Category: Culture

We’ll be waiting for at least a few more years, and maybe we’ll wait forever, but at least some of us know what we are waiting for.

The New York Philharmonic was 160 years old on Saturday, with more history than any other American orchestra and most European ones as well. Played before an A-list audience at Avery Fisher Hall, the anniversary program was a collection of music with the savory smell of comfort food: no initiatives, not much to tweak the imagination, instead an earnest recapitulation of the long-ago discovered and the well remembered.

This City deserves so much more. Inspired leadership could ignite this magnificent institution and those whom it has failed so miserably through the extraordinary banality and elitism of the programs and the direction it has pursued for years. NYTimes Reviewer Bernard Holland joins virtually every music critic in New York with his barely polite references to the new music director, Lorin Maazel (beginning a four-year contract with the orchestra) in an account which summarizes the current state of a Philharmonic pleased to be held in comfortable captivity by its handlers.

The New York Philharmonic is like an island that sits off the coast of the city’s musical life. One looks back to Mr. Boulez’s regime in the 1970’s to find any real relevance, any true plan or purpose for this magnificent orchestra other than self-containment and survival. It is by nature a great shiny machine, although stubborn conductorial minds can force it to rise above itself. And deep within its collective psyche, I think, a shiny machine is what the Philharmonic wants to be. Mr. Maazel is like a mirror. This orchestra, its board, its administration and faithful subscribers look into it and see themselves. They find it a pleasing image.

Barry and I will be scampering about the galleries in Chelsea tomorrow, but only after a hop down to Tribeca and the Apex Gallery, where the artist Nancy Hwang will be offering gift-wrapping services to Apex visitors, who can in turn offer their finger to help hold a bow as they talk with Hwang while their presents are prepared. As in her other projects, Hwang’s services are offered as a courtesy.
We have no boxes for Nancy, both of us being Xmas resistors, so we will only be voyeurs this time.
Click onto “current show” near the top of this page, and look for December 7.

We were part of a very lucky audience at John Jay College last night where Trisha Brown Dance Company, Simon Keenlyside and Pedja Muzijevic opened with their production of Franz Schubert‘s magnificent “Winterreise” (winter journey).
There are five more performances, through the thirteenth of December, and I could not recomend it more highly.
Wonderful music of course, and both it and the dark melancholy of the texts seems more modern in the somber days of the third millennium than it might ever have before, but it comes with the perfect sympathy of Muzijevic’s piano, with Brown’s brilliant choreography, three very, very beautiful young dancers (Brandi Norton, Seth Parker and Lionel Popkin), Elizabeth Cannon’s costumes-you’d-want-to-wear-if-you looked-so-good and Jennifer Tipton’s lighting.
Igniting the whole and garnering the hearts of the audience is the strong, wonderful baritone who not incidently manages at once to look both studly and cute, boyish and stalwart, indeed ageless. Keenlyside more than holds his own with the dancers in his beautiful and controlled movements, and occasionally breaks out in breathtaking leaps and bounds all the while performing vocally in peak form for seventy minutes straight.
Is it necessary to stage or choreograph an evening of songs? Schubert himself didn’t even think of them as an integral set, and there is no narrative unity, but they have often been presented in concert and recordings as a cycle, so while the answer is obviously no, I will say that I had never understood them so well as individual pieces or as a set until I heard and saw them performed as they were last evening.
By the way, we saw Keenlyside as the beautiful eponymous lead in Britten’s “Billy Budd” in Vienna this fall. Yes, grand opera, lieder and he can dance too!
The “Winterreise” reviews won’t appear for another day or so. In the interim, and in supplement, there is this interesting preview article from the NYTimes.
For more, see Keenlyside’s biography and this review of a “Winterreise” in London absent the choreography.
For tickets [hurry, before the reviews hit the streets and the ether] see John Jay College.

Damn! Shoulda posted something before the Festival, since it ends tomorrow! Commenting now won’t help you find the films and videos already screened, and it won’t help the artists.
ACT UP
BUT. We were able to be part of the audience for James Wentzy’s “Fight Back, Fight AIDS: 15 Years of ACT UP on Video.” on thursday, which I did recommend in an earlier posting.
The ACT UP documentary was beautiful, but for all the evidence of the success of the activism it records, the reminders of how little has changed in the world in fifteen years is a horrible concomitance. Bush, war in the middle east, health care, drug company profiteering, oil, greed and stupidity. There were also the images of so many activists whose lives were destroyed at the height of their beauty and their powers. I would not have missed this screening for anything, but it was a melancholy, if not terrifying, experience, and one which an intelligent and generous world could have prevented.
The Middle Eastern and Muslim Lesbian and Gay Experience
This afternoon we were very lucky to be able to go back to Second Avenue for the collection, “Queer Diasporas: The Middle Eastern and Muslim Lesbian & Gay Experience,” and we stayed for the discussion which followed.
There are few subjects whose human dimension could resonate more tragicly in the midst of today’s international madness than that of the challenge of queer existence in the cultural milieus of the Middle East.
The films were apparently just about the only ones addressing this subject which are currently available, but their general excellence, as art and as record, certainly did not belie the narrow selection pool. Particularly wonderful were Tawfik Abu Wael’s “Diary of a Male Whore,” “Just a Woman” by Mitra Farahani and “Whistle,” by the curator of the afternoon’s program, Kouross Esmaeli. Finally, I was fascinated by the softly beautiful and amazingly gentle, familiar but still exotic veiled affection, both seen and heard, in Akram Zaatari‘s “How I Love You.”
Oh yeah, a special rave for the audiences which we both saw and shared on each of the days we visited the Anthology Film Archives for the screenings, a very impressive bunch indeed, far more interesting, intelligent-looking, open-eyed and just plain beautiful than any group I have ever sighted at the somewhat less edgy, The New Festival, in spite of that institution’s own virtues.

Right now who else shows the will and has an alternative culture and, perhaps, the means to withstand the American hegemony?
José Bové is a hero, but he’s going to need help.

A star of anti-globalization has fallen.
José Bové, the sheep farmer and convicted vandal whose mission is to save France from fast food and free trade, will serve 14 months in prison after the country’s highest court Tuesday threw out his appeal.
Bové, 49, is a media-savvy, handlebar-moustachioed anti-globalizer who protests at economic summit meetings and is sometimes likened to the French cartoon hero Asterix, leading defiant Gauls against today’s Romans. He attracted worldwide attention three years ago when he led a group of French farmers to smash windows in a McDonald’s in Millau near his home in southern France.
Later that year, he attacked a field of genetically modified rice grown at a research station near the southern city of Montpellier. He was sentenced to six months in prison, and it was an appeal of that sentence that France’s Cour de Cassation in Paris rejected Tuesday.
A man who supplies sheep’s milk for makers of roquefort cheese, he also has opposed U.S. trade tariffs against French luxury foods and multinational corporations.

The beautiful city of Dresden is going to be alright.
No, not alright, it’s going to be as spectacular as it ever was.
The Zwinger Museum, flooded this summer, has reopened, with 400 paintings, including works by Titian and Rubens, stacked against the walls 10 deep, “like Andy Warhol reproductions in a poster shop.” [They won’t be returned to storage in the cellars, out of fear of future floods, so they await a new or converted building and a new rest above ground.]
The Semper Opera is being repaired at a cost of tens of millions of euros, but has already seen a production of the ballet, “Swan Lake.” It was still impossible to use the house for full opera, so the latest production is being staged in a factory, but not just any factory.

When the star bullfighter in “Carmen” makes his triumphant entrance in the back seat of a Volkswagen, one could dismiss it as a cheeky updating of Bizet’s classic.
But then the Volkswagen shift workers in white overalls, installing drivetrains and dashboards on an assembly line behind the orchestra, signal that this is no ordinary night at the opera.
Flushed out of its 19th-century opera house by the calamitous floods of last summer, the Semper Oper of Dresden is staging its latest production in an automobile factory — a shimmering glass-and-steel edifice in which the newest VW, a luxury sedan called the Phaeton, is assembled.
“We didn’t choose to do `Carmen’ because of the name,” said the opera’s artistic director, Hans- Joachim Frey, though the poster for the production, with “car” and “men” in different colors, is an obvious wordplay.

VW’s rival, DaimlerChrysler, is the opera’s main sponsor, but the firm was more than happy to suspend its rivalry for the run of “Carmen.” The factory continues its operation without interruption throughout the performance.

It was also a chance for Volkswagen to show off its $180 million assembly plant, which opened last December. Built in downtown Dresden, with glass walls, oak and maple floors and a soaring central foyer, it looks less like a factory than an industrial cathedral. Potential buyers can watch the cars being assembled from a circular bank of windows overlooking the line.
For the duration of the opera engagement, which ends on Friday, the foyer has been filled with 450 seats and a stage, festooned with posters of bullfights. The orchestra is seated to the left of the stage, underneath giant soundproof windows that show half-finished cars rolling silently by.
Harry Kupfer, the German director who staged this “Carmen,” made full use of the factory’s dramatic design, filling the balconies with a chorus and sending his players up and down staircases. In a nod to his host, he wrote in a cameo role for the Phaeton, as well as for a vintage VW bus.

Stefan Schulte, the head of sales and marketing for the Volkswagen Phaeton, said, “The opera people keep asking if we’re building better cars. I tell them, ‘Sure, because of your beautiful music.'”

Great theater, meaning brilliant writing, extraordinary and sexy cast, wonderful direction, humanist message for our own time, and for the ages, and a wonderful performance space*, but it’s going to be around for just one more day! Yeah, tears too, but I could still see very well.
Try to get into Timberlake Wertenbaker‘s, “Our Country’s Good,” at the Culture Project, at 212-875-7995.
* go early enough, sit on the far side of the stairs, and watch the audience descend and find their seats around the open rectangle floor. Notice the lighting. As you wait for the company of those who will actually be aware they are performing, you’ll think you’re already in the midst of a play. You are.

Bob Holman thinks so, and it seems like his Bowery Poetry Club may have a good chance to do just that. It looks and sounds wonderful, but the genie himself may be what makes the difference.

This is the poet, a former cabdriver and temporary worker, who used to call himself Plain White Rapper. For a few years, he ran a spoken-word record label, Mouth Almighty.

Last month he opened this, er, club.

“I run a coffee shop and bar so you can have poetry every night,” he said. “Somehow, you have to pay for your addiction. They say no one has ever gone broke running a bar in New York, but we’re going to give it a shot.”

Taylor Mead, Butch Morris, Amiri Baraka, teen poetry slams, karaoke poetry, Norman Ohler, Ned Rothenberg and Uncle Jimmy’s Dirty Basement, are among the starters this month.
The club shares the building with the intriguing, DV Dojo, “a boot camp for digital filmmakers,” in Holman’s description. Last night we also noticed it’s just across the street from the 313 Gallery of CBGB, where we had stopped for the opening of the provocative and still largely illegal work in the exhibition, Illegal Art, especially to see Eric Doeringer‘s installation.
It all seems more than fitting, if not world-changing.

“Boca.” Wonderfully perverse. We’ve now very happy to have been able to see it twice, the first time in its original presentation by Target Margin Theater, and last night, with largely the same, and definitely at least as wonderful, cast, by No One in Particular, at Present Theatre Theatorium.
It’s great great fun, but I suppose it really helps if you know the original.
Tell them Wagner sent you.

Another letter in the NYTimes today puts the lie to the boasts of Hummer owners and GM’s marketing campaign. Note that the vehicle in question is the “small” Hummer

To the Editor:
I’m not surprised that the H2 is such a hot seller (Business Day, Nov. 2). America is full of self-centered people, desperately craving attention from strangers.
Hummer’s general manager says, “The people that buy this product, they’re daring.” What’s so daring about driving a military vehicle to do errands? Riding a bicycle is daring.
BRIAN DRYE
Seattle, Nov. 2, 2002

The question should also be directed toward the owners of less ueber SUVs.