Art: Catherine Opie at the Guggenheim

The breadth of Catherine Opie's oeuvre is so extreme, and so disparate, that without knowing this exhibition is her mid-career retrospective, one might mistake it for a poorly-curated amalgamation of six different photographers' work. But to anyone with a bit of art historical background, what quickly emerges as the binding principle of Opie's work is an insistence on grounding deep conceptualism in deep aestheticism. This may be why she is my new artistic hero.

Though I'm not, nor have I ever been, part of the queer and/or body-modification subculture (a subculture with which Opie is a part of and with which she engages intently in more than half the pictures in this show), I am from California, and I do think this helps me identify with her pictures (Opie is based in LA, and California's own particular aesthetic is a strong presence in much of her work as well)—in addition to inuring me to the "shock" of her more sensational portraits of friends who play with gender and body modification (tattoos, piercings, carvings, etc.) There's no doubt that the early Portraits (the most stilted, and, on the whole, least interesting pictures in the show), shots of nearly-nude or suited up men and women who aren't readily identifiable as either, posed against bright backdrops reminiscent of the colors of the gay flag, could be construed as threatening, weird, or even degenerate by an insulated viewer. For me, they simply remind me of home.

And "home" is a, perhaps now the, key concept for Opie. These early Portraits are of her friends, who comprise a community. They inspire an unexpected contrast with Opie's Houses, portraits themselves in a way, of the fronts of Southern California homes built in the 1950s in wealthy areas; there is something equally as campy about their now almost quaint architecture and hedges (think The Flintstones) as the piercings and tattoos and carefully crafted 'dos of Opie's friends: an intensely constructed identity, a surface that masks the inside, to protect it, to defend it, to fake out potential aggressors. Opie might make a different argument, one of opposition: in the Portraits, her friends reveal their innermost secrets, wear their proverbial hearts on their sleeves; the houses, in contrast, seem pristine from the outside, but mask whatever darkness may lurk inside.

Despite the closed gates of the Houses, Opie's relationship with the home and domesticity is actually very healthy—in fact, all of her work pulsates with a vigorous good-health, a comfort, a vitality that one might not expect to see in work that documents a subculture often associated with suffering, darkness, torture, physical and emotional pain. These are not Nan Golden's punk-rock smears of disaffected youth. These are painstakingly made (most often large format) photographs that engage with something seemingly different to show that it is actually the same. This is most apparent in the Domesticity series, in which Opie photographs lesbian couples, sometimes with their children, in their homes, including a few of her own son in hers. She describes a relationship with the snapshot in these photographs, but it is clear that in some of them, particularly one of her son sitting on the floor, bathed in light, shot over the remains of breakfast food on the table, she is also deeply engaged with the Dutch still life painting of domesticity.

The relationship with art history, with painting in particular, is of key importance in what I think are her strongest pictures: the Large Format Polaroids of performance artist Ron Athey and Darryl Carlton/Divinity Fudge. These are perhaps the most affronting photographs; in one, Athey lies in a bed, his head at the bottom of the larger-than-life photograph, his arm raised and his hand delicately curled, twenty hypodermic needles knitted through his tattooed flesh. But the sheets are golden, and the focus fades in the background (the top of the picture, and the bottom of the bed), where his ankles are strapped with leather thongs to the bedpost. Like the others in the series, this is a highly baroque image. In another, we see Athey from the rear, his venous, muscular legs planted in black stiletto heels, one leg up on a platform; he pulls up the voluminous skirts of a tightly-bodiced gown to reveal his tattooed ass, a luxuriantly long string of white pearls issuing forth from his anus (anus not shown). The backdrop is of patterned silk; again, the focus is muted, the colors warm, dark, opulent. At last, an interesting photographic engagement with the history of portraiture that peaked with Ingres' sumptuousness, an aesthetic wealth that draws us in and comforts us, while our stomachs struggle with the needled flesh, the BDSM implications, our desires, our fears, our titillation, without ever being cheap or vulgar or even offensive; this is not Vito Acconci—there is no affront.

Opie is extremely aware of what she is doing here. She shows three self-portraits together; two of which I saw for the first time in an art history class, at which time I formed a strongly unfavorable opinion of Opie, which opinion has clearly reversed now that I have seen the rest of her work. The earliest of these portraits is of her bare back, into which a childish drawing of a house and two female stick figures holding hands have been carved into her skin, which is beaded with blood. The second is from the front; the word "pervert" has been carved, in an elaborate, filigreed typeface, across her chest—it bleeds; her bare, sagging breasts have nipples pierced through with fat bullets; her white stomach is doughy and hangs unabashedly over the waist of her pants (we see just the top of them; she's seated, and the picture is from the waist up). Her entire head is enclosed in a black leather mask/hood, fastened tightly around her neck. Her arms are laced with hypodermic needles, more than twenty on each side. Together, these two pictures were disturbing and revolting when I saw them in my art history book at the age of nineteen. This was sickness; this was an affront. But the third self-portrait of the series changes the first two—narrativizes them in a way. The third self-portrait is, in art historical terms, a Madonna and Child. It is Catherine Opie, again photographed from the waist up, again topless, but this time neither pierced nor bleeding (though tattooed, and still wearing the white raised scar of the word "pervert" marked indelibly across her chest, which is somehow, now that it ceases to bleed, beautiful), holding in her big, brown, capable hands, the perfectly marble, nearly translucent body of her blond baby bay, just over a year old, whose hand and mouth sucks on her breast (perhaps the first anatomically-correct suckling Madonna and Child). The tone is silent, holy, rapturous even. It is whole. In spite of Opie's fluid understanding of gender (she states that some days she feels like a boy, and some days like a girl, then clarifying that she feels more like a girl since she's had a baby), there seems to be a melting away of anger, of rage, and a shift inward, that happens here, which frames the previous two portraits differently, as part of a story, of something that Opie wanted, which she wondered whether she was entitled to have, and which she finally took, thereby finding peace. This is somewhat reductive, because there are serious implications to this narrative (can a woman only find peace in motherhood? Must one be a mother to be a real woman? Can a woman out of touch with her femininity be "cured" by bearing children?). These are all dangerous potential interpretations of Opie's personal narrative, which she is brave enough (some may say reckless enough) to imply, and against which she does not protect, but I'll leave that to be your discussion question when you go to the show.

Meanwhile, I will make the dramatic shift that Opie makes, and that the layout of the museum affirms, and discuss Opie's. . . dare I say less personal work. Perhaps it's safer to call it her more minimalist work, or her more structuralist work, or her work focused outside of, rather than on the site of, the body. This is work that consists of two paired photographic sequences of Ice Houses and Surfers, black and white panoramic shots of Wall Street, Chicago, and Mini-Malls shot in LA, and tiny platinum prints of Freeways. The Houses and Surfers, shown together in a corridor-shaped room, where they face each other, are reminiscent of the German work that comes from the Bechers' students: large-format color pictures made with a cool, detached eye, tracing a receding line of, in one series, ice houses in a field of snow and, in the other, wetsuited surfers, waiting in a flat, gray ocean for the next wave. The pictures are about waiting (the surfer waits for waves, the photographer waits for the shot), and about the uniconographic. They are steeped in the minimalist aesthetic (if you squint, they could be the white canvases of Robert Ryman). The Freeways, conversely, are steeped in the history of photography. They are tiny, stunning platinum prints, a kind of marriage between the tilted architecture of Rodchenko and the yellowed salt and albumin prints of Middle Eastern ruins taken by Francis Frith and Maxime Du Camp in the 1850s. If content-related anxiety distracted us at all from Opie's technical mastery in looking at her other photographs, we see it here in its pure form: silent slabs of concrete curving across a jewelbox panoramic frame. The highways are California's sphinxes, and so for all their unadulterated aestheticism, these pictures are as richly conceptual documents as any of Opie's others, perhaps just less viscerally so. But they are, like most all of her work, stunningly beautiful.

Movies: Back Door to Heaven (1939)

By far the weirdest, and the most absurd, of the four films I saw as part of MoMA's Hollywood on the Hudson series, Back Door to Heaven begins in a small town's one-room schoolhouse. For graduation day, each student (they appear to be about ten years old) must perform some little piece that relates to what they plan to do with their lives. The premise preposterous already, one little boy who is to be a lawyer recites Portia's speech from The Merchant of Venice; another, who is to be a banker, does arithmetic in his head. A boy who is to be an artist draws something on the chalkboard. A pretty little girl sings a song (because, as the schoolteacher brightly points out, women can have careers too these days!) and a boy, who we saw moments before with his alcoholic father and well-meaning but brow-beaten mother, who are dirt-poor, stands up and plays a song on a harmonica. After this, the sheriff arrives; it seems the boy stole the harmonica from the window of the hardware store, and so he is sent off to reform school, where he promptly engages in a fistfight with the local ringleader.

A placard then tells us that "time goes by. . ." and we now see the boy grown into a man, washing floors in a prison. Again, he gets into a fistfight. But, he and two other prisoners are set free one day, having done their time, and they go back to visit his old town. No one is doing so well as they had hoped (except for the banker, who now runs the whole town)—the lawyer hasn't ever tried a case, the artist is an alcoholic who trades his skill for liquor at the local bar, the girl is a somehow still chaste, but incredibly lonely singer in a dive. When the hero remeets the singer, their childhood affection is rekindled and they are instantaneously in love, but his no-good friends drag him down; they plan a robbery in a restaurant, and when he goes to stop them, he walks in just as they're shooting up the place. Now he's wanted for murder.

His old friends try to help him—the lawyer agrees to defend him for free—but he's found guilty nonetheless. He escapes from prison long enough to join the school reunion the banker is throwing for his classmates under the pretense of benevolence but actually only for positive PR, as he's tearing down the old schoolhouse and forcing their old teacher into retirement. Everyone at the reunion (all five of them?) are so happy to see the hero, and so sad to hear him shot to death by the police after he says goodbye and walks out the door, in possibly the most morbid ending to any movie ever.

Movies: Crime Without Passion (1934)

This film stands apart from most other old movies, because the screenplay, written by Ben Hecht, intends not to entertain, but to instruct (though it lacks the hokey didacticism of Back Door to Heaven). The hero is Lee Gentry, a standard Hechtian (or Randian, if you're unfamiliar with Hecht—the approximation is close enough) übermensch, a misanthropic, calculating criminal defense lawyer with little respect for anything but the power of his own mind.

He no longer cares for Carmen, a cabaret singer he's dated for two years (having stolen her from his once friend, Eddie White), and he's moved onto a sturdy blonde, but he can't seem to break it off with Carmen—she is too melodramatic and he hasn't the heart. But his blonde demands it, and so he crafts a scheme, to "catch" her cheating on him with Eddie White (though she did nothing of the sort) and thereby grant himself the right to break it off.

This plan works, until he gets a raving telegram from Carmen, in which she threatens suicide. At her house, he and she fight over a pistol, and he accidentally shoots her—she falls down dead. The phone rings. An apparition of his ego appears, and instructs him; answer the phone, but mask your voice. Pocket the gun; pick up your crumpled boutonniere; go to the theater to create an alibi. Gentry seems to have structured things perfectly, but, in a Dostoevskyan twist, he is wracked with guilt, and confesses to the blonde. Revolted, she leaves him.

Again, the apparition appears, explaining to Gentry that this is perfect; he can now go to Carmen's theater for her show—demonstrating that he doesn't know she has been killed. But there, things don't go well. He runs into another showgirl who says she saw him at the theater when she was waiting for her new boyfriend—but an hour later than the time Gentry insists it was (which is the time he was in Carmen's apartment). Worried, he decides to silence her with romance, madly promising her furs and jewels, if only she'll leave with him immediately.

Cut to the dressing room, where Carmen is lying down, but insisting she's well enough to go on—she's not dead at all! Only had been in a faint all along. Back outside, while Gentry's hands are on the showgirl, her new boyfriend comes in; it's Eddie White, again. The two men scuffle and Carmen's gun, still tucked in Gentry's pocket, goes off. Eddie White is dead; Gentry is immediately arrested—it's an open and shut case with one hundred live witnesses and a clear motive.

At the police station, Gentry, alone for a minute, receives another visit from the apparition; it tells him to kill himself immediately, rather than wait for the chair. Gentry puts the gun barrel in his mouth, but his hands shake; he can't do it. The police officer confiscates the weapon, and the film is over, with the certain implication of Gentry's death by electrocution.

Hecht was, for a time, my favorite author (the time that I was between 17-21 years old, wore black ball gowns and Victorian boots, and saw nothing wrong with Ayn Rand's conception of the world). There is still something about his self-punishing snootiness (like all his heroes, he was too intelligent for his society, too good for this earth, and therefore suffered suffered suffered) with which I still guiltily identify, something that I don't want to be but feel that I can't help being. It is the thing that made me ask to play Lady Macbeth in grade school Shakespeare productions, the thing that made me read Nietzsche in college. Like Hecht, I fight it, lest I end up like one of his sick characters.

Books: Budapest, by Chico Barque

These Bush years have made it both easy and fashionable to be a kind of self-loathing American, but a book like Budapest reminds me that I'm still proud to be patriotic, so far as literature goes. This is not to say that the US doesn't churn out an unfathomable amount of crap, only to say that the stuff that parades around the rest of the world as literature is, in fact, crap.

So. That last statement is completely unfair and uncalled for, and demeans anything of worth I might actually say in this venue. Allow me to qualify it. There is a kind of pervasive romanticism in non-American novels; Barque (who is Brazilian) writes with the same ebullient affection (as in tenderness, although it does make him, to an American reader at least, seem rather affected as well, or, to a British reader (we'll include the always-sound British with the Americans in this us-vs-them game), soft-headed) as Mann, Proust, Marquez, Kundera. That's company I'm certain he would be proud to keep—each of them famous and loved around the world, even by Americans. But time and again, I hate reading them. There's just a total dearth of. . . moxie, that ultra-American je ne sais quoi.

Otherwise, Barque's novel includes all the things I usually go for; it's a textbook post-modern novel (the pieces are out of order and have that déjà vu, mobius-strip quality thanks to the repetition of certain phrases) about a writer (actually, a ghostwriter: even more po-mo!). On a seemingly random stop in Budapest, he falls in love with the Hungarian language, and, belying a disaffection his romanticism papers over, he picks up and moves to that freezing, foreign city, leaving behind his wife, his son, and his post (an agency which has already begun to self-populate with doppelgangers who manifest his redundancy). With years that pass like days in this short, swift book, he masters Hungarian to the point that he is ready to do his old work in his new language. He writes a poem for the most famous of aging Hungarian poets, frozen with writer's block. And then, he gets kicked out of Budapest, for never having acquired proper papers. The twist of fate that ends his story is recognition, though, for a book he didn't write. After having written hundreds of books, articles, speeches, and even a poem under the names of other famous authors, politicians, travelers, etc., someone has published, under his name, a book he did not write, for which he is granted a hero's welcome back to Budapest, and even into the arms of his Hungarian lover (who was at first his language teacher), who had spurned him in all the years between.

This is an efficient and interesting plot, but one that I'd rather read in the neurotic prose of Roth or McEwen, or even the catty, clever prose of Evelyn Waugh, with whose gotcha! endings the finish of Budapest quite fits. But each of these men write with a kind of chill, completely without the blind romanticism (the kind that comes of sucking on nostalgia tea bags) of Barque and his globe-trotting compatriots.

Books: Beneath the Underdog, by Charles Mingus

Mingus' music discloses all his roiling passion, pride, and sorrow, but his book explains, in an equally compelling and personal language, most of what's behind it, if maintaining the mystique of personal mythology common to monomaniacs and brilliant artists alike. I never knew anything about him but what I could hear: the pulsing streets of New York, the swaying of slave's spirituals, the lone, cool thumping of a bass that sets the tone for a hundred wailing elephantine souls. His records can't be mistaken for anyone else's. But though he came to New York, I recognize our crazy city in his music because I know the city. I don't know a thing about Watts, in LA county, where Mingus grew up, except that it's poor, and that it's black. But it seems that's where Mingus' soul first started to roil.

The way he tells it, three things make Mingus Mingus (and this is not to be confused with the way he starts his book, "I am three"): sex, race, and music. I list sex first because he addresses it early; he seems to have an understanding of himself as a sexual being before seeing himself as a racial being, and before he ever puts his hands on a musical instrument, sitting in the sandbox as a toddler, pouring hot sand into his pants because it feels good. This childhood sexuality doesn't bother me, though his descriptions of his sexual self as an adult will be the undoing of this otherwise honest and unsettling memoir. His uncurbed sexuality starts causing trouble right away (called a pervert on the playground with pants full of sand), particularly when he falls in love with the untouchably beautiful Lee-Marie, who plays cello with him in the county junior orchestra. They can't be more than ten or eleven, but they embark together on a kind of endless love that will last all his life (though he'll bed hundreds of other women, and love them too) and her's, though it will destroy her eventually; her parents forbid her to see him, and so he sates his sexual needs elsewhere, pining for her in her tower all the while.

Meanwhile, he's playing the cello by ear, having been taught enough by a vagabond music teacher to do just that, but not to read music. This will set him up for another kind of rage, because every time a conductor realizes the young musician can't read, the racist epithets will spew, the drawn conclusion always being that "Dumb niggers can't read." Soon, he trades in his cello for a bass and starts playing along with the radio, the notes tuned in reverse until someone clues him in otherwise. I don't doubt that the insults were unbearable for the young man, excoriated for memorizing the treble clef when the bass isn't played on those lines, but I also don't doubt that his incredibly free musical soul gained more by learning less in early years. Even if he did get it from both sides: called a nigger by the whites and called a yellow shit by the darker, prouder blacks. It's tricky for a white girl this decade to engage with Mingus' supercharged discussion of race; 1850 seems so long ago, but when Mingus was a kid in Watts, his grandparents, all the old people around, remembered slavery, had been slaves.

Things get stickier when Mingus, a grown man now and playing clubs in New York and LA starts, against his better judgements, following the examples of his fellow musicians and stringing wealthy, white women along for their money. This evolves into a short stint as a pimp, with which Mingus never seems quite comfortable, although his (white, rich) lover at the time, Donna, seems to embrace the life freely. This is where the book, as previously mentioned, begins to derail, since Mingus, committed to Donna, decides nevertheless to "rescue" Lee-Marie (whom, we find out, he did marry when they were 18, but whose parents separated them, had their own daughter's tubes tied against her will, and threatened to commit her if she tried to see him again). A few gunshots later, he has his childhood love back in his arms, and brings her home to Donna; he is to have two wives, and they are both to be his whores, working the desires of wealthy men as a team to bring in money to support their man. As soon as he brings Lee-Marie home, she and Donna each are captivated by the other's beauty, and as excited as two girls on the first day of kindergarten who decide to be best friends; they immediately go to bed together.

I've insisted here before that memoir need not follow objective historical truth* as closely as a tack stitch follows a hemline. There is a validity to an author's fantasy life; his desires disclose as much (if not more) as his actions, and the way he wants to be seen says more about him as the way he actually looks. Thus, I found little to criticize in Mingus' tall tale of a trip to Mexico; he and another black musician drive down with a pair of white, wealthy Southerner women, where they check into a hotel and Mingus proceeds to hire two dozen Mexican prostitutes for an orgy in their room, each of which he satisfies before the night is over. These faceless, nameless women are the stuff of fantasy, meaningful only in reference to a place, a night, their sheer numbers. But for Lee-Marie, a woman who, for Mingus, at least within the confines of his book, most closely approximates an angel, who refused to ever so much as date another, both before and after their ill-fated marriage, to suddenly, happily, become not only a bisexual, but also a prostitute, is preposterous. Equally, for Donna, who to that moment had barely heard of Lee-Marie, who had Mingus to herself, and who had no idea her man was out gunfighting over an old flame, to welcome Lee-Marie with tender affection rather than jealousy, is preposterous. The three of them going to bed together, living together until Donna and Lee-Marie eventually leave Charles for a shared life of high-class prostitution, is the stuff of a different kind of fantasy, one that doesn't fit, one that shocks us so strongly out of our softened state that we call into question every other thing we took for granted.

All the while, there is a taught undercurrent of spirituality (what I would call pseudo-spirituality if speaking of any person I respected less); Mingus narrates his story in a simultaneous first and third person, as if he writes as a disembodied soul looking down on his body as it moves through the physical world, and he in fact describes a few out of body experiences he had, his soul trying to leave his body forever, to die, before due. He does it even as a baby, then as an adult studying yoga (during which eight-month period, he claims, he remains completely abstinent and free of sexual desire, though he doesn't explain what shook him out of it). For a skeptical reader like me, this works better as a narrative device than an actual spiritual discourse (yoga silences the soul's caterwauling; no yogis write Mingus music). No matter what he says in his book, you hear it in his music; his soul is screaming, restless, raging, reaching—always reaching heavenward with arms and open mouth, but tied to the ground from the waist down, his viscera, his balls, feet kicking.

*Perhaps a construct itself. . .

Movies: Animal Crackers (1930)

Animal Crackers is a madcap comedy, a Marx Brothers film (my first ever) in which I probably only caught one in every five of Groucho's jokes (one needs, I think, subtitles, or a screenplay, to catch them all). The plot revolves around a wealthy woman's unveiling of a famous painting she has purchased, but the painting is so famous that not only has one visitor to the party made a copy in art school—two have. And both get the same idea to switch their canvas out for the original, the first simply as a practical joke, the second in order to gain recognition as a talented painter (his is as good as, if not better than, the original), and thereby gain the right to marry the girl he loves (who is of higher social stature than he is, although she does love him). In the midst of all this picture switching, Chico and Harpo do some switching and stealing of their own, bringing even more confusion and madcappery to the scene. By the end, all three canvasses are recovered (all of which had been stolen by Harpo, who had also has obscene amounts of stolen flatware and silver tucked into his coat), and the film ends happily.

I never realized how much of Woody Allen's schtick (particularly in the early films) was taken part and parcel from Groucho Marx.

Books: The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; and The High Window; by Raymond Chandler

Hardboiled is, of course, the word to encapsulate all three of Chandler's first three novels conveniently packaged by the Everyman's Library into one volume, but to write it off at just that is to miss all the fun: the long-legged showgirls with big, red mouths; the zoot-suited gangsters who are as wide as they are tall; the spoiled heiresses and their limp-wristed male companions; the old drunk women and their window-peeping neighbors; the suspicious cops who puff cigars like religion; the rain, the whiskey, the cigarettes; the pistols, the blackjacks, the laudanum; the smutty photos, the blackmailers, and the private detective who begrudgingly toils in their seamy underworld.

Chandler is far better than your average noir hack writer, though he makes some occasional slips that at first had me wondering (commas where semicolons ought to be, and a habit of using the same word twice in one sentence, as if in too much of a rush to think of a synonym or more elegant construction).* That said, he proves himself with the wildest off-color metaphors and ironic similes (something like "the old bag was as fresh as a two-dollar whore at sunrise," which I actually just made up myself, since I didn't flag the book for the best ones while I was reading).

The Big Sleep is his best-known for a reason; not only is it the novel in which Chandler introduces Philip Marlowe, but it's the one with the most plot twists (and naked ladies), surrounding the murder of a (old, gay) man who runs an old-fashioned underground lending library of pornography. Farewell, My Lovely, by contrast, starts with an exchange of a rare jade necklace for ransom, and The High Window, a stolen rare gold coin. Jewels and money, as important as they are, are nowhere near as titillating as pornography, and while the other two novels contain their share of gangsters, hustlers, and broads, Chandler does seem to have lost some steam (plot-wise, never language-wise) as he wrote on. Maybe if The Big Sleep weren't so brilliant, we wouldn't have noticed.

*Witness: "He wrestled it around on the highway and drove back towards town along a three-lane highway washed clean by the rain. . ." That sentence would be a lot snappier without the phrase "on the highway."

Movies: Laughter (1930)

This is your great-grandma's rom-com (with a less happy ending, because old films are way less apologetic than new films). A beautiful showgirl has married into money, but can't stand her older husband (he spends all his time tallying his stocks and bonds with his male secretary) and still carries the torch for a piano playing composer she knows from her dancehall days, while a sculptor friend, from the same bohemian crowd, still carries the torch for her. Her fun-loving, flapper stepdaughter is only a few years younger than she is, and over a madcap weekend, the flapper and sculptor fall in love (with the help of a bit of booze), while the showgirl and piano player are playing house in a shuttered summer home after getting caught in a rainstorm during a country drive in a convertible automobile that ran out of gas (this is the movie's best scene; in order to warm up, they strip to their skivvies and dress up in the white and brown bearskin rugs found on the living room floor—complete with heads, which they wear as hoods!).

Things fall apart at a masquerade ball when the showgirl runs to stop her stepdaughter from eloping with the sculptor (who then kills himself), and the showgirl finally admits to her husband that she cannot, for all the diamonds in the world, remain married to him. She and the composer move to Paris, and we see them at a sidewalk cafe, happy at last, until the blinking diamonds on a wealthy woman's wrist catch the showgirl's eyes, and we see that she is beginning to bore of her composer, who is still reworking the same riff he was working back in New York. The grass, she reminds us, is always greener elsewhere.

Politics: The Debate (catfight!)

I read an amusing article before the debate predicting the role that body language would play, which concluded with the fantastic line "a robot can't dance with a cat." While Obama did have a certain feline lassitude when he wasn't speaking, comfortably draping himself against the too-tall stool with a smooth grin that barely concealed the canary feathers between his teeth, McCain was less a robot than a different kind of cat: an exhausted, mangy lion at a third-rate traveling sideshow of the kind that probably hasn't existed since the 1930s, pacing his 6x8 wheeled cage, apt to bite any hand that dare poke through the bars, then realizing all too late he doesn't have teeth anymore.

Theater: The 39 Steps at the Court Theater

Though I took a college class on Hitchcock and watched more than half his movies, I never saw The 39 Steps, which perhaps made this production all the more fun: I had no idea what I was getting into, aside from some kind of mysterious comedy in which a mere four actors play 150 roles. Yes, a mere four actors play 150 roles.

This is even more impressive when the show starts and we see that one actor plays only one role, and one actress plays only three, leaving the other two to handle the remaining 146, often with the sparest of costume changes (the flip of a hat, say, or in one case, the turning of the body from right to left, to show one half clad in trenchcoat, the other in suit jacket).

The nail-biting hilarity begins when bored bachelor Richard Hanney goes out to the theatre one night and is followed home by a mysterious woman in a dark suit and hat, vamp-red lipstick, and an unplaceable Eastern European accent. That night, she's murdered in his apartment, and he sets off to complete her mission (she had disclosed to him before dying that she was a secret agent attempting to stop the export of military information, and that this would require a trip to Scotland to see The Professor). With little more information than this, Hanney sets off to save his country, chased all the while by the Scotland Yard as the murderer of the mysterious lady left in his apartment with a knife in her back. Madcap mayhem ensues, of course, as Hanney tries to escape the heat, find the Professor, and then escape from the Professor once he realizes said Professor is playing for the other team. The answer to the mystery ("What are the 39 Steps?") plays out back again in the theater, once Hanney has been in and out of police custody and picked up a nervous but lovely young blonde on the way.

What makes this production so fantastic (aside from the witty script and the positively brilliant performances by all four cast members, the protean pair in particular, with their special chemistry) is its whimsical candidness about the theater. The set is extremely spare, and the actors double as the crew, but they manage to use their bodies and costumes as props (lifting and shaking a jacket to demonstrate wind-flapping motion during a chase scene atop a "moving train"), and, when that won't do, they drop a backlit scrim and create a shadow tableau, with little puppets (complete with a Hitchcock cameo), flashing lights, and at one moment, descending whirly-propeller planes (a reference to North By Northwest! ((There's a Psycho shower shout-out, too, and tons others if you keep your eyes peeled (and ears: the line "The lady vanished!" references, of course, the Hitchcock flick The Lady Vanishes))).