Monthly Archives: July 2008

Barry Johnson, General, Visual Art

Scatter looks in the mirror — and shudders

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Today, we are thinking about the mirror. It’s not our fault; it’s Natalie Angier’s. Art Scatter couldn’t hold NY Times science reporter Angier in any higher regard. She manages the difficult newspaper double of 1) telling you something, often something “technical,” you don’t know and 2) explaining it in a clear and expansive way — and all in a short space! (Art Scatter could sometimes take a lesson.)

Angier’s foray into the mirror (think Alice in Wonderland) starts with Narcissus and his reflection in the pool, brushes past mirrors of antiquity, talks about some unusual medical uses of mirrors, and then gets into some surprising psychological terrain (humans behave better, it seems, when they can see themselves in a mirror), including a few paragraphs on mirrors and self image. But the shocker was straight science:

Outline your face on a mirror, and you will find it to be exactly half the size of your real face. Step back as much as you please, and the size of that outlined oval will not change: it will remain half the size of your face (or half the size of whatever part of your body you are looking at), even as the background scene reflected in the mirror steadily changes.

Half the size? My head must be truly massive! And I thought it was rather petite all these years. Narcissus can be forgiven for falling in love with the image in the pool, then, because it is SO much more winsome than “real life,” beset as it is with Big Heads. Although Angier talks about how humans have a far higher regard for their individual beauty than the facts bear out, she doesn’t specifically address the erotics involved in the mirror. Which when you think about it, are pretty complex. There’s the possibility of watching someone furtively, by catching them unaware in a reflective surface, for example, but we begin to map a psychosexual terrain that we’ll leave for another day.
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Books, Environment, General, Vernon Peterson

Green New: up the country with Henry and Saul

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“I do not believe that history obeys a system, nor that its so-called laws permit deducing future or even present forms of society; but rather that to become conscious of the relativity (hence of the arbitrariness) of any feature of our culture is already to shift it a little, and that history (not the science but its object) is nothing other than a series of such imperceptible shifts.”

Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America

* * * * *

At the end—the end of the novel, which, as we know, can be the beginning of almost anything—Herzog feels something, perhaps happiness, something at least that “produces intensity, a holy feeling, as oranges produce orange, as grass green, as birds heat.” Feeling, after all his adventures that spring and early summer, “pretty well satisfied to be,” and with “fullness of heart,” Herzog lies down, by turns, on mattress, under locust tree and on old dusty couch, expectant.

I feel the same sense of intensity and fullness this summer morning beginning a new book, Reimagining Thoreau, by Robert Milder (Cambridge University Press). Expectant, because Milder’s recent study of Herman Melville, Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine, is one of the finest things I’ve ever read about how a writer’s words come alive, not by giving us an idea to carry away, but by immersing us in the indeterminacy of all ideas—true, an “idea” itself, but one consistent with the general scatter of things human. On life’s ocean we tack to and fro, an island moving in the stream, occasionally finding the isolated Ishmael afloat on his own idea’s island.

Milder’s theme in Reimagining Thoreau, as I absorb it in the first pages, is that Henry David Thoreau‘s “writings are dramatized answers to the social and psychological problem of how to live.” And these were “strategic” answers, the probing initiatives of Thoreau and others who formed that famous American Renaissance literary class which sought to “rescue itself from the margins of national life,” and to reshape the world “according to the imperatives of personal and collective need.” Of course we reshape the world in part by reshaping ourselves and thus our relations with the world. Thoreau’s shapeshifting was in response to “unexpected resistances in nature, society, and his own being.” Resistances to his idealized or mythologized self, a self-conception always in flux. So Thoreau was “a Proteus who eluded tragedy, chronic frustration, remorse and despair through a sidelong change of form” that repeatedly infused new energy into his work. A bracing thought this cool July morning!
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General

We link, we scatter: classical jazz/Warhol/Culture Shock

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An interesting experiment from the Minnesota Orchestra: hire a jazz trumpeter to direct a five-part jazz series, presumably using symphony musicians, which would be where the “experiment” part comes in. Can symphony musicians morph into jazz players? When I’ve heard the Oregon Symphony attempt to play jazz, I have liked the spirit of Norman Leyden conducting, but usually left thinking the effort was half-hearted, even on something like Rhapsody in Blue with Thomas Lauderdale, detached from Pink Martini, attacking the piano. Was it lack of rehearsal time, an interest deficit or did they simply lack the capacity to swing? In any case, we’ll be watching how Irvin Mayfield, the New Orleans trumpet player Minnesota hired, manages with his new orchestra.

Where the flashbulbs of the media are popping, there, moth to flame, we find the ghost of Andy Warhol. Or his traces. In the case of the Beijing Olympics that means the complete set of his “Athletes” series, ten acrylic paint and silkscreen depictions of Muhammad Ali, O.J. Simpson (!), Chris Evert and other heroes of the ’70s. They’ll be on sale at a Beijing Gallery. A single portrait of Ali went for $9.2 million in November at Christie’s. (Warhol produced eight sets.) Will this Olympics reach yet new levels of commercial and political exploitation? The presence of Andy encourages me to think so!

Finally, a tip of the hat to Culture Shock, a blog that we just “discovered”. There’s going to be a lot of Portland theater news on that site, if I’m any judge at all.

Barry Johnson, Books, Theater

Three essays by Peter Nadas, two dishes, one table

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A discussion of three essays by Hungarian essayist/novelist/Nobelist-in-waiting Peter Nadas, dealing with the executions of the Ceaucescu’s, the depths of Hamlet (another killer of tyrants) and the knotty language distortions of Soviet Bloc Hungary, plus some related observations.

I picked up Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays by Peter Nadas based on what short story writer Deborah Eisenberg wrote about it in the New York Review of Books. I’m usually not THAT suggestible, but Eisenberg is obviously passionate about Nadas. Here’s what she said about his novel A Book of Memories in that same review: “After finishing the book, I… felt irreversibly altered, as if the author had adjusted, with a set of tiny wrenches, molecular components of my brain.”

I pictured nanobots, each armed with a multi-tool (including a wrench), scurrying about inside my own skull, opening up some gates to allow more neuronal “flow” and shutting down others. (Until this, I had no idea my mind was like an irrigation project.) Would the sensation be “pleasant”? Or is it simply necessary to experience “what it is to feel or think two mutually exclusive things at once,” which is what Eisenberg says Nadas enables us to do. That doesn’t sound SO impressive, as Eisenberg admits, but frankly we don’t expect it in literature, just our confusing lives, and we certainly don’t expect it to be revelatory in the way Nadas is for Eisenberg.

So, I randomly plucked three essays from the set of 9 short stories and 14 essays and sat down to read. I didn’t hear the clanging of nanobots up there, but I think I understand what Eisenberg has on her mind. Nadas possesses a sharp, insistent intellect that he uses to complicate our thinking, to blur our distinctions, to clog our mental templates. He manages the sweet double of demonstrating the muddiness of our intellectual apparatus in a precise and powerful way: He’s clear about the complexity. More important for my humble purposes, though, these three essays, written in 1977, 1986 and 1998, seemed immediately applicable on all sorts of levels, some of which we’ll get into shortly.
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Barry Johnson, Books

Summer reading ideas: Not!

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Right now, as my fingers stumble across the keyboard, the top story at the ArtJournal site is from the Telegraph in the UK, specifically a video of short interviews with prominent Brit writers who confess their sins: The classic books they haven’t read. Go ahead, click the link! It’s only 3 minutes or so, and really, it’s worth it, because it will make you feel better about some secret reading omission of your own.

The Bible, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, Shakespeare, Catch-22, Ulysses, On the Origin of Species … The big books spool out, unread. As I watch the guilty rat on themselves, my favorite is playwright Michael Frayn, who suggests that he hasn’t read ANYTHING and is “in a state of perpetual embarrassment.” Which is exactly how I feel. Not that I haven’t read anything (and frankly, come on, the erudite Mr. Frayn has read a lot), but even if I’ve read it recently, important details have begun to leak out of my brainpan immediately. Was that book really great, or does it simply leave the impression of being really great…? More than regretting books not read, I regret books not remembered.

But OK. I’ll play. The book I’m most embarrassed that I haven’t read. Hmmm. Suddenly there are so many to choose from! Let’s see: Crime and Punishment. It is so big, it is so important, it is so daunting, and I know almost as much about it as books I’ve actually read and forgotten! But still… Hey, that feels better. Your confession below?

Barry Johnson, Books

Random July notes: LA Times Book Review oblivion

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Although the Los Angeles Times hasn’t made a formal announcement, four former editors of its esteemed book review section have protested the paper’s decision to eliminate it and move book reviews to the paper’s Calendar section. Their letter to the newspaper reads in part:

Angelenos in growing number are already choosing to cancel their subscriptions to the Sunday Times. The elimination of the Book Review, a philistine blunder that insults the cultural ambition of the city and the region, will only accelerate this process and further wound the long-term fiscal health of the newspaper.

I don’t live in LA nor am I a regular reader of the LA Times, so I’m in no position to judge how important to the LA basin’s literary culture its book section has been. But I suspect it’s considerable, at the very least as an important link in the book business chain and in championing the writers of the region. I know the Tribune Company, which owns the paper, is in a severe cost-cutting mode across its many papers — spend a week glancing at Romenesko’s newspaper news and gossip blog on Poynteronline if you want to find out the gory details in Baltimore, Chicago and various other newspaper points in the Tribune domain. No doubt the book section doesn’t attract lots of ads, though I suspect its readership numbers are substantial. But it does speak to seriousness of purpose: How intellectually rigorous the newspaper is.
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Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Ashland report: Hedda in the headlights

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The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, Jeff Whitty’s festive romp through a field of razor blades, brings to mind a couple of things. The first is the flap over the now infamous New Yorker magazine Obama cover illustration, the one that takes the various racial and incendiary whispers about the presidential candidate and his wife and gives them visual form. It’s clearly satirical, and clearly potent: It hits with merciless accuracy at precisely the points of fear and loathing that the dirtier fighters among Obama’s opponents are eager to exploit.

Yet, here’s the funny part: Obama’s camp itself, the presumed beneficiary of this political counterthrust, has found it necessary to protest vigorously against the images, even though the candidate undoubtedly understands their satirical point. Funnier yet: Obama’s opponent for the presidency, John McCain, has also found it necessary to protest, even though he surely understands the difference between satire and actuality. (Do the candidates truly believe that Swift wished to eat children?)

Now that they are presidential candidates, Obama and McCain find themselves the main characters in a pre-scripted drama. They are the guardians and servants of the nation’s images, and it becomes more important for them to respond to the illusion of reality than to reality itself. The script says, Americans don’t talk about such things. So the candidates, no matter “left” or “right,” must protest: To do less would be to place themselves outside the devoutly desired center of the let’s-pretend debate. And so they become the not-Obama and the not-McCain, fictional characters in a ritualized national drama that they can’t escape.

The second thing that Whitty’s comedy, playing in the Angus Bowmer Theater of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, brings to mind: Jasper Fforde‘s sly comic novels (The Well of Lost Plots and several others) about Thursday Next, a human investigator of crimes and misdemeanors among the vast pages of fiction. In Fforde’s universe, fictional characters have an actuality of their own, even though they operate under severe constraints: They find it difficult, for instance, to speak without employing quotation marks and a liberal sprinkling of explanatory “he saids” and “she saids.”

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Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater

Ashland report: fabulous cockroach, deadly deceiver

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Sure, Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa is a brilliant conception, one of the touchstones of 20th century thought. But when it comes to literary cockroaches, my heart belongs to Archy. A free-verse poet, an ink-stained wretch, a nervous moralist of the demimonde, an insect in love with a slatternly cat, Archy first saw the light of print in a 1916 column by New York Sun journalist Don Marquis, who stuck by the little fellow and his feline companion, Mehitabel, through hundreds of columns and a few book collections until Marquis’ death in 1937.

If The Metamorphosis is a comic nightmare vision of the dehumanizing essence of modern culture, Archy and Mehitabel is a sadly knowing comic ode to optimism, and as such, a much more American tale. Life on Shinbone Alley, the little fetid corner of New York where Archy and his pals hang out, has a mythic quality, and the myth that comes to mind is Sisyphus: always reaching for the top, always falling back into the same old muck, always dusting off and starting the journey again. For Mehitabel the sensualist, hope is just another alley cat away. For Archy the world-wise, despair and joy are almost the same thing, and like a Beckett character but with a good deal more joie de vivre, he can’t go on, yet on he goes.

Archy, as Marquis tells the tale, just showed up one night in the Sun newsroom and, choosing Marquis’ typewriter because the columnist seemed “a little less human” to him than most humans (a race with which he held little truck), proceeded to relate the stories of Shinbone Alley. To do this required a good deal of physical pain. Archy climbed onto the keyboard and flung himself headfirst onto the keys in order to type out his first-hand reports of life on the dangerous but always fascinating streets. He wrote everything in lower-case because he couldn’t hit both a letter key and the shift key at the same time. At least he didn’t have to worry about an editor, and that alone endeared him to the corps of semi-anonymous reporters who flung their own heads against the immutable forces of the newsroom in order to record straight the tragedies and comedies and everyday occurences of the strange boisterous brute that was the big city.

What brings Archy back to mind is a visit to the Oregon Cabaret Theatre in Ashland, a spiffy space carved out of a onetime Baptist Church building just a couple of blocks away from the grounds of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The cabaret’s current show is a revival of Archy and Mehitabel, a lightly jazzy, hipsterish 1950s musical adaptation of Marquis’ columns. A sly fusion of the strain of sardonic optimism that flavored the United States of both the 1920s and the 1950s (decades in which a lively underworld put the lie to the official order of standardized moralism), Archy and Mehitabel provides a pleasantly raffish break from the shows at the Shakespeare festival and also fits neatly with them: After all, like the classics that the festival embraces, the enduring qualities of Marquis’ cockroach and cat are built upon a masterful scaffolding of words, words, words. (The festival and the cabaret have always enjoyed a sort of cross-fertilization of talent. In Archy and Mehitabel, stalwart festival actor Michael J. Hume is the highly effective taped voice of Don Marquis, setting the stage with brief interludes of narration.)

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Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater

Ashland report: singing twins, a military hero gone wrong

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In 1938, when Richard Rodgers, Larry Hart, George Abbott and George Balanchine brought The Boys From Syracuse to Broadway, no one had ever before made a successful musical from a Shakespeare play. And Boys, a free and breezy adaptation of The Comedy of Errors, was successful. Its jazzy score landed several songs — Falling in Love With Love, He and She, This Can’t Be Love, Sing for Your Supper — in the Great American Songbook, to be picked up and played around with by interpreters as diverse as Mel Torme, Oscar Peterson and Sonny Rollins.

But while Boys paved the way for such later hits as West Side Story and Kiss Me Kate, and helped inspire many more musical adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, including Arne Zaslove’s popular Twelfth Night with Gershwin tunes for the old Bathhouse Theatre in Seattle in the 1980s, it hasn’t had a lot of revivals. New York’s Encore series of staged musicals produced and recorded a top-flight version in 1997, but a 2002 Broadway revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company was by most accounts (I didn’t see it) badly botched.

Too bad. I’ve listened to the music a fair amount, but I’ve seen a production of The Boys From Syracuse only once, years ago at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, and it’s left me longing to see it again ever since (like another Rodgers & Hart show, 1940’s Pal Joey, which also has a terrific score and is rarely revived).

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival‘s new outdoor production of The Comedy of Errors isn’t The Boys From Syracuse. But it is a free musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy (which was itself an adaptation of a Plautus comedy from ancient Rome), and it has its considerable charms.

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Bob Hicks, Environment, General, Theater

Ashland report: Words fail (and rescue) the festival

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I walked into the open-air circle of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival‘s Elizabethan Stage last night a disgruntled man, and three hours later walked out, finally, with what I’d come to Ashland looking for: the emotional, intellectual and aesthetic transformation that fine theater can achieve. Thank goodness for Our Town.

The trip’s been fine: that glorious drive south of Eugene, where the climate changes and the road becomes a curving slice through the mountains. (Why is Rice Hill at the bottom of the hill and the Rice Valley exit at the top?) An overnight stop, with two good meals, at the Wolf Creek Inn, where Jack London stayed in a tiny room for a few weeks in 1911 and wrote a story called The End of the Story. (I’m going to have to look it up: I’ve never read it.)

A quick stop at the nearby gold-mining ghost town of Golden, where volunteers are working to stabilize the remaining wood-frame buildings (the church has new glass in the windows) of a little boom town that was always different: Built by preaching miners, it had two congregations and no saloons. Two or three genuine markers lie in the little cemetery, but most of the headstones are fakes, set there many years ago for filming of an episode of Gunsmoke: So the not-so-wild West reinvents itself. And bless the volunteers, who have split new rails for the fence along the little road and are slowly reclaiming the natural state of the gouged-out mined areas below the town. May they outfox the woodpecker who was tap-tap-tapping away at the old church spire.

But in Ashland, aesthetically, it hadn’t been a good beginning. On Saturday afternoon, indoors at the Angus Bowmer Theatre, a gauche and vulgar version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play that deserves far, far better. Dream is a wonder of the Western World, one of the most nearly perfect plays ever devised, and I’ve often thought it close to foolproof. Turns out it’s not. It can be defeated by a director and designers determined to overwhelm the magic of its language with insipid pop-cultural winks, incessant visual distractions, head-scratching hand gestures that appear to be choreographed but have no apparent link to the emotional lives of the characters or the plotting demands of the story, and a general busy-ness that makes it almost impossible for the actors to settle into the quiet glowing heart of the story. It was the Roman circus, not the magical wood. My congratulations to Ray Porter, who managed a fine low-comedy focus as Bottom, and Kevin Kenerly, who kept his dignity intact as Oberon while all around him were being engulfed in foolishness.

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