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Opera UCLA's Mother of Us All

Imagine, if you will, a romantic comedy of the original women’s rights movement, incorporating deconstructions of 19^th century political rhetoric, set in an operatic mode mixing Pirates of Penzance with Dido and Aeneas, with music based on Stephen Foster, and American hymns.

 

I’ve been waiting to see and hear Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson’s Mother of Us All for about 40 years, so I didn’t miss Opera UCLA’s performance last Tuesday. It was a brilliant, funny, disturbing and moving production. I gather UCLA did it in 1965, with sets by David Hilberman. I left wondering why it isn’t produced all the time.

 

It’s Stein’s later mode, so there are characters, a sense of narrative progression, and the characters speak sentences, though their sentences play with sense more than assert earnestly. The meanings go in and out of focus – appropriate for dealing with politics. One witty touch was to provide supertitles, projecting bits of Stein’s text. It was a sign that director Michael Hackett knew his material. For all the amiable nonsense, there were some jarringly pertinent lines.

 

I suspect it will always seem topical – sexism, racism, public discourse, the constitution – but it seemed especially so the other night, “… because they are afraid of black men because they are afraid of women because they are afraid afraid. Men are afraid.”

 

Thompson’s music is the perfect foil to the text. Instead of knotty, it’s easy-going and tuneful. It delineates characters and scenes with elegant efficiency. Thompson provides an outline for some of Stein’s more freeform passages. There are elaborate instrumental interludes providing additional layers. Thompson is even more underappreciated than Stein, if that’s possible. Andreas Mitisek, the magician of Long Beach Opera, kept the music on target.

 

The action consists of seven scenes of Susan B. Anthony’s life, in which she lectures, resists, debates, dreams about or laughs affectionately at an inner circle of mostly fictional women and mostly historical men, plus a chorus of Suffragettes. It ends with an epilogue where the characters pay their respects to her statue on a pedestal in the Capitol, while her spirit looks down and wonders.

 

The whole opera is about people getting up onto, and down off of, pedestals.

 

Some – most of the men – are fanatical about maintaining their prominence. In the fourth scene there’s a male trio singing “We you see we V.I.P. very important persons to anyone who can hear or you can see just we three.” Garrett Schoonover gave Daniel Webster an impressively solemn voice and presence.

 

But none remain steady on their pedestals. Webster finds his Angel More. And Mario Arias found the ridiculousness of the John Adams character, constantly reminding poor Constance Fletcher of what an honor it is to be loved by an Adams.

 

Hackett gave everyone on stage a characteristic walk, a stance, a look and gesture. Though Susan B. dominates, Thompson’s music gives everyone a moment in the spotlight, and the students had a ball with it.

 

Even characters without much music made an impression:

 

Vanessa Martucci’s Angel More doesn’t sing very much, but she pulled off a way of carrying herself that was mesmerizing. Likewise Jacelyn Yeo did a memorable (literal) star turn as Lillian Russell, swanning around stage in a queenly manner. Ulysses S. Grant isn’t a big part, but Michael Valentekovic mimed rages that were hilarious.

 

Thompson made the role Susan B. a challenge, and Maureen Brabec pulled it off. She nailed the finale, “We cannot retrace our steps,” which is the work’s analogy to Dido's "Remember me". It was shattering.

 

Intermittently interrupting the proceedings is Jo the Loiterer, a not noble, idealistic, upstanding citizen. Other than Alice B. Toklas, he’s the most compelling character Stein ever invented. I suspect Jo’s a distillation of the irreverent G.I.s Stein delighted in after WWII. Eric Levintow perfectly embodied Jo's clowning, his funks, and surprisingly tender lyric tenor sighs. Under the table or sprawled on the floor, he was definitely not on any pedestal.

 

The big comic surprise – when Indiana Elliott’s brother forbids her marriage to Jo - was beautifully perpetrated by Dominic Delzompo, parodying a dozen other operas in authentic Gilbert & Sullivan style: “Nobody knows who I am but I forbid the marriage”.

 

Irena Jacobs’s sets defined interior and outside spaces with elegant austerity. Their minimalism was contrasted by the exuberant maximalism of Maddison Caroll’s 19^th century pastiche costumes. UCLA went all out, and it was worth it.

Happy Birthday Wanda June @ the Gene Frankel Theatre

 

The Wheelhouse revival of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1970 screwball/absurdist fantasia on men, women and guns was perfect. The audience packed onto the stage roared until the lines that made everyone gasp. More relevant to 2018 than 1970.

 

Kate Maccluggage as Penelope provided the one touch of civilized behavior – which the play proceeded to dismiss. Has anyone else presented Odysseus’s homecoming so unsympathetically? Even Dante reserves a grudging admiration for his daring. Vonnegut will have none of that.

 

This production combined some characters in a way that seemed inevitable. Penelope became the ghost of Harold’s ex, Mildred, living it up in heaven. And Harold became the ghost of his victim Major Siegfried von Konigwald: “The woods were full of all kinds of nuts who were proud of some damn thing or other, and they all had guns. They were always looking for revenge. You find a way to bottle revenge – that’s the end of Schnapps und Coca-Cola.”

The spread of polychromy at the Getty Villa & the Met Breuer

 

I didn’t hate everything in the Met Breuer’s “Like Life: Sculpture, Color and the Body”: there was a statuette by El Greco (of all people), Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier’s over-the-top polymarble bust “Capresse des Colonies”, and good examples of Duane Hanson and John De Andrea.

 

But then I realized that I had seen this exhibit before, at the Getty Villa’s “The Color of Life: polychromy in sculpture from antiquity to the present” (March 6–June 23, 2008) that featured Hanson, De Andrea, El Greco’s statuette and Cordier’s “Capresse des Colonies”.

 

I remember the Getty show as compact and focused instead of gigantic and sprawling; witty rather than clever. Instead of freakshow hipster bait the jawdropper was a conjectural reconstruction of a statue of Augustus with its original (eyepopping) colors.

 

[Image: John De Andrea’s self-portrait in Oakland in 2016]

Mostly about pianos

Last February the highlight of the Green Umbrella concert was Julius Eastman’s piece with the name I don't want to repeat.

 

I don’t know what I expected but it wasn’t this. It’s minimalism but not the minimalism of long fine threads spun out and twined systematically; it’s the minimalism of kids banging a piano with two-note trills, over and over. It’s ferocious and insolent. The four pianists – Dynasty Battles, Michelle Cann, Joanne Pearce Martin, and Vicki Ray – understood their duty and delivered an overwhelming sound.

 

Then, in the last quarter, the trills subside into distinct lines, and the mood relaxes. But only a bit. It’s never nice, never entirely agreeable. It’s up there with the American piano epics – The Concord Sonata, Sonatas and Interludes, Night Fantasies – but alone, separate in its urgency.

 

A few weeks later, PianoSpheres presented “An Evening with Terry Riley and Gloria Cheng”. I’d seen Riley play before, but this was the moment I woke up and heard.

 

Cheng set the stage with works by Riley from the 1950s and the 1990s, demonstrating how Riley is too idiosyncratic for labels. His spikey postwar serialism (Two Piano Pieces 1958/1959) has a jazzy bounce, and later pieces (The Heaven Ladder, Book 7, 1994) recapitulate modes of the last century and a half (Brahms, Ravel, ragtime, stride, Ives, Monk, Webern, Cage, minimalism, trance, etc.) in a way that is genuinely epic while remaining genial.

 

“Genial epic” maybe an oxymoron but it’s the best description of Riley’s own solo piano performance. He followed Cheng with Simply M (2007) and Requiem for Wally (1996). In the program Cheng commented on Riley’s comportment at the piano. He holds his torso very still and steady. And even his arms, extended, are poised rather than slashing through the air. The variety of styles in his music is matched by the precisely gauged varieties of attack, sweetness/harshness, velocity/stillness.

 

The concert ended – and culminated – in the world premiere of Cheng Tiger Growl Roar (for four hands). It was a glorious roar.

 

Unfortunately, because Riley is a celebrity, Zipper Hall was full of Goops more interested in broadcasting their presence than attending to what was happening.

 

I understand that the custom of sitting quietly and listening intently is a relatively recent development, and confined to a narrow range of live performance events. I also understand that since the beginning of time people have been going to live performances for social, rather than aesthetic reasons.

 

Still, it’s a pain to have to struggle to hear Riley’s otherworldly music over idle chitchat about last night, celeb-spotting, and selfie- and video-taking.

 

It got so bad that – in the absence of ushers – a woman got up and slapped one offender so hard she dropped her video-taking phone. This did not result in a brawl, but fists were shaken and fingers were flipped for the rest of the show. Where were the ushers? The event organizers? Are we just supposed to put up with it, like Zipper Hall in the 2010s is the Anti-Club in the 1980s?

Mostly about cellos

 

JANUARY

Last January Susanna Mälkki led the LAPhil in the U.S. premiere of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s 1966 Concerto for cello and orchestra (and three dancers), en forme de pas de trois.

 

There was a lot going on even before the curtain went up. Robert deMaine, the scheduled cello soloist, dropped out, and was replaced by a team of three: the Phil’s own Ben Hong, plus guests Eric Byers, and Jacaranda veteran Timothy Loo. They needed three, according to the program insert, “due to the highly complex nature of the work.” Each took a movement: Hong did the Allegro, Byers the Adagio, and Loo the Blues and Coda.

 

The staging and the choreography on offer made BAZ’s specification of a dance element in the orchestra seem a bad idea. What was he thinking? Possibly he meant it as a comic/critical gesture, crashing two different genres of performance together in the same space. A collage of two activities typically separated? A satire of lack of space for creative work? Or it might have been an attempt to seduce the audience, in the way Cunningham’s dancing seduced audiences to listen to Cage’s music.

 

Whatever, what’s memorable is the concluding Blues and Coda with cello in dialogue with the bass, which sounds like a guitar. Then the piano and cimbalom jump in. Bebop ferocity and New York School whispers. Still, but not stopped.

 

It was nice to preface the concerto with Webern, and follow it with the with Richard Strauss; BAZ has a connections with both.

 

(There’s a good performance online by Heinrich Schiff, and the SWF Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden.)

 

FEBRUARY

Then in February, the LA Phil premiered Salonen’s Cello Concerto, with Yo-Yo Ma. Salonen’s music is always engaging, but this was shattering. The score called for the cello to produce exquisitely pure tones, astonishing static feedback, romps, elegies, and everything else, including whale calls. Ma made it seem natural, nothing to it. I need to hear it again. But who besides Ma can play it?

 

MARCH

In March, Ma was back with Emmanuel Ax and Leonidas Kavakos, playing the three Brahms trios. WDCH was packed, almost sold out, despite being Oscar Night.

 

The Trios were challenging but rewarding. The program, in ascending order of impressiveness, peaked with the Adagio of the revised #1 at Morton Feldman levels of slowness.

 

The audience went berserk. So they did an encore of another slow movement, the Andante from Schubert’s B flat Piano Trio. And so just after having spent all evening convincing us that Brahms was the most genial and impressive magician, this fragment cast Brahms in the shade. Worth it.

 

APRIL

This month, LA Phil did another Salonen premiere, “Pollux,” for a big orchestra. Twelve minutes of intricate colors and textures, a succession of moods, from relaxed to agitated. It seems it’s a work in progress, with a contrasting “Castor” forthcoming. It seemed a work in progress, especially when Dudamel followed it with Varèse’s Amériques. I wondered if the audience would rebel, but instead it roared.

 

Followed by another switchbacks – Shostakovich’s Symphony #5. Followed yet another – an encore of the Tristan & Isolde Prelude. Dudamel didn’t let the nine French horns go to waste.

Music theater notebook

 

 

October. L.A. Opera’s production of Bizet’s Pearl Fishers was set in a neo-realist shantytown flooded by global warming, populated by idlers in color-coordinated rags. The famous male duet "Au fond du temple saint" made less of an impression than Javier Camarena’s soliloquy, “À cette voix quel trouble agitait tout mon être?”

 

Halloween. L.A. Opera’s annual movie event at the Ace featured Philip Glass’s re-scored Belle et la Béte live, with the Philip Glass Ensemble. I don’t understand why Glass did this. Loving the movie would seem to imply not wanting to muck it up. Georges Auric’s quietly ecstatic original score seems unsurpassable. Moreover, Glass’s score erased the actors’ voices, eliminating a huge part of the movie’s charm. Cocteau was attuned to music and the visuals of his movie are accompanied by a careful composition of the actors’ voices. I remembered Jean Marais’s rasp, and despaired. And the farouche whispers of Josette Day, the contrapuntal screeching of Mila Parély and Nane Germon, Marcel André’s melancholy bass grumbling, …. In the Glass version, all the male voices sounded the same; all the female voices sounded the same. I didn’t even realize there were four singers till the bows at the end. The evening was redeemed by the after-party. A big, big shout-out to the brilliant young lady who came as one of Cocteau’s animated arm-chandeliers.

 

November. The director Thaddeus Strassberger framed Nabucco with an on-stage audience of very grand ladies with their military escorts, with the costumes and manners of the Austrian authorities of Milan at the time of the 1852 premiere. In keeping with the theme, the sets and costumes were clever reimaginings of 19^th century stage modes. Strassberger might have taken a hint from Visconti’s Senso (above). Whatever he was thinking, the conceit framed the story of separated lovers within the narrative context of an evil Queen, and crazy King, plus the larger political context. It was hard not to take this as a timely lesson in how to survive a crazy leader. Every detail of the action was vividly re-invented. When the time came for the chorus to sing the opera’s signature tune, “Va, pensiero,” the sets had spun around, and it was as if we were backstage, with the all the performers, watching the chorus – along with the dancers and stagehands - sing, “Oh my country, so beautiful, so lost.” Even at as the performers took their bows there was an ingenious gesture, as they unfurled banners and flags calling for unity against tyranny, to the scandal of the authorities watching on-stage. Verdi our contemporary.

 

February. Dudamel and Elkhanah Pulitzer and the L.A. Phil did Leonard Bernstein’s Mass (1971) at Disney Hall. It's hard to imagine a better production of this strange collage. A fable of a Celebrant whose vision is misunderstood by his audience. Their blindness leads to doubt, and then violent rejection – causing him to have a breakdown. Having reached bottom, it ends with a glimmer of hope for reconciliation. Which is to say, it’s about a symphony conductor …. There’s a lot of Sondheim in this (same year as “Follies”), but there’s a lot of Bernstein in Sondheim. The ballads and icily ironic choruses are well done. There’s also a lot of Varèse, Mahler, Britten, Berlioz and Stravinsky in the music. And the text appropriates not only liturgy, but Godspell, Auden, Eliot and Joan Baez. The high point was “Meditation #1”. Pulitzer staged it perfectly: a recuperative moment after the frenzy that preceded it. The Celebrant led one of the dancers onto the altar where she waved her hand over the huddled Street Chorus. She descended and they supported her in the air. It was the visualization of grace.

 

Later in February, the Disney Hall stage presented another piece from the same era, one without a speck of redemption. Salvatore Martirano’s L's G.A. (1967) for reciter (Ron Athey), tape, and film (Ron Nameth). Not outrage, but exasperated disgust at the corruption of words and ideas. A chilling disconnect between lovely sound of manipulated gongs and ghastly images of mummies and skulls, as Athey heroically howled the Gettysburg Address through a gas mask.

 

And then last Wednesday, back at Dorothy Chandler, for Gluck’s revised 1774 Paris version of his Orpheus and Eurydice. Fifteen years ago L.A. Opera presented the original version in a production by Lucinda Childs. That production was my first experience of opera as something that matters. During the first act of this new production, I felt that something like that tremendous experience was happening again. Orpheus (Maxim Mironov) and the Chorus (the Master Chorale) – who together do 90% of the singing – were radiant. But then it was sabotaged by the dances: inappropriate, empty gesticulating. Something else is required for the music that George Bernard Shaw described as a depiction of a world where, “virtue and effort are transcended: there is no need to be good or to strive upward any more: one has arrived, and all those accursed hygienics of the soul are done with and forgotten.”

Decades of The B-52s & Robert Rauschenberg

 

 

The end of January and the middle of February I got the chance to catch up with old friends - the B-52s at Night On Broadway, and Rauschenberg at SFMOMA.

 

The acquaintance with both began in Chicago, in the late ‘70s.

 

I heard Fred Schneider, Kate Pierson, and Cindy Wilson and company at B’Ginnings, shortly after their first album came out. I had not wanted to go - “novelty band” was my put-down - but I let myself get dragged along. Their focus and intensity astounded me. Nonsensical lyrics and dance beats became a life or death matter.

 

Around the same time I went to a big Rauschenberg show at the Art Institute. I approached this too with suspicion, but for different reasons. In this case, there was no revelation: the work was so over-familiar that I didn’t see it. Except for the epic Barge and the decorative Jammer fabrics, none it prompted any personal feelings.

 

Personal feelings didn’t come until twenty years later, when the Pace Gallery in Beverly Hills (now Niketown) showed gigantic pictures from his Anagram series.

 

This was when Rauschenberg hit me. The pictures seemed a synopsis of every traveler’s experience of any strange city, the composite of novelty and familiarity: the novel truck and the familiar fruit; the buildings and sky which are at once novel and familiar. The sensual impact was overwhelming: the creamy, fibrous fabric surfaces seemed like giant watercolors, with passages of luscious azure, cyanne, fuscha, lemon, azalea red-orange, amber …. I turned from picture to picture dizzy from the heat of the colors. From then on I was a committed fan. 

 

When I saw the B-52s again in the ‘90s it was different, naturally. But I admired them more than ever. There was something truly great about the way Fred and Kate shrieked and flung themselves about. They had been doing it for so long now, the danger was very great they might - through the same blind persistence that erodes mountains and evaporates oceans - acquire some facility in singing or dancing. But not at all. Indeed, from the frenzy with which they swept the crowd before them, I realized as never before, how bad dancing is really the key to their appeal. The new member of the group, Julie Brown, on her first tour, pursued a course of bad dancing with determination and diligent artfulness suggesting she had just read an interesting essay about the B-52’s in New Left Review.

 

Fast forward to 2018. I was in a better position to take in the range of Rauschenberg’s work than in 1978.

 

America’s heroic redneck, beatnik Chagall navigating through our collective heap of history, artifacts, culture, and commodities. Acknowledging it, not pretending it isn’t present, but not acting like it completely crushes out any space of freedom.

 

There’s a kind of transformative addition at work: 1 painting + 4 Wheels + 1 Bucket + 1 Chain + Miscellaneous brackets and boards = Gift for Apollo. Which equals what? A painting that stands up on its own, like a sculpture. Note the wheels overlap. And note the chain is attached to the rim of the bucket, not the handle. It’s not creating a new painting, but creating a different kind of thing – that has aspects of a painting, but is also a sculpture, also a toy, and a junkheap.

 

It’s not the Thing, but the Juxtaposition. The opposite of working towards coherence and continuity. Distraction as vision. Intent unfocus.

 

Likewise 2018 turned out to be a good year for the B-52s. it was a delight at Night on Broadway to see Cindy back, and hear – feel – full-on versions of “Mesopotamia,” “Party out of bounds,” “52 Girls,” and “Planet Claire”. Kate maintained the groove wholeheartedly. In a sign of the times, Fred snapped twice at the crowd for recording rather than experiencing it.

 

It was clear that the songs that got the crowd to put down their phones and dance were from the album that appeared almost forty years ago.

 

What must it feel like to repeat past triumphs, again and again?

 

Part of the appeal of their oldest songs is their combination of strict pop musical structure and thrown-together casualness. Four decades ago someone raised a laugh by mentioning “bikini whales.” And ever since they have been obliged to repeat that joke, again and again. It’s a compliment and a sign of love that audiences continue to demand it. But what does it feel like for them?

 

Earnest nonsense can have, as here, a durability outlasting soberer statements. “Here comes a stingray / There goes a manta-ray / In walked a jelly fish / There goes a dog-fish” remains evergreen as “The Dong with a luminous Nose!,” or a painting on rickety wheels. All gifts for Apollo.

 

 

[Image from www.rauschenbergfoundation.org]

Adam Tendler @ The Broad

 

Since there’s no money, popularity or prestige to be gained by it, John Cage recitals tend to be labors of love, hence the performances tend to be outstanding. Adam Tendler’s recital at the Broad last Wednesday was not only that and more.

 

The event organizer introduced him as someone “bringing Cage to a new generation.” It could be true. Tendler played it all as music.

 

Not that he made Cage sound like Debussy or Copland. No: Tendler’s intensely heartfelt performance succeeded in really making Cage sound like Cage and nobody else. There were jolting bangs, frostily aloof episodes, moments of What’s Going On confusion, but also constellations of exquisitely individualized sounds, dense foliage, glimpses of vast expanses. Are we finally getting over the stupid misconception that Cage’s compositions are conceptual art?

 

Tendler really grooved on the pre-chance works: The Suite for Toy Piano, Perilous Night, In a Landscape. His performance of The Seasons revealed a work to me that I had heard, but never listened to before. It’s a gesture of renunciation – complete, total, final. Just a tiny residue of pathos. It’s heartbreaking.

 

The best thing was three of the Music for Piano pieces from the early 1950s. They were accompanied by projections of Merce Cunningham dances, which were compelling, too, but I didn’t want to look right that moment; I wanted to listen. Patric Creagh translated some Giuseppe Ungaretti that describes the sounds: “Dashed from the heights of freedom / Down into scalding facts, / The dazzle and the rending.”

 

The Broad’s lobby is not the best place for recital, but Adam Tendler is not just a John Cage expert, he’s an expert at making the most unpromising venues work (see his endearing memoir of a zero-budget DIY tour of all 50 states.)

 

There are two more concerts coming up in this series.

 

[Image: Detail from the Villa Livia garden fresco, circa 20 B.C.E.]

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Joseph O'Neill's The Dog: a Novel

Edward St Aubyn's Dunbar

 

A nasty excellent surprise. It’s a gimmick for Hogarth Press – new fictions based on Shakespeare - but the result stands on its own merit.

 

St Aubyn tackling King Lear is almost too obvious. Our foremost anatomist of wealth and aristocratic connections that produce nothing but even more greed, envy, pissed away lives, and estrangement from humanity.

 

But on the other hand, in the Patrick Melrose novels, St Aubyn maintained an anti-Shakespearean clarity and concision. Most of the novels follow the classical unities of time and place. Likewise, he even tends to keep conventionally “dramatic” bits of the story between chapters (or between volumes). More Phèdre than King Lear. Hence the pleasure of following St Aubyn as he adapts the material.

 

He’s clearly in his element with the horrible daughters. Here’s a glimpse inside Abby’s mind:

 

She had hunted by helicopter before—gazelle in Arabia, wild bull in New Zealand, hog in Texas—it was something that ostentatious people kept thrusting on her as a special kind of treat, but to be honest it was absolutely deadly being trapped in one of those swaying, shuddering machines, wearing headphones and a pair of goggles while spewing hundreds of empty shells a minute into the pristine countryside below. It made one feel like such a litterbug. The animals were rather pathetic as well, trying to escape the cacophony of flying metal by setting off on what might seem to them a virtuoso gallop, but from an aerial vantage point just looked like a bad choice made in slow motion.

 

A “step backwards” if you will, to the world of his Patrick Melrose novels. But are we really done with the 1%? Have the super-rich subsided into harmless docility since the last PM novel came out in 2011?

Pacific Standard Time: Latin America/Los Angeles

 

This last edition of Pacific Standard Time was for me an introduction – not a reinterpretation or re-contextualization. I was proud of myself for recognizing the names of three artists (out of 100+) featured in “Radical Women”. My awareness of post-pre-Columbian Peru was limited to Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo” and ”The Things I Say are True“ by Blanca Varela, so it was good to walk into a room and get blasted by Victoria Santa Cruz’s “Me Gritaron Negra”.

 

That kind of discovery kept happening, at show after show. I had never heard of Raúl Lozza or Eduardo Abaroa,(his “Total Destruction of the Anthropology Museum”) or the composers Diana Syrse and Felipe Waller, or the photographer Gustavo di Mario, or the sculptor Nadín Ospina. I don’t know how I lived before seeing two gloriously witty and naughty shorts: Gloria Camiruaga’s “Popsicles” and José Ángel Toirac’s “Opus”

 

It helped that the exhibitions were cleverly curated and well-installed. “Found in Translation” and “Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney” were, of the shows I saw, the only ones that really engaged with the overarching theme of Latin American connections with Los Angeles.

 

The Getty’s spectacular “Golden Kingdoms” justified including art before Columbus. Their other offerings contrasted nicely: the jazzy jewel-like abstractions of “Making art concrete” and the sprawling cultural and historical documentation of “Photography in Argentina”.

 

“Condemned to be Modern” took an unconventional topic – artist’s reactions to modernist architecture, usually imposed by totalitarian regimes – and created a festival of black humor.

 

Two of the best shows approached LA/LA theme obliquely:

 

The Huntington’s “Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin” was at first glance daunting: lots of glass cases with old books propped open inside them. But if you took the time to look and let your eyes adjust! A set of books from 1554 & 1645 with armadillo illustrations! Another vitrine with 16^th century books about tobacco. The show-stopper was a set of tempera-on-paper paintings for the Matis expedition 1783-1816, by Jose Maria Carbonell, et al. Each specimen is presented in a way that not only makes its form clear, but also creates a superb decoration. Plus there were first-class curiosities like “His Majesty’s Giant Anteater”, without doubt the most likeable picture to come out of the studio of Anton Mengs (or was it really painted by ... Goya!?)

 

I confess to uncritically loving everything in “Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.” This betrays a bit of nostalgia – I remembered some of this  stuff from the 1980s. But it's also completely relevant as a reminder of How Not to be Oppressed, and How Not to be Depressed. Use razzing and ridicule to make up your own culture, for the fun of it. Not commercial, not academic, not esoteric. Political in the sense of aware of cultural and economic conflicts, but free of moralizing outrage. No party allegiance to defend. In short, a utopia of love, laughter and irreverence. A dream curtailed for too many by AIDS: Mundo Meza, Carlos Almaraz, Ray Navarro, Bruce Rapp, Teddy Sandoval, Jack Vargas, ….

 

[Image: Free buttons! Available at some of the PST LA/LA exhibitions]