Silverlake Blvd.

Los mejores deseos (tardíos) en tu quadricentenario

 

Shakespeare wasn’t the only 400^th-aniversary boy. Cervantes’ big gift came a few years ago, in the form of a bright new translation of Don Quixote by Edith Grossman.

 

I was struck by how different the two halves of the story are. The first part is elegantly framed, with the ironies and paradoxes neatly folded in.

 

But in the second half they burst out of the frame. It becomes unnervingly topical: an exploration of fame, of all ultramodern experiences.

 

The Don is no longer an incomprehensible lunatic, but the famous lunatic everybody has heard about. The Duke and Duchess, and every other literate (or literate-adjacent) person he and Sancho encounter are delighted to meet the celebrities in person. They are all fans, in the modern sense. They want Quixote and Sancho to behave like the characters in the novel, and create elaborate hoaxes in order to insure the desired responses.

 

Hence, what in the first part were the Don’s fantasies of being famous and lionized, become, in the second part, true. The difference is that the fame and lionization are derived from amusement and astonishment, rather than admiration and respect. But still, it’s better to be fussed over by a Duchess in her palace than clobbered by ruffians on the road.

 

At this point it becomes not merely the first novel, but the first meditation on this thing that has taken over the world.

Best (belated) wishes on your quadricentennial

 

 

Back in March last year I discovered the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare was happening. So I started reading by genres, the tragedies first, and finished fourteen months later. I didn’t grow up with Shakespeare. I had this stupid dislike of reading plays. I finally got around to him in seventeen years ago. I mention it because WS’s whole writing career, from Venus & Adonis to The Tempest lasted only eighteen years.

 

Reading by genre—the tragedies, comedies, histories, romances and the poems—left me with the impression that I was reading five different writers. What consistent attitudes can be discerned toward love, political authority, community, the conflict between public and private obligations, war, … and so on? A thing that’s not hard to do with more consistent, self-contained writers.

 

 

There are a few things, but they are all suspiciously theatrical. They might not be Shakespeare’s world-view so much as Shakespeare’s favorite devices for creating compelling scenes on stage:

 

Actors playing actors. On stage, the actors speak and gesture to present, each one, a specific character. And what are these characters they present? They are all actors, too. To generate suspense, no one in the plays pays attention to the command of Apollo at Delphi, “γνῶθι σεαυτόν / nosce te ipsum / Know thyself!” Conflict springs from the discord between who I am versus who others see. With comic or tragic results. People typically don’t know themselves, don’t see the truth, live a fantasy. Leaders/Nobles are crippled by lack of self-knowledge.

The characters who know they're acting thrive: Richard III’s delight in lying, his delight in insincerity is so sincere, that we’re momentarily blinded to the evil of it. Iago too.

In the soliloquies, we get to see characters struggling to define themselves. Which is the same action as the actor struggling to realize his/her part.

 

Communities, rather than individuals. The only story worth telling is the inclusive, comprehensive one. No one person or class is more interesting than his or her web of connections. Not just aristocrats and intellectuals, but their servants, their neighbors, the police, …. Hence WS is careful to differentiate these different classes and types: between men and women, between aristocrats, rich commoners, poor commoners, rustics and servants. Diction, action, imagery, rhetoric, modes of argument all vary with the different speakers. Not all one uniform grand style (French classical drama).

 

“Time’s ruin”. The fleeting changefulness of everything: political order, romantic passion, worldly success, youth, beauty, life. But that also means that corruption, vice, injustice and treachery, insanity, jealousy, are only temporary and partial.

 

No rules. There is no prescription anyone can follow to achive a life without tragedy. Not even honor and duty suffice. Characters who give advice or expound rules or philosophies are generally shown up by events.

 

“Tug & scramble”. The Bastard’s comment (King John, 4.3) is a synopsis of all the Histories, and most of the other plays: “The life, the right, and truth of all this realm / Is fled to heaven, and England now is left / To tug and scramble, and to part by th’ teeth / The unowed interest of proud swelling state.” Leaders of all kinds neglect to guide their kingdoms/families/lovers/friends prudently, failing through incompetence, distraction, cowardice, ambition and greed. Reality is not tidy Myth, but wayward, open-ended. Sometimes things work out OK, but never according to plan.

 

Women speak out. The paradox that the sexism that required boys to play female characters probably enabled these characters to be more than supernumeraries (Homer), problems (Virgil), idols (Dante), or fantasies (Spencer). Besides, WS couldn’t afford to leave half the stage standing around silent and passive. The tragedies have wildly entertaining bad girls—Tamora, Goneril, Regan, Lady Macbeth. The romances revolve around noble-hearted women who overcome trials imposed by stupid men. The histories have prophetic Cassandras and warrior queens; the comedies have witty intellectuals, intrepid adventurers, and young women not quite up to the challenge but still game.

 

Words set free. A lot of the speeches are incoherent nonsense. Unjustified, improper, absurd. Sometimes the character is joking, sometimes the character is an idiot, sometimes drunk. But nonsense, blather, and bawdiness can be portals to visions. WS uses malapropism to widen the mental space available for his characters. There are also the songs, that interrupt the action, but comment on it, obliquely, like Greek choruses:

 

When that I was and a little tiny boy,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

A foolish thing was but a toy,

For the rain it raineth every day.

 

Iphigenia @ Getty Villa

 

Can leaders be trusted? What are their motives, really? What—if anything—justifies going to war? Is political power worth the personal cost? Can an individual do anything to stop a mob? The 12^th installment of the Getty Villa’s annual end-of-summer outdoor play demonstrated how the classics remain relevant, unfortunately.

 

Nicholas Rudall’s translation and the Court Theatre’s production of Iphigenia in Aulis did not pull any punches.

 

It was apparently one of Euripides’ last works, written about the time as the Bacchae (scheduled for next year). Both depict worlds in which neither gods nor humanity offer any hope. Reverence for the gods is probably the best policy, but Euripides warns against have any illusions about it leading to happiness or even peace (both plays end with parents killing children). It’s only sensible because people are even worse.

 

The text of the play includes additions by another writer, adding a less dire ending, in which Iphigenia is miraculously rescued at the last minute and whisked away to safety. This “Abraham and Isaac” version was also current in antiquity. Euripides even wrote an exciting escape thriller based on it.

 

Rudall and director Charles Newell went for the darker, more authentically Euripidean, ending, where Iphigenia is not miraculously saved. And they took the authenticity even further, dispensing with any updating. They trusted Euripides, and it worked.

 

They approached the text with courageous fidelity, not trimming any of the long speeches. We got all the backstory of Helen’s marriage, and the full genealogy of Achilles. And the actors didn’t rush through them, but made them resonate.

 

The cast was superb. “Old Man” doesn’t sound like a promising part, but Jim Ortlieb made it essential, modulating servility and familiarity. Hichael Huftile likewise managed the tricky part of Menelaus, self-absorbed and dim, but not entirely awful.

 

Sandra Marquez’s Clytemnestra made the conflict between public duties and family duties explicit. She steals the last half of the play from Agamemnon. Marquez played her as a great lady, employing all the authority, seductiveness, pity, curses she can muster to save her daughter. The evening ended with a silent stare-down between Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, his hands red with their daughter’s blood, over a white carpet. Next stop, the red carpet that on which Clytemnestra will lead him to his death.

 

Iphigenia, embodied by Stephanie Andrea Barron, is not conflicted, but in her short time on stage passes through distinct moods: a girl excited to travel to see her dad, a bride excited over getting married, a hysterical and desperate marked woman, a manipulator trying to escape, and finally a heroine, accepting her fate.

 

Mark Montgomery’s Agamemnon is a successful soldier forced for the first time to think about the morality of his actions. It just about kills him. In the end, he capitulates to what he calls necessity. He must sacrifice his daughter because the army gives him no options. The men demand it. They will kill him and his whole family if he refuses. Piety? Cowardice? Duty? Ambition? Euripides implies “All of above.”

 

The darkness of the proceedings were moderated, thankfully, by humor, hunks and music.

 

Clytemnestra got the biggest laugh of the evening when she took out a calendar to begin planning her daughter’s wedding, raising her eyes at the choice of venue.

 

Agamemnon and Menelaus were fine specimens, but Acquah Kwame Donsoh, both a hunk and a skilled comedian, realized Euripides’ vision of Achilles as a good-looking dolt. The chorus girls sighed over him, even though his “plan” for rescuing Iphigenia consists of making Clytemnestra plead her case to Agamemnon.

 

Best of all, we got a real chorus, that really sang their text. And what singing! A female a cappella quintet, whose sound (courtesy of composer Andre Pluess) was a thrilling doo-wop/gospel/pop. Hence the choruses really did their job of commenting, lyrically and indirectly, on the action. Registering at least the aspiration of hope and happiness.

 

[Image: Sacrifice of Iphigenia (Mark Rothko, 1942)]

Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels

 

I love that Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels ended in bitterness. Elena is pleased her daughters seem to be better off than she was, but her books, her literary career, suddenly seems empty. Her works seem merely symptoms of the times and places she—and we, the readers—lived through. Among other things it’s a rebuke to Proust, who ended his epic so pleased with himself for writing it. And her friend, Lina, whose different destiny has generated their mutual story, has disappeared. In part because of Elena's writing.

 

I don’t understand the blurbists when they call it great and unprecedented. Doesn’t anybody read Natalia Ginzburg anymore? Didn’t anybody else watch La meglio gioventù (2003)?

 

But that’s not Ferrante’s fault. The cycle is tremendous. It’s also entertaining. The third volume, Those who leave and those who stay, is a permanent accomplishment. It creates an atmosphere of chaos, meaning both danger and the possibility of escape.

 

It begins with Elena’s encounter with the student revolutionaries. This is presented as a stupid misunderstanding. Seems accurate. Certainly it isn’t sentimental. First we follow Elena’s bewilderment among her new intellectual friends. Then we follow Lina’s path, dealing with conditions at the factory. Lina and Enzo’s comrade Pasquale, and the Dr. Galiani’s daughter Nadia—the chic woman Elena envies so—remain in the background. But in a sense they become the central characters. By the end of the volume it seems established that they were the terrorists who attacked Lina’s factory. But it’s not certain. Organizing, the conflict becomes Lina’s excuse for leaving the factory, and returning to the old neighborhood. All the threads come together. Gino from the old neighborhood becomes the leader of the neofascists. In the end, everyone—the anarchists, the neofascists, the thugs, the intellectuals, the stupid idealist Pietro—all revert to their original idiotic awfulness as neighborhood characters.

 

Perhaps the best thing in the last volume is the horrible epilogue of this thread, when Nadia emerges from hiding to tell lies to the police, and make everybody’s life miserable.

 

What does it mean that the Neapolitan novels are not the only multi-volume literary Bildungsroman of the moment—the most prominent being Eward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose cycle (2011-4), and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (2009-11)?

 

Ferrante’s novels were published later (2011-4), and start further back in time—the Fifties rather than the Sixties.

 

All three cycles detail desperate struggles to escape (family, home, dialect, fate). Their protagonists engage in idiotic behavior, we share all their varies modes of shame and remorse. All are intensely specific about places. The action is always defined by the scene. Ferrante’s whole epic emerges from the fact that Elena leaves the old neighborhood, while Lina stays. In Ferrante, venturing just a few blocks away is as significant as Patrick Melrose’s expulsion from Saint-Nazaire. Knausgaard begins a new life with each new apartment.

 

Ferrante’s Elena and Knausgaard aspire to write, though both are acutely aware that the desire for money, fame, and escape complicates the picture. St. Aubyn’s Patrick just wants to avoid madness and monsterhood, which turns out to be much more ambitious. Patrick and Knausgaard have substance abuse issues, to put it mildly. Ferrante’s women are spared that, but they have their own problems. Knausgaard’s terrified of his father, Ferrante of her mother, Patrick of both.

 

Sylistically, the cycles couldn’t be more different: St. Aubyn’s books are tidy and compact IEDs. Knausgaard transforms embarrassing over-sharing into art. Ferrante’s style is not so idiosyncratic. Her pace is brisk and she takes care to balance bitter and sweet. And so HBO & Rai have teamed up to turn the Neapolitan novels into a miniseries.

 

I look forward to it. It might be what the books are meant to be. Ferrante’s best moments are all cinematic: Lina having a tantrum about Marcello’s shoes at her wedding, the neighbors discovering that Giuseppina Peluso hung herself mid-pedicure, Mariarosa breastfeeding Mirko at the student meeting, Manuela’s blue fan fluttering at Elisa’s awful banquet, Elena and Lina watching their neighbors flee a earthquake from inside a car, ….

Stuart Davis in SF

 

 

I only just caught Stuart Davis: In Full Swing at the De Young before it closed. It meant a special trip to SF; it was worth it. SD’s paintings have to be seen in person. They’re thick, impasto-y, 3-D constructions. Textures vary and are significant. The planes of color fit together like marquetry, with a satisfying snap. Pictures that fizz with explosions of confetti have a physical heft and well-crafted solidity.

 

And reproductions don’t do justice to his eye-popping hot colors.

 

And then the installation was significant. At first I was put out how it played fast and loose with chronology. But one of the themes of the exhibit—elaborated in the catalog—was how Davis returned to the same motif, again and again, over decades. It was not obvious when you saw the pictures individually, but the light dawned when the related works were lined up together. Riffs on the same theme.

 

This habit of working in series is just one of the eye-opening lessons of the exhibit, suggesting more exploring needs to be done. Davis’s work is so accessible and fun that its been taken for granted.

 

For instance, one of the things that stuck me was the sameness of mood of his work. When I first arrived, I was beside myself with delight at the sassy cheerfulness. It was like a gust of fresh air. How wonderful to escape from art that creeps and moans. But later, I started to wonder about the absence of darker moods. Cheerfulness is great, but was this too cheerful? Was it shallow?

 

The plot thickens when you read the Chronology in the catalog, which is really a biography of SD’s life and times. What becomes clear is that the work came out of a self-destructive bohemian milieu of Crime and Punishment-quality grimness. After helping him get started as an artist, his parents, for example, turned into Marmeladov and Katerina Ivanovna, creating havoc for the rest of their lives.

 

But nothing of the chronology’s grim litany of poverty, domestic discord, falling-down-and-breaking-limbs drunkenness appears anywhere in the work. He never tried to express pain—his pain, anybody’s pain.

 

When it got to be too much, rather than try to express it, he stopped working. It’s hard not to see his wife Bessie’s horrible death in 1932 as the start of a slough in his life. Then his family falls apart in 1933. Between Red Cart and Landscape (both 1932) there’s nothing that’s uniquely his till 10 years later, Arboretum by flashbulb (1942). Some touching experiments, but irrelevant eddies. He got involved in politics, Popular Front activism. When the Stalinists take over, he withdraws.

 

After Arboretum he never flags. It’s crazy. 23 years of him banging it out. His 1950s are an exhilarating traffic jam of “honking” pure tones (Glenn O’Brian’s apt adjective). Taking a cue from Matisse’s cut-outs, after Mellow Pad (1951) the work just gets bigger and bolder.

 

Some other themes ...

 

Abstracting, but not really abstract. Few, if any, of his paintings are 100% abstract. There’s always the hint of a motif, in the foundation. As DNA, seed, grit. It should be awful. His method seems to be the worst cliché of modernism: deriving geometric forms from realistic studies of places and things.

American scene. Ash Can Swing. Electronics, household gear, gas stations, posters, …. American scene without despair and without sentimentality. He’s giving the finger to the Yahoos who reject capital-M Modernism as anti-American, Communist, European, academic, and elitist. Is confetti American?

Big, simple shapes (clearly defined)

Bold, animated lines, richocheting around the picture plane like a billard ball.

Bright, hot colors. Intense, jolting combinations. No shading, no chiaroscuro.

Cartoonist/caricaturist. He never quite dropped his first career. Like Gris, Fenninger, …. Contrast with the infinitely less gifted Valerio Adami.

Clean, spotless surfaces. No light, no atmosphere, no fugitive effects.

Dancing. Graceful, vigorous, athletic motion.

Decorative, not sublime.

Entertainer. SD is an entertainer, not a prophet, not a social critic, not a seer.

Episodic, anecdotal.

Extroverted. Completely and exclusively. Razzing high-dungeon abstract expressionists, their gloomy introspection, their rhetoric of tragedy, Greek mythology and existential angst. SD has absolutely nothing to do with that.

Idealizing. A better world, with the dirt and suffering refined away. The flimsy, shoddy stuff transmuted to permanently interacting forces and forms. Living it up is the best revenge.

In sync. The optimistic vision of all heterogeneous events and things encountered fitting together. Where noise and disorder are a source of fun rather than terror. Idealized, classicized, ….

Irreverent. The scene is not mocked, but it’s not taken in sober seriousness.

Flowing, floating, fizzing up.

Graphic. The paintings are born in drawing. He never lost his cartoonist skills. He makes the forms withdraw and pop up.

Introspection that’s ironic, tongue-in-cheek, rather than grave.

Levity not gravity, lightness, animation, fizz.

No autobiography. No intimacy. Really?

No portraits, no psychology, no Rembrandt, no Goya.

No satire, exposés, or outrage.

No sorrow, melancholy, or pathos.

No suffering, decay, or infirmity.

Object portraits.

Playful. Chaos and conflict without harm. Harmony, an improbable, cacophonous harmony. E pluribus unum.

Swing. OED: “a flowing but strongly compelling rhythm”

Townscapes, Towns rather more than big city. A townscape of non-specific planes, colors, textures. The kind of industrialized landscape that Hopper and Demuth presented as nightmares, SD presents as a gas: Summer landscape (1930), Landscape with garage lights (1931-2), Red cart (1932), ….

Variations on a motif. Reworking older work. Boulez. SD a classicist, returning to a motif, over and over, refining and producing variations?

 

Music is a key. Popular music. Hot, swinging Jazz. Not Mozart quartets (Rothko), and also not Billie Holiday, Monk, Morton Feldman or the Velvet Underground ...

• “The Charleston (piano roll)” (James P. Johnson, 1925) Overplayed as background music to the point that it’s hard to hear as music, rather than as a sign indicating The Roaring Twenties. Non-stop pep and irrepressible fun. Exceedingly physical.
• “Fifty Seven Varieties” (Earl Hines, 1928) Syncopated, fragmented, but unified by a unmissable beat.
• “No. 29” (Wesley Wallace, 1929) Sassy, naughty boogie-woogie.
• “Frankie’s Jump” (Frankie Newton & His Cafe Society Orchestra, 1939) Exactly the kind of music in Fred & Ginger danced to. Swing
• “It Don’t Mean a Thing” (Duke Ellington, 1943)
• “Love Nest” (Max Kaminsky, James P. Johnson & Eddie Condon, 1944) A trio, chamber swing. Dixieland plus stride/boogie woogie.
• “Rocket Boogie” (Pete Johnson, 1949?)
• “Study for Player Piano #37” (Conlon Nancarrow, 1960s)

 

Making pictures of the street, that can hold their own against the street.

 

[Image: The Paris Bit (1959)]