Archives for May 13, 2005

That’s all from me for this week. I’m off to the Kennedy Center, there to dine with my maximally cool Washington friend and see Alladeen, a wonderful multi-media show by the Builders Association, a remarkable theatrical group with which I’ve been semi-obsessed ever since I saw Alladeen a year and a half ago at BAM and reviewed it for The Wall Street Journal:

You may not know it, but when you dial an 800 number to order a fruitcake or gripe about your Internet service provider, your call is often answered by an Indian operator who has been given an American-sounding pseudonym, painstakingly (though not always successfully) taught to shed his native accent, and assigned to help you as best he can for the lowest possible per-call price. Half performance art, half documentary, “Alladeen” tells the story of these deracinated residents of Nowhere, U.S.A., who take calls from halfway around the world without ever having seen the distant land they pretend to inhabit….

Marianne Weems, the director and tutelary spirit of “Alladeen,” claims the show is all about “the social imagination in an age of corporate colonialism.” Not to worry, though: Ms. Weems and her collaborators have turned this PC-speak high concept into a poetic extravaganza that effortlessly blends words, music, film, video art, and the vivid performances of five versatile onstage actors who waft you into the mysterious world of a Bangalore call center.

Here’s how much I liked it the first time: I’m going to see it in Washington tonight on my own dime, purely for my pleasure (and that of my friend). How about that?

I’ll be back Monday as usual, and blogging, damn it, will be light. I overblogged this week, and I am bruised. I hope you appreciated it! In the meantime, have a nice weekend.

Over to you, OGIC….

I sure hope this is true, anyway….

Friday again. My Wall Street Journal drama column again. I’m in a v. good mood, thanks to the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., in which I am well pleased:

In theater as in all other art forms, believe what you see, not what you’re told. On paper, Shakespeare Theatre’s production of “The Tempest” sounds like the worst kind of politico-intellectual stew, Shakespeare run through the theory mill and turned into a Statement for Our Times. On stage, it’s a fantastic procession of sights and sounds that will set your head to spinning. Kate Whoriskey, the director, may fancy herself a purveyor of ideas, but in fact she’s something infinitely more precious–a natural-born stage magician….

I can’t think why we haven’t seen more of her in New York. In fact, I’d like to see her “Tempest” in New York, ideally at the Public Theater, where I’m sure it’d knock everybody sideways. Don’t wait for it, though–instead, go to Washington and let yourself be enraptured by the most imaginative Shakespeare production I’ve seen since Propeller’s all-male “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Meanwhile, back in Manhattan, I was scarcely less delighted by a new revival of She Stoops to Conquer:

Lest we forget, there’s more than one way to skin a classic. The Irish Repertory Theatre’s revival of “She Stoops to Conquer,” which opened last night, is a resolutely unfantastic, straight-down-the-center staging of Oliver Goldsmith’s 1773 farce, devoid of the slightest trace of trickery and played on an old-fashioned drawing-room set whose walls are festooned with no less than 65 gloomy-looking paintings (yes, I counted them). The actors and actresses are bedecked in periwigs and petticoats–and the results couldn’t be more pleasing….

No link. WillyoujustbuythedamnpaperforGod’ssake? Or go here and stride boldly forward into the Information Age. (Psst–it’s a bargain.)

What they said:

– Go get ’em, Althouse:

Speaking of sincere, how sincere was Joni Mitchell in “Woodstock”? She didn’t attend, and, in fact, she played at the Atlantic City Pop Festival, a few weeks before, and walked off in the middle of her set, after ranting at the audience for failing to pay rapt attention to her. We were milling around, dancing and talking, and acting like a big bunch of hippies. She did not like it one bit. She steered way clear of Woodstock, then wrote a song idealizing it.

“Then can I walk beside you?” she wrote, but the fact is, she didn’t want to be anywhere near these people.

– Poor Little Professor! She’s been grading papers:

“These works have many similarities and many differences.” This. Means. Nothing. Absolutely. Nothing. (Insert instructor banging her forehead against the desk here.)

It gets worse….

– Meanwhile, Laura Lippman wraps up her classroom stint for the year:

Another tradition in the last class–another tradition based on once–is reading the worst review I’ve ever received. Bear in mind, it’s not the cruelest, which was also so wrong-headed that it was easy to dismiss. This is a thoughtful, nuanced piece that judged the work, Every Secret Thing, by the very standards I had set for myself–and rated me a dismal failure. The writer is unknown to me; I can neither dismiss her as a fool nor elevate her to god-like authority.

This is the price, I tell my students. If you get lucky enough to publish and make a life as a writer, you will enter a field where anyone–truly anyone, in our Internet age–can make vicious, even personal, assessments. Get used to it. Toughen up. It’s a relatively small price to pay for being published….

Mine aren’t quite that big, but here’s something I used to do in my own last class: when I taught criticism at Rutgers/Newark, I handed out each week a review by a well-known critic of the past without telling the students who wrote it, then asked them to comment on it. The last handout of the semester was one of my own pieces. Kids say the darnedest things….

– Critical Mass offers a cautionary tale for bloggers everywhere, but especially in the academy:

At SMU, a popular adjunct professor has been fired–or, more precisely, “not renewed”–and the word is that her firing had a lot to do with her blog. Elaine Liner has taught writing as an adjunct at SMU for several years; she is also a local theater critic and, until recently, she led an active anonymous life online as the Phantom Professor, an outspoken critic of the academy whose tales of campus life ultimately hit a little too close to home for her colleagues. Though Liner never told anyone at SMU that she was the Phantom Professor, and while she never named names or identified her place of work, her descriptions of SMU’s campus culture and her portraits of students and colleagues were accurate enough that people at SMU began to recognize their school, their friends, their teachers, and even themselves, in Liner’s words….

Click through this posting to Liner’s blog. Yikes!

– Wax Banks earns an entry in my commonplace book:

Irritation is the sincerest form of flattery.

– Likewise Lileks:

I have no bumperstickers, for the same reason I do not paste editorials with which I agree on the seat of my pants.

(Was it Alison Lurie who coined the phrase “legible clothing”?)

– Same blogger, different day:

Blogging has ruined public social events. Now you have to begin by asking “anyone blogging this?” which is like lining up the wait staff at the Stork Club and asking which one is going to phone Winchell tonight. Then you have to request that certain lines of conversation are off the record–in a bar! A bar, with Prince music playing at levels that would liquefy gorilla prostates at fifty paces. No one can hear anything. Finally, you have to leave the party early to write the blog entry, which consists of coy remarks about all the wonderful things you can’t reveal. So people just post pictures with people standing around grinning in the harsh wash of a flash, the inky black of the bar behind them.

We are all on the record now….

– Mr. Superfluities serves up a very useful two-kinds-of paradigm:

In so far as it specifically relates to theater, it occurred to me that, on the off-off-Broadway scene, we can divide theater into two distinct disciplines. The first, Barroom Theater, is the stream that emerged from Cafe Cino and its other raucous siblings: energetic, seeking active engagement from the audience, irreverent. This theater swims in popular culture: it yells, it whoops, it prances, it gets drunk, it takes off its top and drops its pants and lets its inhibitions loose. The second, Gallery Theater, is that which was practiced in the Artists’ Theater and similar spaces: contemplative, the performance an object to be observed rather than an activity in which one became engaged, similarly irreverent but somewhat detached from its function as entertainment (though still, we might put it in our intellectualized way, “amusing”).

There are vices and virtues to each, of course. As wildly entertaining as Barroom Theater is, it unfortunately tends to pander to its audience’s desire for distraction. There’s a garrulous “love me, pity me” feel that you get from drunks in the same venue; and speaking of drunks, it’s hard to keep their attention, and you have to reach for more spectacular and more vacuous effects just to dissuade their eyes from wandering. On the other hand, Gallery Theater is an insider’s game, frequently self-absorbed, self-important and cliquish, and visual art has a tendency to slavish distillation whereas performing art tends to “celebrate” the performative experience (that is, to make lots and lots of noise and shine flashlights into the audience’s faces; but most audiences like that, for it makes them feel important)….

Read the whole thing, please.

– Mr. Sandow asks a good question:

You can’t blame people as individuals for not liking the music you think they should like. Or at least you can’t blame them without understanding why they feel the way they do. This becomes quite a conundrum, I think, because abstract expressionist painters (whose style might be more or less analogous to atonal modernist music) have a much easier time with the public. People like their work. As I’ve mentioned many times in many contexts, there were lines around the block when MoMA had a Jackson Pollock show. So why doesn’t music work that way?

– While we’re on the subject, guess who said this?

Then there are two developments in music itself that have their origins primarily in the West but that for a long time have affected the whole of mankind in the world culture that is being formed. Modern so-called “classical” music has maneuvered itself, with some exceptions, into an elitist ghetto, which only specialists may enter–and even they do so with what may sometimes be mixed feelings. The music of the masses has broken loose from this and treads a very different path….

(Stop waving your hand, Alex Ross, I know you know.)

– Quotations from Chairman Wayne (Shorter, that is), courtesy of JazzPortraits:

“Miles [Davis] turns around to me this one time,” recalls the 71-year-old New Jersey jazz giant, “and he says, ‘Wayne, do you ever get tired of playing music that sounds like music?’. Then before I answer, he says ‘I know what you mean’. We were on the same page….

“Miles would say, ‘You see how Humphrey Bogart walked in that movie? How John Wayne threw that punch? You see how Marlon Brando played with Eva Marie Saint’s glove in On the Waterfront?’ Miles would say to the young student, ‘Play that’.”

– James Panero tells you how to spend a lot of money:

Twenty-five hours of Leonard Bernstein’s “Young People’s Concerts” have now been released on DVD. The news should not be taken lightly. It should rather be taken as a cue to order copies immediately. As a boon to home schoolers and to parents concerned with the state, where it still exists, of music education today (drumming for credit, anyone?), these DVDs will be invaluable. Just about anyone–adults and children alike–will find a great deal to take away from the episodes. Bernstein’s convincing theories on the connection of folk music to national style are just one example (Episode 9: “Folk Music in the Concert Hall”). The series also includes complete performances of Stravinsky’s “Petrouchka” (Episode 11: “Happy Birthday, Igor Stravinsky”), Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9 (Episode 19: “A Birthday Tribute to Shostakovich”), and Aaron Copland guest conducting part of his own Symphony No. 3 (Episode 2: “What is American Music?”)….

I remember quite a few of these televised concerts from my childhood. I revisited some of them in adulthood, and my memories were right on the money–they were, and are, wonderful.

– I have a title for Catherine Seipp’s first essay collection. She should call it Du c

“It matters very little to me whether people believe one thing or another. Life is short, even for those who live to a ripe old age, and we must live for the few who know and appreciate us, who judge and absolve us, and for whom we have the same affection and indulgence. The rest I look upon as a mere crowd, lively or sad, loyal or corrupt, from whom there is nothing to be expected but fleeting emotions either pleasant or unpleasant, which leave no trace behind them.”

Read this: