they go to church; they grow old; they go to sleep.

 

I saw some of that. But mostly I saw dancers moving like streamers through space.It wasn’t uniform: more serious bits alternated with more silly bits.

There were bits of situations: She’s over there while He’s over here.And Everybody’s chasing those two.

Bits of I don’t quite fit in with the others. And Everybody try this!

 

The dancers flowed effortlessly. They seem to be selected on the basis of being interesting characters. Lauren Grant was impossible not to stare at whenever she was on stage.

Handel—the music—is in charge here. It is graceful, varied and not grippingly dramatic. It is content to be pretty.

Milton and Blake are of course presiding spirits, but their sensibilities are a bit out of place, their kind of fun is a bit too high-strung and strenuous.

But even Milton unbound himself sufficiently to sing a “Song On May Morning,” in which nothing more urgent happens than,

 

Now the bright morning Star, Dayes harbinger,

Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her

The Flowery May …

 

Which is probably the point of a piece that ends with a chorus singing “Mirth, we thee we mean to live.”

 

The most important news of the week

 

 

Whenever my fellow MIAS students make presentations, you learn about amazing things. I'm still trying to digest this newsreel from 1932 featuring a seven-year-old Flannery O'Connor and her backwards-walking pet chicken. 

 

She wrote about this twenty-nine years later in "The King of the Birds," describing how her buff Cochin Bantam's 

 

fame had spread through the press and by the time she reached the attention of Pathé News, I suppose there was nowhere left for her to go--forward or backward. Shortly after that she died, as now seems fitting.

 

Rossini's Le Comte Ory on the big screen in Burbank

 

 

The Met considerately re-runs its HD opera broadcasts, so those of us who can't deal with getting to a movie theater early Saturday mornings can catch up on the show. 

It was really well presented, with just enough inside-the-theater sounds and images to evoke some of the sense of really being there. The action was captured seamlessly with just three cameras. 

And what action! Le Comte Ory doesn't take itself very seriously, to say the least. It's what Stendahl meant when he called Rossini the Voltaire of music. 

The story is so utterly ridiculous from first to last that it is a challenge to stage. Bartlett Sher occasionally lost the thread, but overall put the thing over. He got Juan Diego Flórez to clown around dressed as a Hermit and a Nun, Diana Damrau to unleash a spectacular "Aaaaaah!" while spinning around in a daze.

Joyce DiDonato was playing a man, but as often happens with these parts, it was kind of hard not to read her as an lesbian with a serious crush on Countess Adèle. In that capacity she created an island of innocent earnestness in the middle of a rampaging romp.

The first barbeque of the summer

 

 

TW really did it up, Sunday. It pays to have several goodlooking professionals manning the grills. 

 

 

And there were even gifts! She gave me this lovely Dr. Seussical vase just because I admired it. Currently in a place of honor on the mantelpiece.