Silverlake Blvd.

Lucinda Williams @ Royce Hall, UCLA

 

 

She’s the best. For the last couple years there hasn’t been any pop musician who meant as much to me as her.

 

Why this is so is not self-evident. Her performance is striking for a lot of negative qualities. She isn’t glamorous. She isn’t even especially charismatic. Her singing is often weak. She doesn’t flatter the audience, or flirt with it. The show is not polished. Last night, she had instructions for the crew after each song. Worst of all, she constantly referred to a book of lyrics open on a music stand by her side. I know this is her procedure, but last night it really seemed to disrupt communication sometimes.

 

But all that is just external. In fact the show was very artfully composed. She began solo, doing a few songs accompanied by herself on guitar. Then Blake Mills came out and joined her for a few more songs. Then, one by one, the other members of her band joined in—the steel guitar, the bass, the drummer. So the evening was a steady, deliberate, continuous crescendo and accelerando, from a quietly reflective “Lake Charles” to a raucous “Get Right with God.”

 

And anyway her shows stand on the foundation of her songs, which are incomparable. The lyrics, about which she is so anxious, are actually worth being anxious about.

 

She combines the folky sweetness and propulsion of country rock in the Gram Parsons tradition with stingingly precise images:

 

The company couch covered in plastic

Little books about being saved

The dining room table nobody ate at

 And the piano nobody played.

 

This kind of densely resonant plainness is the opposite of natural language—it’s the result of a lot of hard work and conscious art.

 

Front and center is the strain of country music from Hank Williams through George Jones, Tammy Wynett, and Loretta Lynn—especially it’s knack of giving dark feelings their full weight without breaking down into utter gloom.

 

And her literary side has less to do with Southern Gothic than with the more astringent modern poets like Robert Creeley (“Oh come home soon, I write to her. / Go fuck yourself, is her answer.”) and Stevie Smith (“The wood grows darker every day / It’s not a bad place in a way / But I lost the way / Last Tuesday.”)

 

She played lots of my favorites: besides “Back to Baton Rouge,” she did animated versions of “Ventura,” “Jackson,” and the great “list” songs “Changed the Locks” and “World Without Tears.’ She did an especially rowdy version of “Can’t Let Go” in which she repeated over and over “Well it's over I know it but I can't let go,” at once describing and demonstrating one of the song’s themes.

 

The revelations of the evening were “Concrete and Barbed Wire” and “Fruits of My Labor,” which until last night I had never realized were so powerful.

 

It was quite a different crowd from the El Rey show a few years ago. I got the impression a lot of university types were there to see what Miller Williams’s daughter is up to. From our party came reports of a gentleman distinctly chortling over the saltier lyrics, and a woman commenting mid-show to her companion, “I don’t think she’s going to sing any happy songs!”

 

Steve Reich @ Disney Hall

   

 

A Certain Person noted that there were actually 20 persons on the Disney stage last night performing Steven Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. No wonder. It’s pretty demanding for the performers. I kept staring at the older woman at the marimba, who basically has to bang the same notes continuously and steadily for an hour.

 

Also fascinating was the girl in the black top, who functioned as a “floater,” sometimes helping at a marimba, sometimes turning pages for a pianist, and then—her big moment—rocking out with two maracas. Whenever she got out of her chair you knew something was going to happen.

 

And a lot happens. I knew the piece—everybody I knew circa 1980 had the silver ECM album—but I hadn’t appreciated how magnificent it was. It’s the happiest, least tormented classical music of the whole 20^th century. Though it’s not exactly lighthearted: after 40 minutes it starts to become oppressive. But that’s part of its lovely bluntness.

 

I have read the explanations of how it’s all based on 11 chords and each section’s riff on a chord is signaled by the metallophone, and all the patterns are very simple.

 

But they don’t sound like that at all. It sounds like a continuous shimmering field of textures and patters. The singers and instruments don’t play tunes so much as insert contrasting textures.

 

Yes if you are art-inclined it is analogous to the bliss of an Agnes Martin painting or a Sol LeWitt wall drawing. But it is also closer to the experience of a jazz club or rock band at a bar than any other classical music. That happy, American way of being straightforward and matter-of-fact but also magical.

 

It’s also theater (the four female singers cooing as they bring their microphones closer to their lips) and performance: i.e. an experience we all undergo together. When the musicians stopped, the audience exploded into cheers.

 

 

Pina Bausch at the Cinerama Dome

 

 

A woman in a sparkly white gown enters a train and begins stomping on a giant pillow, while a man with giant cardboard Spock ears looks on from the back seat. It’s all my worst public transportation experiences transformed into a huge joke.

 

But there’s more: some odd, old-time pop music is playing the background, anding a funky vintage sweetness. Did I mention that the train was the Wuppertal Schwebebahn, the bizarre century-old Floating Tram?

 

Welcome to Pina.

 

The ride on the tram was my favorite moment of Wim Wenders' 3D Pina Bausch movie. And there were plenty of other moments of rapture, too. I’m still digesting the image of a woman shoveling dirt onto another woman while Mahler rumbles in the background. And humor—how can you not love a woman in the flowery gown skipping through a pretty forest with a leaf blower?

 

But much of the time I was wondering what in the world Wenders thought he was doing. The movie has a nice, thoughtful, low-key intensity that’s appealing. But it’s not really earned.

 

While most of the dances staged out in the world are cleverly done, Wenders never figures out an adequate way to present the dances presented inside a theater. He tries different tricks: the camera sits behind the heads of a live audience, the camera chases the dancers around onstage, the camera zooms up dancers nostrils, the camera freezes in place while everyone runs around it, etc.

 

For one thing, it doesn’t respect Bausch’s stage pictures—which are 99% of her work. And it only intermittently takes advantage of the 3D effect.

 

Bob Fosse, a kindred spirit, might have been the right director to film Bausch.

 

The exception, thankfully, was the extended presention of bits from Kontakthof, in which three sets of dancers—the regular troupe, a group of seniors, and a group of teens—enact Bausch’s hilarious/frightening homage to social dancing. A lot of the time Bausch’s performance art/dance/theater/whatever is more arty than art, but this piece is acute, earnest and perfectly poised.

 

The movie includes remarks from the dancers. I wish we could have been spared their expressions of adulation for their late boss. If I heard one more dancer share a bit of gnomic advice that Pina once gave them, I was going to puke.

 

Bausch was lucky. Besides an international assortment of cute guys (Michael Strecker, Reiner Behr, Franko Schmidt, Pablo Aran Gimeno, Jorge Puerta Armenta), there are beautiful, stately older women like Josephine Ann Endicott and the born-for-the-stage Nazareth Panadero. It was great to see them dance.

 

 

The Mahler Project @ Disney Hall

Last night at Disney the Wayfarer songs and the 4^th symphony. Intense Mahlerian voluptuousness and emotional meandering, but not too much of it. A perfect start to the Mahler Project.

 

Thomas Hampton sang the four Wayfarer songs mostly with his eyes closed. Eyes closed, shaking his head and trembling with rapture. Perhaps overdoing it, but with such music overdoing it is never out of place.

 

Hampton wasn’t the only one: throughout the concert I kept spotting musicians sitting with their heads tilted back, with their eyes closed, soaking up with anguished deliciousness. What must it feel like to sit in the middle of those sounds!

 

Last night I was struck how in the very first song of his very first song cycle Mahler had perfected his characteristic effect of emotional discord. Bits of thoughtlessly cheerful folk tunes are presented ironically. The soloist guides our experience. The words fill in the details (rejected lover faces his beloved’s wedding day) The effect is intensely dramatic rather than intellectual. The bitterness takes your breath away. And in the midst of it, the soloist announces, in song, “Alles Singen ist nun aus! / All singing must now be done.” It’s a Thomas Hardy novel condensed to 15 minutes.

 

Throughout the piece, Lou Anne Neill detonated deep percussive thuds on the harp.

 

A decade and a half later, in his 4^th symphony, Mahler explores less straightforward kinds of emotional discord. Each of the sections wanders freely over the widest possible range of moods. (Why did he bother with section divisions at all?) It’s stream of consciousness, one thing after another, and can induce disorientation. Which is certainly part of the point.

 

 

And through it all there are moments of beauty and strangeness. Mahler generously distributes these throughout the orchestra, so that almost all the musicians can have a moment to shine. Andrew Bain, playing a beautiful non-shiny antique French horn, had more than a few of these moments. The soloist Miah Persson sang the concluding strange naïve folk poem with a combination of guilelessness and poise that was perfect. “Kein' Musik ist ja nicht auf Erden, / Die unsrer verglichen kann werden. // There is just no music on earth / that can compare to ours.”

 

[Image: Sisley, 1873, Autumn: the Seine at Bougival]

 

La meglio gioventù

 

 

It takes a long while to get going, but eventually I got sucked into the soap opera of The Best of Youth. 

 

Shameless Italian pop, i.e. family arguments, tears, political conflict, tears, family arguments, emergency room crises, tears, family arguments, political-economic conflict, tears, family arguments, weddings, and tearful hugs of reconciliation. It doesn't even hesitate to have a pretty girl playing Mozart on a rescued piano as the flood waters batter Florence in 1966.

 

As an up-to-date epic, there's lots of heavily significant music, e.g.Fausto Leali's Who? haunting the soundtrack throughout. This video has bad sound, but the fashions are terrific, and the dancers show that RAI-Italia was not intimidated by Pan's People. 

Kindle vs Chaos

 

Santa brought me a Kindle, which was very nice. There followed a day of bewilderment and resentment (you have to pay Amazon $40 to stop ads from popping up on the homepage and screen saver). And then came the moment when I happily put down the public library’s hardcopy of Brothers Karamazov and picked up where I left off on this little slate grey hand mirror.

 

This compactness is an advantage that I got immediately. I’ve come to hate big bulky tomes. Just last week I borrowed from LAPL the one-volume version of the latest Dostoevsky biography. One volume, but it’s three inches thick! Never again.

 

 

Likewise I’m already fantasizing about unburdening myself of some of the books that clutter up my rooms. Sure, probably a third of them have sentimental value, or are very nice editions, and I’m keeping them whatever. But what about the mountain of cracked, yellowed Penguin paperbacks that were already old and worn when I bought them?

 

Using the Kindle is fun but I don’t quite grasp what I’m doing. I’m still at the stage of being intensely aware of all the physical activities that have been part of my reading life for 50 years, and that I’m not experiencing them. Is what I’m doing really reading?

 

In The Adolescent, Arkady looks around his friend Vasin’s tidy apartment, and comments, “I don’t know, but I like it better when books are scattered about in disorder, when studies are at least not turned into a sacred rite.” Maybe the Kindle de-ritualizes reading a bit, but if so, it’s probably a good thing. A chance to refocus on content. I keep thinking I’m reading from a scroll, like readers a couple thousand years ago.

 

The euro's 10th birthday

137 years ago, the narrator’s father in Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent foresaw it all:

“Quite simply, all the states, despite all balancing of budgets and ‘absence of deficits,’ one fine day will become utterly confused, and each and every one of them will refuse to pay up, so that each and every one of them will be renewed in a general bankruptcy. … A struggle will begin, and after seventy-seven defeats, the beggars will annihilate the shareholders, take their shares from them, and sit in their place—as shareholders, of course. And maybe they’ll say something new, or maybe not. Most likely they’ll also go bankrupt. …”

 

Happy new year!