Silverlake Blvd.

Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall

 

 

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It’s really an accomplishment for a historical novel to have such low nostalgia and sentimentality content.

 

Mantel’s language is not beautiful, but every person, place, and encounter is vividly realized in deft, clear strokes. And she arranges her material so artfully that she never has to waste time explaining anything: all she does is describe. A tour de force of explication.

 

Mantel might go a bit too far in making Thomas Cromwell’s household at Austin Friars seem like Anna Madrigal’s 28 Barbary Lane, but her fresh take on all these familiar characters is part of the fun. She certainly doesn’t trouble herself to make many of the other people in the book likeable. It’s The Sopranos in 16^th century London. Thomas More, in particular, is treated to both a metaphorical and a literal hatchet job. It’s wicked and fun. 

 

[Image: Cranach, Salome, 1530]

The Last of the Haussmans via National Theatre Live

 

I like Devon and I think Dartmouth is a sweet place. I can imagine what the neighbors on Devon’s coast thought of Judy (Julie Walters), living in the ruin of her parents’ jaunty modernist seaside house, with her two wildly dysfunctional adult children, Libby (Helen McCrory) and Nick (Rory Kinnear). The white trash blight of the neighborhood.

 

A pivoting set permits us to travel from the disheveled outside to the disheveled inside of the house, as the family fights, whines, complains, and pines away. There is a final late-night chat between Nick, Libby and their mom in which the bitterness and exasperation becomes incendiary. Nick dismisses his mother’s life of radicalism as a complete joke: "While you were wanking into a chrysanthemum, Margaret Thatcher was making her entrance."

 

Judy dies, Nick and Libby lose the house, i.e. they are abandoned again. The bravest thing about the play is how it ends: there is no last-minute recue, no salvation. It stops without anything being resolved. 

 

One of the things this journey explores is what a catastrophe it can be to be the child of an idealist. A dark thought in a culture devoted to heroics. Ibsen’s Brand turned it into a very grim tragedy. Stephen Beresford, on the contrary, plays this material for laughs—which might be grimmer yet.

 

First Aid Kit @ The Fonda Theatre

 

[The song starts around 1:30 on the video, if you don’t care for the scenes of Dublin nightlife.]

 

 

Johanna and Klara Söderberg sing Simon & Garfunkel-influenced country rock. I guess you could say they are from the South: their hometown Enskede is south of Stockholm. They put on a fantastic show at the Fonda last Tuesday. I didn’t mind being the oldest person in the (very crowded) room—that just added to the fun. Their harmonies are very sweet, though Klara is obviously the one in charge.

 

The one down side was the wretched sound. It was such a jolt when they performed “Ghost Town” without microphones. It really brought home how much reverb and muddle we had been putting up with. Terrible audio completely sank the performance of the opening act, Dylan LeBlanc. Sabotage? It’s such a small venue it’s really inexcusable. 

Last Monday

A good day for the Villa:

 

 

 

 

The Last Days of Pompeii: Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection @ The Getty Villa

 

Two things I was very impressed by at the new exhibit at the Getty Villa:

 

First, it’s the first time anyone has dared to engage the camp aspect of the place. Camp is one of the subjects of the exhibit—the rooms have flat screen monitors displaying clips from ridiculous/fabulous sword and sandal epics from the silent era to The Simpsons. In the room devoted to the theme of “Decadence,” they have painted the walls around the most outrageous 19^th century paintings with Pompeii-ish decorative details. The last renovation toned down the Villa’s kitsch a few notches, so this unexpected note of silliness is very welcome.

 

Second, the show is a serious presentation of a serious topic. It surveys a couple centuries worth of representations, interpretations, and judgments of who the people of Pompeii were and what their destruction means. It was a real eye-opener to have juxtaposed in the same room Francesco Netti’s moralizing Gladiator Fight during a Meal at Pompeii (1880) Guglielmo von Plüschow’s 1885 photographs of nude boys voguing in the ruins, and scenes from Bob Guccione’s ultra-trashy Caligula (1979).

 

It wasn’t all luridness. The resin Cast of a Young Pompeian Woman with a Garment Rolled around Her Waist was incredibly moving and disturbing. It has the immediacy of a snapshot—a snapshot by Weegee. I don’t care how faked it might be, it’s a compelling work of art, in contrast to  Gunther von Hagens’s dehumanizing Body World freak show.

 

Another moving object was a Plan of Pompeii Showing Locations of Allied Bomb Strikes. For a city of the dead, Pompeii received a lot of attention from Allied bombers during World War II. Too bad, but it’s also kind of fascinating. Was it because the place looked so alive?

 

And there were more conventional aesthetic pleasures. One hallway was covered with gloriously over-the-top 19^th century depictions of Vesuvius erupting. Facing these hot red and orange extravaganzas were two of Mark Rothko’s Seagram Mural Sketches. Brilliant kinds of fire.

 

 

[Top image: Pierre Henri de Valenciennes, The Eruption of Vesuvius, August 24, A.D. 79 (1813); Bottom image: Mark Rothko, Untitled (Seagram Mural Sketches, 1958) National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.]

 

Patti Smith @ The Wiltern Oct. 12

 

I didn’t have very high expectations. I had cautioned myself that, at the age of 65, a punk had earned the right to phone it in. But she didn’t phone it in. It was thrilling, immediate and genuine in a way that only a handful of other rock concerts have ever been for me.

 

I never appreciated before how fun her music is. For all dark imagery and allusions to Rimbaud, the music is grounded in Motown. She and her band (plus Flea on bass) produced blistering versions of “Birdland,” “Free Money,” “Pissing in the River,” “People have the Power,” “Gloria,” and “Rock and Roll Nigger”.

 

Even the more sprawling recitations (“Constantine’s Dream”) have a basic pop feel in the form of a continuous crescendo and accelerando. And if “Constantine’s Dream” and her other printed poetry is inert on the page, in performance, it was immediately compelling. Without sets and props she created the most urgent kind of theater.

 

Another remarkable thing is how she really does it all in her voice. What she does may not be conventional singing, but even if it’s howling, it’s a magnificent howl. She has range: she was sweet and melodious when necessary. She also made herself clearly intelligible above the deafening din of the band for several hours, without a single strained syllable.

 

I was also impressed by her completely un-diva-ish stage presence. Of course she is an Icon—the wild cone of hair, the black jacket and vest—but the show was about the music, not about Patti Smith. For a rock star—what am I saying? For a poet, she is remarkably free of ego and pretentiousness. She smiled and waved at the audience, and joked like a smart aleck waitress with something tart and perceptive to say. There was a lot of laughter. At one point she announced, “This song is dedicated to Sylvia Plath,” but immediately scotched the bathos with, “I have no idea why I said that.” A fan at her feet was begging for “Redondo Beach” all night, and finally she complied with a few lines of a silly a cappella lounge version. She exhorted the crowd, “Love one another, be smart, be brave, … and have fun!”

 

She ended with yanking out strings of her guitar one by one, and shouting, “That’s all I’ve got.”

 

[Image: photo by Anne Zimmerman]

Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End

 

Impatiently awaiting the BBC2 Parade’s End miniseries, I read the four novels. It was my fourth try in two years. As Dorothy Parker wrote

 

Ford’s style has here become so tortuous that he writes almost as if he were parodying himself. There are grave hardships for the reader in the long interior monologues which make up much of the book. It is a novel to be read with a furrow in the brow. You must constantly turn back pages, to ascertain from inside which character’s head the author is writing.

 

However it is not merely complication for its own sake. Behind it all there is an intense anger. Ford is outraged at the blindness and selfishness that shoved the world into war.  Especially in the first book, he presents an Edwardian world that has already shattered to pieces. The war didn’t blow it up; it had already blown itself apart. It was too insane.

 

As a consequence, he will have nothing to do with any kind of explanation, rationalization or alibi. He refuses to stand above his characters and tell us what their actions mean. Instead, he circulates among them and records what he can. We overhear their conversations. We are given access to their unspoken thoughts. The motives, the point, the meaning is never clear. The form isn’t tidy because the subject matter is the opposite of tidiness:

 

Intense dejection, endless muddles, endless follies, endless villainies. All these men given into the hands of the most cynically care-free intriguers in long corridors who made plots that harrowed the hearts of the world. All these men toys, all these agonies mere occasions for picturesque phrases to be put into politicians’ speeches without heart or even intelligence. Hundreds of thousands of men tossed here and there in that sordid and gigantic mud-brownness of midwinter … by God, exactly as if they were nuts willfully picked up and thrown over the shoulder by magpies … But men.

 

But it’s not all high modernist seriousness. For instance, there’s Christopher’s wife, Sylvia. What can I say about Sylvia?  She's the most animated and amusing character in the books. She stirs up trouble for fun and gets away with it. Her goal in life is to make everyone around her miserable.

 

You couldn’t discover in the skin of her face any deadness; in her eyes the shade more of fatigue than she intended to express, but she had purposely increased her air of scornful insolence.

 

Some of her breathtakingly appalling actions, comments and thoughts have the excessively studied air of a character in a novel by de Sade (and the big sister of Handful of Dust’s Brenda Last), but her appearances invariably generate an uptick of fun. She’s the catalyst that makes everything happen.

 

The rapidity with which her ardour for her lovers cools is the epic’s best running gag:

 

But, quite suddenly, on seeing some well-known English faces in the casino it had come over her to think that, however much she imagined Christopher to be humiliated by her going off with an oaf like Perowne, that humiliation must be as nothing compared with that which she might be expected to feel at having found no one better than an oaf like Perowne to go off with.

 

This is a girl who relishes her wounds:

 

She remembered, years ago, trying to shock her mother’s spiritual adviser, Father Consett, whom they had lately murdered in Ireland, along with Casement. … The poor saint had not in the least been shocked. He had gone her one better. For when she had said something like that her idea of a divvy life—they used in those days to say divvy—would be to go off with a different man every week-end, he had told her that after a short time she would be bored already by the time the poor dear fellow was buying the railway tickets. …  And, by heavens, he had been right.

 

Rebecca Hall is a lucky actress; let’s see what she does with the part.

 

[Image: Postcard of the destruction of Reims, 1917]

CicLAvia October 7

 

 

 

 

Barely got an hour in, but I made it to today's CicLAvia. We're at the starting line on 7th Street, near MacArthur Park.

National Theatre Live: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

 

Last Sunday we caught the National Theatre’s broadcast of their stage production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I hadn’t read the book. I had the idea that it was a romp. Wrong: it was overwhelming. Chris’s attempts to deal with the, to him, incomprehensible world of adult emotions becomes an acute version of something everybody’s experienced, one time or another.

 

Maybe the most brilliant thing was the staging in Act Two of Chris’s journey by train to his mother in London. Everything about this experience is absolutely new to him: getting money from an ATM, navigating through a train station, riding on a train, navigating through a big London station, riding the Underground …. It is absolutely terrifying, and Chris only just survives it by unspeakable bravery and determination.

 

Luke Treadaway embodies all this brilliantly, while the ensemble goes through tightly choreographed mime/dances that realize the crowds, bustle, the characters of all these places.

 

Meanwhile, director Marianne Elliott, designer Bunny Christie, lighting designer Paule Constable created astonishing visual expression of Chris’s experience. Constant bombardment by words, words, words—written, sung, recited over the P.A., …. What a bizarre verbal landscape we inhabit. Most of us tune it out. But what if, like Chris, you have difficulty filtering relevant from irrelevant perceptions? The train station becomes the Gate of Hell. Chris goes into a trance, which is probably the most most appropriate response.