Silverlake Blvd.

Marjorie Perloff on Karl Kraus @ the Getty

Just back from Marjorie Perloff’s lecture, “The Mediated War: Karl Kraus's Docudrama The Last Days of Mankind” at the Getty. I’ve devoured her books, but never had encountered her live. Unsurprisingly she’s both astonishingly erudite (quoting texts in half a dozen languages) and acute (distinguishing between satire—which presupposes an ideal norm—and irony, which does not). She’s also completely engaged in her material; she talks about it because she's fascinated by it and wants us to be fascinated, too. Unlike some other famous scholars, the subject matter is not a prop deployed to demonstrate a superior cultural status. She totally succeeded in imparting her enthusiasm for Kraus to us.

 

I knew from her books that she was unmatched in the gift of making the most opaque literature seem accessible and entertaining. What I didn’t know before this lecture was that she has the even rarer ability to explain a joke in a way that doesn’t ruin the humor. Kraus is very funny, but his humor depends on puns which are lost in translation, and detailed knowledge about life in the Austro-Hungarian Empire which are not part of most people's toolkit. She made his jokes live again.

 

Her take on Kraus is that he was World War I’s most astute media critic, and that his war against buzz and slogans and spin might be more relevant in 2015 than in 1915. Kraus’s obsessive collecting and quoting outrageous abuses of language in newspapers and ads during wartime might—in other hands—have proved a dreary, arcane topic. But Perloff not only made the historical context vivid and alive (so we might enjoy his jokes better), but framed her remarks so that the present-day relevance was unmistakable. A virtuoso performance.

[Image: Das Gerücht/Rumor (Rudolf Herrmann, 1918) ... with a still from a YouTube news video of Angelina Jolie in Iraq]

“Theater of the Outrageous” @ Disney Hall

I had never heard any of HK Gruber’s music before last Tuesday. After Frankenstein!! (1978) I’m a fan. The music, under the direction of John Adams, was charming: witty, raucous, subtle, fun. Without being derivative of anything, it echoed and extended earlier attempts to combine chamber music and cabaret: Stravinsky and Kurt Weill in particular. I’ve never experienced a decent fully-staged performance of the Soldier’s Tale, but last Tuesday the Gruber gave me a taste of what it must be like. It was that good! The program noted that Gruber is noted for his performances of Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King, and that is also part of the mix.

 

A big part of its triumph was due to the extraordinarily droll performance of the chansonnier/speaker/soloist Pieter Embrechts. He declaimed, sang, shrieked, played a kazoo and whirled a wind tube above his head.

 

The piece is a celebration of anarchy. Part of the freedom it claims is freedom from refined, adult good taste. It is an evocation of childhood without sentimentality. Instead of highminded mythopoetic fairy tales, it revels in the stupid antics of superheroes and vampires.

 

Five minutes into John Zorn’s For Your Eyes Only (1989) I was kicking myself for not following this composer more closely. Warner Bros. cartoon music plus Varèse plus god knows what else! But the piece went on, and the wit never evolved into anything beyond cleverness, and I lost interest. A collage that failed to become a composition.

 

Olga Neuwirth’s Hommage à Klaus Nomi (2013) presents a tricky puzzle for the soloist. Not only does he have to sing the full range of Klaus Nomi’s repertoire—his delicate countertenor high notes and his lowdown growling in music ranging from Purcell, to Leslie Gore to proto-techno—but he has to find a way to evoke Nomi onstage without resorting to imitation. Nathan Medley succeeded on all counts.

 

In fact his triumph was so complete it almost covered up the fact that Neuwirth’s music wasn’t very interesting. There was one stunning moment, when Dido’s Lament by Purcell segued into You Don’t Own Me by Leslie Gore. It beautifully captured Nomi’s freedom and wit. But otherwise, Neuwirth’s arrangements of the songs merely served to whet the appetite to hear Nomi’s original versions. 

 

 

Shostakovich @ The Clark

Last Sunday afternoon The Clark Library provided exactly the right human-scaled, grand but not autocratic frame for Shostakovich, as the Pacifica Quartet continued their trek through his string quartets, with numbers 9 (1964) through 12 (1968).

 

A domestic-scaled room held the quartet and about a hundred lucky auditors. The intimacy meant that the music was not only heard but seen. Its conversational quality was enacted in Simin Ganatra’s burrowing deep inside her violin as if lost to the world, and then suddenly signaling to her colleagues something urgent. And in violist Masumi Per Rostad’s animated, full-body gestures, and Sibbi Bernhardsson’s vigilant monitoring of everybody, and Brandon Vamos reflecting on it all from behind his cello.

 

The sequence of quartets presented a first rate opportunity to really savor Shostakovich. Each quartet has its own character. Number 9 is a discontinuous sequence of contrasting moods. Number 10 begins with deceptive simplicity, but turns into an epic air raid. Number 11 is admirably concise, with an uncluttered clarity that, in the end, creates a sense of mystery. Number 12 progresses from a genial grotesque dance, to a noir city soundtrack, skittering out of control, then back again.

  

The violent shifts in mood prompt doubt; passages that seemed straightforward acquire ambiguity. The mood—the meaning—is never securely genial, earnest, jubilant, or whatever. Episodes of seeming simplicity tend to generate a distinct air of disquiet. It’s like how the very absence of melodrama and obvious strangeness in an Edward Hopper painting creates a shattering unease. Altogether these pieces demonstrated Shostakovich’s uniquely compelling ambivalence. His heroism consisted in refusing to play the hero, or any other readymade role. Rather than off-putting, this ambivalence seems an essential aspect of the music’s fearless humanism. Shostakovich can be seen has part of the musical tradition—from Mahler, and the blues, through Thomas Adès—in which irony becomes a way of not hiding behind a mask. 

Beethoven helps us through, again

 

A few minutes into Michael Tilson Thomas’s performance of the Missa Solemnis last night, I realized I was present at exactly the public commemoration I needed, after the week’s horrible news from Paris. Not that it was intended as such, of course. I mean that, for me at least, this presentation of Beethoven’s grand and sane humanity was the perfect response to the dispiriting discovery that we live in a time and place where writers and artists can be murdered for keeping alive the tradition of Rabelais, Molière, Diderot and Voltaire.

 

MTT drew a thrilling performance from the orchestra and singers. Everything fell into place: the magnificent moments were spectacular, and the moments of meditative quiet were absorbing.

 

James Darrah devised a staging in which the soloists and chorus sang to each other, and listened to each other. The words of the mass provide no narrative, but occasions for affirmations of grief and hope. The four fantastic soloists—Joélle Harvey (soprano), Tamara Mumford (mezzo-soprano), Brandon Jovanovich (tenor), Luca Pisaroni (bass-baritone)—functioned as Everymen and Everywomen, passing between the orchestra and the chorus, signalling concern and consolation.

 

Sometimes the marching around got out of hand and become counterproductive, but there were simple encounters that were powerfully dramatic. The first was a moment in the Kyrie when the four soloists and a part of the chorus suddenly all clasped hands, as if at a demonstration. The extraordinary solo violin section in the Sanctus was given maximum effect, with Martin Chalifour playing alone on stage, and slowly joined by the soloists, who mostly looked on at his playing. At the end, the soloists walked among groups of boys from the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, checking to see they were okay.

 

David Finn’s dramatic lighting design immediately signaled that this was not business as usual, and registered changes in mood throughout with ingenuity and taste. Finn Ross’s video was so bad I had to avert my gaze the whole evening. I don’t understand why moving images are needed at concerts, but if you’re going to show them, why not chose something worthwhile? We live in Hollywood; there’s all sorts of people around who are actually good at this stuff. Enough!

 

[Image: Lucille Clerc]

Hollywood Costume @ the Academy Museum

 

 

I was completely unprepared for the depth and scope of this show. Other than some overkill with the glitzy gizmos and perhaps excessive zeal with the archival frigid room temperatures, every aspect demonstrated exemplary intelligence.

 

It began with completely appropriate didactic/polemical points: displays making the argument that costumes mimicking everyday clothes can be as inventive as the crazy outfits of historical extravaganzas. Then came case studies that showed how costume designers work, the stages of their task, their interactions with the other visual designers and the director.

 

Only then did the exhibit begin in earnest. Room after room of costumes draped on mannequins, densely packed on platforms. Instead of generic heads, each mannequin was outfitted with a screen showing a clip of the head of the actor who wore the costume. A witty reminder that almost everything on display was made for a specific person.

 

The curatorial intelligence came into play in the groupings. This was not just a collection of the coolest clothes they could get their hands on. The emphasis was on demonstrating how specific character types have been dressed over the last century. The costumes were presented in clever compare/contrast groupings, such as a gaggle of gowns for Queen Elizabeths from different movies from several decades, multiple glittery sex goddess sheathes (plus Marlene Dietrich’s tuxedo) and an especially instructive display of dozens of costumes worn by Meryl Streep in her wide-ranging career. Each grouping contained a mix of very recent things for casual viewers, iconic old things for buffs, and oddball zingers (Ming the Merciless’s high-collared robe) for the fun of it. All the major movie genres were represented, with a century’s worth of outfits for cowboys, gangsters, spacemen, pirates, soldiers, …. 

 

Over and over again, I was reminded of the decorative arts collection at the Getty. Just as the fantastically intricate André-Charles Boulle cabinet is a monument to the skill and labor of 17^th century craftspeople, Edith Head’s peacock-feather cape and gown for Heddy Lamar in Samson and Delilah is a testimony to the skill and artistry obtainable more recently. Almost everything in the exhibit deserved the subtitle, Triumph of (probably female) Labor.

 

Beyond the specific excellence of the work on display, and the organization of the exhibition, I was haunted by two more general thoughts.

 

First, astonishment that any of it exists at all. It’s the same feeling I get when I see intact glassware from antiquity: How is it possible that, after it’s original use, it survived? What improbable chain of events led to it ending up here? The archivist in me wishes somebody could determine the precise combination of neglect and care that safeguards fragile things.

 

In the case of the costumes in this exhibit, the world owes a lot to Debbie Reynolds and Larry McQueen and the others who realized these artifacts were beautiful and important. What’s especially impressive is that people often had the foresight to save the less spectacular items. It’s not so surprising that somebody realized that Heddy's peacock-feather cape and gown was worth keeping: it’s obviously one of a kind, spectacularly crafted, and crazy beautiful. But it’s more impressive that somebody also saved John Wayne’s shirt and vest from The Searchers, which aren’t anywhere near as striking.

 

I'm afraid the other general response is ... doubt. At the risk of appearing ungrateful, I can’t shake the suspicion that putting artifacts that are essentially props on display runs the risk of distracting attention from what really should matter—the movies. Does everything have to turn into a how-to demonstration?

 

Of course, how could I not be transfixed by seeing in person the beaded cape and gown by Travis Banton that transformed Carole Lombard into shimmering white flame in My Man Godfrey? But I couldn’t help feeling that there was something beside the point about my fascination, as well as the object itself. Travis’s gown isn’t, after all, meant to be seen anywhere, in any context, on any body other than Carole Lombard’s, as it’s represented up on the screen in luminous black, white and silver.

 

But that's a bigger question--something the Academy has a few years to work on--that doesn't detract from this brilliant event.

Shangri La and after @ the L.A. Municipal Art Gallery

 

I suppose you could say this exhibit was about the last gasp of an utterly uninhibited style of Orientalism. Indeed, it tells the story of an Art Deco zillionairess furnishing her ultra-luxe interiors with exotic loot from the Middle East.

 

But Doris Duke wasn’t just any art-mad plutocrat, she was an Evelyn Waugh heroine, living it up on a scale that transcends such labels and judgments. The story of her Honolulu house—Shangri La—is a story of fantasy and hedonism and indulgence played out in many distinct, fine layers.

 

 

 

For example there was Honeymoon World Tour, during which she started collecting Islamic artifacts. The exhibit featured snapshots that were like stills from a lost screwball comedy. Many could be captioned Heiress Surrounded by Hunks. Then there were the buildings. Duke employed a number of interesting architects over the years—including Marion Sims Wyeth—and their drawings and plans were fascinating. 

 

Then there was the loot: stunning objects such as a 17^th century waterpipe base from Iran …

 

My favorite object was a 19^th century silver vessel from Kashmir that stands on dainty little paws (see above).

 

Since her death, Shangri La has become a museum and study center. One of its programs is to invite artists from Islamic countries for residences. This work was also spectacular, including photographs by Walid Raad, and video projections by Shahzia Sikander.

 

A companion exhibit at the Municipal Gallery, “Shangri La: Imagined cities,” extended the conversation even further, with fantasies and realities from contemporary artists from Islamic cultures. So much good work, ranging from the Gulf Labor collective’s necessary muckraking, to George Awde’s sensual, elegiac images of men the media typically depicts as stereotyped lunatics or monsters ...

 

 

Thank you, Brooke Hodge, for alerting me to this show!

The Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller collection of samurai armor @ LACMA

I don’t know anything about this other than what I’ve seen in Kurosawa movies. But even for the ignorant, the designs and imagery are compellingly strange, and the craftsmanship is breathtaking. Delicate art nouveau floral and dragonfly scenes worked in bronze as a hasp for a helmet. Flowers etched in white on bronze breastplates. An elaborate ensemble in which all the parts—the fabric vest, undergarments, helmet, etc. all have subtly nuanced versions of a butterfly motif. The thing I didn’t know at all was how they employed masks. Long-nosed freak masks that look like commedia dell’arte. There were even masks for the horses (a dragon head). The helmets were showpieces of metalwork, sporting bronze antlers, flames, feathers, cubist tubes, bristles, dragons, …. Putting one of these costumes on is not for the fainthearted, as seen in these short and long instructional videos.

Pierre Huyghe @ LACMA

 

I left the Pierre Huyghe retrospective at LACMA with the feeling that there was nothing annoying or obnoxious about it, but neither was there anything that compelled any deep interest. However it has haunted me ever since. I find it coming up in conversations with friends. I can’t stop thinking about the gentleman announcing the name of everyone entering the exhibit (Name Announcer, 2011) and the Ibizan hound with one leg painted pink (Human, 2012) with fur coats plopped in various corners to provide her with cozy places to rest (though she seemed way too skittish for napping). The non-performance objects on display were deliberately mashed together, so it was hard to know what was what. Atari Light (1999) was droll, the movie Human Mask (2014), featuring a monkey in a Noh mask was terrifying. Perhaps the most puzzling and compelling object was a giant tray of black muck, mysteriously described as a “broken black ice rink”. Friends report a visitor dropping her iPhone into it. I’m not surprised. Huyghe has created a space where things are going to happen.

Jane Freilicher (1924-2014)

Jane Freilicher died at the beginning of December. Now will come the inevitable realization that she was one of the essential painters of the last decades. Of course it’s nice to get your youth immortalized as an effortlessly charming, good-hearted romp in poems by Frank O’Hara and others. But this legacy probably became an obstacle to the understanding of her work. The myth of mid-century bohemian NYC obscured her accomplishment, which was vast, without ever overstepping a refreshing and sane modesty. She was our Morandi; a Morandi with the window open, open to a city or country view.

[Image: Jane Freilicher, 12th Street and Beyond, 1976]