Archives for March 2004

“He had supposed that when you dissolved a joyless marriage, you opened yourself to the return of joy, but he discovered himself open instead to loneliness.

“In matters of loneliness, Chris was a novice. He had never in his life been lonely. Indeed, during the last and most trying years of his marriage, when Karen was in treatment for alcoholism and Kay was in treatment for drugs and Billy’s rock group was practicing in the basement, he thought of himself as suffering from the opposite of loneliness–which, he was amazed to discover, didn’t have a name. Why, of the 600,000 words in the language, was there no word for the opposite of loneliness?”

Jon Hassler, The Love Hunter

“Chaplin’s a great artist–there can’t be any argument about that. It’s just that he seldom makes the corners of my mouth move up. I find him easy to admire and hard to laugh at.”

Orson Welles, This Is Orson Welles

In addition to all those postings I didn’t really have time to write yesterday, I succeeded in drafting yet another chapter of the Balanchine book. I want to (A) get it polished and locked up this morning and (B) get another chapter started tonight. To these ends, I plan to post no more today. Our Girl isn’t in Chicago, so chances are that you won’t be seeing anything new until Saturday, unless my resolve slackens. I’m sure you’ll forgive us…right?

Anyway, we did manage to put up a lot of stuff on Wednesday and Thursday, and it may be that you haven’t read it all, so eat what’s here. One or more of us will see you tomorrow.

I got so preoccupied with the latest chapter of my Balanchine book (which is now polished to a fare-thee-well) that I forgot to post the weekly teaser to my Friday Wall Street Journal theater column! Apologies. Today I wrote about Propeller’s all-male production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Edward Hall and playing at BAM Harvey through March 28, and Tim Robbins’ Embedded, now showing at the Public Theater.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is pure bliss:

Everyone knows that in Elizabethan times, Shakespeare’s plays were performed by companies of men and boys, but it’s one of those snippets of historical knowledge we tend to file and forget. Not only are Mr. Hall and company well aware of it, but they make the most of it without ever stooping to heavy-handed sexual sermonizing: Hippolyta (Emilio Doorgasingh) is attired in Milton Berle-style drag, while Helena and Hermia (Robert Hands and Jonathan McGuinness) duke it out like a pair of roller-derby queens on the rampage. The cheery atmosphere even extends to the intermission, during which the entire cast strolls out to the lobby and leads the audience in a sing-along (they did the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer” on opening night).

Yet the members of Propeller are no less alert to the chiming music of Shakespeare’s verse, and no sooner has the wreckage of “Pyramus and Thisby” been carted away than they work one final feat of theatrical prestidigitation and modulate into the sweet solemnity of the last scene, with Puck (Simon Scardifield) speaking the epilogue so simply and benevolently that I forgot to breathe. Suddenly the lights came up and I found myself back in the real world. I hated to go home….

Embedded isn’t, and not just because of its fact-twisting, either:

You’d think a satire about Gulf War II would have tried to be laughworthy, and I suppose Mr. Robbins did his best, but in the whole of “Embedded” there are just two clever touches, both involving the American journalists who covered the war. They’re put through basic training by Col. Hardchannel (V.J. Foster), a brass-voiced drill instructor who in private life is a musical-comedy buff with a taste for Stephen Sondheim, and the military press conferences they attend are accompanied by canned Muzak, to which they gently sway in unison.

Save for those two tiny oases of wit, “Embedded” is a desert of agitprop clich

I’m going to be appearing next month on Studio 360, Kurt Andersen’s radio show. To this end, I was chatting with the producer about critics of the past whom I admire, and I mentioned that I thought the film criticism of James Agee to be grossly overrated (though not without merit). That opinion cuts sharply against the grain of received taste, and it’s not one I’ve always held: I used to admire Agee a lot more than I do now.

One thing that caused me to change my mind was Agee’s preposterously effusive praise for Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux. Turner Classic Movies has been working its way through the Chaplin oeuvre all month, so I took a look at Monsieur Verdoux the other day, and found it no more amusing on reacquaintance. But, then, I’ve never liked Chaplin, whom I simply don’t find funny at all, whereas I think Buster Keaton is not merely funny but one of the very few silent filmmakers in any genre whose best work remains fully viable today.

I got sick of writing tonight, decided to do a little channel surfing to clear my head, and saw that The Gold Rush, by common consent Chaplin’s finest feature-length film, was showing on TCM in the re-edited version Chaplin released in 1942 (he removed the original title cards and substituted his own spoken narration). I thought I ought to give the old boy one more try, so I turned it on…and I just couldn’t stick it out to the end. I didn’t laugh once.

All this reminded me that not long after 9/11, I went to see Buster Keaton’s The General at New York’s Film Forum, which isn’t all that far from Ground Zero. I wrote about the experience a few days later in my Washington Post column:

To me, it suggests a portfolio of Civil War photographs by Mathew Brady into which a slapstick comedian of genius has somehow inadvertently wandered. The Film Forum showed a handsome-looking print of “The General” two weeks ago as part of its recent Keaton retrospective, and people were lined up halfway down the block to get into the 7:30 showing, which featured live piano accompaniment by Steve Sterner. No doubt the audience was lousy with film-studies majors, but that didn’t keep them from laughing themselves silly at Keaton’s divine foolery. Where there are laughs, there is hope.

I wonder whether The Gold Rush would have made that emotionally battered audience laugh nearly so hard–if at all.

Maybe it’s just me, but it’s my impression that Chaplin’s films, unlike Keaton’s, are now widely thought to have aged poorly. As so often, David Thomson read my mind before the fact:

Intuitively, he sensed how ready the viewers were to have their fantasies indulged. But that instinct usually lacked artistic intelligence, real human sympathy, and even humor. Chaplin’s isolation barred him from working with anyone else. He needed to fulfil every creative function on a film, whether it is scripiting, composing, or directing actors. He is isolated, too, in the sense that his later films seem as cut off from any known period or reality as the earlier ones….Chaplin looked like a great instinct narrowed by the absence of the other qualities that would mature an artist.

James Agee, of course, thought otherwise. So much the worse for him, I fear.

“‘That’s an old attitude.'”

“‘It may be old, but I am currently holding it.'”

Jon Hassler, Staggerford

I’m still tied to the tracks. For now:

– Courtesy of Symphony X, a fascinating samizdata.net posting by Brian Mickelthwait on Dmitri Shostakovich, the greatest Russian composer of the twentieth century:

Shostakovich was almost certainly a better composer after Stalin had given him his philistine going-over following the first performances of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, than he would have been if Stalin had left him alone. Although both are very fine, I prefer Symphony Number 5 (“A Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism”) to Symphony Number 4.

Had Shostakovich continued unmolested along the musical path he was travelling before Stalin’s denunciation of him, I don’t think he would merely have become just another boring sub-Schoenbergian modernist. He was too interesting a composer for that already. But I do not think his subsequent music would have stirred the heart in the way his actual subsequent music actually does stir mine, and I do not think I am the only one who feels this way.

Thanks to Stalin, if that is an excusable phrase, Shostakovich was forced to write what is now called ‘crossover’ music, that is, music which is just about entitled to remain in the classical racks in the shops, but which also gives the bourgeoisie, such as me, something to sing along to and get excited about. Shostakovich had always written film music as well as the serious stuff. What Stalin and his attack dogs did was force him to combine the two styles. He might well have ended up doing this anyway, but who can be sure?

What Stalin also did for Shostakovich was to make his music matter more. Thanks to Stalin (that phrase again!) every note composed by Shostakovich became a matter of life and death

Courtesy of Mixolydian Mode, this hair-raising quote from John Tavener, the “holy minimalist” composer:

I have always been drawn more to the archetypal levels of human experience and human types, which is why I think I was drawn to Stravinsky and revolted by Schoenberg. Schoenberg was for me the filthy, rotten ‘dirt dump’ of the twentieth century. I personally could not stand the angst-ridden sound of decay in his music, the vile post-Freudian world. Basically, I do not respond to the so-called ‘Germanic Tradition,’ whose by now rotting corpse — the hideous sound world of its fabricated complexity — smothers archetypal experience that I have always sought.

For more of the same, go here.