Let's make a movie. We'll have a good guy, Nico, a young, good-looking Greek guy who just got back from a trip around the world, who can't wait to see his parents, and his blonde fiance. We'll need a bad guy. Let's make him. . . a money-grubbing produce salesman, who will stop at nothing to maximize his profits on tomatoes and apples.
Wait, you don't think that's a good idea? An evil produce salesman, who let Nico's dad (a produce trucker) lose his legs in an "accident" rather than pay for his truckload of tomatoes? Who will do the same thing to Nico, pay a whore fifty bucks to separate him from his truck, get a couple of thugs to steal his wallet? Jules Dassin thought it was a plenty good idea, so made Thieves' Highway, perhaps the only film noir ever set in California's sunny breadbasket, in which the blonde turns out to be more money-grubbing than the whore (Dassin's got a thing for lofty fallen women). Filled with wrinkled, scummy truckers, and produce-salesman-henchmen that use a small axe as their weapon of choice, this isn't the finest Dassin film you'll see, but it's not quite a midnight movie, either.
The Naked City, on the other hand, is a New Yorker's noir. Narrated by a delightfully hardboiled voiceover, the film zeros in on one murder case, while reminding us that it's only one of the city's 8,000 stories. A beautiful dress model is dead (we see her murderers shaking her body at the film's beginning, while the narrator flies over the city, stopping in on the strangers who will eventually all find themselves tangled in the plot). An old investigator and his green partner need to find out why. The woman had a male friend who was—surprise!—engaged to her best girl friend. The best girl friend had no idea her fiance even know the victim, much less that the two of them were running a jewel-thieving scam in cahoots with a fancy-pants Park Avenue doctor and a scummy Lower East Side boxer: one to provide the apartments to rob, the other to do the robberies. Dassin's cross-section of the city—rich, poor, innocent, guilty, jaded, naive—is the ice cream sundae, and the shots of old New York's buildings and street corners, elevated train tracks and waterfront docks, are the cherry on top. The Naked City is one of the top five New York Noirs I've seen.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Books: The Runaway Soul, by Harold Brodkey
Woe to the source that foisted this brick upon me—luckily for it, I have no recollection which it was. After carrying this book to and from China (where I did not so much as crack it open), I finally did start reading—more than a month ago, and though I considered giving up often, I did finish it last night. But I've gained little.
Brodkey writes like a flatulent Philip Roth with Proustian ambition. His sensual moments are stunning; few write about the men's sexual experience with such (physical) tenderness. But these passages, even though some of them are quite long, are buried in a wasted landscape of mud, arduous prose about nothing that goes nowhere, the heaps of erasure dust of bildungsromans from Roth, Updike, Bellow (The Runaway Soul makes Augie March read like Flannery O'Connor).
This could have been an unforgettable 300 page novel; Brodkey managed to keep me spellbound through the first two hundred pages (in which the narrator masturbates (once) and takes a shit (once)—that's right, nothing else happens, and it's spellbinding). Had he kept his narration to his narrator—to youth, to exploration, to sensation—rather than veering off into familial drama, an older sister's spoiled tantrums, a mother on her deathbed, a father's love of stock phrases—had he kept his focus, Brodkey could have written a modern classic. Instead, he's created one of my least favorite books containing my favorite sentences.* Quite a feat.
E.g. "Thinking is a shadow fruit, shadows and weirdness in an electric orchard, blossoming with mirage after mirage, crumblingly real, then shadow paintings, mock photographs in black-and-white, then a mere sickly sense, and exposed underpainting, the overlay lost."
Brodkey writes like a flatulent Philip Roth with Proustian ambition. His sensual moments are stunning; few write about the men's sexual experience with such (physical) tenderness. But these passages, even though some of them are quite long, are buried in a wasted landscape of mud, arduous prose about nothing that goes nowhere, the heaps of erasure dust of bildungsromans from Roth, Updike, Bellow (The Runaway Soul makes Augie March read like Flannery O'Connor).
This could have been an unforgettable 300 page novel; Brodkey managed to keep me spellbound through the first two hundred pages (in which the narrator masturbates (once) and takes a shit (once)—that's right, nothing else happens, and it's spellbinding). Had he kept his narration to his narrator—to youth, to exploration, to sensation—rather than veering off into familial drama, an older sister's spoiled tantrums, a mother on her deathbed, a father's love of stock phrases—had he kept his focus, Brodkey could have written a modern classic. Instead, he's created one of my least favorite books containing my favorite sentences.* Quite a feat.
E.g. "Thinking is a shadow fruit, shadows and weirdness in an electric orchard, blossoming with mirage after mirage, crumblingly real, then shadow paintings, mock photographs in black-and-white, then a mere sickly sense, and exposed underpainting, the overlay lost."
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Movies: Z
Not to be confused with Zorro, Costa-Gavras' Z is the 1969 Euronoir political thriller in which Yves Montand plays a leftist intellectual activist murdered by a bop on the head from a club waving out the back of a careening three-wheeler. This is in Paris, the night of pacifist rally, and Montand's crew knows trouble is coming—but there's nothing they can do to stop it. The police are against them, and have secretly hired a group of right-wing thugs to spoil their meeting; the thugs trash their posters, start fights, kill Montand, and then do their best to hush up all the witnesses.
This corruption would go unpunished if not for the right-minded district attorney (too young to buy into the government's scheme, an in spite of threats) and the money-minded journalist (also young, but modeled after a paparazzo rather than a judicious student of the law). Working at first parallel and eventually together, they untangle the mystery and bring all the crooked cops and military officials to trial, though a disappointing end note tells that the bad guys went unpunished and the good guys eventually got screwed.
The (brilliant) plot is based on actual events—in Greece, in 1963. Which leads me to my only complaint: I left the theatre loathing the French, with never a thought to Greece at all—even though I knew from the beginning that the film was based on actual Greek events. Costa-Gavras is such a fantastic story-teller that I believed him fully, to the point of taking home the wrong message. I suppose he didn't have the liberty to make an actual expose, but I still regret that the French now bear the brunt of my anger. Then again, French district attorneys are likely much more stylish than Greek ones. . .
This corruption would go unpunished if not for the right-minded district attorney (too young to buy into the government's scheme, an in spite of threats) and the money-minded journalist (also young, but modeled after a paparazzo rather than a judicious student of the law). Working at first parallel and eventually together, they untangle the mystery and bring all the crooked cops and military officials to trial, though a disappointing end note tells that the bad guys went unpunished and the good guys eventually got screwed.
The (brilliant) plot is based on actual events—in Greece, in 1963. Which leads me to my only complaint: I left the theatre loathing the French, with never a thought to Greece at all—even though I knew from the beginning that the film was based on actual Greek events. Costa-Gavras is such a fantastic story-teller that I believed him fully, to the point of taking home the wrong message. I suppose he didn't have the liberty to make an actual expose, but I still regret that the French now bear the brunt of my anger. Then again, French district attorneys are likely much more stylish than Greek ones. . .
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Movies: 12
This remake of the intriguing 12 Angy Men is a bloated parade of sentimental nonsense, watchable only because it is a remake in Russian (one is always more forgiving of pap if it comes in foreign tongue). There is a radical twist—the boy on trial is not just a ragamuffin; he's a Chechen ragamuffin—but the filmmaker wastes it. He seems to want to comment not only against the racism and classism protested in the original, but also against war and genocide. To that end, he intercuts the jury's deliberation scenes with flashback shots of the Chechen boy knife dancing with soldiers, seeing his parents shot dead, hiding amongst corpses from continuous gunfire, and holding his dog at the moment that its shot dead by a stray bullet.
If you like dogs, I suppose that will move you, and if that were the only taste of sap in the film's entirety, I'd let it go. But it's not. The film ends with Henry Fonda's character talking to a tiny bird that had gotten trapped in the deliberation room (a school gym, whose tawdry state provides opportunities for certain of the jurors to rail against the government). The bird, like the boy, is given the opportunity to remain trapped inside, where he will be safe, or to be let free, where the swirling snow will freeze him (the boy isn't in danger of freezing to death, but of being killed—since he has been a pawn all along, framed for a murder committed by a much more organized group (the government? capitalists?) in order to rid a building of an aged tenant and make way for new construction.
The production is certainly competent, but the script required heavy editing before filming, which it clearly didn't get. The first half of the film is watchable enough; it's enjoyable to watch individual characters unfold, open up, change sides. But the film's insistence on providing an opportunity for each of the 12 to break down, spill their guts, is at first exhausting and then cauterizing. By the last third, we know what to expect and we aren't interested it watching it play out. In a real room of 12 people, six or 10 may reveal themselves, but a few will always remain mysterious. But 12, by forcing each man to his breaking point, jumps the shark before it's half over.
If you like dogs, I suppose that will move you, and if that were the only taste of sap in the film's entirety, I'd let it go. But it's not. The film ends with Henry Fonda's character talking to a tiny bird that had gotten trapped in the deliberation room (a school gym, whose tawdry state provides opportunities for certain of the jurors to rail against the government). The bird, like the boy, is given the opportunity to remain trapped inside, where he will be safe, or to be let free, where the swirling snow will freeze him (the boy isn't in danger of freezing to death, but of being killed—since he has been a pawn all along, framed for a murder committed by a much more organized group (the government? capitalists?) in order to rid a building of an aged tenant and make way for new construction.
The production is certainly competent, but the script required heavy editing before filming, which it clearly didn't get. The first half of the film is watchable enough; it's enjoyable to watch individual characters unfold, open up, change sides. But the film's insistence on providing an opportunity for each of the 12 to break down, spill their guts, is at first exhausting and then cauterizing. By the last third, we know what to expect and we aren't interested it watching it play out. In a real room of 12 people, six or 10 may reveal themselves, but a few will always remain mysterious. But 12, by forcing each man to his breaking point, jumps the shark before it's half over.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Music: Days of Wild headlines Sly Stone's Birthday Celebration at BB King's
How can I maintain that I don't like Funk when I spent all last night shaking it on the dance floor? Every ten minutes, one who will here remain nameless said, "Look! You do like the Funk!"
People. Just because I was dancing doesn't mean that I like the Funk. It means that I like dancing, and that Funk is fairly easy to dance to. In all honesty, the suite of Sly songs expertly executed by Days of Wild were a little too slow for dancing, as most of Sly's songs are. They are more like grooving songs than dancing songs—songs for dancing in your chair, not on your feet.
But there were two or three solos on the bass and guitar that did move me musically, which is more than I can say for the repetitive, canned Funk one hears on the radio. And all three vocalists had hidden surprises in their voices, released at timely moments.
Ultimately, it was worth it all just to see band leader Swang dance. Even if I can't really enjoy Funk, I can totally enjoy other people enjoying Funk.
People. Just because I was dancing doesn't mean that I like the Funk. It means that I like dancing, and that Funk is fairly easy to dance to. In all honesty, the suite of Sly songs expertly executed by Days of Wild were a little too slow for dancing, as most of Sly's songs are. They are more like grooving songs than dancing songs—songs for dancing in your chair, not on your feet.
But there were two or three solos on the bass and guitar that did move me musically, which is more than I can say for the repetitive, canned Funk one hears on the radio. And all three vocalists had hidden surprises in their voices, released at timely moments.
Ultimately, it was worth it all just to see band leader Swang dance. Even if I can't really enjoy Funk, I can totally enjoy other people enjoying Funk.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Dance: Ethan Stiefel and His Students at Guggenheim's Works and Process
The Works & Process season is generally a well-curated cross-section of performance arts, but this year, they are scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrel (or courting some nepotistic donor). Last night was literal amateur hour: undergraduate students from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts joined their new Dean, Ethan Stiefel (Principal Dancer, American Ballet Theater). Ethan was interviewed by Matthew Murphy, an UNCSA alumnus who danced with ABT as well, and then by Larry Keigwin (of Keigwin + Company), whom Stiefel brought to UNCSA as a guest artist.
Perhaps because Stiefel spoke more as an administrator than as a dancer, his comments were not particularly interesting. In fact, and perhaps egged on by Murphy's own cavalier attitude, he seemed rather flippant about the process by which he was recruited for the role. Keigwin is a fascinating and very of-the-moment choreographer, but his presence didn't add much depth to the discussion; it was ultimately an excessively cheerful puff-piece, driven by banter that (Keigwin's excepted) rang falsely.
And the dancing was almost unmentionably bad. The choreography, by UNCSA faculty, was either embarassingly dated (like Tangled Tango, something one would expect to see on an early-80s episode of The Muppet Show), clearly outside the dancers' ability (in the Pas de Deux from Le Corsaire, the girl almost fell over twice during her turns, and the boy was not yet strong enough to manage the dramatic lifts; his entire body was buckled and trembling, and I was certain that he was doing damage to his lumbar spine), or so infantile that one would expect it at one's children's school talent show (like the Four Cygnets section from Swan Lake).
I realize that these are young dancers in training, and so I do not want to be cruel. It is the Guggenheim's responsibility to present performers of a certain caliber, not children playing at pretend. And as a somewhat cruel aside, dancers of the same age at Russian ballet academies are far more accomplished (and do not sound like stomping cattle when they cross the stage in pointe shoes—the Cygnets almost sounded like tap dancers). It is Stiefel's responsibility to instruct his students on the proper diet for dancers, as well as to train them much harder, both physically and theatrically (did I mention that they all wore virtual death masks?).
Keigwin's Natural Selection, shown in an abridged version to accommodate the limits of the small theatre and the traveling students, was the sole piece of watchable choreography in the evening's program. But the dancers were visibly straining, and simply could not do many of the jumps. I do think that, as students, they should be working on repertory this challenging, but they should certainly not be performing it, at least not in New York, at the Guggenheim, for a paying audience. At the show's end, were they flushed with pride, having danced on a real stage in the big city, or were they red with shame, for having shown their big thighs and flat feet to what is arguably the toughest audience in the world?
Perhaps because Stiefel spoke more as an administrator than as a dancer, his comments were not particularly interesting. In fact, and perhaps egged on by Murphy's own cavalier attitude, he seemed rather flippant about the process by which he was recruited for the role. Keigwin is a fascinating and very of-the-moment choreographer, but his presence didn't add much depth to the discussion; it was ultimately an excessively cheerful puff-piece, driven by banter that (Keigwin's excepted) rang falsely.
And the dancing was almost unmentionably bad. The choreography, by UNCSA faculty, was either embarassingly dated (like Tangled Tango, something one would expect to see on an early-80s episode of The Muppet Show), clearly outside the dancers' ability (in the Pas de Deux from Le Corsaire, the girl almost fell over twice during her turns, and the boy was not yet strong enough to manage the dramatic lifts; his entire body was buckled and trembling, and I was certain that he was doing damage to his lumbar spine), or so infantile that one would expect it at one's children's school talent show (like the Four Cygnets section from Swan Lake).
I realize that these are young dancers in training, and so I do not want to be cruel. It is the Guggenheim's responsibility to present performers of a certain caliber, not children playing at pretend. And as a somewhat cruel aside, dancers of the same age at Russian ballet academies are far more accomplished (and do not sound like stomping cattle when they cross the stage in pointe shoes—the Cygnets almost sounded like tap dancers). It is Stiefel's responsibility to instruct his students on the proper diet for dancers, as well as to train them much harder, both physically and theatrically (did I mention that they all wore virtual death masks?).
Keigwin's Natural Selection, shown in an abridged version to accommodate the limits of the small theatre and the traveling students, was the sole piece of watchable choreography in the evening's program. But the dancers were visibly straining, and simply could not do many of the jumps. I do think that, as students, they should be working on repertory this challenging, but they should certainly not be performing it, at least not in New York, at the Guggenheim, for a paying audience. At the show's end, were they flushed with pride, having danced on a real stage in the big city, or were they red with shame, for having shown their big thighs and flat feet to what is arguably the toughest audience in the world?
Friday, March 13, 2009
Movies: Roman Holiday
People love Audrey Hepburn, but she’s a bit fragile for my taste. She is, though, perfectly cast as a princess taking the day off, shifting back and forth between the royal beauty’s air of entitlement and propriety and the nervous, zesty girl getting her first taste of plebian life (drinking, driving, brawling, and spending the night in a man’s apartment—though all in a perfectly innocent way). The movie, unsurprisingly, struggles to live up to its fame; Audrey is delicate, Gregory Peck is startling in that fine-hewn, 1950s American way, and their antics are sweet. But like so many sweet things, their story is unnatural—do we really believe that the medicated but headstrong princess, once escaped from her caretakers, having fallen asleep in the street, would be so lucky as to be found by a begrudgingly well-meaning American journalist, handsome to boot? It’s easy to believe he’d plan to sell her out, bringing his buddy aboard to snap candid photos of her misdemeanors, and even easy to believe that he would be so touched by her graceful innocence that he’d decide, after 24 hours, to keep the story to himself—once we’ve bought into the initial absurdity. And the cool, quiet, rejection of the usual happily-ever-after ending, in which the princess and journalist share a cordial, public goodbye, is so level-headed that it makes up for all the earlier leaps of fantasy.
And so, yes, the film is sweet, nice, fun. . . but to what end? It’s not particularly deep or challenging or lasting. It’s kind of like a can of soda. There is nothing—in all its famous shots—the Vespa, the Mouth of Truth, the royal gown—to sear our hearts or minds. I expect a movie this famous, this loved, to leave indelible marks on my memory. I’ve had chicken sandwiches more compelling than this movie.
And so, yes, the film is sweet, nice, fun. . . but to what end? It’s not particularly deep or challenging or lasting. It’s kind of like a can of soda. There is nothing—in all its famous shots—the Vespa, the Mouth of Truth, the royal gown—to sear our hearts or minds. I expect a movie this famous, this loved, to leave indelible marks on my memory. I’ve had chicken sandwiches more compelling than this movie.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Movies: Leave Her to Heaven
Gene Tierney does it again—I’ve only ever seen her before in Laura, but she is too good at playing these dangerous beauties—women who drive their men to madness through madness of their own (is it really that easy?) This time, in 1945 op-art Technicolor, she’s Ellen, the ultra-lipsticked obsessive lover. She falls for writer Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) seemingly only because he’s already fallen for her, but she falls much harder. She instantly breaks her engagement to the local district attorney, announcing to him and her family that she’s engaged to the author—which isn’t true, until, of course, she makes the announcement, and with a mixture of good-natured surprise and confusion, he corroborates. But her obsession deepens and her lies multiply; Richard’s only other family is a sickly teenaged brother, who lives in a long-term care facility. To win her husband’s trust and affection, the beauty becomes close with the boy, helping him to build his health so that the three of them can go together to the Harland lake-front property—the Back of the Moon, as they call it.
There, Ellen longs for her husband’s attention—he’s divided between his brother and his new book, and the sexual implications of that are clear: she is not getting what she wants. We see them wake together in separate twin beds. Ellen climbs out of hers, in full make-up and wearing a white nightgown of pre-code opacity. She clings to the side of his bed, begging as overtly as one could, onscreen in 1945, but is interrupted by the morning greetings of her new brother-in-law through the wall, and the promise of a morning swim before breakfast. In the light of sexual starvation, her reaction—to drown that brother-in-law in the lake, in cold blood and after premeditation—is perfectly understandable! And rather proto-feminist, if I do say so. Her next choice, to kill her fetus by intentionally falling down the stairs (nevermind that this would hardly result in abortion) is even moreso—even though she did choose pregnancy purposely, to shake her husband out of his grievance over his brother.
These actions, of course, only serve to push him farther away, deeper into depression, and closer to Ellen’s happenstance rival—her cousin (who was raised as her sister), who becomes Richard’s friend and confidante. But Ellen, lacking human empathy (clearly key to being a feminist!) reacts only with jealous rage, rather than a change in attitude. Her eyes become cold and venomous, as she refills a jar of white powder with a different white powder. . . poisoning herself with arsenic at a picnic and framing her cousin for her death.
All of this narration unfolds in a film-length flashback, while Richard is rowing across the lake to Back of the Moon after two years in prison for conspiracy—for having suspected Ellen of killing his brother without turning her in (this comes out while Ellen’s cousin is on trial for the poisoning). When, at the film’s end, he gets there, he’s greeted by Ellen’s cousin—the woman he now loves—who is wearing, disturbingly, the very same dress Ellen wore when she walked the same dock. David Lynch would have a field day with these sister-cousins, their matching red lipstick paired with eyes innocently wide and cruelly narrow. My, what sharp teeth you have!
There, Ellen longs for her husband’s attention—he’s divided between his brother and his new book, and the sexual implications of that are clear: she is not getting what she wants. We see them wake together in separate twin beds. Ellen climbs out of hers, in full make-up and wearing a white nightgown of pre-code opacity. She clings to the side of his bed, begging as overtly as one could, onscreen in 1945, but is interrupted by the morning greetings of her new brother-in-law through the wall, and the promise of a morning swim before breakfast. In the light of sexual starvation, her reaction—to drown that brother-in-law in the lake, in cold blood and after premeditation—is perfectly understandable! And rather proto-feminist, if I do say so. Her next choice, to kill her fetus by intentionally falling down the stairs (nevermind that this would hardly result in abortion) is even moreso—even though she did choose pregnancy purposely, to shake her husband out of his grievance over his brother.
These actions, of course, only serve to push him farther away, deeper into depression, and closer to Ellen’s happenstance rival—her cousin (who was raised as her sister), who becomes Richard’s friend and confidante. But Ellen, lacking human empathy (clearly key to being a feminist!) reacts only with jealous rage, rather than a change in attitude. Her eyes become cold and venomous, as she refills a jar of white powder with a different white powder. . . poisoning herself with arsenic at a picnic and framing her cousin for her death.
All of this narration unfolds in a film-length flashback, while Richard is rowing across the lake to Back of the Moon after two years in prison for conspiracy—for having suspected Ellen of killing his brother without turning her in (this comes out while Ellen’s cousin is on trial for the poisoning). When, at the film’s end, he gets there, he’s greeted by Ellen’s cousin—the woman he now loves—who is wearing, disturbingly, the very same dress Ellen wore when she walked the same dock. David Lynch would have a field day with these sister-cousins, their matching red lipstick paired with eyes innocently wide and cruelly narrow. My, what sharp teeth you have!
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Dance: Morphoses, Choreography & Design at the Guggenheim's Works & Process
So far as New York is concerned, Christopher Wheeldon is ballet’s golden child, the choreographer anointed by Diaghilev’s ghost to save his ancient religion of pointe and pomp from shoeless oblivion. Wheeldon still sets dances to Stravinsky, still commissions extravagant costumes, and still believes that no show is complete without a romantic pas-de-deux. Compared to the general NYCB standard, Wheeldon’s choreography is rather fresh, though I could do without his preservation of the trappings.
Those trappings were actually the focus of Sunday’s Works and Process program, featuring Wheeldon along with designers Isabel and Ruben Toledo, who collaborated on his ballet Commedia (a suite of riffs off Diaghilev’s Pulcinella, a ballet inspired by the characters of the even older Commedia dell’arte tradition), creating harlequin-like costumes (white unitards painted with black diamonds, colorful capes and masks, long black gloves and short tulle skirts) and an enormous painted backdrop of stylized faces that peer down at the dancers, scaled by the painting to the size of puppets.
This vision, too, is rather refreshing for ballet—traditionally as scene-stilted as opera, where the performers are dwarfed by parapets and fake trees and all other varieties of distracting nonsense. With Commedia, Wheeldon managed to include just enough trappings to satisfy the old guard, while keeping the stage clear enough for more modern minimalists. It was a small disappointment to find that this was motivated more by his limited budget and need to travel, rather than by a brave refusal to buy into a tired tradition.
Also on the topic of disappointment, I admit that I’m not a fan of Toledo’s costumes—I don’t like the hard geometry of the diamonds in black and white against the soft fantasy of the frothy tulle skirts in cantaloupe and mint green. I don’t like the red cape against the lime cape, or the red mask set against the lavender one. The designer’s intention was to create a kind of mayhem, an unintentioned chaos of color, but in the quiet, elegant theatre at the Guggenheim, that kind of visual noise is unwelcome.
Stravinsky, too, is always unwelcome to my ears, but when the music was off, and Wheeldon was demonstrating a kind of mock mini-rehearsal, working with a pair of dancers from NYCB on a short pas-de-deux, I bought at last into the choreographer’s magic—as a dancer, at least. In denim pants and button-down shirt (and striped socks once he did away with his boots in frustration), Wheeldon’s half-movements were more saturated with elegance than the dancers, performing fully and in flexible attire. The mere toss of Wheeldon’s hand, the implied line of his extended torso divulges a radiating grace that made the other dancers suddenly appear amateurish, unstudied, like teenagers at a high school talent show. If he’s going to single-handedly save the genre, he had better teach his dancers to move the way he does.
Those trappings were actually the focus of Sunday’s Works and Process program, featuring Wheeldon along with designers Isabel and Ruben Toledo, who collaborated on his ballet Commedia (a suite of riffs off Diaghilev’s Pulcinella, a ballet inspired by the characters of the even older Commedia dell’arte tradition), creating harlequin-like costumes (white unitards painted with black diamonds, colorful capes and masks, long black gloves and short tulle skirts) and an enormous painted backdrop of stylized faces that peer down at the dancers, scaled by the painting to the size of puppets.
This vision, too, is rather refreshing for ballet—traditionally as scene-stilted as opera, where the performers are dwarfed by parapets and fake trees and all other varieties of distracting nonsense. With Commedia, Wheeldon managed to include just enough trappings to satisfy the old guard, while keeping the stage clear enough for more modern minimalists. It was a small disappointment to find that this was motivated more by his limited budget and need to travel, rather than by a brave refusal to buy into a tired tradition.
Also on the topic of disappointment, I admit that I’m not a fan of Toledo’s costumes—I don’t like the hard geometry of the diamonds in black and white against the soft fantasy of the frothy tulle skirts in cantaloupe and mint green. I don’t like the red cape against the lime cape, or the red mask set against the lavender one. The designer’s intention was to create a kind of mayhem, an unintentioned chaos of color, but in the quiet, elegant theatre at the Guggenheim, that kind of visual noise is unwelcome.
Stravinsky, too, is always unwelcome to my ears, but when the music was off, and Wheeldon was demonstrating a kind of mock mini-rehearsal, working with a pair of dancers from NYCB on a short pas-de-deux, I bought at last into the choreographer’s magic—as a dancer, at least. In denim pants and button-down shirt (and striped socks once he did away with his boots in frustration), Wheeldon’s half-movements were more saturated with elegance than the dancers, performing fully and in flexible attire. The mere toss of Wheeldon’s hand, the implied line of his extended torso divulges a radiating grace that made the other dancers suddenly appear amateurish, unstudied, like teenagers at a high school talent show. If he’s going to single-handedly save the genre, he had better teach his dancers to move the way he does.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Art: The Armory Show
I almost didn’t make it to the Armory show this year, citing general artistic exhaustion along with extreme disapproval of the $30 admission fee (when was the last time you paid admission for the right to shop at the mall, which is basically what the Armory is—a poorly-curated international mall of art up for purchase). Because I was pressed for time, annoyed, and exhausted, I didn’t make it to SCOPE, the Armory’s low-brow ugly stepsister that I’m not ashamed to admit I usually prefer to the bigger, better, more-renowned thing. Too bad, because it was probably better than the Armory.
At first, I did think that this year’s Armory was an improvement over last, but it was so extensive that after the first two hours (I was there for three, and technically “saw” [often meaning glanced at dismissively] everything) I really couldn’t be attentive to anything. I did have a notebook, though, and jotted down the following trends:
Art that is interesting but not moving.
Art that is pleasant but not good.
Art that appeared again and again in different booths (and unwarrantedly so).
More specifically, I noticed a greater incidence of pen and ink virtuosity (something that I saw seeds of at SCOPE last year, but which has fully exploded since then) and highly textured collages—huge creations of layered paint, photographs, cut-outs, woodchips, threads, and sequins. Craft, it seems, is making a come-back, even if it’s not in a traditionally aesthetically-pleasing way. Artists are back to laboring hard and taking their time.
Less pleasingly, a lot of artists are relying on tacky technology—LCD screens and flashing lights, Jenny Holzer 2.0s, “look at me!” art that is generally less interesting than the floor (which concrete landscape of trapped shipping flotsam is actually pretty captivating in places.) Other gluts were of a more traditional kind—much too much photography from Diane Arbus and Robert Maplethorpe (though I did make a great photographic discovery—one gallery had a few huge prints from Paul Himmel, a mid-century American photographer whose name I’d never heard and whose work I instantly loved).
The other great find was a group of ink drawings by Hope Gangloff, a series of Egon Schiele-meets-Zak Smith (with a taste of the Wallace Smith woodcuts in Fantazius Mallare) portraits of women in bed and men in bands—hipsterish content that would have no staying power if not for her technical virtuosity, and distinct ability to use line to imply rather that demonstrate—the quality that makes Schiele’s drawings so emotive and powerful.
Her biggest drawing (which wasn’t big at all, maybe 18”x24”) was selling for $8,000, and if I were a collector of any means, that’s the thing I would have bought that day. Hers is a name to follow.
At first, I did think that this year’s Armory was an improvement over last, but it was so extensive that after the first two hours (I was there for three, and technically “saw” [often meaning glanced at dismissively] everything) I really couldn’t be attentive to anything. I did have a notebook, though, and jotted down the following trends:
Art that is interesting but not moving.
Art that is pleasant but not good.
Art that appeared again and again in different booths (and unwarrantedly so).
More specifically, I noticed a greater incidence of pen and ink virtuosity (something that I saw seeds of at SCOPE last year, but which has fully exploded since then) and highly textured collages—huge creations of layered paint, photographs, cut-outs, woodchips, threads, and sequins. Craft, it seems, is making a come-back, even if it’s not in a traditionally aesthetically-pleasing way. Artists are back to laboring hard and taking their time.
Less pleasingly, a lot of artists are relying on tacky technology—LCD screens and flashing lights, Jenny Holzer 2.0s, “look at me!” art that is generally less interesting than the floor (which concrete landscape of trapped shipping flotsam is actually pretty captivating in places.) Other gluts were of a more traditional kind—much too much photography from Diane Arbus and Robert Maplethorpe (though I did make a great photographic discovery—one gallery had a few huge prints from Paul Himmel, a mid-century American photographer whose name I’d never heard and whose work I instantly loved).
The other great find was a group of ink drawings by Hope Gangloff, a series of Egon Schiele-meets-Zak Smith (with a taste of the Wallace Smith woodcuts in Fantazius Mallare) portraits of women in bed and men in bands—hipsterish content that would have no staying power if not for her technical virtuosity, and distinct ability to use line to imply rather that demonstrate—the quality that makes Schiele’s drawings so emotive and powerful.
Her biggest drawing (which wasn’t big at all, maybe 18”x24”) was selling for $8,000, and if I were a collector of any means, that’s the thing I would have bought that day. Hers is a name to follow.
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