What to do in New York at 1a.m. on a Monday when it's too hot to sleep and you're too old to face Splash or anyplace else that might be open and entertaining:
Borrow an Ingmar Bergman movie from the library!
There seems to be a general change in attitude towards Bergman, once regarded as among the cinema's authentic living geniuses, ranked with Fellini and Bunuel and Ozu when few others were (no Americans, needless to say), a man whose profundity of vision, his conflicted attitude towards God, parents, mistresses-as-muses, solitude in Scandinavian winters, sex in Scandinavian summers, madness and art seemed close to the core of Western thinking on these subjects. We (in New York) flocked to the Thalia and the other art houses to take it all in, parse it, get our heads around it. His disgust at civilization, even civilization taken sparingly from the p.o.v. of a barren island in the Baltic, seemed to mirror our own disquiet at the inadequacy of the civilization of free, consumerist satiety. If God had no use for us (being in an existential crisis), we wanted Bergman to use us, or tell us at what star to gaze in God's stead.
From this emerged a dozen films as good as any anyone made in the postwar era: Wild Strawberries and Monika (Scandinavian sex!), Sawdust and Tinsel and The Magician and Fanny and Alexander (life is theater! or it would be better if it were!), Winter Light and Through a Glass Darkly and Hour of the Wolf (there is no God; I might as well go mad), The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring (life was lousy in the Middle Ages, but at least it was intense in those days, not crass!), Shame and Passion and Scenes from a Marriage (I'm breaking up with my girl, no wonder the world is coming to an end), Cries and Whispers and Autumn Sonata (even women can't handle family - we already know men can't) and even so perfect a "costume" sex comedy (Smiles of a Summer Night) that Woody Allen and Stephen Sondheim tried without avail to imitate, to build upon, to improve its magic. (Sondheim's version is at least pretty to hear.) Even Fellini and Bunuel would be hard put to equal such a variety of masterpieces. For two or three decades the ideal collegiate thinking-couple's double bill (or, one filmbuff dorm neighbor said, the ideal film to take a dumb girl that would keep her quiet while he had time to think) was Wild Strawberries and Seventh Seal - so much so that a celebrated short in subtitled nonsense-Swedish (Madeline Kahn's film debut: "Have a cigar?" "Phallica symbole?") was Die Duve, a parody of both of them at once. (Death and Inga play badminton; the Dove of salvation intervenes ... all over Death's black nightshirt.)
Okay, I didn't understand them. Or I thought I understood them. Or I had no idea what was going on. Watching The Virgin Spring and The Magician for the first time at maybe 18, I remember, I was puzzled that the story wasn't "signaling" good guys, bad guys, what the hell this tale was about in the way I was accustomed to having stories laid out for me in Hollywood movies. Why was the girl raped and murdered, when she had done nothing to deserve it? (One may ask the same in Rigoletto, eh?) Because that's how it happens in real life: grow up and try to understand that. Why did the lawyer let his young wife elope with his half-wit son? It didn't seem fair. It wasn't fair - but it was the more understanding conclusion. Why did the knight lose at chess? Why did the madwoman rape her brother? Why do people in these movies pretend to go out the door, but actually stay behind to overhear a phone conversation or even a seduction?
Besides Hour of the Wolf and The Magician (ur-documents of the LSD generation), Persona, Smiles, Virgin, Strawberries, Seal and the splendid autumnal masterpiece Fanny and Alexander (and how many other writer/directors have produced eight supreme masterpieces?), and The Magic Flute, the first of the great filmed operas that set a whole generation rethinking the unfashionability of that form, the Bergman work I would select as his most perfect work of art is the seldom-cited Shame.
The story seems typical of Bergman after he had got over his middle class Stockholm soap opera settings of the '50s and could create whatever world he wanted: Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman (two of the most famous faces of the period, precisely because of the range of roles they played in Bergman's films - Max usually standing in for IB, Liv often standing in for IB's current lover, who was Liv for about five years) are a married couple living on a farm on a small island somewhere. Where isn't clear, and isn't important - what is important is that it is the center of a war zone, that armies and guerrillas are battling through the movie, taking as much notice of the rights and feelings of the couple as armies usually do. (The marriage might almost be a metaphor for Sweden, neutral since 1814 but hardly immune to upheaval as two world wars and the cold war erupted around it. Bergman was among the few notable Swedes willing to remember how pro-Nazi many of his countrymen were.) The destruction of their world, of their relationship to it, mirrors the increasing bleakness and violence and dishonor of the couple's relationship to each other. When she commits adultery and he avenges it with a horrifying betrayal, we are shocked. When he commits a skulky murder, she (and we) are too stunned to react any more. The ruin of their civilization mirrors the ruin of their marriage - at the end they cling to each other because neither of them has anything else - including hardly any will to survive. Most magical and unsettling of all: just as the film began with Max recollecting a pointless, ominous dream, it ends with Liv recounting a different, equally ominous one. It is bitter and beautiful and complete.
In contrast, The Passion of Anna (as it was called in the U.S. - as Ullman points out in the commentaries, that is not its title in Swedish, which is merely The Passion), Bergman's next film and his first one in color, which uses the same cast (plus Bibi Andersson, last seen in Persona), is a mess. When I saw it, still under the spell of the genuinely strange Hour of the Wolf and the genuinely perfect Shame, I was confused. For one thing: who is killing all those animals? Somehow I got the impression it was Anna (Liv), probably because of the American title. Use Bergman's title, remove that clue, and I have no idea.
So I got it from the library and watched it again last night, for the first time in forty years, and now it makes sense - aided by the commentaries of three of the stars (Ullman, Andersson, Erland Josephson). The movie doesn't make sense, but now I know why it doesn't. Bergman, a control freak (what great director has not been?), always had his scripts down, and his shots calculated, and there wasn't much to do but shoot them (Nykvist did that, of course) and barely edit. But whatever was in the original script, it wasn't what got filmed. For one thing, the dinner party of the four leads, when Max von Sydow's Andreas really encounters the others for the first time (he's already met, and eavesdropped on, Ullman's Anna), is not scripted: they were told to improvise as if inhabiting the characters as they then understood them, and quite a lot of the personal got into it. Ullman is still upset that much of her improvisation was edited out - though she asked for it, because she felt Bergman's idea of Anna (who believes she is living the utter truth when in fact she has based it on a lie to cover an unpalatable truth) was unjust, a blow aimed at herself for breaking up with him - so she defended Anna, and herself - and Bergman got back at her (she feels) by cutting the speech.
The film is not neat, as Shame is neat: it is an incomplete metaphor, perhaps because Bergman knew life is not neat (but art is our attempt to correct that). I found the dawning relationship between these two damaged, lying people, Andreas and Anna played by Max and Liv, unconvincing - a desperate move on the part of both - because they find themselves with nowhere else to go and nothing to do. I was more stirred by the scene where Bibi's Eva, unhappily married, gets drunk and, dancing to some old bebop, casually seduces Max - not because she wants him, but because he happens to be there and somewhat sympathetic, and sex will take her mind off her insomnia and her unhappy marriage. Erland's Elis takes photographs of Max, but the tension in the air during this session leads nowhere - he remains utterly enigmatic - though he suspects his wife has slept with Max. There is none of the power of the scene in which the vampire makes up Max's face in Hour of the Wolf. Perhaps the moral is IB telling me to get over my obsessions with artistic artifice and face the reality that there aren't always neat endings and solutions and meanings. And the greatest sign of this is that the brutal murder of animals (a puppy Max rescues from a noose, eight slaughtered sheep, a horse set on fire) does not end when the likeliest suspect is brutally driven to suicide. Max and Liv seem to have alibis, Bibi is utterly unlikely, Erland was in Milan, or was he? No, the slaughters go on to the end, as if they were occurring spontaneously (like the war in Shame) to mimic the breakdown of our characters, which climaxes with a furious Max, chopping wood, turns the axe on Liv, then beats her up on camera.
Just to make it all the more confusing, there are postmodern moments that were not scripted and seem to be trendy afterthoughts (responses to Bunuel and Godard?): each of the four actors is asked, on camera, to discuss the character s/he is playing. We get a lot of background that way that the screenplay does not give us, but still ... it comes across as cheating, as trying to be au courant in 1969. It is beneath Bergman, I think.
So, not a satisfying Bergman film - not one of the great ones by a long chalk - but further meditation on his besetting themes. Recommended for that, and for the first experiments in color (the olives and oranges and browns that would remain his palette in Autumn Sonata, and only shift to scarlets in Whispers) and the shots of Liv Ullman at the height of her imperious, vulnerable beauty, and Bibi Andersson utterly adorable just a little past the peak of hers, and Max the very symbol and totem of Scandinavian manhood in the aging prime of his.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
An exchange at Les Huguenots
On the damp campus of Bard, where four performances of Les Huguenots are a highlight of this year's Summerscape Festival, illustrating the theme of influences on Richard Wagner (while he rolls in his grave), I ran into many, many friends.
Neil and James: Are you familiar with Meyerbeer's music?
Moi: Am I familiar with Meyerbeer's music?! Why, I had it with my mother's milk (between Cole Porter numbers). I even sang Meyerbeer at my bar mitzvah, instead of that tedious old Biblical exegesis.
Neil: What did you sing? "Si j'étais coquette"?
James: No - he sang "Prëtres de Baal."
Perhaps you'd have to know my rabbi to understand why this was so funny.
All right - full disclosure - I do not have a rabbi and I never had a bar mitzvah. But I am fond of Meyerbeer (up to a point). And I do have witty friends.
Neil and James: Are you familiar with Meyerbeer's music?
Moi: Am I familiar with Meyerbeer's music?! Why, I had it with my mother's milk (between Cole Porter numbers). I even sang Meyerbeer at my bar mitzvah, instead of that tedious old Biblical exegesis.
Neil: What did you sing? "Si j'étais coquette"?
James: No - he sang "Prëtres de Baal."
Perhaps you'd have to know my rabbi to understand why this was so funny.
All right - full disclosure - I do not have a rabbi and I never had a bar mitzvah. But I am fond of Meyerbeer (up to a point). And I do have witty friends.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Ensor at MoMA
Nika and I went to MoMA yesterday to see the James Ensor show, which is not overwhelming or without interest, but puzzles more than it pleasures.
Did he just go a bit dotty at the end? No - not at the end. At some fairly early point? No one seems ready to say. His public behavior as he became a national institution was respectable enough. As to what went on his head - no one knows. But he wasn't productive.
That's the first thing that struck me about the James Ensor show at MoMA: the paintings begin well enough with some promising but hardly unusual impressionists from the early 1880s (he was born in 1860). North Sea skies, gobs of paint close up, reveal their restless beauty when viewed at an angle or from across the room. Studies of his father reading a newspaper, his sister sewing, might be Renoir or Vuillard. As for the skies - yes, he knew Monet, had crossed the Channel for a peek at Turner in the Tate. The influence of Whistler is everywhere: gray on gray.
But also there is something antic, something that does not fit: self-portrait in a flowered hat (with peacock feather), say. Or a confrontation of two figures in carnival masks. Or one figure (often Ensor himself) surrounded by, assaulted by, skulls or masks or figures wearing them. The show explains: His mother kept a souvenir shop downstairs; carnival masks were a major item. He was surrounded by them all his life, filling his nightmares (of which clearly he had many) and his ambitious dreams. He also loved satirical cartoons, of which the 1880s-90s were a golden age. His politics at this point were anarchic left: down with everything. But he found he disliked his fellows (except for one or two good friends) quite as much as he disliked the folks in power.
A drawing of his aunt, asleep in her oh-so-proper Belgian lace and black, impeccable bonnet and corseted figure (such ladies were common enough on Ostend streets as late as the 1950s), but surrounded by hideous masks making faces, filling her dreams (or Ensor's own troubled, antisocial fantasies). A Temptation of St. Anthony with Ensor as the hallucinatory saint. Christ entering Brussels, met by a brass band but the onlookers paying no attention. Was Ensor a wounded mystic or did he identify with the scorned Christ or was he just unable to find a proper direction for his art? His boasted desire to paint light turns up very little in the way of exquisite exploration, at a time when Van Gogh was already dead and Monet was still fantasticating and to the current young crowd (Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Gris) Ensor must have seemed undistinguished and old hat.
But the big mystery is: why all this creativity in the 1880s, much less in the 1890s and not a damn thing after 1900. He lived till 1949. He was an eminent figure, ennobled and awarded by his country, trotted out as a living institution, perfectly sane - just utterly unproductive. Art had gone its way; it did not renew Ensor. He was over and out well before he turned forty. Does he have a place in the saga of Modern Art? Yes. Is it an important, productive, ineffaceable place? No. You can skip him and you'll hardly miss a thing.
He painted up there to keep his hands and his eyes busy, and maybe to stave off demons in masks. He wasn't painting for us at all.
Note: The mask is a curious artifact, and it interested Ensor far more than faces did. He did very good impressionist faces, but they did not fascinate him. People doing one thing, living one soul, while wearing the face of something else - that interested him. But he did not find an art where he could make something important out of this discovery.
Did he just go a bit dotty at the end? No - not at the end. At some fairly early point? No one seems ready to say. His public behavior as he became a national institution was respectable enough. As to what went on his head - no one knows. But he wasn't productive.
That's the first thing that struck me about the James Ensor show at MoMA: the paintings begin well enough with some promising but hardly unusual impressionists from the early 1880s (he was born in 1860). North Sea skies, gobs of paint close up, reveal their restless beauty when viewed at an angle or from across the room. Studies of his father reading a newspaper, his sister sewing, might be Renoir or Vuillard. As for the skies - yes, he knew Monet, had crossed the Channel for a peek at Turner in the Tate. The influence of Whistler is everywhere: gray on gray.
But also there is something antic, something that does not fit: self-portrait in a flowered hat (with peacock feather), say. Or a confrontation of two figures in carnival masks. Or one figure (often Ensor himself) surrounded by, assaulted by, skulls or masks or figures wearing them. The show explains: His mother kept a souvenir shop downstairs; carnival masks were a major item. He was surrounded by them all his life, filling his nightmares (of which clearly he had many) and his ambitious dreams. He also loved satirical cartoons, of which the 1880s-90s were a golden age. His politics at this point were anarchic left: down with everything. But he found he disliked his fellows (except for one or two good friends) quite as much as he disliked the folks in power.
A drawing of his aunt, asleep in her oh-so-proper Belgian lace and black, impeccable bonnet and corseted figure (such ladies were common enough on Ostend streets as late as the 1950s), but surrounded by hideous masks making faces, filling her dreams (or Ensor's own troubled, antisocial fantasies). A Temptation of St. Anthony with Ensor as the hallucinatory saint. Christ entering Brussels, met by a brass band but the onlookers paying no attention. Was Ensor a wounded mystic or did he identify with the scorned Christ or was he just unable to find a proper direction for his art? His boasted desire to paint light turns up very little in the way of exquisite exploration, at a time when Van Gogh was already dead and Monet was still fantasticating and to the current young crowd (Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Gris) Ensor must have seemed undistinguished and old hat.
But the big mystery is: why all this creativity in the 1880s, much less in the 1890s and not a damn thing after 1900. He lived till 1949. He was an eminent figure, ennobled and awarded by his country, trotted out as a living institution, perfectly sane - just utterly unproductive. Art had gone its way; it did not renew Ensor. He was over and out well before he turned forty. Does he have a place in the saga of Modern Art? Yes. Is it an important, productive, ineffaceable place? No. You can skip him and you'll hardly miss a thing.
He painted up there to keep his hands and his eyes busy, and maybe to stave off demons in masks. He wasn't painting for us at all.
Note: The mask is a curious artifact, and it interested Ensor far more than faces did. He did very good impressionist faces, but they did not fascinate him. People doing one thing, living one soul, while wearing the face of something else - that interested him. But he did not find an art where he could make something important out of this discovery.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Brooklyn and Queens on a hot weekend
I have seen BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music evolve over thirty years from salvageable hulk of ruin amid scenes of ruin (with unusual performances), to punk palace of the arts (with its own snazzy crowd of devotees and lots of Euro-art), to major grande dame of the city arts scene, jewel set in glittering renewed downtown Brooklyn. At the moment it is holding a Muslim Cultural Festival, with Asia House and other institutions around town – music, theater, dance, film, “storytelling” from a dozen countries – and I am getting to as much of it as I can.
There was a “souk” in BAM’s car park this past weekend, the usual arts and crafts (overpriced), the usual unhealthy junk food – and some exceptions. At the Turkish booth, a bunch of ladies in headscarves brought home-made stuffed vine leaves (best I’ve ever eaten) and home-made baklava (ditto, especially when it had been sitting in the hot sun a while), and some Lebanese guys had spinach pies shaped like hamantaschen. Someone was selling witty T-shirts for far too much money, such as, on a covered wagon, heading a whole train of such, “Why settle? … Israel!” which could be taken to support either (any) side of the question, eh?; “Surf Saudi Arabia! Sportsman’s Mecca,” “Petro sexual,” “Come out to … Iran!,” “Party Like Iraq Star,” “Gaza Strip Club XXX,” and “Afghanistan!” above images of a wind surfer on the ocean. There was very good Middle Eastern music but the CDs on offer were mostly recent, jazz-inspired, beatboxed shit - if it uses microphones or electric instruments, I'm not very interested.
Across the street, by the way, is Mark Morris’s building, an old hulk completely gutted and refitted and modernized for his dance troupe, with rehearsal halls to rent to others. Typical of the modesty of the man: The new cornerstone, prominently visible, was laid in 2000, so it reads: “A.D. MM.”
According to an article I happen to be proofreading, 46 percent of Queens is foreign-born (a record for U.S. counties), and the borough is huge, in addition, with well over a million people. All sorts of cool folk live there now.
All this as prelude to Sunday when, fed up with being cooped up by ill health in gorgeous weather, I took the bike (via E train) to Roosevelt Avenue for Queens Pride. I’d somehow never made it before, and by the time I arrived, the parade was over (if it had ever been) and a street fair on rainbow themes filled a dozen blocks where the Indian, Pakistani and Afghan colonies meet various Latino enclaves as the E train crosses the 7. (There are also a Thai temple and a Jain center not far down the street.)
Several stages had lip sync drag mamas or folk acts or rappers to which almost no one in the crowd paid attention, there was lots of unhealthy food, there was a guy giving out cards of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, lots of condom distribution, petitions to sign (I signed one to save the libraries of Queens from budget cuts), free hepatitis shots and STD screenings, someone selling straw cowboy hats (I bought one, and it saved me from sunstroke), a bin of used CDs (Ann Hampton Callaway scatting standards in tribute to Ella, a bargain for $2), and I got pair of binoculars for $10 which won’t hurt me when I lose them, as the $140 ones did, there were assorted well-built young men but it was very neighborhood, much of the crowd was straight and enjoying the festa part. I’ve always preferred that Gay Pride be a festa for all, not just Our Crowd.
After an hour or so, I’d had enough of it, so I began biking aimlessly southerly, pausing for beer at an Irish bar (barman from Galway, “city of the tribes” – “I have friends who spend the summer there,” I told him; “Have they got a summer there?” he was skeptical) with a waterfall and barbecue in back, drifting down Greenpoint Avenue through ethnic neighborhood upon ethnic neighborhood, all unknown to me, over the Newtown Creek into Brooklyn. The plaza around the east end of the Williamsburg Bridge, once full of elegant bank buildings, then a ruin for decades, is now reviving nicely – some of the banks are now churches; others are, once again, banks – and through the Valley of the Shadow of the Hasidim to Fort Greene and on and on, miles and miles, most of it amazingly less shabby than it was in the 80s. I attempted a bridge to Manhattan, but my thighs were having none of it.
At last I was at BAM again – easy to spot from a distance because it is beside the Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower, a Romanesque domed minaret spire, the oldest skyscraper in Brooklyn and one of my favorites in the city. (The ground floor, currently in restauro during condo conversion, has a sublime Cosmatic pavement which I trust will be preserved.) The Turks were out of vine leaves, so I got spinach pie instead to wash down more baklava. Then I took the bike by subway back to the Village. Another week of exercise and I’ll be able to handle a bridge or two.
Old movie houses (often full of fine deco detailing) and old banks (usually of turn-of-the-century grandeur: many domes, imitating either the Pantheon or the U.S. Capitol/St. Paul’s; many colonnades of one or another classical order) and old churches tend to switch functions: churches become theaters, banks and movie theaters become churches; banks become carpet warehouses. I favor retaining the old buildings just to vary the streetscape, prevent it becoming lethally dull, so I am delighted when they are preserved, whatever the organization.
There was a “souk” in BAM’s car park this past weekend, the usual arts and crafts (overpriced), the usual unhealthy junk food – and some exceptions. At the Turkish booth, a bunch of ladies in headscarves brought home-made stuffed vine leaves (best I’ve ever eaten) and home-made baklava (ditto, especially when it had been sitting in the hot sun a while), and some Lebanese guys had spinach pies shaped like hamantaschen. Someone was selling witty T-shirts for far too much money, such as, on a covered wagon, heading a whole train of such, “Why settle? … Israel!” which could be taken to support either (any) side of the question, eh?; “Surf Saudi Arabia! Sportsman’s Mecca,” “Petro sexual,” “Come out to … Iran!,” “Party Like Iraq Star,” “Gaza Strip Club XXX,” and “Afghanistan!” above images of a wind surfer on the ocean. There was very good Middle Eastern music but the CDs on offer were mostly recent, jazz-inspired, beatboxed shit - if it uses microphones or electric instruments, I'm not very interested.
Across the street, by the way, is Mark Morris’s building, an old hulk completely gutted and refitted and modernized for his dance troupe, with rehearsal halls to rent to others. Typical of the modesty of the man: The new cornerstone, prominently visible, was laid in 2000, so it reads: “A.D. MM.”
According to an article I happen to be proofreading, 46 percent of Queens is foreign-born (a record for U.S. counties), and the borough is huge, in addition, with well over a million people. All sorts of cool folk live there now.
All this as prelude to Sunday when, fed up with being cooped up by ill health in gorgeous weather, I took the bike (via E train) to Roosevelt Avenue for Queens Pride. I’d somehow never made it before, and by the time I arrived, the parade was over (if it had ever been) and a street fair on rainbow themes filled a dozen blocks where the Indian, Pakistani and Afghan colonies meet various Latino enclaves as the E train crosses the 7. (There are also a Thai temple and a Jain center not far down the street.)
Several stages had lip sync drag mamas or folk acts or rappers to which almost no one in the crowd paid attention, there was lots of unhealthy food, there was a guy giving out cards of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, lots of condom distribution, petitions to sign (I signed one to save the libraries of Queens from budget cuts), free hepatitis shots and STD screenings, someone selling straw cowboy hats (I bought one, and it saved me from sunstroke), a bin of used CDs (Ann Hampton Callaway scatting standards in tribute to Ella, a bargain for $2), and I got pair of binoculars for $10 which won’t hurt me when I lose them, as the $140 ones did, there were assorted well-built young men but it was very neighborhood, much of the crowd was straight and enjoying the festa part. I’ve always preferred that Gay Pride be a festa for all, not just Our Crowd.
After an hour or so, I’d had enough of it, so I began biking aimlessly southerly, pausing for beer at an Irish bar (barman from Galway, “city of the tribes” – “I have friends who spend the summer there,” I told him; “Have they got a summer there?” he was skeptical) with a waterfall and barbecue in back, drifting down Greenpoint Avenue through ethnic neighborhood upon ethnic neighborhood, all unknown to me, over the Newtown Creek into Brooklyn. The plaza around the east end of the Williamsburg Bridge, once full of elegant bank buildings, then a ruin for decades, is now reviving nicely – some of the banks are now churches; others are, once again, banks – and through the Valley of the Shadow of the Hasidim to Fort Greene and on and on, miles and miles, most of it amazingly less shabby than it was in the 80s. I attempted a bridge to Manhattan, but my thighs were having none of it.
At last I was at BAM again – easy to spot from a distance because it is beside the Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower, a Romanesque domed minaret spire, the oldest skyscraper in Brooklyn and one of my favorites in the city. (The ground floor, currently in restauro during condo conversion, has a sublime Cosmatic pavement which I trust will be preserved.) The Turks were out of vine leaves, so I got spinach pie instead to wash down more baklava. Then I took the bike by subway back to the Village. Another week of exercise and I’ll be able to handle a bridge or two.
Old movie houses (often full of fine deco detailing) and old banks (usually of turn-of-the-century grandeur: many domes, imitating either the Pantheon or the U.S. Capitol/St. Paul’s; many colonnades of one or another classical order) and old churches tend to switch functions: churches become theaters, banks and movie theaters become churches; banks become carpet warehouses. I favor retaining the old buildings just to vary the streetscape, prevent it becoming lethally dull, so I am delighted when they are preserved, whatever the organization.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Mahler meets the Shekinah - A solution?
Went to hear Boulez conduct the Mahler 8th the other night - that's the one you probably have not sung in the shower, as it is the Symphony of a Thousand and they wouldn't all fit. They didn't fit in Carnegie Hall either. (And Loren Maazel is doing it next month as his farewell to the Philharmonic - or rather, four farewells - he never can say goodbye, no no no.) The text of this leviathan (or do I mean behemoth?) is in two parts, first a setting of the 8th century hymn Veni, Creator Spiritus ("Come, Creator Spirit"), the second a setting of the last scene of Goethe's Faust, Part 2: Faust's soul saved from damnation by the intercession of A Penitent (i.e. Gretchen from Part 1) with the Triple Mother-Virgin-Goddess (so addressed), and the Eternal Feminine Calls Us On from above.
That was appropriate, as I'd sneaked in without a ticket and had to climb the stairs to the top of the building (puff puff puff). At the first performance of this work in New York, Anna Mahler was present and said to an usher friend of mine, "Not one of Papa's best." I have to agree with her. Though I thought otherwise the last time I heard it, under Levine, with the BSO. (Another friend suggests the Metropolitan Opera House would be the right size for this symphony. John G, who was present on this occasion, says only the Royal Albert Hall is the right size with the right size organ, and we all know how important that is.)
As I reached the top of the stairs, I found the evening's usher was a stranger (to me), a tall, lanky, sexy, long-haired youth. Before I'd located an empty seat (sparse at these Mahler concerts), a guy I know slightly arrived, and began to harangue the young usher on the Faust Legend, its medieval and operatic and Goethean variants. As I'd written about the Faust legend for Opera News and the Met Opera program, I listened intently; later, this fellow explained to me that the usher is a young genius and leader of a "dark metal band" (whatever that means) which has dealt with satanic themes (don't they all?), but that he is also interested in the late romantic orchestral-operatic equivalents for death-thrash-metal (equivalent may be the wrong word here), and Greg is trying to introduce him to unfamiliar mythic concepts (such as music without electronics), which desire is perhaps lust-inspired on his part, but what the hey? A natural adjunct to pedagogy in many ancient societies, is it not? And this kid is definitely of age. (Plus, I think the philosophe is hot, frankly: chunky bronze Sicilian.)
Then he turns to me and says, "How do YOU think the parts connect in this symphony? Why did Mahler put them together?" really not knowing. And I hadn't ever thought about it myself (late Mahler not being my specialty).
But suddenly it was all very clear, because I'd just been reading Carl Jung's Answer to Job, which discusses the "divorce" between God the Will and God the Creative Spirit, and how that Creative Spirit is personified in Jewish mysticism as the Shekinah, and in Greek-Christian mysticism as Sophia, and how that spirit was necessary (and necessarily feminine) to God's creation of life itself, and his plans for the earth, and his assault on Job took place because Sophia was on sabbatical or something (Satan merrily slipping into her advisor's place), and her return and unification with God solved Job's dilemma by assuring him that God would be born as a human and find out what he'd been missing, an event only made possible because Sophia was to be incarnate as Mary. (I'm very dubious about all this as EVENT, or theology, but it makes sense as MYSTIC BELIEF.) (Mystics will believe ANYTHING. As you know. They believe, for one thing, that they've been told to believe it by those, as Cole Porter would say, "in the know.")
And suddenly it seemed to me that what Mahler was up to (a Catholic convert of somewhat mystical bent, and married to a femme fatale named Alma, of all symbolic names) was to join the invocation to the Judaeo-Christian god as Creator Spirit to Goethe's guilt-ridden self-invented pardon for Faust (his own questing, amoral, inventive spirit) by an eternal feminine who is given many names and many roles in the poem (Mater Gloriosa, Maria Egyptiaca, etc.) but who is clearly, in all cases, a synthesis subdivided by whole in the supernal Mary (bearing a very slight resemblance to any human Mary), queen of heaven, consort of God and (since God can only be one) his female alterity, anima to the divine animus, in short Sophia-Shekinah. Thereby invoking pardon for his (Mahler's) sins (whatever they were) and justifying his life as the manifestation of God's creativity, just as the original text (completed only a year before Goethe's death after forty-odd years of work, was a similar justification of his life as such a manifestation. (Could Goethe believe in a God who was not an aspect of Goethe? I mean, we all have that problem, but he had it especially rough because it seemed so very obvious to everyone that He was.)
So entirely by chance - the chance that I was reading Jung (on the recommendation of my friend Fritz Muntean of The Pomegranate magazine) - I think I have solved everybody's problem about why Mahler put these two texts together in his magnificent setting. Even if it's not one of Papa's best. (As, say, Das Lied von der Erde or the Wayfarer Songs are.)
That was appropriate, as I'd sneaked in without a ticket and had to climb the stairs to the top of the building (puff puff puff). At the first performance of this work in New York, Anna Mahler was present and said to an usher friend of mine, "Not one of Papa's best." I have to agree with her. Though I thought otherwise the last time I heard it, under Levine, with the BSO. (Another friend suggests the Metropolitan Opera House would be the right size for this symphony. John G, who was present on this occasion, says only the Royal Albert Hall is the right size with the right size organ, and we all know how important that is.)
As I reached the top of the stairs, I found the evening's usher was a stranger (to me), a tall, lanky, sexy, long-haired youth. Before I'd located an empty seat (sparse at these Mahler concerts), a guy I know slightly arrived, and began to harangue the young usher on the Faust Legend, its medieval and operatic and Goethean variants. As I'd written about the Faust legend for Opera News and the Met Opera program, I listened intently; later, this fellow explained to me that the usher is a young genius and leader of a "dark metal band" (whatever that means) which has dealt with satanic themes (don't they all?), but that he is also interested in the late romantic orchestral-operatic equivalents for death-thrash-metal (equivalent may be the wrong word here), and Greg is trying to introduce him to unfamiliar mythic concepts (such as music without electronics), which desire is perhaps lust-inspired on his part, but what the hey? A natural adjunct to pedagogy in many ancient societies, is it not? And this kid is definitely of age. (Plus, I think the philosophe is hot, frankly: chunky bronze Sicilian.)
Then he turns to me and says, "How do YOU think the parts connect in this symphony? Why did Mahler put them together?" really not knowing. And I hadn't ever thought about it myself (late Mahler not being my specialty).
But suddenly it was all very clear, because I'd just been reading Carl Jung's Answer to Job, which discusses the "divorce" between God the Will and God the Creative Spirit, and how that Creative Spirit is personified in Jewish mysticism as the Shekinah, and in Greek-Christian mysticism as Sophia, and how that spirit was necessary (and necessarily feminine) to God's creation of life itself, and his plans for the earth, and his assault on Job took place because Sophia was on sabbatical or something (Satan merrily slipping into her advisor's place), and her return and unification with God solved Job's dilemma by assuring him that God would be born as a human and find out what he'd been missing, an event only made possible because Sophia was to be incarnate as Mary. (I'm very dubious about all this as EVENT, or theology, but it makes sense as MYSTIC BELIEF.) (Mystics will believe ANYTHING. As you know. They believe, for one thing, that they've been told to believe it by those, as Cole Porter would say, "in the know.")
And suddenly it seemed to me that what Mahler was up to (a Catholic convert of somewhat mystical bent, and married to a femme fatale named Alma, of all symbolic names) was to join the invocation to the Judaeo-Christian god as Creator Spirit to Goethe's guilt-ridden self-invented pardon for Faust (his own questing, amoral, inventive spirit) by an eternal feminine who is given many names and many roles in the poem (Mater Gloriosa, Maria Egyptiaca, etc.) but who is clearly, in all cases, a synthesis subdivided by whole in the supernal Mary (bearing a very slight resemblance to any human Mary), queen of heaven, consort of God and (since God can only be one) his female alterity, anima to the divine animus, in short Sophia-Shekinah. Thereby invoking pardon for his (Mahler's) sins (whatever they were) and justifying his life as the manifestation of God's creativity, just as the original text (completed only a year before Goethe's death after forty-odd years of work, was a similar justification of his life as such a manifestation. (Could Goethe believe in a God who was not an aspect of Goethe? I mean, we all have that problem, but he had it especially rough because it seemed so very obvious to everyone that He was.)
So entirely by chance - the chance that I was reading Jung (on the recommendation of my friend Fritz Muntean of The Pomegranate magazine) - I think I have solved everybody's problem about why Mahler put these two texts together in his magnificent setting. Even if it's not one of Papa's best. (As, say, Das Lied von der Erde or the Wayfarer Songs are.)
Sunday, May 3, 2009
The Wampire of Windsor?
There aren't many takes on the vampire and zombie movie that have not been worked - Lizzie Bennett fighting zombies is only the latest. But what if Jane were a vampire herself? She'd have lived a lot longer and written more. And who would deny a few pints to our divine Jane, eh? Lives there the reader with soul so dead? And if they're dead - why not unearth them?
Or maybe not Jane. Maybe Jane's been done done done to death. (At 41, of Addison's disease.) Maybe what we need for an unexplored angle is an unexplored angle:
Victoria, Queen of the Vampires! (The Zombie of Windsor? The Widowed Wight of Wight? The Boggle of Balmoral?)
A flying saucer crash lands on the mausoleum at Frogmore, causing untold (well, who has the time?) damage and an unpredictable radioactive reaction bringing to life - Queen Victoria! Teeth bared, widow's cap at the read, fingernails 108 years a-growing, she stomps off into Windsor Great Park, pausing to rip a few young Etonians to pieces and perhaps an unwary history master hoping for inside dope on his thesis about the origins of the Triple Entente and the maladministration of Afghanistan. Soon her bloody (sorry) flag waves over an empire where the full moon never sets....
Or maybe not Jane. Maybe Jane's been done done done to death. (At 41, of Addison's disease.) Maybe what we need for an unexplored angle is an unexplored angle:
Victoria, Queen of the Vampires! (The Zombie of Windsor? The Widowed Wight of Wight? The Boggle of Balmoral?)
A flying saucer crash lands on the mausoleum at Frogmore, causing untold (well, who has the time?) damage and an unpredictable radioactive reaction bringing to life - Queen Victoria! Teeth bared, widow's cap at the read, fingernails 108 years a-growing, she stomps off into Windsor Great Park, pausing to rip a few young Etonians to pieces and perhaps an unwary history master hoping for inside dope on his thesis about the origins of the Triple Entente and the maladministration of Afghanistan. Soon her bloody (sorry) flag waves over an empire where the full moon never sets....
Notes on the Ring
We’re off to watch the world end
The wonderful world of the Ring –
The wonderful wonderful wonderful world --
The Ring that's the king of bling!
If ever a wonderful Ring there was
Then Wagner's is the one because
Because because because because because –
Because of its meanings so variause ...
We're off to see the world end,
The wonderful world of the Ring!
A friend remarked that fewer people were in scenic horned helmets and witty caps. (I wore a witty cap, from the Seattle Opera.) But on the whole it was a decent audience, lots of young people attending (perhaps) their first Rings. Is this spin-off from the Tolkien films? Or are they tired of lousy electronic imitations and want to hear real singing and see real sets? Wagnerites of the Future, come out.
The wonderful world of the Ring –
The wonderful wonderful wonderful world --
The Ring that's the king of bling!
If ever a wonderful Ring there was
Then Wagner's is the one because
Because because because because because –
Because of its meanings so variause ...
We're off to see the world end,
The wonderful world of the Ring!
A friend remarked that fewer people were in scenic horned helmets and witty caps. (I wore a witty cap, from the Seattle Opera.) But on the whole it was a decent audience, lots of young people attending (perhaps) their first Rings. Is this spin-off from the Tolkien films? Or are they tired of lousy electronic imitations and want to hear real singing and see real sets? Wagnerites of the Future, come out.
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