Silverlake Blvd.

Lebbeus Woods @ SFMOMA

 

The show wasn’t  big; it didn’t try to overwhelm you with quantity. It didn’t need to: just a selection of representative work from the last few decades. “Just”!

Awareness of his absence amplified the pathos of the work.

I couldn’t help feeling that this was probably the last time an architect’s work would be represented by a show of freehand drawings. A tradition inaugurated with Alberti finding its conclusion in Woods. People tell me I’m wrong about this—that a lot of architects are still skilled in traditional drawing skills. But photography and computer renderings are the visual currency: it’s hard to imagine any present-day school or office encouraging anyone to refine their gifts as Woods did his.

And his gifts were extraordinary. Modernist orthodoxy promotes the de-skilling of craft as an essential component of the de-mystification of art. And perhaps justly so: there’s something magical and uncanny about ease with which Woods evokes materials, surfaces, textures, different degrees of buoyancy and gravity, with a few ink scratches, and patches of color.

And the clarity and refinement that characterize the style of drawing perhaps has a function beyond mere presentation. It frames the vision, which is of situations that are violently inchoate and unrefined. Frames in both the sense of “separates from its context,” and also the sense of “amplifies by contrast.”

And the vision is the essential thing. Looking at his drawings from the early Nineties, its impossible not to see them as visions of things to come. His ostensible subject might have been Sarajavo, but he was drawing the East African embassies, lower Manhattan, Bagdad, New Orleans, Tohoku …. Woods gave form to our now familiar landscape of spectacular urban catastrophe. The hope he offers out is not that disaster will be averted, but that—with ingenuity, improvisation, freedom—it might be possible to live among the ruins.

This sounds like a description of a Piranesi drawing, and the connections with the earlier draughtsman of tragedy resonated throughout the exhibit. The linking of their names now seems inevitable.

 

[Image: Lebbeus Woods, San Francisco Project: Inhabiting the Quake, Quake City, 1995] 

Last for now ...

 

Arnold Genthe, Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1917

More Edwardiana

 

Parker & Unwin, Housing designs for Letchworth, 1906

More Edwardian era things

 

Piet Mondrian, Red Cloud, 1907

Edwardian era things

 

André Derain, London Docks, 1906

Edwardian things

Banner by Mary Lowndes for a 1908 National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies demonstration

Flying Dutchman @ Dorothy Chandler

Raimund Bauer’s sets were flashy techno-goth, creating a terrific setting for The Dutchman’s entrance in a shaft of brilliant light through a giant propeller/rotary disc shutter.

 

But why did Andrea Schmidt-Futterer insist that the sailors dress as Daleks?

 

(I suspect that is Schmidt-Futterer is fictitious, a caricature of a severe German costumer dreamt up by another Wagner, Bruce.)

 

Then in the next scene, all the village women were made up like Bauhaus automatatons in shiny brass hoop skirts. They are supposed to be silly village girls. Similiarily, in Act III, making the sailors and their girls look like demonic figures from an expressionist Kirchner cityscape kind of ruined the dramatic contrast intended by the score between their fresh liveliness and the deadness of the Dutchman’s ghost ship. Director Daniel Dooner didn’t let us see the ship anyway, adding even more confusion.

 

So I completely understand why somebody might leave the theater muttering, “That was dreadful!” I see it. And I also heard the inadequate voices, last minute substitutions.

 

But I also heard the orchestra blazing away, and I guess the orchestra took me beyond the present circumstances into an imaginary performance, in which I saw (Richard) Wagner's abilities stressed rather than his absurdities exposed. Not that this story is comprehensible: everyone in Dutchman is mythic and inhuman. But at the end, when Senta affirms her solidarity with the Dutchman, it’s piercing and transcendent like Isolde at the end of Tristan. But Senta can count on nothing: she’s braver than Isolde.

 

I have been thinking lately that Wagner is essentially and only a dramatist. The old ladies circa 1850 who denounced it as meaningless noise were right. When it’s detached from a fully staged performance, it is meaningless. But when the music figures into a performance—even a flawed one like last night—it has power.

 

Just like the music, Wagner’s philosophic and mythological views have no reality, no substance, no truth off-stage. If you were really insidiously mean, I think it would be possible to detect the origin of his whole philosophy of ultra-Romantic self-sacrifice in the heroines of Bellini and Donizetti. It’s not a question of What is the right thing to do? but How do I make the biggest sensation? Senta—as well as her sisters Brunhilda and Isolde—derive their doctrine from Norma, Elvira, and Lucia—not Goethe, Schopenhauer, or even Beethoven.

Anne Carson, red doc>

 

Her latest arrived the other day. On the flap she says she’s revisiting some of the characters she invented in her 1998 Autobiography of Red.

 

But where Red dealt with explosions of youthful ardor, this is a book about aftermaths. Carson is the best novelist alive, though none of her books is even remotely like a conventional novel. Here, as always, she mixes scholarly games (Stesichoros, Proust, Daniil Kharms), some first-hand accounts of family drama (mother's death), and portrait-sketches in vivid, colloquial language (war- and memory-haunted vets). Most of the action takes place in a hospital: the scene couldn't be more everyday or more grim. It’s dark and tragic. It might even literally be a tragedy: there are definite “choral” interludes providing lyrically oblique commentary.

 

I don’t “understand” it, but after a first reading, I already feel it beginning to work on me. It does not quite offer hope, but it registers the possibility of somehow not being utterly crushed:

 

All sing. Patients sing. Nurses sing. Kitchen staff sings. Even the donors sing. Numb normal vanishes. Hopes float free—macaroni for supper, let the catheter not slip true love new meds play the cello again— …

 

[Image: Anselm Kiefer, 1986, Emanation]

The Gospel According to the Other Mary @ Disney Hall

 

Peter Sellars, his awfulness on full display, managed to ruin Disney Hall’s production of The Other Mary last Thursday night. What is wrong with this guy?

 

John Adams has provided The Other Mary with a festival’s worth of compelling, dramatic music: the raspy cimbalom taps that prefaced most of the solos, the narration by three countertenors (Daniel Bubeck, Brian Cummings, Nathan Medley) singing in compelling, slightly off harmonies, the outbursts from the chorus, ranging in true Bachian style from riotous hectoring to angelic prayer. Through the orchestra alone he depicts the death and raising of Lazarus, in a way that gives full value to the story’s eeriness but also to its fairytale beauty. The first act ended with Passover, which was largely a magnificently somber solo for the tenor Russell Thomas.

 

However all this wonderful work was subverted from the minute Dudamel walked on stage to the minute the lights went out.

 

We were subjected to a staging in which everything was either banal (Mary having an orgasm on the table at the Last Supper), redundant (dancers miming “Oy! Somebody cut off my ear!” over and over), or just wrong (the newly risen Lazarus dancing the funky chicken). And of course because this was a Sellars production singers writhed on the ground, and scrubbed the stage floor. Why ask why? Sellars even managed the ruin the Resurrection--surely a lifetime achievement--so that the whole impact of Mary's discovery of Jesus was lost.

 

I admit that any of these things might, in other circumstances, be interesting and amusing. But believe me, in the atmosphere of vulgar pretentiousness which is oxygen to Sellars, all these tricks were eyesores. I spent most of the evening trying to focus my attention on the ladies playing the flutes, in order to ignore the nasty goings-on at the front of the stage.

 

And there was also the Sellars-inspired nastiness going on at the back of the stage, where the supertitles were projected. For Sellars was responsible for assembling the texts Adams used. After an hour of gooney mystical rubbish by Castellanos, Bingen, Erdrich, et al., listening to bits of Dorothy Day’s crisp and concrete account of civil disobedience in support of the United Farm Workers was a relief—though don’t ask me what this “Arrest of the Women” scene was about.

 

I realize that Sellars was also the literary collaborator who helped Adams create his masterpiece Nixon in China. We didn’t reach that height Thursday night.

 

Ultimately the Disney management is to blame. This game of semi-staging semi-dramatic works started under Salonen and continues under Dudamel. Sometimes the results are wonderful ( the Stravinsky double bill of Oedipus Rex and Symphony of the Psalms), but more often it seems like a misguided attempt to goose up nondramatic vocal music. What’s wrong with letting singers stand in one place and sing?

 

[Image: Mary Magdalene weeping, Saint Symphorian church of Pfettisheim, Bas-Rhin, France. 19th century] 

Alice Oswald’s Memorial: a version of Homer's Iliad

It begins with a breathtaking surprise: pages 1 through 8 consist of a single column of Greek names, in capital letters. It’s beautiful; a field of headstones. The book proclaims itself a cemetery, literally a memorial.

 

But then the poems begin, and they’re not very compelling. At least the first twenty pages or so. However, on page 26 comes this:

 

Like a rainbow shining a warning to the world
A bright banner of disruption hung above the fields
Meaning war perhaps or maybe just a summer storm
So that everyone stops work and looks up and the flocks grow restless

 

This is not swanking in antique drag. It’s funny how the lack of punctuation marks—Oswald doesn’t use any throughout the book—allows the words sit so quietly on the page. Then there’s another form of plainspoken estrangement: the stanza is then repeated. AO does this every now and then. It’s a gimmick, it’s stolen from Robert Frost among others, but it works, here, as a gently odd form of insistence.

 

She describes her goal as a “translation of the Iliad’s atmosphere, not its story,” which sounds plausible, until you realize how it short circuits the drama. She takes one of the most heart-stopping scenes of cold-blooded murder in literature—the death of Dolon—and turns it into a flat, third-person bit of gossip.

 

But sometimes she really rises to the challenge:

 

Somebody’s husband somebody’s daughter’s husband
Stood there stunned by fear
Like a pillar like a stunted tree
He couldn't bend his stones
He couldn't walk his roots
His armor was useless it simply
Cried out and broke open oh
There stood ALCATHOUS and a spear
Knowing nothing of his wedding
Not knowing his feelings or his wife’s face
Or her doting parents or her incredible needlework
That spear when straight through his heart
And began to tick tick tick but not for love