Silverlake Blvd.

Clifton's Cafeteria restored

 

 

The newly renovated Clifton’s is an essential Los Angeles attraction. The renovation is exactly what everybody hoped: the grime abolished, the depressing Sixties encrustations peeled away, but the taxidermy dioramas and fake rocks and trees have been preserved. Not only preserved, but—if anything—framed and set off so that they look weirder and more inexplicable than ever.

 

And the new additions are admirable and welcome. In the back, the floors have been cut through creating a jaw-dropping atrium, complete with a towering new fake redwood. The second floor is the rustic mellow bar, and the third floor is the happening Gothic bar with a live DJ. In between are dinning rooms and spaces that feel like 19^th century hotel lobbies. The place is so vast that even though there were lots of people there, it didn’t seem crowded. There’s always a place to escape to.

 

In short: the Bullocks Wilshire tea room, plus the Natural History Museum, plus a giant gay disco.

 

The new Clifton’s is a bar—very definitely a bar—and only secondarily a cafeteria. The food is better, but it’s not that much better. Considering all the thought and creativity that went into reviving the décor, the food is still sadly authentic.

 

The layout of the cafeteria, however, has been modified for the worse: multiple stations and multiple lines and multiple starting and end points. It’s chaos. Perhaps it’s just a matter of working out the kinks; perhaps all that’s needed is better signage and visual cues. But for the time being I will have to dust off my We’re Not Here For the Food speech.

An terrific encore preceded by a so-so concert @ Disney Hall

 

Last Thursday was one of the strangest concerts I have ever experienced at Disney Hall.

 

I was excited to see András Schiff. I had never heard him live. Connoisseurs who know more about piano artistry than me have raved about him for years. I was expecting a treat. However his Mozart piano concerto #25 was probably the worst Mozart performance I have ever heard by a professional orchestra. Dry, deliberate and completely lifeless. Obviously Schiff hates the sparkling and effervescent Mozart of pop culture, and is determined to give us something sober and clean to correct our palate. I get it; I hated it. I thought of Glenn Gould’s Mozart recordings, where he couldn’t disguise his distaste for the music.

 

The Haydn Mass In Time of War was better. The L.A. Master Chorale was in excellent form. Despite the title, the music is jubilant, and expressive of redemption and forgiveness; it’s not Guernica or The War Requiem by a long shot. Still, the performance felt a bit stiff.

 

These two pieces were the stated concert program. However there was an additional program, the “Post-Concert Recital” as it was characterized in the program. What? About half the audience left, which was a shame, because they missed seeing what the musicians really could do. Each of the soloists from the Haydn Mass performed two Schubert lieder. From the first note it was obvious that this was the music that they wanted to perform. It was night and day. This was the real music-making event of the evening.

 

The bass, Robert Holl, made an indelible impression. He was so completely in character that he put us into the scene before uttering a note, simply by his posture and the expression on his face.

 

[Image: Schubertiade (Moritz von Schwind, 1868)]

Grace Jones @ the Hollywood Bowl

 

Grace Jones finished the Hollywood Bowl season last month. From the size and vehemence of the crowd, I suspect Grace at the Bowl may become an annual event. Let’s hope so. The critic at the L.A. Times noted her “blend of arrogance and exuberance,” which is just about right.

 

It was a better show than her last Bowl appearance. She simplified the costumes: they were less astonishing, but the changes didn’t bring the show to a dead stop like before. The video monitors were set to black & white which added a terrific graphic punch.

 

Punch is the word; she still has it—and more of it than you’ve ever had.

 

She’s 60-something and performed credibly topless most of the night. If that wasn’t enough, she propelled a hula-hoop throughout an extended version of “Slave to the rhythm” and kept it going through  detailed, affectionate introductions to the band, backup singers dancers, and crew members. Can you do that?

 

If she perhaps didn’t really even try to sing “La vie en rose,” this time around, she definitely nailed “Love is the drug,” with a single spotlight shining straight down on her elegant rhinestone bowler hat.

 

Several (younger) people around us seemed to be there to see the first act, Future Islands. There’s nothing wrong with loving Echo and the Bunnymen, and Samuel T. Herring is obviously a formidable performer, but he needs to dial it down a bit.