Silverlake Blvd.

America the amazing

 

Yesterday I was searching a for an image of headphones, and found this:

 

 

 

 

Apparently, the artist, H. Price, produced a whole series of posters like this, circa 1942, for the U.S. Public Health Service. The U.S. National Library of Medicine website has a bunch.

 

 

 

 

Could someone please tell me more about H. Price? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More from the archive

 

By popular demand, more archival cat photos:

 

Mus in Champaign, 1984. For the first weeks after Delmar found her, she just sat like this. She also never made a sound. It didn't last.

 

Mus in Venice, CA, 1985. Perhaps the photo that best captures the essential Mus-ness. It reflects her never-ending quest of incredibly hot surfaces to nap on.

 

Smokey in Koreatown, circa 1988. Already a pretty old girl by this point. In sunlight she was blue.

 

Mus and Smokey in their favorite Koreatown perches, circa 1988

 

Foote in her favorite Koreatown perch, 1988. Foote was my constant companion whenever reading or writing--especially writing. She loved paper, pens and books. The disgust with which she stared at Mus used to make us howl. I don't have many photos--she always appeared as a black smudge.

 

Mus and Foote in Los Feliz, 1993. The balcony and window looking out into a tree that was always alive with birds provided the main entertainment on Clarissa Ave.

 

From the archive

 

Note the dust on the whiskers.

 

“Simplicity—of course. But how? What kind?” (Anna Kamienska, A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook)

 

[Image: Mus, circa 1985, in Venice, CA]

 

One Man, Two Guvnors screened at the Downtown Indepdendent

 

 

Last year Richard Bean took on Carlo Goldini’s comedy Il servitore di due padroni, transporting the action from 1743 Venice to 1963 Brighton. He produced entirely new dialogue that only occasionally reflects the original. (More on that later.)

 

This was the best live theater on screen presentation I’ve seen yet. Despite (or perhaps because of) the technical challenge of One/Two being a super-fast, super-physical farce with actors flinging themselves across the stage at top speed the camera crew managed to capture it all, in high definition, in such a way that you forgot about the camera and just got lost in the mayhem. The image was crisp without being scary—they did a good job with the makeup: nobody looked like a circus clown in close ups.

 

The primary engine of the evening was the Olympic-caliber performance of James Corden. For three hours he ran at top speed, slammed himself into sets and against the floor, stuffed his face, blathered and twitched. It was certainly showing off, but it was also acting. The thing he did with his whole body while engaged in acts of shamelessly dishonest obsequiousness gave new meaning to the word writhe. He was engaging without ever being entirely likeable.

 

Corden also beautifully supported his colleagues. Oliver Chris as the ridiculous toff Stanley, and Tom Edden as the grossly superannuated waiter Alfie. The stage seethed. And in-between acts, the actors all came out, one by one, and did little musical numbers that were completely absurd and delightful.

 

And so I spent most of the evening in tears, laughing myself sore. The second half was not as hilarious as the first, but how could it be? It all ends with a rousing dance.

 

During the break, the cameras took us backstage, where director Nicholas Hytner was asked point blank the question of the evening: What does all this have to do with Goldini’s 18^th century comedy? To his credit, Hytner admitted,“Not much,” but added that the Goldini credential was probably necessary for such stuff to get produced by a serious cultural institution like the National Theatre.

 

I don’t know if that’s the whole story.

 

First of all, I dispute the assumption that there’s something aesthetically or intellectually unworthy about a farce. If the thing transports you to another place—and One/Two transported all of us, both the screened and live audience, then something aesthetically significant has happened. Why do you need anything else? Didn’t Proust say something about overly obvious ideas in books being like price tags on gifts?

 

And then there’s the assumption that the text of Il servitore di due padroni is a literary classic like Importance of Being Earnest, with beautiful speeches and beautiful lines, with every syllable bristling with significance. Goldini’s too hard for me, but my sense is that his text is not like that at all. I don’t see any speeches or lines of note at all. All his art went into crafting a scene, some characters and some conflicts. The words he provided accomplish this with artful efficiency and clarity. But Goldini’s words are not the heart of the play, but merely as the context for the clowning of the performers.

 

Goldini was clear enough, prefacing the printed text of Il servitore with the declaration that what followed consisted of a “soggetto, … a scenario that, pointing the way, traces the conduct and motive of the action, with which the actors are free to add necessary words, suitable jokes and humorous business.”

 

I can imagine Signor Goldini contentedly gliding up the Thames in his gondola to pick up a royalty check at the NT, thinking "The acconci lazzi e spiritosi concetti of this Signor Richard Bean and the buffoon James Corden are exactly what I hoped for, if not anything I might have imagined. But why isn't my name bigger on the posters?"

 

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat @ Long Beach Opera

 

Probably because I had Michael Nyman’s bombastic soundtracks for Peter Greenaway’s bombastic movies in mind, last night in Long Beach I found his calmer music for The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat unexpectedly eloquent.

 

Not everyone in the audience agreed, and, indeed, the ensemble whirled full steam for the full hour of the drama. And, granted, a bit more nuance in the playing and singing would have been welcome.

 

But once the opera took us into the lives of the Man, his Wife, and the Doctor who tries to make sense of it all, I was hooked.

 

There are a lot of conceptual games in play (Representation, Language, Images, Things, Reality), but in the end Man/Hat is the story of heroic married love.

 

The Wife’s patience, good-humor and ingenuity in accommodating the strange perceptual world of her Man is common enough in life, but uncommon on the stage. It makes the usual operatic liaisons and adulteries seem shabbily beside the point.

 

All of which is underscored by the ending in which there is neither a cure nor a death, just an exhortation to carry on as best you can.

 

It was fun to return to Bixby Knolls abandoned department store where LBO triumphed with Medea. The black tarp draped over the far windows lets you know you’re not just at any other evening at the opera. But did they have to make us sit in fake bamboo dining room chairs? I know one reason that Chinese restaurant failed.

 

Henryk Górecki @ Disney Hall

 

The Master Chorale’s was brave to offer a Górecki concert last Sunday. Unlike other kinds of avant-garde music, the challenge of Góreki is that he adheres to very simple harmonies and very simple melodies, and he has no fear of repeating them over and over.

 

His Marian Songs offer, within limits, enough contrasts in mood and texture to evoke folk song—kind of a dreamy Aaron Copland. The Lobegesang, on the other hand, was a demonstration of how there’s such a thing as too much simplicity: the sonic equivalent of Aurélie Nemours.

 

Even so, the singing was beautiful. The Chorale handled the frail and naked music with poise.

 

The big piece of the concert was the 1981 Misere, a work whose creation and premiere are tied up in the Solidarity struggles of the 1980s. The different voice groups in the choir join together, gradually, one by one, over a half hour. A gimmick, perhaps, but it makes a point.

 

It is political in the most serious and musical sense. It recalls all sorts of choral music, from Thomas Tallis’s Spem in alium, to John Cage’s Lecture on the Weather, in which the performers, without representing any particular group, seem to embody a political charge.

 

They also inserted a Brahms motet, Schaffe in mir. It was a contrast, but almost too much. The dense and dramatic trajectory shook off the meditative mood. It almost took over.

 

[Image: Odilon Redon, Shell, 1912)

The Diamond Jubilee as seen from Mt Washington