Silverlake Blvd.

James Turrell @ LACMA

 

I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that—despite the PR hoopla surrounding this show—the overall effect is calm. It isn’t a fun house extravaganza, but a carefully-pared down selection of representative work. Though with Turrell the characterization “calm” must be qualified by “ambiguous,” if not “uneasy.” I imagine a lot of people miss out by not giving the work enough time. A glance will only reveal the ingredients, not the work.

 

Yukaloo (2011), for example, seems clear enough: a big rectangle glowing on a dark wall. But when you sit with it, the blue and green starts to modulate. Then after more staring into the light, the colors shift in a way that suggests it’s your perceptions that are changing, not the light. Finally you are left uncertain what it is you’ve been looking at. "What am I looking at?" was my most-used expression.

 

The big novelty for me was the holograms. They obviously fit in with Turrell's other work, but they have none of the elegant loveliness that has become his trademark. What they are is stubbornly insidious. As you move around, they seem to stalk you. Or is the right word "shadow"?

Huntington Gardens

I don't know what was wrong with the old entrance, but it's gone and the new one is under construction. We'll see. Another construction new to me was the additional bonsai garden, with beautifully worn fencing and gates. Everything was in bloom.

 

 

 

 

Earlier this month in SF

 

Citizen's Band, with the excellent down-home food, was a real discovery that saved us from starving. Attentive service, and decor of flea market finds that anywhere else would have probably turned out either arty or not arty enough, but on Folsom shined liked a lighthouse beacon.

 

Likewise, Sight Glass on 7th, provided the right start of each day.

 

The National AIDS Memorial Grove, in Golden Gate Park, is calm rather than heroic, happily.

 

I only meant to peek at the roof of the California Academy of Sciences, but ended up spending most of the afternoon there. 

Their critters included bits saved from the old building.

 

Newsy nationalisms & the deep bass vibe @ Disney

 

On the sidewalk outside Disney Hall last Friday, politics took the form of a demonstration against the current Venezuelan government, as that government’s most conspicuous cultural export—the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra—performed inside.

 

Meanwhile, politics in the TchaikovskyFest took the form of Alina Pogostkina's knock-down of Mr T's Violin Concerto, followed by an encore of Fritz Kreisler’s Recitativo and Scherzo-Caprice (1910). This did not articulate an argument for or against Nicolás Maduro, but demonstrated something about the possibilities of collective focus and personal achievement.

 

Likewise the Bolívar’s soulful rendition of the "Little Russian" Symphony did not clarify how much of the anti-Maduro agitation is merely a power grab by the Venezuelan ancien régime, but they have a big, deep sound, that’s also immaculately clean and precise.

 

The Ukrainian folk-tunes that prompt the nickname “Little Russian” are probably unfamiliar to the Bolívar band, as well as the audience. But of course all week Ukraine has shared the spotlight with Venezuela as a scene of politico-economic-nationalistic chaos. If you want to switch back to the politics of words on this issue, I recommend Timothy Snyder in the NYRB’s last issue and upcoming issue.

 

I confess to switching the radio dial frequently from news (KPCC) to classical music (KUSC) in order to escape from words in general and political discourse in particular, but the conflicts remain however they are carried out.

[Image from La Opinión]

New Century Chamber Orchestra @ The Jewish Community Center of San Francisco

 

Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg doesn’t bother with performing because she’s too busy communicating. She doesn’t have time to be a star, because she’s telling you something urgently necessary to know about longing, and hilarity, and stillness.

 

The New Century Chamber Orchestra performs without a conductor, but that doesn’t mean no one is in charge. NSS is the music director and 1st violinist, but it was obvious last Saturday that her enthusiasm radiated in ripples of delight across the stage, and into the audience. It was a thrilling ensemble performance: 100% enthusiasm and conviction and concentration. And it was the rarest kind of performance—rare in any genre of music—one that manages to dispense with the rituals and focus on the music.

 

The first half of the program consisted of instrumental pieces from operatic composers. All were newly arranged to fit the New Century’s forces, which didn’t matter a bit. The Prestissimo of Verdi’s quartet was a romp, the Cavalleria intermezzo (a favorite ever since Raging Bull) really ached, and the Meditation from Thaïs brought down the house. But it was the performance of the Fledermaus overture that really floored me. I thought I knew all I needed to know about this over-familiar trifle. “I know, but listen,” NSS was broadcasting, “Isn’t it terrific that we all know all these tunes? Isn’t this a tremendous sound? Listen!” I listened and learned. The beauty and expressivity of her violin playing was accompanied and amplified by her eyes, her gestures, her posture: an expressive totality. An audience of the deaf would be able to follow the music.

 

 

After the old favorites of the first half, came an unheard novelty—Donizetti’s one-act farce Rita. It was a sequence of freestanding character arias—“I’m on top of the world!” “I’m in the dumps!” “I hate you!” “I hate you but I’m going to get you to do what I want!” etc.—connected very loosely by dialog. It didn’t make sense and it didn’t matter. It occasioned marvelously vivid and exciting singing and instrumental music.

 

It helped that the singers—Thomas Glenn, Maria Valdes, Efraín Solis (pictured above)—had voices comfortable with Donizetti’s fiendishly difficult frivolities. And they were adept clowns, too. With 0.0001% of the resources, their performance had approximately 1000 times the wit of L.A. Opera’s last Falstaff.

 

If Rita is a fair specimen of the one-act operas that lie forgotten in the music libraries of Italy, there’s a whole world that needs to be explored pronto. May I take this opportunity to request that somebody—the oligarchs who built Sochi?—subsidize the task of unearthing them all and bringing them all back to the stage? I can’t think of a more worthwhile project.

Venice Baroque Orchestra with Philippe Jaroussky @ Disney

Without making a thing of it, I suppose I’m reasonably up to-date-on countertenors. I still have Klaus Nomi’s RCA album that I bought in 1981, and since then I've heard Andreas Scholl, Antony, David Daniels, Bejun Metha, Daniel Bubeck, Brian Cummings, Nathan Medley, and Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes.

 

They're terrific--especially Antony and Scholl--but I think my new favorite is Philippe Jaroussky. Last Wednesday he put on a tremendously exciting and moving show. Never a strained note; he just seemed to exhale the impossible filigree. He had all sorts of stage tics to indicate effort that never once was audible.

 

It didn’t hurt that he sang with the Venice Baroque Orchestra, which humanizes repertoire that too often is merely an excuse for showing off. And it also didn’t hurt that the program was cleverly designed: a face-off between the composers of 1730s London’s two rival opera houses. In one corner—Handel—a composer who is as familiar as a classical composer can be; in the other corner is a composer nobody living has ever heard of: Nicola Porpora.

 

I assume the program was the Orchestra’s idea. Nationalism can be a good thing. When I first heard Venice Baroque in 2009 they performed with Cecilia Bartoli a program that was part of a big Italian conspiracy to sell us on Vivaldi and his compatriots as The Real Kings of Baroque Music. Bartoli has been doing this on her own for years. She sings this unheard-of stuff with such conviction that you can’t help get swept up in her enthusiasm.

 

Last Wednesday was the same experience. Porpora came across as a master of an elevated vernacular style. It was a demonstration of how innovation not only isn’t everything, but how much is lost when it becomes the only goal. Handel, in this context came across as above all a dramatist—indifferent to smoothness, only concerned with dramatic effects.

 

Jaroussky ended with “Alto Giove” from Polifemo, which seemed the ultimate, until he followed it with the fireworks of “Nell’attendere il mio bene.”

 

[Image: Giovanni Bellini, G, 1480s, St. Francis in the desert]

L.A. Art Book Fair 2014

 

I went Saturday afternoon and managed to escape without buying too much:

• Two photo zines from Public Editions, documenting fashion along the Arab/Israeli divide.
• I wish I had bought more of the beautiful printed work by Perish Publishing from Toronto, but at least got the sublime Twenty-Four Composers. (Image above)
• The Hot Artists zine from Prairie Fortress Press (i.e. Bradford Kessler)

 

Philip Aarons & AA Bronson’s Queer Zine exhibit contained a few things I remember, but most was new to me. It was, in effect, a history of the last 60 years. I was moved, and wished all the hipsters had gone somewhere else, so I could commune in solitude with my own past. On the other hand, the cumulative effect was the most life-enhancing hilarity. Comedy in the face of adversity.

They were selling some archival gems, and I bought two issues of Straight To Hell Chap-Books from 1981 for nostalgia’s sake. I remember when Different Light at Sunset Junction used to have boxes on the floor of them. Also issue #2 of Eloisa Aquino’s The Life and Times of Butch Dykes, on Gertrude Stein. God bless B&D Press.

 

I would have liked to buy something from every exhibitor—even the books I didn’t care for seemed to be produced by people who were earnest and interesting and deserving support.

 

After 90 minutes I started to get tired of getting elbowed. Vast sections of the Geffen had become a deafening hipster beard/flannel/miniskirt scrum of socializing, posing, raving, and people generally reveling in their blessed with-it-ness. 

 

But even this irritating Art Fair aspect (the Gagogsian Gallery had a room?) is a good thing. This is not a literary event, or an academic event. It’s an event for people who love books but don’t care to read. Cultural comentators take note: art books, comics, zines are alive and well.

 

I can’t pretend it’s my favorite way to shop for books, but a bit of carnival, a bit of glamour, a bit of hipness is what the book world needs.