Category: Culture

I couldn’t recomend more highly the Les Arts Florissants production of Rameau’s “Les Boréades” which opened June 9 at the Brookly Academy of Music. I’d be astounded if it hasn’t sold out already, but the Academy Howard Gilman Opera House is a very big space.
The music is gorgeous, and until recently inexplicably neglected. The singing is superb, and the visuals are magificent, modern but fully respectful of the formalism of mid-eighteenth-century France.
The story and the libretto, with their elevation of la Liberté to the highest order, well, next to the redemptive qualities of love, are pure Enlightenment, and a healthy reminder of how much we still owe to the French, who taught our Fathers so much we seem now to have forgotten ourselves.
Rameau wrote the music in 1763. He was 80, and he died the following year. The text was the work of a Freemason, which may explain why it was never performed in his time. The work but had to wait for its premier until just a few years ago. This is it’s American premier.
More than most operas, “Les Boréades” is a balance of theater, music and dance. There are long sections with no vocal lines whatsoever, where the dance soars.

Director Robert Carsen and his creative team flood the stage with summer blossoms, mountainous piles of autumn leaves, punishing winter snows, and thunderous spring storms. The soloists, chorus, and dancers, 140-strong, are costumed in late 1940s, Dior-inspired dress to simpler garments to no garments at all. And then there are the marvels of Rameau, a master whose haunting airs and orchestral dances for Les Boréades put many more familiar operas to shame. Rameau called on a lifetime of experience in its creation, but above all he knew the human heart.

The huge chorus and the dancers (astoundingly, they are virtually indistinguishable for much of the evening in this production) are individually and together exceptionally beautiful and athletic, and lucky in their choreographer. The sets and lighting would please Wieland Wagner and Robert Wilson.
Awesome.
p.s.
Adding to our own entertainment on opening night was the buzz created by the presence of the dashing young Canadian equery who accompanied “Her Excellency the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson, C.C., C.M.M., C.O.M., C.D., Governor General and Commander-in-Chief of Canada” and her consort, the essayist and novelist “His Excellency John Ralston Saul, C.C.”
This handsome, perfectly-bilingual couple sat immediately across the aisle from us and joined the champagne patron receptions during two intermissions. The smiling equery, equally bilingual, clutched a thick leather portfolio (documents which might be needed to identify the GG, in the event of some unpleasant emergency, like our INS mistreating another Canadian citizen?) and never strayed far.
I have to gasp at the biographies of these two and admire what that says about their nation, especially when we look at what passes for the “qualifications” of our own current pretender to the office of U.S. chief executive. Of course the Canadian executive office has no real power, but it does clearly represent what Canada holds dear. Both nations regularly select lessor creatures to do the real ruling business.
[Note: The Governor General is nominated by the Canadian Prime Minister and approved by the Queen (Canadian Head of State) as her representative in Canada.]
By the way, Clarkson and Saul were at BAM on Monday not because of any official Canadian connection, but just for the show (they’re both interested in the culture of all nations, and Saul especially is interested in promoting that of the French). Just a night out.

And the paper of record remembers her.

Pepper [LaBeija] was the last of the four great queens of the modern Harlem balls; Angie Xtravaganza, Dorian Corey and Avis Pendavis all died in recent years. These four exuded a sort of wild expressionism that might make Las Vegas showgirls seem tame.

LaBeija was the last name used by all members of the House of LaBeija, the group of performers Pepper led.

When Pepper LaBeija was not onstage, she was William Jackson of the Bronx, who sometimes dressed as a man.

But to the younger members of the house, for whom there was no other family, she was “mother;” the others were the “children.”

Miss LaBeija had diabetes, which had led to the amputation of both feet, and had been bedridden for most of the last decade. She last performed at a ball in 2001, when 30 attendants delivered her on a litter to the crowd’s jubilation.
“Her specialty was the Egyptian effect,” Marcel LaBeija said.
Pepper LaBeija was a legend to the members and patrons of the Harlem ball scene, a world of extravagant make-believe that crosses sexual boundaries and that was chronicled in “Paris Is Burning,” directed by Jennie Livingston. In an interview, Ms. Livingston spoke of Pepper’s “glamorous bravado” that stood out in a flock of Marilyn Monroes.
The public also glimpsed the ball scene in a Madonna video that featured voguing, a highly stylized and posed dance form used in the balls. Voguing was also featured at the Love Balls, which were held at Roseland in 1989 and 1990 and drew top fashion industry figures.
Though men have long dressed as women for many reasons, the modern institution of the Harlem ball began around 1960, said Marcel LaBeija, who is writing a book on the subject. The idea was to give gay blacks and Hispanics a place to dress up and perform. An earlier circuit for drag performers had been geared to white people, and black performers had sometimes whitened their faces to fit in.

The Times does it very right sometimes.

For most of her life, Miss LaBeija’s world was the balls. Marcel said that Pepper supported herself by producing them and by teaching modeling.
In an interview with The Village Voice in 2000, Miss LaBeija said her life had grown more ordinary, and called herself an “old-way legend in recovery.” Without mentioning her disabled status, she volunteered that she had even given up shoplifting designer clothes, called “mopping” by performers who rely on the practice.
“You mop, you get locked,” she explained.

Pepper is survived by her mother, a son and a daughter.

Ved Mehta, talking wistfully about the house he did not get:”Really, I wanted to buy an old house and adapt to it,” he said.

In America, everyone thinks he can build his own dream house. In the rest of the world, you adapt to the house. This country is so rich, everyone wants to dominate the world, not adapt to it.

Included in a Clemens Lecture presented in April for the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, by Kurt Vonnegut:

What other American landmark is as sacred to me as the Mark Twain House? The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln were country boys from Middle America, and both of them made the American people laugh at themselves and appreciate really important, really moral jokes.
I note that construction has stopped of a Mark Twain Museum here in Hartford —behind the carriage house of the Mark Twain House at 351 Farmington Avenue. Work persons have been sent home from that site because American “conservatives,” as they call themselves, on Wall Street and at the head of so many of our corporations, have stolen a major fraction of our private savings, have ruined investors and employees by means of fraud and outright piracy.
Shock and awe.
And now, having installed themselves as our federal government, or taken control of it from outside, they have squandered our public treasury and then some. They have created a public debt of such appalling magnitude that our descendants, for whom we had such high hopes, will come into this world as poor as church mice.
Shock and awe.
What are the conservatives doing with all the money and power that used to belong to all of us? They are telling us to be absolutely terrified, and to run around in circles like chickens with their heads cut off. But they will save us. They are making us take off our shoes at airports. Can anybody here think of a more hilarious practical joke than that one?
Smile, America. You’re on Candid Camera.
And they have turned loose a myriad of our high-tech weapons, each one costing more than a hundred high schools, on a Third World country, in order to shock and awe human beings like us, like Adam and Eve, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
. . . .
What has happened to us? We have suffered a technological calamity. Television is now our form of government [my italics].

Further mocking our current regime in Washington, Vonnegut recalls the man who became the first president of a Republican Party which would reject him today. The words of Congressman Abraham Lincoln, describing President Polk’s 1848 War on Mexico:

“Trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory, that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood —that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy, he plunged into war.”

Vonnegut jumps up:

Holy smokes! I almost said, “Holy shit!” And I thought I was a writer!

John Lennon’s boyhood home, a modest 1930s semi-detached just outside of Liverpool’s center, has opened to the public with an English Heritage plaque on its facade. It’s now a museum. Yoko Ono bought the house in 2001 and donated it to the National Trust. It’s a sweet news story, but then, we expected that.
In 1945, when he was five, three years after his parents were divorced and with his father long at sea, his mother had decided her bohemian life with a new boyfriend was unsuitable for raising a child and John was put in the care of his uncle and aunt.

Uncle George died in 1955, and Aunt Mimi became the disciplinarian who tried to rein in the increasingly restive John. Ms. Ono said that one of Aunt Mimi’s habits — prying into her nephew’s diaries and notebooks — ended up contributing to his art. “He thought it was as if Mimi was looking over his shoulder, and so he started to write in gobbledygook, and he used to say that’s how surrealism first got into his work,” Ms. Ono said.
[The house] was sold in 1965, after Mr. Lennon bought a bungalow for his aunt on the English Channel coast at Poole in Dorset. For her new home, he gave her a stone tablet inscribed with a quote of hers that he wanted her never to forget.
It read, “A guitar’s all right John, but you’ll never earn a living by it.”

More information, with more pictures, is available on the Trust’s website. And on that site, Yoko describes the house, called Mendips: “This is the house where John did all his dreaming about his future, about the future of the world…and the rest is history!”

“It is our humble homage to a site which is part of the heritage of the entire world. Vine growing began here, and here, after 2000 years, we once more propose a wine made in Pompeii.”

Senor Mastroberardino exaggerates a bit about the southern Italian origin of winemaking, but the Etruscan, Greek and Roman Campania’s accomplishment, and his own, is significant nevertheless.
Ok, not a story that will appeal to everyone, but it definitely appears made for me. My maybe-all-too-numerous passions include food, wine, Italy, Naples, ancient history, landscapes, cities, and so on. By coincidence late last night we sat down to a simple Campanian dish, Spaghettini alle Vongole con Brocoli di Rapa (thin spaghetti with brocoli rabe and clams, with garlic and hot pepper flakes) accompanied by a wonderful Campanian white, a Falanghina (dei Campi Flegrei). Perfect.
Now if we only had access to Mastroberardino’s Pompeian wine itself. But I’m definitely going to order more of that Falanghina.

An excerpt from today’s NYTimes review of the “Così fan tutte” I wrote about earlier this week:

But it’s not the updating alone that makes Mr. Miller’s production so comically sharp and penetrating. It’s that with this staging concept Mr. Miller has inspired his winning cast, which includes four gifted young artists and two ageless veterans, to give such vibrant, natural and uninhibited characterizations. The conductor Robert Spano and 35 players from the Brooklyn Philharmonic deliver a buoyant, lithe yet unhurried account of the score, and the 900-seat auditorium provides an ideally intimate performance space. Mozart lovers should not miss the production, which has five more performances through May 4, including tonight.

Time Out New York wants to sell magazines, so it’s virtually impossible to find anything on their website, but the print copy reminded me today of the remarkable history of May 1 as a world holiday (except in the U.S., of course), so I owe them a credit even if they make me type the entire story myself. The piece is amazing for its Left-radical slant, although any other would hardly be possible in talking about the history of May Day.

It’s nearly May 1, and America’s least popular holiday next to National Boss Day is upon us. May day originally began as a pagan celebration, marking the arrival of spring. Toward the end of the 19th century, however, the holiday took on a serious socialist flavor. Maybe that’s why May Day – popular in the rest of the world – never caught on here. (Hallmark doesn’t print a single card for it, and the company makes a whopping 100 different designs for an obscure October “holiday” called Sweetest Day.) Following a strike by American workers for an eight-hour working day, the 1899 International Socialist Congress officially established May Day as the holiday of the workingman. The day was always marked by large military parades in Communist countries. (The American government, paranoid entity that it is, moved to counter in 1947 by designating May 1 “Loyalty Day.” Hallmark doesn’t make any cards for that, either.)
And for your further edification, “Mayday” – the distress cry of pilots – has nothing to do with spring, socialism or holidays. It’s simply an English bastardization of the French m’aidez, which means “help me!” – Reed Tucker

New York City didn’t buy into the Cold War “Duck and Cover” mindset of the fifties, and it’s no sucker for the War on Terrorism “Code Orange” threats of the aughts.
A recent poll reveals that New Yorkers are the least prepared for an emergency among residents of America’s 10 biggest cities. How can we account for this? Tom Vanderbilt says, in a NYTimes OP-ED piece, “City Without Fear,” it’s because of a “deep-dyed, venerable spirit, an inner civil defense.”

In a city where one has to fight for everything, fighting for survival is second nature. We stock our symbolic survival kits with the enduring idea of New York, which is more resilient than any of its architecture.

I was wrong, or at least wanting, in my information on the general audience dates for the “Così fan tutte” I described last night. The corrected, more extended list of performance dates now appears in the post below.