Silverlake Blvd.

The Difficulty of Crossing a Field @ Long Beach Opera

 

It was a definite hint that we were in for something different when we arrived at the Terrace Theater and were led to seats set up on the stage.

 

It reminded me of Anna Krajewska-Wieczorek’s production of The Changeling at UCLA in the Eighties were we all sat on stage while the actors writhed and shrieked under our folding chairs. It wasn’t that threatening, but Difficulty was difficult.

 

It was not that it was so oblique and non-narrative; what was difficult about it was that it ended after the first ten minutes, but didn’t realize it, and kept on going for an additional, entirely unnecessary hour and a quarter.

 

David Lang’s music—a string quartet was the entire orchestra—was lovely and hypnotic, if a bit aimless. The setting was on a plantation in the Old South. There was an excellent black choir—led by Eric B. Anthony. And there was the Family—most impressively a deranged matriarch played by Suzan Hanson. Characters rose up to view on the stage elevators, and the vastness of the auditorium stood in for the vast fields of the plantation. The fog machine worked overtime and by the end it felt like a sauna.

 

Mac Wellman’s libretto not only avoided narrative but mostly avoided syntax—which is fine. Thank God people take Gertrude Stein to heart. But what’s fun on the page doesn’t necessarily translate to the stage—especially when you’re sitting on a folding chair. And note that the music Virgil Thomson created for Stein’s operas was in a very easygoing vernacular style: no need for all the elements to be strange at the same time. Here it was the words x by the music x the staging = irritation.

 

Charitably, you might say the effect was of a time and place so corrupted by lies (i.e. slavery) that not only communication between people broke down, but language and reality. Which is a provocative thought, but one that was comprehensively presented in the first few minutes.

 

I realize there is not much market for such a thing, but the crowd at LBO Saturday seemed game, and if it had finished by 8:00, once they had gotten over the initial shock, I don’t think anyone would have minded a micro-mini-format.

 

At any rate, good for LBO for putting it on. It’s invaluable that we have a company around willing to take on these oddball projects, even if they aren’t always winners.

 

Barbara Pym, A Glass of Blessings

 

“I amused myself by observing these students, who seemed to be of all ages, until I came to the conclusion that people who went to evening classes were all more or less odd. It was unnatural to want to acquire knowledge after working hours.”

 

[Parkinson, Thymelaeceae, 1770]

Some ideological bet-hedging @ the Brentwood Getty?

 

“Paris: Life & Luxury,” according to the Getty’s press release, “re-imagines, through art and material culture, the complex and nuanced lifestyle of elite 18th-century Parisians who made their city the fashionable and cultural epicenter of Europe.”

 

Since that couldn’t possibly be the explanation, I suspect we should credit the Getty with perpetrating a curatorial joke by presenting a wallow in 18^th century French frou-frou across the plaza from “A Revolutionary Project: Cuba,” starring Che as Guerrillero Heroico. I don't think I would have liked either as much without the other.

 

Life & Luxury was probaby just an excuse to import some paintings to accompany their collection of furniture by André Charles Boulle and others:

 

A brass mechanical yarn shuttle compliments Getty’s 1750s rococo brass microscope.

 

A dress from LACMA looked nice with Boucher’s Toilette (1742) from Madrid.

 

Chardin's The Good education (1753) from Houston was prim compared to Nicolas Coypel’s over-the-top Abduction of Europa (1727) from Philly.

 

A set of four still life paintings by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, from Stockholm presented the riches of the Four Elements: Earth (fruits and veggies), Air (birds), Water (fish and waterfowl), and Fire (a rifle—get it?—with hare and bird).

 

Plus A Reading of Molière by Jean-François de Troy (1728) from the late Marchioness of Cholmondeley, which is nobody’s idea of a great picture, but certainly is emblematic of an era.

 

Meanwhile across the plaza there were emblems of three eras of Cuba Pre-Revolution, Revolution, and the current extended special limbo. I was especially taken with Alex Harris's large, brilliant color photographs documenting home, work and play spaces haunted by statues of José Martí.

 

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, "In Defense of Rosinante" 1927

 

"The Don Quixotes sally forth on their fantastically marvelous and distant quests,

straight to the idea,

the ideal

and the City of the Future;

all eyes,

beginning with Cervantes's own,

are on them and on them alone.

No one cares about the winded and mercilessly lashed Rosinante."

Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence

 

“Prudence chose what she would have, perhaps more carefully than a woman truly in love would have done, and Fabian made his choice, which was equally deliberate and not quite the same as hers. / The chicken will have that wonderful sauce with it, thought Prudence, looking into Fabian’s eyes.”

 

“She had been feeling that things were pretty desperate if one found oneself talking about and almost quoting Matthew Arnold to comparative strangers, though anything was better than having to pretend you had winter and summer curtains when you had just curtains.”

 

[Larry Rivers, The Studio, 1956]

Theater, Film & TV commencement @ UCLA last Friday

 

The MIAS mob: Charles, Hyunjin, Michelle, Kara, me, Jessica.

 

Dr. Horak of the UCLA Film & TV Archive, my classmates Kara and Charles, Dr. Lievrouw, my academic advisor Ally (aka Dr. Field) & me

Me, the nice David Smith sculpture in the Murphy Sculpture Garden, and a person who has no interest whatsoever in the fuss going on.

 

It turned out a nice day. Barbara Boxer kept her speech short and sweet, and during the goopy show tune performances Charles was sitting next to me providing uncharitable commentary.

Thanks David, Amanda & The Harts: couldn't have done it without you.

 

Guercino, Steve McQueen's Hunger, Da Cortona, Kiss Me Deadly, Kate Bush's Pi ...