Category: Culture

A few days ago we accepted an invitation for this evening’s full dress rehearsal of the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s “Così fan tutte,” in a co-production with BAM, directed by Jonathan Miller.
Mozart and Da Ponte got it right over 200 years ago, but this very modern staging (public performances are scheduled for April 24, 26, 28, 30 and May 2 at 7:30 pm, and May 4 at 3pm) is absolutely magnificent, enchanting, hysterical, beautiful, sexy, humanistic, enlightened. Highly recommended on every count. Under Robert Spano’s direction, the orchestra was brilliant, perhaps beyond anything even lucky New Yorkers should ordinarily expect; Miller’s direction incredibly credible and inspired at the same time; the singing extraordinary, both the four younger, new, and the two older, more familiar voices you may already have in your CD library; the acting superior to most straight theatre. The contemporary costumes worked, perhaps especially those of the two “Albanian” chums, one a white, dredlocked, Carribean bopper and the other a trashy, blond, 80’s heavy metalist, but the creamy modern sets suffered from an excess of silly drapery, even if the couples’ celebratory champagne looked irresistably real.
The theater is the Harvey, a converted Brooklyn cinema, and one of its greatest virtues is its intimacy, at least compared to the convention halls known as the Metropolitan Opera House and the New York State Theater. You actually get to hear and see the singer-actors, and you’ll still be able to pay the rent after buying a ticket.
Opera really has become the classical music form of our time. It is once again absolutely the most vital outlet for both composers and audiences, for very good reasons not all related to our increasingly sad cultural circumstances. The elimination of educational facilities, diminishing subsidies and a dramatic decline in the number of venues have all forced a cutback in the number of music models generally available, but opera survives. It even flourishes, fortunately sometimes in innovative shapes which traditionalists would not recognize as opera.
This one however should please everyone. Check out this cozy “Così.” If you’re just now getting into opera, this really is the time, the place and the song.

For a taste of what people will be talking about and, yes, singing, twenty years from now, not unlike the way that the music of Donizetti or Verdi was popularly enjoyed in nineteenth-century Italy, head for The Kitchen tomorrow evening (Saturday). Robert Ashley is the prophet of modern opera, even if he is still not properly honored in his own country.
We sat in the front row this evening, next to his wonderful colleague, Mikel Rouse, for a performance of Ashley’s latest work, “Celestial Excursions,” an extraordinarily fresh music-theater take on those we usually try to avoid calling “the old.”
From The Village Voice “Choices” section:

Old people–a community so marginalized it doesn’t even have a future to look forward to–are the subject of Ashley’s “Celestial Excursions,” which has its domestic premiere tonight. America’s most inventive and ambitious opera composer seamlessly interweaves several natural-language recitatives (performed by Thomas Buckner, Sam Ashley, and Joan La Barbara, among others), pop-song nostalgia, pre-recorded electronics, and “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s homey piano playing into what should be a witty, moving, and densely textured meditation on aging, memory, and the great unknown.

From the review by the almost-impossible-to-please Anne Midgette, in the NYTimes:

His five central characters (including himself), seated at card tables with microphones, speak or sing fragments or long episodes of meaningful past, out of context: pieces of story like tiles fallen from their mosaic, lovely and broken.
What he creates is a dream state that’s brought into relation to the outside world only through structural conventions. The characters, for example, come together in a meeting at an assisted-living center, with Mr. Ashley as the group leader trying to impose some kind of meaningful order out of the waves of feeling welling around him.
Their monologues are also grouped into episodes that have the appearance of traditional musical forms, if not their sound: a deft, intricate quartet juxtaposing speech and song; a big ballad-aria, “Lonely Lady,” which is spoken by Mr. Ashley. But there’s never a resolution; the music intensifies, climaxes, ebbs, while Joan Jonas, a performance artist, enacts a sequence of dreamlike images at the back of the stage. Imposing form on feeling is every artist’s task; in this piece, age is the threat to this difficult act, and attempts at structure seem like thin walls seeking to hold back shifting sands.

Ashley himself is now in his early seventies, but his music, his texts and his entire conception belongs to all the ages.

Ron English borrows billboards to advertise his politics.

Ron English puts up illegal billboards, so he has only one way of knowing if it has been a good day.
“I consider it a success if I don’t go to jail,” he explained. He should know. He has had two very unsuccessful days in the past.
You may have seen Mr. English, a 43-year-old father of two, wandering around the streets of Manhattan or New Jersey with a bucket of glue, a set of rollers and a crew of accomplices. He plasters his original paintings in broad daylight on billboards he does not own. This is a conscious decision, because billboarding in the dark would only look more suspicious. “If you’re out at night,” he said, “it’s obvious that you’re not supposed to be there.”
. . . .
“Ron’s kind of a one-man billboard hurricane,” said Jack Napier, the founder of the Billboard Liberation Front, a San Francisco-based movement considered one of the first to alter such advertising. “He’s done some brilliant stuff.”
Two weeks ago, Mr. English pasted up three works in Jersey City, where he lives and paints. One reads: “Saddam’s SUV’s. Oil Dependence Day Sale.” It ends with the Chevy logo and the tag “Like Iraq.”

He frankly admits, in his own words, “I guess I’m a criminal. But I don’t think I’m a nuisance to society.”

watching the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it. So, for now, I think you should go to Bloggy for culture blogs. We dig up the stuff together, but just now I’m not able to focus enough on the art-which-keeps-me-mostly-sane in order to actually write about it, but B seems to manage.

In an interview with the brilliant and gloriously political playwright Tony Kushner, Cleveland Plain Dealer theater critic Tony Brown quotes him on the subject of our unelected one:

“We’re seeing this sort of grotesque, illegitimate recrudescence of the Reagan political agenda that was solidly rejected in three straight presidential elections,” Kushner said. “Bush started with no political clout after the electoral college fluke and the political theft of the elections process by the Supreme Court. He’d be in the toilet now if he had not benefited tremendously from 9/11.”

And there’s more:

“He wants to secure oil markets by unilateral military action and give back as much as possible to the very rich. If he didn’t start this war and if Congress hadn’t given up its war powers, what would we be doing but watching Wall Street swooning, unemployment going up and the economy tanking. This guy is a catastrophe. He’s given away the goodwill of the world and turned America into a rogue nation.”

Oh yes, we can soon expect to be hearing more from Kushner. One of his latest works-in-progress, titled “Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy,” is described in the Plain Dealer article as a play about Laura Bush and the nature of evil.

The first scene, excerpted in the March 24 edition of The Nation, features first lady Laura Bush reading from Dostoevsky’s voluminous “The Brothers Karamazov” to a group of dead Iraqi children.

Ouch.

It was assembled in love and anger thirty years ago in a world most of us could hardly have imagined, safe in our enlightened beds, until now.
In 1973, at the height of the Apartheid regime, the playwright Athol Fugard collaborated with John Kani and Winson Ntsona to develop the wonderful South African play, “The Island,” being staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Harvey Theater this week and the next.
Barry and I were lucky to be in the theatre last night to see the original artists bring their work back to New York, to a society very different from that which originally inspired the work, yet one suffering its own new dark age.
The Brooklyn production demonstrates that the play has lost none of its power, and amazingly Kani and Ntsona have actually enhanced its profundity, without sacrificing its art, through tweaking and expanding the original lines of the final scene, a dramatization of Sophocles’ “Antigone,” with its magnificent theme of civil disobedience, by two convicts in the penal colony of the play’s title. The play now clearly relates to a new authoritarian regime, and it pulls no punches.
Even without the changes in the script, the production would have been a triumph. As it was, virtually the entire audience, having audibly gasped at some of the last lines delivered by the two artists, stood in an astounding ovation to their accomplishment. Kani and Ntsona were nowhere to be seen however. It was clear that they wanted it understood that the evening and the work was not about them, and that it was no longer just about South Africa.
An extraordinary bit of theater and an awesome statement for all times. Don’t miss it.
A personal note: In 1974 and 1975, when the play was first produced, outside South Africa of course, I myself was living an extraordinary privileged existence in that frightening and beautiful country. My only exculpation is the fact that I was more than aware of my unnatural status and that I was there basically hoping to learn more about the extremes of both human good and evil, in which I think I succeeded somewhat. Unfortunately South Africans didn’t have to travel so far for their own lessons. In reality, of course, neither did I, and today none of us do.
[For a follow-up, on the morning after I originally posted this, see Bruce Weber’s review in the NYTimes.]

I haven’t been able to just walk away from the distressing experience of last night’s religious assault at BAM, John Adams’ “El Niño.”
The story of the piece was in fact not that of the niño or child, but the mother of the child, specifically the mother of the man organized christianity misuses as the excuse for its existence. Possibly the most disturbing aspect of the evening for most in the audience was that what may have been intended as a salute to woman was patronizing in the extreme.
Mary.
Historically the Catholic Church eventually absorbed the people’s cult of Mary for the same reason that the observance originated in the first place, the men who ran the home office operation had gone too far with the guy message of control and fear and had left compassion and a lot of people behind, especially people who had taken seriously the early Christian message of love and respect.
The Church needed to protect its power. It went with the Mary thing, but only on its own terms. Mary intercedes for us with the men. The Church has never suggested a woman could really be equal to men of any kind, on earth, in heaven or even in hell for that matter, since each of these branch offices has always been run by males. We are assured this will forever be the case, since Mister God has said so.
Adams’ oratorial is more than comfortable with that.

Don’t go!
It’s a trap. A religious cult has abducted John Adams and forced him to create a monstrosity, called “El Niño,” which opened in New York tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Unfortunately our city will be subjected to its offensive cant again on Saturday.
While there were some beautiful musical moments, and one extraordinary extended piece, “Memorial to Tlateloco,” the oratorial was basically ill-conceived, and should never have seen the light of day. “El Niño” offended me and should profoundly offend any humanist and anyone concerned with the dignity of women.
I do not go to the concert hall or the opera to be subjected to religious proselytizing, a glorification of the mysteries of the Roman Catholic superhero and an argument for the transfigurative fulfillment of women in the role of motherhood, especially something created in this, my own era, one I would generally like to share with rational people of good conscience. Not incidently, and not surprisingly, this monstrosity was also simply bad art.
Samples from the text:

“O how precious is the virginity
of this virgin whose gate is closed,
and whose womb holy divinity infused with his warmth
so that a flower grew in her.

This is from Hildegard von Bingen, whose music we all adore, but whose words are better left to our imagination, or Latin, 900 years later. But here’s more, from one of the three kings, via the Nicaraguan writer Rubén Darío:

“I am Balthasar. I have brought gold.
I assure you, God exists. He is great and strong.
I know it is so because of the perfect star
that shines so brightly in Death’s diadem.”

In the interest of full disclosure, I confess [sic] that I really, really love Adams’ “Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghofer,” and I have championed both as the very best operas of the late twentieth century, but the great man came up with even more than just a dud this time. I will think twice, maybe more, before going back again.

In an article frustratingly inadequate for the subject, at least on account of its brevity (although it takes 64 inches of NYTimes typespace, including two excellent historical photographs), Richard Bernstein reports on a new German phenomenon.
After sixty years of virtual neglect in Germany, the story of what its civilians suffered at the hands of the Allies during World War II has now become a common subject of discussion at all levels of society, inspiring serious treatment in literature, theatre, film and television.

Ms. John, who witnessed the nighttime firebombing of Dresden by the Royal Air Force on Feb. 13, 1945 — an attack that killed about 35,000 people and destroyed one of the most beautiful cities in Europe — was doing what many Germans have been doing lately: talking about their own suffering in World War II.
For the last few months in fact, television has been showing endless documentaries and discussions of the air war waged by Britain and the United States against Germany in World War II. While this is not exactly a new subject in Germany, there are at least two ways in which the discussion is different from the past.
First, the emphasis in today’s articles and discussions is on what Jörg Friedrich, author of a best-selling book on the Allied bombing campaign, calls “Leideform,” the form of suffering inflicted on the German civilian population.
In other words, a taboo, by which Germans have remained guiltily silent, at least in public, about their experience of the horrors of war, has been suddenly and rather mysteriously broken.
Second, the new awareness of the Allied bombings and the devastation they wrought has become an important element in German opposition to the expected American war on Iraq. What people like Ms. Lang and Ms. John, both antiwar activists in Dresden, have been saying is something like this: We have direct knowledge of the gruesome effects of war and we don’t want anybody else to experience what we have experienced.

For an account of the literary side of this development, see, “War and Remembrance.” a review by Hugh Eakin in the current The Nation of two new books dealing with the questions of guilt and “guilt about having too much guilt.” Unfortunately the essay is only available in the print edition.

Even if it can’t bring itself to do the proper business of Congress itself, the U.S. House of Representatives has the courage and the time to rename items on all of its cafeteria menus in response to the terrorist threat from France, or Belgium, or, oh shucks, does it matter?

Washington – Wave the flag and pass the ketchup was the order of the day yesterday in House of Representatives cafeterias, where lawmakers struck a lunchtime blow against the French and put “freedom fries” on the menu.
And for breakfast, they’ll now have “freedom toast.”

France however knows the world, and the French government knows its responsibilities.

The French Embassy in Washington said French fries actually come from Belgium.
“We are at a very serious moment dealing with very serious issues and we are not focusing on the name you give to potatoes,” said Nathalie Loisau, an embassy spokeswoman.