Even on an airplane, some movies are better left unwatched. No one thinks of J-Lo as a great actress, but I'm still trying to understand how one can go from making a film with Steven Soderbergh to dribbling out such a diarrhetic stream of inane romantic comedies, of which The Back-Up Plan is the latest fecal plop. The plot is barely worth recounting; Lopez plays Zoe, a single girl who owns a frou-frou pet store and a dog with no hind legs. Frustrated by dating and ready to be a mom, she gets artificially inseminated—but then meets the man of her dreams later that day. Hilarity, as the saying goes, ensues as their relationship develops and he adjusts to the reality of becoming the father of a stranger's babies (she's having twins).
But what I found most offensive about this movie was not the plot. Instead, it was Zoe's self-absorption, insensitivity, and inability to communicate. Throughout the film, she makes unfair demands of her beau, and again and again, even though he chafes under this treatment, he returns to her and her insanity. I'm more and more disturbed by media that present poor examples of relating as successful models. Women will watch this film, and expect men to smilingly succumb to this kind of treatment; then, when real-life men fall short of these false expectations, real-life women will be disappointed and confused, but won't identify their own spoiled behavior as the problem.
For the record, I am a girl, and I did cry—multiple times. The film is drivel, but it is effective drivel. Luckily, I can keep my critical faculties plugged in and calculating, even when my permeable emotional self is penetrated and besieged. The two must remain as separate as church and state when entering Hollywood's territory.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Theater: Fela!
I discovered Fela Kuti the same week I discovered Midnite, thanks to another mix-CD from the same source. Months later, I saw posters all over downtown Manhattan announcing FELA! with the very special name Bill T. Jones at the bottom. I have been following Bill T.'s work for awhile, first having heard him speak when I was a dance student at Berkeley, up until reviewing Serenade/The Proposition nearly ten years later. He is one of the few artists I have ever encountered whose work is driven by an immense intellect, expressive of political rage, modulated by honest emotions, and sculpted by rigorous aesthetic standards. He is—and I say this without shame—the perfect artist.
How did Bill T. become Bill T.? Certain biographical facts are helpful, as are certain habits. While studying dance at the State University of New York at Binghamton in the 1970s, the big, black Bill T. met a little red haired theater student named Arnie Zane. They became lovers, then partners, forming Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane and Company. Their work played with their difference of shape, size, and color, and their sameness of gender—some of the first modern dance that addressed gay issues. In the late 1980s, AIDS took Arnie from Bill T. and the rest of the world, but the company still bears both names together. And yes, Bill T. is HIV-positive.
He is also a voracious reader, and an intellectual task-master. When he starts thinking about a new work, before stepping foot in the studio, he reads. For his last cycle of works—three pieces on Abraham Lincoln, of which Serenade/The Proposition was a part—he read over 100 books on Lincoln and the American Civil War. He made his dancers read, too. In fact, as if they were high school students, each had to choose an individual figure from the period to research, bringing their intellectual and emotional knowledge of that personage to the studio.
I am certain that during the creation of Fela!, he and his cast worked in the same way. Kuti was a performer, but he was, perhaps more importantly, a political figure. I don't doubt that Jones identifies with him in some ways—both artists whose intellects refuse to let them igore injustice, both black, both HIV-positive. The first half of Fela! is mostly fun: an introduction to the sounds that make up his Afrobeat music, a dance lesson that gets the audience up on its feet and ticking its collective pelvis around an imaginary clock. Toward the end of the first act, though, things get dark, as we see the Nigerian government becoming uncomfortable with Kuti's power. It is in the second act that we see Bill T. as we know him really come forth. Fela's personal compound, where he lived with his mother and many wives, was literally besieged by the police; his women were raped; his mother was killed. For this scene, mugshots of members of the female ensemble are projected above the stage, and the women, one-by-one, tell us—in one cool sentence each—what the police did to them. Here is Bill T. demanding heart and mind from his dancers, as well as body.
The show is as good as a two hour Broadway show about Fela Kuti can be. That is not to say that it is perfect; the confines of telling such a big story in such a short time make for a show that is a bit episodic, conveyed in one of my less-favorite formats: flashback. And oddly, Jones does not address Kuti's HIV-status, which I found strange, even disingenuous. That said, the scale of Broadway, in exchange for what it takes, offers quite a lot in exchange. Jones has long been integrating projection into his work, but it has never worked so seamlessly as it does here, bringing Fela's mother back from the dead when her portrait opens its eyes and turns to chide her boy on stage. In the past, Jones hasn't had the funding for production to match his imagination, but now that he is a Tony Award winner, he will continue to work on Broadway, and I have no doubt that he will carve greater and greater width down that strip of fluff and flashing lights for meaningful political and artistic discourse.
How did Bill T. become Bill T.? Certain biographical facts are helpful, as are certain habits. While studying dance at the State University of New York at Binghamton in the 1970s, the big, black Bill T. met a little red haired theater student named Arnie Zane. They became lovers, then partners, forming Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane and Company. Their work played with their difference of shape, size, and color, and their sameness of gender—some of the first modern dance that addressed gay issues. In the late 1980s, AIDS took Arnie from Bill T. and the rest of the world, but the company still bears both names together. And yes, Bill T. is HIV-positive.
He is also a voracious reader, and an intellectual task-master. When he starts thinking about a new work, before stepping foot in the studio, he reads. For his last cycle of works—three pieces on Abraham Lincoln, of which Serenade/The Proposition was a part—he read over 100 books on Lincoln and the American Civil War. He made his dancers read, too. In fact, as if they were high school students, each had to choose an individual figure from the period to research, bringing their intellectual and emotional knowledge of that personage to the studio.
I am certain that during the creation of Fela!, he and his cast worked in the same way. Kuti was a performer, but he was, perhaps more importantly, a political figure. I don't doubt that Jones identifies with him in some ways—both artists whose intellects refuse to let them igore injustice, both black, both HIV-positive. The first half of Fela! is mostly fun: an introduction to the sounds that make up his Afrobeat music, a dance lesson that gets the audience up on its feet and ticking its collective pelvis around an imaginary clock. Toward the end of the first act, though, things get dark, as we see the Nigerian government becoming uncomfortable with Kuti's power. It is in the second act that we see Bill T. as we know him really come forth. Fela's personal compound, where he lived with his mother and many wives, was literally besieged by the police; his women were raped; his mother was killed. For this scene, mugshots of members of the female ensemble are projected above the stage, and the women, one-by-one, tell us—in one cool sentence each—what the police did to them. Here is Bill T. demanding heart and mind from his dancers, as well as body.
The show is as good as a two hour Broadway show about Fela Kuti can be. That is not to say that it is perfect; the confines of telling such a big story in such a short time make for a show that is a bit episodic, conveyed in one of my less-favorite formats: flashback. And oddly, Jones does not address Kuti's HIV-status, which I found strange, even disingenuous. That said, the scale of Broadway, in exchange for what it takes, offers quite a lot in exchange. Jones has long been integrating projection into his work, but it has never worked so seamlessly as it does here, bringing Fela's mother back from the dead when her portrait opens its eyes and turns to chide her boy on stage. In the past, Jones hasn't had the funding for production to match his imagination, but now that he is a Tony Award winner, he will continue to work on Broadway, and I have no doubt that he will carve greater and greater width down that strip of fluff and flashing lights for meaningful political and artistic discourse.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Movies: Carne (1968)
One of the most well-known "collaborations" between Argentinian writer-director Armando Bo and his actress wife Isabel Sarli, Carne (which is not available on DVD) was recently offered to American audiences at Walter Reade Theatre's mini-retrospective of Sarli's work. Not knowing what to expect, other than an Argentinian Bridget Bardot, I went, finding myself in the rather awkward position of watching a soft-core porno at an art-house filled with stylish hipsters and film nerds eating popcorn. Forty years ago, this film played at theatres near 42nd street, where lonely men in the audience kept their hands busy with something else.
The film is disturbingly biographical, if you follow its extended metaphor. Sarli, 1955 Miss Argentina, was "discovered" by Armando Bo, and recorded her first nude scenes with him unwittingly. Recounting the story, she describes the way she told him she would not do a nude scene, and he promised she could wear a nude-colored swimsuit. "Later, when we were shooting the film in the middle of the Paraguayan jungle, needless to say, there was no swimsuit. I made them keep the camera very far away. I didn’t know anything at the time. I wasn’t even aware of zoom lenses and things like that. When I watched the film at the premiere, it was a terrible shock."
In Carne, Sarli plays Delicia, a meat plant worker who is raped in a tunnel by one of the men who works in the plant. She hides the fact from her lover (played by Bo), who seems to know that something is wrong, but spends too much time brooding to do anything about it. Soon, Delicia is raped again, by the same man (called Macho)—this time in a meat locker, on a cold, red, cow's carcass. This begins as an almost Hitchcockian suspense scene, in which she sees Macho's eyes between the dressed carcasses hanging from hooks, then his feet down below, and begins to hurry away (in her tight dress and high heels), as he chases her between the swinging rows of meat. But, it quickly devolves into a cheap and rather disgusting soft-core rape scene, which today's audience is supposed to gleefully watch in the name of "camp."
But there's actually very little artistic delight to be had in this "exploitation" film, because it is so truly exploitative. This isn't art or games or an empowered woman playing with her sexuality on-screen. As the plot goes on, Macho kidnaps Delicia and takes her, in a meat truck, to the outskirts of town, where he has collected a handful of his friends and coworkers for a game of cards, a few drinks, and—for a price—a turn at Delicia. She is locked in the truck with a small cot. Macho is the first to enter, and he rapes her a third time. When the next man comes in, she is shocked, still unaware of her fate. She tries to reason with him, but is unsuccessful. Four more men follow. Only once is she given a break—in the strangest of scenes—by a man who admits in a high-pitched voice that he is a homosexual, with a crush on Macho.
All the while, Delicia's behavior is very strange. She sits simpering on the bed, begging not to be taken, while tossing her hair and caressing her (extremely large) breasts. After she is let go, she runs home and takes a long shower; Bo's camera follows her here, where she again writhes and caresses herself as she flashes back to the ordeal she has just experienced.
At the film's conclusion, Delicia's lover finally realizes what has been happening, and finds Macho, challenging him to a fist-fight. He gives the wrong-doer a good beating, kicking him into a muddy creek. This is the extent of his punishment. Delicia and her lover go off to live, we assume, happily ever after.
Sarli and Bo made more than 25 films "together," and though this is the only one I've seen, both from it and from what I've read, I gather that he was no better than a pimp. Sarli describes Bo's brilliant ability to write a script in a few hours, but what little script Carne has was quite clearly written by a hack—and I refuse to blame the translated subtitles. What Bo did—take a beautiful naive, sweet girl, and put her naked body onscreen for the delectation of strange men, against her will, to line his own pockets—is what Macho did. No wonder it was so easy for Bo to write this script; it's a confession. What breaks my heart is that Sarli loved Bo nevertheless, sharing her body with the public against her will because he told her she had to. She had offers to work with major studios, to take control of her own career, but she refused, devoted to her abuser to his death.
It may be trendy to watch dated porn as art, but Sarli is deeply unsettling onscreen. Her discomfort and ambivalence are more palpable than the "sexual frisson" for which she is famous. The notion that I could watch a woman willingly suffer this kind of abuse and giggle, or say "hmm," stroking my chin, is ludicrous. Equally distressing was the presentation of the series, by its female curators, who did not for a moment problematize Sarli and Bo's working relationship, instead giggling about their memories of watching their first Sarli films illicitly, on Argentinian cable television. If films like this are going to be presented to a thinking audience, they had better be contextualized.
The film is disturbingly biographical, if you follow its extended metaphor. Sarli, 1955 Miss Argentina, was "discovered" by Armando Bo, and recorded her first nude scenes with him unwittingly. Recounting the story, she describes the way she told him she would not do a nude scene, and he promised she could wear a nude-colored swimsuit. "Later, when we were shooting the film in the middle of the Paraguayan jungle, needless to say, there was no swimsuit. I made them keep the camera very far away. I didn’t know anything at the time. I wasn’t even aware of zoom lenses and things like that. When I watched the film at the premiere, it was a terrible shock."
In Carne, Sarli plays Delicia, a meat plant worker who is raped in a tunnel by one of the men who works in the plant. She hides the fact from her lover (played by Bo), who seems to know that something is wrong, but spends too much time brooding to do anything about it. Soon, Delicia is raped again, by the same man (called Macho)—this time in a meat locker, on a cold, red, cow's carcass. This begins as an almost Hitchcockian suspense scene, in which she sees Macho's eyes between the dressed carcasses hanging from hooks, then his feet down below, and begins to hurry away (in her tight dress and high heels), as he chases her between the swinging rows of meat. But, it quickly devolves into a cheap and rather disgusting soft-core rape scene, which today's audience is supposed to gleefully watch in the name of "camp."
But there's actually very little artistic delight to be had in this "exploitation" film, because it is so truly exploitative. This isn't art or games or an empowered woman playing with her sexuality on-screen. As the plot goes on, Macho kidnaps Delicia and takes her, in a meat truck, to the outskirts of town, where he has collected a handful of his friends and coworkers for a game of cards, a few drinks, and—for a price—a turn at Delicia. She is locked in the truck with a small cot. Macho is the first to enter, and he rapes her a third time. When the next man comes in, she is shocked, still unaware of her fate. She tries to reason with him, but is unsuccessful. Four more men follow. Only once is she given a break—in the strangest of scenes—by a man who admits in a high-pitched voice that he is a homosexual, with a crush on Macho.
All the while, Delicia's behavior is very strange. She sits simpering on the bed, begging not to be taken, while tossing her hair and caressing her (extremely large) breasts. After she is let go, she runs home and takes a long shower; Bo's camera follows her here, where she again writhes and caresses herself as she flashes back to the ordeal she has just experienced.
At the film's conclusion, Delicia's lover finally realizes what has been happening, and finds Macho, challenging him to a fist-fight. He gives the wrong-doer a good beating, kicking him into a muddy creek. This is the extent of his punishment. Delicia and her lover go off to live, we assume, happily ever after.
Sarli and Bo made more than 25 films "together," and though this is the only one I've seen, both from it and from what I've read, I gather that he was no better than a pimp. Sarli describes Bo's brilliant ability to write a script in a few hours, but what little script Carne has was quite clearly written by a hack—and I refuse to blame the translated subtitles. What Bo did—take a beautiful naive, sweet girl, and put her naked body onscreen for the delectation of strange men, against her will, to line his own pockets—is what Macho did. No wonder it was so easy for Bo to write this script; it's a confession. What breaks my heart is that Sarli loved Bo nevertheless, sharing her body with the public against her will because he told her she had to. She had offers to work with major studios, to take control of her own career, but she refused, devoted to her abuser to his death.
It may be trendy to watch dated porn as art, but Sarli is deeply unsettling onscreen. Her discomfort and ambivalence are more palpable than the "sexual frisson" for which she is famous. The notion that I could watch a woman willingly suffer this kind of abuse and giggle, or say "hmm," stroking my chin, is ludicrous. Equally distressing was the presentation of the series, by its female curators, who did not for a moment problematize Sarli and Bo's working relationship, instead giggling about their memories of watching their first Sarli films illicitly, on Argentinian cable television. If films like this are going to be presented to a thinking audience, they had better be contextualized.
Music: Midnite at S.O.B.'s
I'm writing about this show nearly two months after the fact; I admit, I've been remiss, and I have excuses that you either already know, or don't care about. The one applicable excuse, though, is that I've been in somewhat of a quandary as to how to describe this experience. I was introduced to Midnite by a handcrafted mix-CD without track listings. I eventually found out that all the very best songs came from the same people: Midnite—and, because I am the luckiest, the person who made me this mix-CD also bought tickets for the Midnite show at S.O.B.'s.
When I used to go to late-night movies at Film Forum, and would descend into the Houston Street 1-train subway stop, I would always hear a pulsing beat leaking out of the vents of a utility room off the tracks. I used to think, "Damn, that MTA knows how to party!", picturing a secret break room behind those doors with a bumping stereo system. Eventually, I realized that the beat was coming from S.O.B.'s, a club right up above the subway station. That was years ago, but this was the first night I had ever been inside. It's a small club, wider than it is deep, which is good, because basically everyone is right up in front of the band—and Midnite is a band you want to be up close to.
I don't know much about them and I won't pretend to know more than I do; what you need to know is that they are from St. Croix and they are the antidote to what Reggae has become under the tutelage of Sean Paul. But at that opposite end of the spectrum, they don't merely inhabit what sound Bob Marley once did; they are something completely their own: spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and totally rocking. Vaughn Benjamin is not a singer; he is a prophet. Streams of language bubbled up out of his mouth, and the rastas in the audience, with their dreadlocks bundled up in scarves, watched with reverence. A few times that night, while the band played over four hours straight, one of the older rastas in the audience, a lumbering man with dreadlocks down past his waist, held his locks up to Benjamin, simultaneously giving and receiving blessing.
We danced and danced and danced. A few times, I recognized a series of lyrics that linked back to mix-CD, but I don't know what songs were played; the experience was too organic for the "performance" of tracks. Not was the show like one of the drug-fueled interminable meanderings of, say, Phil Lesh—each moment was startlingly lucid, deep, memorable. I still see Vaughn's eyes glowing with a knowledge simultaneously dark and bright as he looked out and through us, holding the mic in fine, slender hands up close to his lips, murmuring warnings, instructions, and dedications.
When I used to go to late-night movies at Film Forum, and would descend into the Houston Street 1-train subway stop, I would always hear a pulsing beat leaking out of the vents of a utility room off the tracks. I used to think, "Damn, that MTA knows how to party!", picturing a secret break room behind those doors with a bumping stereo system. Eventually, I realized that the beat was coming from S.O.B.'s, a club right up above the subway station. That was years ago, but this was the first night I had ever been inside. It's a small club, wider than it is deep, which is good, because basically everyone is right up in front of the band—and Midnite is a band you want to be up close to.
I don't know much about them and I won't pretend to know more than I do; what you need to know is that they are from St. Croix and they are the antidote to what Reggae has become under the tutelage of Sean Paul. But at that opposite end of the spectrum, they don't merely inhabit what sound Bob Marley once did; they are something completely their own: spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and totally rocking. Vaughn Benjamin is not a singer; he is a prophet. Streams of language bubbled up out of his mouth, and the rastas in the audience, with their dreadlocks bundled up in scarves, watched with reverence. A few times that night, while the band played over four hours straight, one of the older rastas in the audience, a lumbering man with dreadlocks down past his waist, held his locks up to Benjamin, simultaneously giving and receiving blessing.
We danced and danced and danced. A few times, I recognized a series of lyrics that linked back to mix-CD, but I don't know what songs were played; the experience was too organic for the "performance" of tracks. Not was the show like one of the drug-fueled interminable meanderings of, say, Phil Lesh—each moment was startlingly lucid, deep, memorable. I still see Vaughn's eyes glowing with a knowledge simultaneously dark and bright as he looked out and through us, holding the mic in fine, slender hands up close to his lips, murmuring warnings, instructions, and dedications.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Books: In Search of Lost Time Volume Two: Within a Budding Grove, by Marcel Proust
Marcel has matured much between Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove. I found myself able to push through Swann's Way with some ease only because the child-neuroaesthete* steps aside (and back in time) for over 200 pages to narrate the story of Swann (an older, more well-manicured neuroaesthete) falling in love with Odette de Crécy, a social-climbing common courtesan. Swann's fits of jealous anxiety are clearly designed to mirror young Marcel's fits of longing, first for his mother, then for Gilberte, daughter of Swann and Odette. But by Within a Budding Grove, though Marcel still thinks all too often of Gilberte, his desire has become sexual. After an impromptu wrestling match in the early pages of the novel, during which he experiences orgasm without quite realizing it (a passage I must admit I find far more compelling than that of the madeleine; call me a boor), Marcel begins to visit Gilberte at home, and transfers his obsession from the capricious girl to her more worldly mother.
Not long after (two years pass with a page turn), he leaves Paris for Balbec, a seaside resort town, with his grandmother. Sent there for his health, Marcel indeed achieves new heights of physical robustness, lusting interchangeably after various members of a "little band of girls" vacationing at the same resort. He eventually singles out their ringleader, Albertine Simonet, for his intrepid sexual advances (which meet with her vehement rebuff). Once Albertine leaves (not long after the rebuff), the band dissipates, and Marcel lurks around the half-closed hotel at the season's end.
The other object of Marcel's obsessive affection is Saint-Loup, nephew to his grandmother's friend, the noble Mme de Villeparisis. Writing now from the perspective of having read ahead slightly, Marcel's affection for Saint-Loup will transfer to his aunt the Duchesse de Guermantes, in The Guermantes Way, but until then, Marcel's affection for Saint-Loup, without ever overtly expressing sexuality, seems to foreshadow the author's homosexuality. He writes about Saint-Loup's breezy manner, his fine—if scandalously informal—attire, the figure he cuts walking across the beach, and the messy affair the young man has with a mistress in Paris. At this stage in his personal development, Marcel desires Saint-Loup by desiring to be like Saint-Loup, making do with desiring to be near Saint-Loup. Letting on, perhaps, homosexual tendencies of his own, Saint-Loup takes Marcel as his dear friend.
At this point, I will address something to which I alluded in my post on Swann's Way, which is the pronunciation of the author's name. It was around the time of my reading of Within a Budding Grove that I began to notice that, when I said "I'm reading 'Proost,'" people looked at me with some confusion, until I clarified, "Prowst," and they said, oh, yes. In fact, I had mentioned to my Francophile friend, who had just spent the last six months in Paris, that I was reading 'Proost,' and he responded, in an academic tone I assumed was ironic, "Uh, I believe it is pronounced 'Prowst.'" I laughed, because I thought he was mocking the many who mispronounce the name, but he did not laugh with me, leaving me with an empty sense of dread. Had I been mispronouncing Proust myself? Wikipedia tells me just what I like to hear: I'm right. "French pronunciation: [maʁsɛl pʁust]" in which the upside-down R is like "red" and the "u" is like "zoo."
If this entry seems to stop abruptly where it only ought to pause, I've successfully passed to you the sensation one feels when coming to the end of Within a Budding Grove. Thus, one must have The Guermantes Way on hand to pick up immediately, as if only turning a page between chapters. The two are inextricably linked. Unfortunately, I will need to get through 600 more pages of reading before offering you the next installment; sincere apologies.
*Yes, a made-up word, eliding "neurasthenic" with "aesthete," both of which apply and seem to be regularly co-symptomatic.
Not long after (two years pass with a page turn), he leaves Paris for Balbec, a seaside resort town, with his grandmother. Sent there for his health, Marcel indeed achieves new heights of physical robustness, lusting interchangeably after various members of a "little band of girls" vacationing at the same resort. He eventually singles out their ringleader, Albertine Simonet, for his intrepid sexual advances (which meet with her vehement rebuff). Once Albertine leaves (not long after the rebuff), the band dissipates, and Marcel lurks around the half-closed hotel at the season's end.
The other object of Marcel's obsessive affection is Saint-Loup, nephew to his grandmother's friend, the noble Mme de Villeparisis. Writing now from the perspective of having read ahead slightly, Marcel's affection for Saint-Loup will transfer to his aunt the Duchesse de Guermantes, in The Guermantes Way, but until then, Marcel's affection for Saint-Loup, without ever overtly expressing sexuality, seems to foreshadow the author's homosexuality. He writes about Saint-Loup's breezy manner, his fine—if scandalously informal—attire, the figure he cuts walking across the beach, and the messy affair the young man has with a mistress in Paris. At this stage in his personal development, Marcel desires Saint-Loup by desiring to be like Saint-Loup, making do with desiring to be near Saint-Loup. Letting on, perhaps, homosexual tendencies of his own, Saint-Loup takes Marcel as his dear friend.
At this point, I will address something to which I alluded in my post on Swann's Way, which is the pronunciation of the author's name. It was around the time of my reading of Within a Budding Grove that I began to notice that, when I said "I'm reading 'Proost,'" people looked at me with some confusion, until I clarified, "Prowst," and they said, oh, yes. In fact, I had mentioned to my Francophile friend, who had just spent the last six months in Paris, that I was reading 'Proost,' and he responded, in an academic tone I assumed was ironic, "Uh, I believe it is pronounced 'Prowst.'" I laughed, because I thought he was mocking the many who mispronounce the name, but he did not laugh with me, leaving me with an empty sense of dread. Had I been mispronouncing Proust myself? Wikipedia tells me just what I like to hear: I'm right. "French pronunciation: [maʁsɛl pʁust]" in which the upside-down R is like "red" and the "u" is like "zoo."
If this entry seems to stop abruptly where it only ought to pause, I've successfully passed to you the sensation one feels when coming to the end of Within a Budding Grove. Thus, one must have The Guermantes Way on hand to pick up immediately, as if only turning a page between chapters. The two are inextricably linked. Unfortunately, I will need to get through 600 more pages of reading before offering you the next installment; sincere apologies.
*Yes, a made-up word, eliding "neurasthenic" with "aesthete," both of which apply and seem to be regularly co-symptomatic.
Books: In Search of Lost Time Volume One: Swann's Way, by Marcel Proust
What I remember most strongly about my first weeks of college is the revelation of the lacunae in my learning. In comparison with my high-school peers, I was (without knowing it), quite a Proustian character: constantly reading, physically weak, and intellectually smug. I had read from Henry Miller and Kerouac to Kafka and Dostoevsky, all in my free time and in addition to school work (my school had a bias toward Shakespeare on one end and contemporary novelists of color on the other, leaving the great swath of what I considered literature unattended); I thought myself very well-read. But I sat down for the second lecture of my Existential Philosophy in Literature and Film course with my new friend Suzanne, and her friend (a bleached blond, name-dropping homosexual) told us that he was reading Marcel Proust's (pronounced "Proost's") À la recherche du temps perdu. He told us in French, even though he was reading it in English. He told us that his goal in life was to read all seven volumes.
Not many weeks later, in my Environmental Design Writing About Space workshop, our professor invoked Proust's (again, pronounced "Proost's") madeleine, as if it were some iconic trope we should all recognize (it is). He gave us, as a reading that night, the introductory pages of Swann's Way, in which Marcel, given a cup of lime-blossom tea in which to soak his madeleine cookie, begins to recall his youth in Combray. I didn't find it particularly moving. My last year at Berkeley, I wanted to take the Proust senior seminar, in which all seven volumes were read, but I was already pushing it by taking four English courses in one semester (ill-advised), and in order to graduate that year, my senior seminar needed to simultaneously satisfy the dreaded pre-1800s requirement. And so, I had to put off Proust.
Nearly ten years later, this lacuna remained in my literature knowledge. I found a tattered copy of Volume I of the silver-bound Vintage edition* in my building's laundry room and began reading. My intention was, at that point, to read all seven volumes on end, but from the start, it was a slog. I hated Marcel. He was neurotic, obsessive, and above all, long-winded. For fifty pages on end, he tossed and turned in bed, longing for his mother's kiss on his cheek, plotting ways to send for her, but too anxious to take action lest he offend his father. I finished Swann's Way and started Within a Budding Grove. I didn't blog about Swann's Way because I had so little of consequence to say that I planned to simply write one blog entry upon completing the work in its entirety. But, wearied that Marcel had transferred his obsession with his mother to an obsession with Gilberte Swann, I set the book aside for a time and never picked it up again. Hence, Swann's Way went unblogged.
A year later, I encountered another copy of Swann's Way in my laundry room. For some reason, I mistakenly thought this was the second volume, which I had never finished, so decided to start the project again. Luckily, it was in fact the first volume of the Modern Library edition, and I was able to reread with occasional rapture something I had once dismissed. Enough had shifted in my life that I can't be certain that the revised translation is what changed things, though having had such an experience with Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, I remain open to that possibility. I emerged from Swann's Way fresh enough that I was able to proceed directly through the Modern Library's Within a Budding Grove, and though I haven't had time until just now to write about either of these, I am now a quarter into The Guermantes Way. My only challenge now will be to address the contents of Swann's Way here without eliding them with Within a Budding Grove. Or have I here already written enough?
*A note on the volumes: Proust's novel is written in seven volumes. The 1982 Vintage edition, which was used by Berkeley's Proust senior seminar, is entitled A Remembrance of Things Past, and collapses these into three silver-bound bricks. Volume I contains Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove; Volume II The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain; and Volume III The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained. The Modern Library's 1993 edition, entitled In Search of Lost Time, is in six volumes: Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way, Sodom and Gomorrah, The Captive and The Fugitive together in one cover, and Time Regained. For this edition, D. J. Enright has revised the original C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin translation found in the Vintage edition, and is responsible for the subtle and not-so-subtle changes in titles. In 2005, Penguin UK released a new edition featuring all new translations, edited by Christopher Prendergast and featuring further title shifts: Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, translated by James Grieve, The Guermantes Way, translated by Mark Treharne, Sodom and Gomorrah, translated by John Sturrock, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark, The Fugitive, translated by Peter Collier, and Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson. I would be thrilled by the prospect of all-new translations by various authors if I had already read the "standard" translation years ago, but I don't think this is the place to start, and will see The Modern Library through before proceeding to anything too fresh.
Not many weeks later, in my Environmental Design Writing About Space workshop, our professor invoked Proust's (again, pronounced "Proost's") madeleine, as if it were some iconic trope we should all recognize (it is). He gave us, as a reading that night, the introductory pages of Swann's Way, in which Marcel, given a cup of lime-blossom tea in which to soak his madeleine cookie, begins to recall his youth in Combray. I didn't find it particularly moving. My last year at Berkeley, I wanted to take the Proust senior seminar, in which all seven volumes were read, but I was already pushing it by taking four English courses in one semester (ill-advised), and in order to graduate that year, my senior seminar needed to simultaneously satisfy the dreaded pre-1800s requirement. And so, I had to put off Proust.
Nearly ten years later, this lacuna remained in my literature knowledge. I found a tattered copy of Volume I of the silver-bound Vintage edition* in my building's laundry room and began reading. My intention was, at that point, to read all seven volumes on end, but from the start, it was a slog. I hated Marcel. He was neurotic, obsessive, and above all, long-winded. For fifty pages on end, he tossed and turned in bed, longing for his mother's kiss on his cheek, plotting ways to send for her, but too anxious to take action lest he offend his father. I finished Swann's Way and started Within a Budding Grove. I didn't blog about Swann's Way because I had so little of consequence to say that I planned to simply write one blog entry upon completing the work in its entirety. But, wearied that Marcel had transferred his obsession with his mother to an obsession with Gilberte Swann, I set the book aside for a time and never picked it up again. Hence, Swann's Way went unblogged.
A year later, I encountered another copy of Swann's Way in my laundry room. For some reason, I mistakenly thought this was the second volume, which I had never finished, so decided to start the project again. Luckily, it was in fact the first volume of the Modern Library edition, and I was able to reread with occasional rapture something I had once dismissed. Enough had shifted in my life that I can't be certain that the revised translation is what changed things, though having had such an experience with Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, I remain open to that possibility. I emerged from Swann's Way fresh enough that I was able to proceed directly through the Modern Library's Within a Budding Grove, and though I haven't had time until just now to write about either of these, I am now a quarter into The Guermantes Way. My only challenge now will be to address the contents of Swann's Way here without eliding them with Within a Budding Grove. Or have I here already written enough?
*A note on the volumes: Proust's novel is written in seven volumes. The 1982 Vintage edition, which was used by Berkeley's Proust senior seminar, is entitled A Remembrance of Things Past, and collapses these into three silver-bound bricks. Volume I contains Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove; Volume II The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain; and Volume III The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained. The Modern Library's 1993 edition, entitled In Search of Lost Time, is in six volumes: Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way, Sodom and Gomorrah, The Captive and The Fugitive together in one cover, and Time Regained. For this edition, D. J. Enright has revised the original C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin translation found in the Vintage edition, and is responsible for the subtle and not-so-subtle changes in titles. In 2005, Penguin UK released a new edition featuring all new translations, edited by Christopher Prendergast and featuring further title shifts: Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, translated by James Grieve, The Guermantes Way, translated by Mark Treharne, Sodom and Gomorrah, translated by John Sturrock, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark, The Fugitive, translated by Peter Collier, and Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson. I would be thrilled by the prospect of all-new translations by various authors if I had already read the "standard" translation years ago, but I don't think this is the place to start, and will see The Modern Library through before proceeding to anything too fresh.
Movies: Double Take
Unlike Nightfall, which I saw the same night as Double Take, at the beginning of June, Johan Grimonprez's pastiche may require two month's of consideration to understand. Unfortunately, it didn't compel me to give it this kind of thought.
Perhaps my expectations were unfair. I had read about the film before, and understood it to be a collage of found footage synthesized into a plot-driven movie in which Alfred Hitchcock encounters his double, addressing his famous instruction: "If you meet your double, you should kill him." In fact, Double Take is a film-studentish riff that for some reason parallels Hitchcock's self-acknowledged demise in televisionland (Alfred Hitchcock Presents) with the televised conversations between Nikita Kruschev and Richard Nixon, and later John F. Kennedy (at which debates, unaccidentally, the availability of television in every American home is no accident). Hitchcock impersonator Ron Burrage plays himself playing Hitchcock in 1980, encountering (vintage footage) Hitchcock in 1962. They converse over a cup of tea; one finds himself poisoned and dies. Mushroom clouds punctuate the picture.
Perhaps there is interesting potential for an in-depth analysis of Kruschev/Nixon/JFK as doubles (except that they are three rather than two, Nixon is far from JFK's double, and so if Nixon were Kruschev's double, JFK could not be, and vice-versa, so. . . ), but this film does not offer any thorough analysis on the topic. Instead, in amateur fashion, it presents a number of amusing if not potentially interesting selections of footage (clips from Hitchcock's various introductions to his television program, scenes from The Birds, vintage advertisements for Folger's instant coffee, documentary footage of the Soviet and American leaders at the World's Fair) and leaves it to the audience to suss out what the connection is. Die-hard Hitchcock fans will cling to the Easter eggs Grimonprez plants along the way (look, it's a bird! Oh, isn't that Bernard Hermann? I would recognize that soundtrack anywhere!), but ultimately, the film is an artistic exercise flaccidly executed with little relevance.
Perhaps my expectations were unfair. I had read about the film before, and understood it to be a collage of found footage synthesized into a plot-driven movie in which Alfred Hitchcock encounters his double, addressing his famous instruction: "If you meet your double, you should kill him." In fact, Double Take is a film-studentish riff that for some reason parallels Hitchcock's self-acknowledged demise in televisionland (Alfred Hitchcock Presents) with the televised conversations between Nikita Kruschev and Richard Nixon, and later John F. Kennedy (at which debates, unaccidentally, the availability of television in every American home is no accident). Hitchcock impersonator Ron Burrage plays himself playing Hitchcock in 1980, encountering (vintage footage) Hitchcock in 1962. They converse over a cup of tea; one finds himself poisoned and dies. Mushroom clouds punctuate the picture.
Perhaps there is interesting potential for an in-depth analysis of Kruschev/Nixon/JFK as doubles (except that they are three rather than two, Nixon is far from JFK's double, and so if Nixon were Kruschev's double, JFK could not be, and vice-versa, so. . . ), but this film does not offer any thorough analysis on the topic. Instead, in amateur fashion, it presents a number of amusing if not potentially interesting selections of footage (clips from Hitchcock's various introductions to his television program, scenes from The Birds, vintage advertisements for Folger's instant coffee, documentary footage of the Soviet and American leaders at the World's Fair) and leaves it to the audience to suss out what the connection is. Die-hard Hitchcock fans will cling to the Easter eggs Grimonprez plants along the way (look, it's a bird! Oh, isn't that Bernard Hermann? I would recognize that soundtrack anywhere!), but ultimately, the film is an artistic exercise flaccidly executed with little relevance.
Movies: Nightfall
I saw this movie two months ago at Film Forum. It wasn't so challenging that it's taken me two months to digest it, nor was it so tedious that it's taken me two months to rally my sense of responsibility to write. I've just had a busy two months.
Sitting down to write today, I had, I admit, forgotten the title, and, in fact, most of the plot. The only thing I remembered vividly was the action-packed climax: a fist-fight that tumbles out of the driver's seat of a snowplow—the snowplow still proceeding voraciously toward a lonely lean-to, in which the heroine and another character are bound at wrist and ankle. The shot that sticks is the dead-on, full-screen, look into the maw of the plow, which fills the contemporary audience with drunken giggles, though I imagine the 1957 audience sat on the edges of their seats with their eyes wide open, or else closed them, shrinking away in terror.
But how did we get here? The lurchingly sweet Aldo Ray (I always think he would make a good Frankenstein's monster; his body is too big for his personality) has suited up the innocent Anne Bancroft in winter hiking gear, traipsing into the snowy wilderness of Wyoming in search of a doctor's bag stuffed with cash. The money isn't his, but accidentally fell into his hands the winter before, when he was camping with his friend (incidentally, a doctor). When the two of them stopped to look into a roadside accident, they unwittingly found themselves fraternizing with a couple of criminals—bank robbers on the lam, whose bag full of cash happens to look just like the doctor's bag. Not only do the robbers take the campers' car, but they shoot the doc dead with his rifle, and try to kill Aldo Ray, too. He escapes, taking what he thinks is the doctor's bag, but what is actually the bag of money. Somewhere along the way, he stops to sleep in a lean-to, and forgets the bag out in the snow, never realizing its contents.
Months later, Ray is a hunted man. The bank robbers think he has their money, and the bank's insurance investigator thinks so too, though he has a hunch that Ray is innocent. Bancroft unwittingly steps into the middle of this web when she lets Ray pay for her martini and subsequent dinner at a lonely restaurant in the middle of the night—the same night the robbers find him and drive him out to the waterfront to deliver an information-seeking beating. He escapes, but knows that the only way out of this mess is to find the money himself, which is how he finds himself rolling around in the snow, wrestling in front of an unmanned moving snowplow. The bank robber, I'm afraid to say, becomes food for the beast.
Ultimately, the film is basically as generic a noir as its title implies (I at last remembered the title, but had doubts that it was right, it being so generic). For those with a particular interest in really bad bad guys, bank robber number two is a little gone in the head, with a penchant for torture. For those with an interest in 1950s haute couture, Bancroft plays a model, and one of the better chase scenes involves the robbers crashing her rendezvous with Ray at a classy department store's garden fashion show. And of course, for those with an interest in snowplows, it is a must-see.
Sitting down to write today, I had, I admit, forgotten the title, and, in fact, most of the plot. The only thing I remembered vividly was the action-packed climax: a fist-fight that tumbles out of the driver's seat of a snowplow—the snowplow still proceeding voraciously toward a lonely lean-to, in which the heroine and another character are bound at wrist and ankle. The shot that sticks is the dead-on, full-screen, look into the maw of the plow, which fills the contemporary audience with drunken giggles, though I imagine the 1957 audience sat on the edges of their seats with their eyes wide open, or else closed them, shrinking away in terror.
But how did we get here? The lurchingly sweet Aldo Ray (I always think he would make a good Frankenstein's monster; his body is too big for his personality) has suited up the innocent Anne Bancroft in winter hiking gear, traipsing into the snowy wilderness of Wyoming in search of a doctor's bag stuffed with cash. The money isn't his, but accidentally fell into his hands the winter before, when he was camping with his friend (incidentally, a doctor). When the two of them stopped to look into a roadside accident, they unwittingly found themselves fraternizing with a couple of criminals—bank robbers on the lam, whose bag full of cash happens to look just like the doctor's bag. Not only do the robbers take the campers' car, but they shoot the doc dead with his rifle, and try to kill Aldo Ray, too. He escapes, taking what he thinks is the doctor's bag, but what is actually the bag of money. Somewhere along the way, he stops to sleep in a lean-to, and forgets the bag out in the snow, never realizing its contents.
Months later, Ray is a hunted man. The bank robbers think he has their money, and the bank's insurance investigator thinks so too, though he has a hunch that Ray is innocent. Bancroft unwittingly steps into the middle of this web when she lets Ray pay for her martini and subsequent dinner at a lonely restaurant in the middle of the night—the same night the robbers find him and drive him out to the waterfront to deliver an information-seeking beating. He escapes, but knows that the only way out of this mess is to find the money himself, which is how he finds himself rolling around in the snow, wrestling in front of an unmanned moving snowplow. The bank robber, I'm afraid to say, becomes food for the beast.
Ultimately, the film is basically as generic a noir as its title implies (I at last remembered the title, but had doubts that it was right, it being so generic). For those with a particular interest in really bad bad guys, bank robber number two is a little gone in the head, with a penchant for torture. For those with an interest in 1950s haute couture, Bancroft plays a model, and one of the better chase scenes involves the robbers crashing her rendezvous with Ray at a classy department store's garden fashion show. And of course, for those with an interest in snowplows, it is a must-see.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Books: The Music of Life: Biology Beyond the Genome, by Denis Noble
When writing non-fiction, the author must make assumptions about his audience, so that he conveys the right depth and detail of information. Denis Noble, though, seems not to have asked himself whether he was writing for a scientific or lay audience. Sometimes, he gives maddeningly obvious information, reminding us, for example, that the four bases comprising the DNA molecule are known in shorthand as A, T, G, and C, and that DNA is shorthand for deoxyribonucleic acid. This I learned in school when I was sixteen. He tells us that a millisecond is one-thousandth of a second. Then, perhaps forgetting that we readers are too uneducated to understand simple power prefixes without his assistance, he launches into a description of how the heart's pacemaker function works by a feedback system of electrical charges, showing us graphs of cell voltage in milivolts against potassium, mixed ion, and calcium channels in nanoamps, which are nearly illegible to a layperson.
I think that Noble's trouble is that he's not writing science for the layperson or the scientist; he is a scientist with strong humanist tendencies, railing against his less-humanist colleagues, at anyone who will listen. Noble wants badly to present his philosophical ideas in a way that seems scientific, so he uses one of literature's staple techniques: the extended metaphor, which allows one to build two parallel columns of data that correspond one-to-one, preserving the clean, linear aesthetic of science. Life, he tells us, is like music.
But things get messy, because Noble neglected to draw a schema for his one-to-one correspondences before he began. He presents DNA as information that gives rise to a human in the same way that a compact disk contains information that gives rise to music—but only when inserted into the correct stereo system. Thus, as a CD is silent without its player, DNA creates no life without a womb and its chemical inputs.
This is fine, but things fall apart when he tries to build the correspondence from the bottom up. DNA codes for life in the same way that a score codes for music; a score exists, but without the musical instrument and musician, the score is silent. In my lay understanding of biology, the correlate for the instrument would be pre-existing tissues, the cells that surround the DNA, and the musician would be the chemical signals that flush these cells and drive DNA to do its work of dividing and coding and protein-building. But I haven't taken biology for more than ten years now.
Noble tells us no: "If there is a score for the music of life, it is not the genome," [italics mine] because "DNA never acts outside the context of the cell." And yet, as I've worked it out above, neither does a score "work" outside the context of the instrument. So, what is the problem? Likely, there is none, for Noble then flips back to the original construct, describing how "protein and cell machinery works to stimulate and control transcription. . . this is what 'plays' the genes." So DNA is again the score. But then, in the chapter on the Conductor (how does a Conductor fit in?! Certainly, music can be played without one. . .), Noble reminds us that "we have also developed the metaphor of the genome as a [pipe] organ, which needs someone to play it." So, wait. Now, the genome is the instrument? What is the score? Noble attempts to clarify: "We should think rather of a 'virtual conductor'—the system behaves 'as if' it has a conductor. The genes behave 'as though' they are being 'played' by this conductor—rather like some orchestras that play without a separate conductor." But Noble had told us that "the organ is not a program that writes. . . the Bach fugues. Bach did that." So corrodes our tidy one-to-one correspondence.
Clearly, what Noble means by the sentence quoted at the beginning of the preceding paragraph is that "the genome itself is not the music of life." It is in his penultimate chapter that he clarifies this, realizing his true goal: to demonstrate that "the self"* can not be located in one isolated part of our being, be it DNA, a section of the brain, or any other proposed lone location. "The self," he tells us, is "an integrative process that can be deconstructed;" not a mere "neurological object." This is his reason for insisting on an integrated "systems" biology, which doesn't assume bottom-up or top-down causation, but, in a much more Zen way, understands life as a feedback loop of being. The messy music metaphors, it turns out, were completely unnecessary in the making of this point.
*philosophically speaking
I think that Noble's trouble is that he's not writing science for the layperson or the scientist; he is a scientist with strong humanist tendencies, railing against his less-humanist colleagues, at anyone who will listen. Noble wants badly to present his philosophical ideas in a way that seems scientific, so he uses one of literature's staple techniques: the extended metaphor, which allows one to build two parallel columns of data that correspond one-to-one, preserving the clean, linear aesthetic of science. Life, he tells us, is like music.
But things get messy, because Noble neglected to draw a schema for his one-to-one correspondences before he began. He presents DNA as information that gives rise to a human in the same way that a compact disk contains information that gives rise to music—but only when inserted into the correct stereo system. Thus, as a CD is silent without its player, DNA creates no life without a womb and its chemical inputs.
This is fine, but things fall apart when he tries to build the correspondence from the bottom up. DNA codes for life in the same way that a score codes for music; a score exists, but without the musical instrument and musician, the score is silent. In my lay understanding of biology, the correlate for the instrument would be pre-existing tissues, the cells that surround the DNA, and the musician would be the chemical signals that flush these cells and drive DNA to do its work of dividing and coding and protein-building. But I haven't taken biology for more than ten years now.
Noble tells us no: "If there is a score for the music of life, it is not the genome," [italics mine] because "DNA never acts outside the context of the cell." And yet, as I've worked it out above, neither does a score "work" outside the context of the instrument. So, what is the problem? Likely, there is none, for Noble then flips back to the original construct, describing how "protein and cell machinery works to stimulate and control transcription. . . this is what 'plays' the genes." So DNA is again the score. But then, in the chapter on the Conductor (how does a Conductor fit in?! Certainly, music can be played without one. . .), Noble reminds us that "we have also developed the metaphor of the genome as a [pipe] organ, which needs someone to play it." So, wait. Now, the genome is the instrument? What is the score? Noble attempts to clarify: "We should think rather of a 'virtual conductor'—the system behaves 'as if' it has a conductor. The genes behave 'as though' they are being 'played' by this conductor—rather like some orchestras that play without a separate conductor." But Noble had told us that "the organ is not a program that writes. . . the Bach fugues. Bach did that." So corrodes our tidy one-to-one correspondence.
Clearly, what Noble means by the sentence quoted at the beginning of the preceding paragraph is that "the genome itself is not the music of life." It is in his penultimate chapter that he clarifies this, realizing his true goal: to demonstrate that "the self"* can not be located in one isolated part of our being, be it DNA, a section of the brain, or any other proposed lone location. "The self," he tells us, is "an integrative process that can be deconstructed;" not a mere "neurological object." This is his reason for insisting on an integrated "systems" biology, which doesn't assume bottom-up or top-down causation, but, in a much more Zen way, understands life as a feedback loop of being. The messy music metaphors, it turns out, were completely unnecessary in the making of this point.
*philosophically speaking
Dance: Christopher Wheeldon's Estancia at the New York City Ballet (with Danses Concertantes and Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet)
Tuesday, June 1st was the second showing of Estancia, one of seven new ballets commissioned this season by the New York City Ballet under the "Architecture of Dance" rubric, for which Santiago Calatrava has created the sets. I expected something modern, kinetic, and minimal. I've seen Wheeldon's work before, and while he is too much of a traditionalist for my tastes, for the antiquarian NYCB, he's a young Turk, more interested in static shapes than traveling jumps. Estancia is the first time I've seen him revert to one of ballet's most cloying traditions: plot. Though it can't be much longer than 20 minutes, this ballet proposes a love story in the Argentine Pampas, between a city boy and a country girl, the latter rejecting the advances of the former until he proves his manhood by conquering one of the region's wild horses.
Strictly choreographically, Estancia offers a few stunning passages. The five dancers in the roles of wild horses embody that particular equine breath, the trembling chest, pawing feet, and tossed head of the wild creature that first refuses to be conquered, until its spirit is broken, and its feet fall into a measured trot once the bridle is fitted. In partnering horse-dancers with people-dancers, Wheeldon creates exceptionally fresh and captivating pas-de-deux, impressionistic sequences of shapes describing not only the physical interaction of the human and equine body, but the exchange of power between the two. This break from the standard pas-de-deux, in which the male dancer supports the female as she turns innumerable circles around herself, is very welcome.
That said, the piece is not so modern as we might have hoped. I would have happily watched 20 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour of plotless human-equine interactions, but this wouldn't satisfy the typical NYCB audience. But, because this is a piece set in the country, the jeweled and feathered pomp native to the theater would not suffice either. Wheeldon takes recourse, oddly, to the free-wheeling sun-and-dust palette of Rodgers & Hammerstein. Estancia has the feeling of a ballet sequence in a Broadway show staged in the 1950s, Carousel or Oklahoma!; Estancia! would in fact be a title more fitting in tone.
As for Calatrava, what is his contribution? Not the kinetic, architectural sculpture I had expected, but a watercolor-esque painted backdrop of swaying grasses and a few stark palms. The show is beautifully lit, and as the action occurs over a 24 hour period, the backdrop does glow beautifully with the first pink light of dawn, when the city boy and country girl wake up to find themselves lovers, and discovered.
I can forgive Estancia for not meeting my expectations, for it interested me nevertheless, but cannot forgive NYCB for sandwiching the piece between two antiquated Balanchine pieces, the first a parade of harlequin-like trios who present us with their "charming" escapades as if we were royals and they our court entertainers, and the last an example of that airless jeweled and feathered nonsense, an interminable series of emotionless drawing room postures better suited to a fancy-dress photo shoot than the stage of art or entertainment. What is the point of commissioning new works, bringing together contemporary artists, if you are going to then subject your audience to offensively outmoded selections both before and after, poisoning both any anticipation and any lingering sweetness from the piece that is new? Fie.
Strictly choreographically, Estancia offers a few stunning passages. The five dancers in the roles of wild horses embody that particular equine breath, the trembling chest, pawing feet, and tossed head of the wild creature that first refuses to be conquered, until its spirit is broken, and its feet fall into a measured trot once the bridle is fitted. In partnering horse-dancers with people-dancers, Wheeldon creates exceptionally fresh and captivating pas-de-deux, impressionistic sequences of shapes describing not only the physical interaction of the human and equine body, but the exchange of power between the two. This break from the standard pas-de-deux, in which the male dancer supports the female as she turns innumerable circles around herself, is very welcome.
That said, the piece is not so modern as we might have hoped. I would have happily watched 20 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour of plotless human-equine interactions, but this wouldn't satisfy the typical NYCB audience. But, because this is a piece set in the country, the jeweled and feathered pomp native to the theater would not suffice either. Wheeldon takes recourse, oddly, to the free-wheeling sun-and-dust palette of Rodgers & Hammerstein. Estancia has the feeling of a ballet sequence in a Broadway show staged in the 1950s, Carousel or Oklahoma!; Estancia! would in fact be a title more fitting in tone.
As for Calatrava, what is his contribution? Not the kinetic, architectural sculpture I had expected, but a watercolor-esque painted backdrop of swaying grasses and a few stark palms. The show is beautifully lit, and as the action occurs over a 24 hour period, the backdrop does glow beautifully with the first pink light of dawn, when the city boy and country girl wake up to find themselves lovers, and discovered.
I can forgive Estancia for not meeting my expectations, for it interested me nevertheless, but cannot forgive NYCB for sandwiching the piece between two antiquated Balanchine pieces, the first a parade of harlequin-like trios who present us with their "charming" escapades as if we were royals and they our court entertainers, and the last an example of that airless jeweled and feathered nonsense, an interminable series of emotionless drawing room postures better suited to a fancy-dress photo shoot than the stage of art or entertainment. What is the point of commissioning new works, bringing together contemporary artists, if you are going to then subject your audience to offensively outmoded selections both before and after, poisoning both any anticipation and any lingering sweetness from the piece that is new? Fie.
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