Archives for October 2008

Don’t you love getting turned on to beautiful things in unlikely places?

The other day I was wondering around a store in the tiny touristy Northern Californian town of Point Reyes Station looking for a birthday gift for a friend when my ears pricked up at the sound of the music on the store’s stereo system. I was so transfixed that I lingered in the store for about half an hour. The shop keeper must have thought I was casing the joint.

The songs were instantly recognizable to me: Most of them were lovely, old Brecht/Weill standards that I had heard many times on stage before, including “The Bilbao Song” and “Surabaya Johnny” from Happy End and “Moon over Alabama” from The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany.

But the voice that was singing the songs, accompanied by maudlin strings and piano, was not.

It was a male voice — sweet, reedy and orgasmically pure. Having heard only fabulously oversexed, raspy female vocalists like Ute Lemper essay the Brecht/Weill cannon in the past, I was completely entranced by the contrast between the Brecht’s snarling-destitute lyrics/Weill’s blue-collar harmonies and the singer’s boyish, unsullied tenor.

My friend, who was equally mesmerized, went up to the lady who was standing behind the cash register to ask about the source.

Turns out the singer was Theo Bleckmann. Embarrassingly, I’d never heard of Bleckmann, though the German-born singer-songwriter is big on the lounge music circuit in New York and has played many famous stages around the world including Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall, the Sydney Opera House, L.A.’s Disney Hall, The Whitney Museum and the new Library in Alexandria, Egypt. He’s even been interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air.

As soon as I returned home, I bought the album which I’d heard in the store, Berlin: Songs of Love and War. That eerie-dulcet timbre is currently the soundtrack of my life. I can’t get Bleckmann’s Berlin out of my head.

The British playwright Mark Ravenhill just wrote about his experience of directing one of his own plays in Armenia. The process is apparently going well despite the language barrier: Ravenhill speaks neither Russian nor Armenian and the actors don’t speak English.

But when it comes to staging plays for English-speaking audiences in English, language can prove to be an issue. I’ve found this to be true on many occasions over the years as I watch American companies produce plays by British dramatists. (I’m sure the reverse is true too; I just haven’t experienced an American play produced by a British company in many years.)

I’ve been thinking about the linguistic barrier since the other day when I experienced a terrific San Francisco production of The History Boys, a play about a group of high school students applying to get into Oxford and Cambridge in the 1980s by the great Yorkshire playwright Alan Bennett.

There are many elements in this play that don’t translate easy for US audiences. If the audience hasn’t got enough on its plate coping with the play’s many references to T S Eliot, Auden, Larkin, Wittgenstein and obscure Reformation era monastic lore, there are also many impenetrable Anglicisms to parse. Examples include references to “sixth form” (the final two years of high school); the “Carry On” films (a series of popular, bawdy comedies made in England in the post-War years starring many of the same actors); Black Magic (a well-known brand of chocolate assortment made by Nestle that used to be considered fancy); and — best of all — “a bit of a pillock” (an insult roughly meaning “idiot.”)

I don’t think it’s necessary to be able to understand all of these expressions, but I wonder whether one’s enjoyment of the play is diminished by not getting such references?

Obviously, thousands of people — both British and American — cheerfully sit through productions of Shakespeare each year with no idea of the meaning of all of the Bard’s words. I also think that if a playwright’s writing is eloquent enough, a director’s direction clear enough, and an actor’s acting bold enough, the meanings of “foreign-sounding” words should come across to a degree anyway. It should at least be possible to follow the gist of any unfamiliar expressions.

So the inclusion of a glossary of terms in the program notes, though helpful in a way, may point to a slight shortcoming in the production.

If this country weren’t going to through what it’s going through right now, watching Barry Levinson’s 1990 film Avalon would probably just make me feel a bit misty-eyed and queasy. Based on the director’s memories of growing up around his immigrant grandparents who came to the US from Eastern Europe at the start of the First World War, the film is good, old fashioned sentimentality. It’s a bit like Woody Allen’s Radio Days but without the sense of humor.

But at this point in US history, as we watch the tenets of the so-called American Dream, with its cut-price goods, TV dinners and rags-to-riches can-do mentality, turn into a hideous joke, Levinson’s film looks darkly ironic.

Spanning three generations of one family, the film tells the story of an immigrant, Sam, who arrives in Baltimore in 1914 to join his three brothers in the wallpapering business. His son, Jules, grows up to become a successful salesman — he and his cousin are pioneers of the discount electronics trade. By the time Jules’ own son, Michael, becomes a man, the family’s fortunes have somewhat changed, as have their priorities. Jules loses his fortune when an electrical fire burns down his new (uninsured) warehouse store. He leaves the “roller-coaster” world of business empire building behind him and goes into media sales. We don’t learn much about Michael as a grown up, except that he is married and has a small boy. But it seems clear that his parents’ fortunes have left a deep impression on him.

Quite apart from leaving a bitter taste in our mouths for its portrayal of lines of shopping-frenzied Americans lining up for hours to buy their shiny, cut-rate televisions in the 1950s, the film is interesting for the way it charts the changing concept of community and family over three generations. The family in the story are extremely close-knit at the start. They all chip in to help each other come to the new world from the old one even though they don’t have much money at their disposal. They all live in adjacent houses in downtown Baltimore and are completely involved in each others’ lives.

But by the time Jules comes of age, attitudes have changed. With comfort comes a greater desire for privacy — and heightened selfishness. The family moves to the suburbs and gradually breaks up into smaller units; brothers who were once close allies, fall out over such trifles as the premature carving of a Thanksgiving turkey; when Sam’s wife wants to bring her long-lost, Holocaust-surviving brother to the US, the family refuses to chip in funds to help. “We can’t be paying for every Tom, Dick and Harry,” says one family member, disgruntled. Once the site of noisy discussion around a huge table, family dinners become silent affairs, consumed on trays in front of the TV. And Sam, in his old age, wonders if his family exists anymore.

Levinson’s movie is full of nostalgia for a lost time. But it’s also a sharp critique of the path that this country has taken over the past 60 years or so. I’m not suggesting that this country should try to return to the dreamlike concept embodied by the notion of the word “Avalon.” But the film certainly provides a crucial perspective on recent social and economic history in the run up to November 4.

A strange item in Ohio’s Springfield News Sun, via Yahoo News, caught my attention today.

The story concerns the punishment facing a 24-year-old man, Andrew Vactor, for playing rap music too loudly on his car stereo in July.

Champaign County Municipal Court Judge Susan Fornof-Lippencott absurdly offered to reduce Vactor’s $150 fine to $35 if the miscreant agreed to spend 20 hours listening to classical music. The thinking behind this idea was to give Vactor a proverbial dose of his own medicine by forcing him to listen to something he might not like, just as other people had no choice but to listen to his loud rap music.

According to the news story, Vactor managed to listen to only about 15 minutes worth of music by the likes of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven before giving up and agreeing to pay the full $150 fine, citing his need to get to basketball practice. “I didn’t have the time to deal with that,” the article quotes Vactor as saying. “I just decided to pay the fine.”

I don’t know who’s more worthy of ridicule here: Vactor, for assaulting peoples’ eardrums with his unnecessarily loud music, or Fornof-Lippencott for co-opting Mozart & Co as devices of torture. The thought of it makes me feel a little queasy. No music, not even angry rap, should be used to punish people. The idea reminds me of that hilarious scene in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where the pan-galactic stowaways Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect are strapped to chairs and forced to listen to the captain of the Vogon spaceship reading his poetry aloud. Dent and Prefect almost die from being exposed to such thumbscrew gems as “Ode to a Lump of Green Putty I Found Under My Armpit One Midsummer Morning.”

The judge in the Vactor case apparently makes a habit of meting out similar punishments. According to the article, she has on occasion taped TV shows for defendants to watch on topics such as financial responsibility. As she sees it, they get the chance to have their fine reduced “and at the same time broaden their horizons.”

But Fornof-Lippencott is deluding herself if she thinks that forcing someone to listen to classical music is going to turn them onto the art form. If anything, it’ll have entirely the opposite effect.

An experience I had at San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre Center last night reminded me of seeing people file into the his and hers changing rooms at my local swimming pool.

The theatre, which specializes in putting on shows aimed at gay audiences, has two productions running in tandem at the moment: Alan Bennett’s play about a group of precocious British schoolboys revving up to take the Oxbridge entrance exams, History Boys, and That’s What She Said — a musical comedy revue starring two Los Angeles-based performers, Amy Turner and Kathryn Lounsbery.

What was striking was walking into the theatre lobby and seeing the playgoers literally sort themselves into two camps along gender lines before my eyes. Pretty much all the female audience members went through a door to the left to see Turner and Lounsbery’s “girl-on-girl comedy duet”, while most of the people heading through the right hand door to see Bennett’s homoerotic-tinged drama were men.

It’s good to see a company catering to a wide range of its core audience’s predilections simultaneously. But I wonder how many of NCTC’s subscriber base would go and see both shows?

It seems to me that you don’t need to be a believer in order to sing religious music masterfully. Plenty of great singers bring tears to the eyes of listeners while singing songs written within various world spiritual systems without necessarily subscribing to those beliefs. They do this by finding their own way to connect to the music and lyrics, which is, in a way, a form of acting. And no performance of any kind worth its salt is without some element of acting.

It was interesting, therefore, to interview a bunch of people from the gospel music community and hear their thoughts about the relationship between religious belief and the music they practice. Very few people I talked to think that it’s possible to sing gospel music convincingly without being a worshipper of Jesus Christ. Here are some examples of answers I received to the questions: “Is it possible to separate the music from the religious aspects of gospel or must the two always go hand in hand? Is it possible to be a great gospel singer if you’re not a Christian?”

Marvin Sapp, chart-topping gospel recording artist:

“I don’t know of any gospel artists who aren’t christians. Gospel music is about conviction. it isn’t easy to have a conviction about someone if you don’t have a relationship with them. I don’t know of any great secular artists that are gospel artists. Al green is a better secular artist than he is a gospel artist in my opinion.”

Donald Lawrence, gospel music songwriter and record producer:

“Someone who doesn’t go to church can respond to lyrics that share good news. On the other hand, the music tends to talk about Jesus and God, so you may not want to be a gospel artist if you don’t believe to avoid compromising yourself. Gospel music comes from heart so you have to have it in your heart to connect with it. It’s the same for all art forms from country music to opera: you have to make the connection and train hard to be successful.”

Rebecca Sherill, director of McCoy Memorial Baptist Church choir in Los Angeles:

“You have to feel and believe what your’e singing in order to make other people believe and feel what you’re singing. The essence of gospel is beliving what you’re singing. The two go hand in hand.”

Janet Sutton, director of ACME Missionary Baptist Church Choir in Chicago:

“Anyone can sing gospel music. The record stores are full of recordings of “Amazing Grace” created by people who aren’t believers. You can sing whatever you want to sing. But the message is more effective if you know what you are singing about. You can be a gospel artist if you aren’t a christian. But if you haven’t gone the whole way by declaring Christ as your lord you can’t fully engage with it.”

I am always saddened when powerful words like “love,” “terror” or “tragedy” lose their strength and even eventually their meaning owing to overuse, bowdlerization and/or general carelessness.

I’ve been feeling this disappointment particularly strongly of late with respect to what was until recently one of my favorite words: “maverick.”

Maverick was once a wonderful word. It sticks on the tongue and in the heart. It reminds me of wild, empty plains; of life lived on the edge. The way in which the McCain-Palin junket has seized the word and made it synonymous with stolid Republican values inspires nothing in me but boredom and disgust.

So it was a great relief to turn on the radio yesterday and catch the middle of the latest edition of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s great news commentary show, As It Happens. During the show, the host interviewed an 82-year-old woman by the name of Terrellita Maverick. Ms. Maverick lives in San Antonio, Texas. She comes from a long line of Mavericks. She’s what you might call a “genuine Maverick.”

When asked for her thoughts about McCain-Palin’s attempt to turn her family name into part of the brand image of Republican campaign, Ms. M was naturally indignant. She said that the Republicans had no business using the word “maverick”, regardless of whether it’s with a capital or small “m.” She then went on to relay her family’s history in the real-estate and cattle business. The original meaning of the word “maverick” apparently dates back to the mid-1800s, when one Samuel A. Maverick (1803-70), a Texas cattle owner and one of the interviewee’s ancestors, was negligent in branding his calves and became known for his individualist behavior.

The seven-minute interview was wonderful, despite the fact that Ms. Maverick, perhaps suffering from slight deafness, called Palin “precocious” and “a good speaker.” (Alas I don’t think the pensioner was being ironic.) I really needed to let off some election season steam. Hooray for Canada.

Like many things in life, people often judge an arts experience by the entrance that a performer makes on stage. Whether it’s the members of the male a cappella vocal ensemble Chanticleer all traipsing on stage in perfect tuxedo-sporting synchronicity with black folders neatly tucked under their right arms, or Katherine Hunter loping on with a scowl as the malignant, hunchbacked Bolingbroke in a production of Shakespeare’s Richard III I witnessed in 2003 at London’s Globe, performers tell us much about what to expect within the first few seconds of their act.

So it was interesting, on Friday night, to experience the country singer Iris Dement’s entrance at http://www.yoshis.com/ in San Francisco. Shuffling on stage with her head bowed, her guitar hung haphazardly around her neck like a baby chimp, spilling liquid from a cup in one hand and carrying a plastic bottle of water in the other, Dement looked like she was carrying huge bags of groceries to her front door rather than getting ready to play before a packed house at one of the west coast’s premiere jazz clubs.

Dement sighed, put down her load, and plonked herself down at the piano. “So much for a smooth start,” said the singer-songwriter in her husky, southern drawl.

Dement’s entrance might have left some audience members non-plussed, and her appearance — stocky, bespectacled and dressed like a school marm in an old-fashioned, knee-length, patterned sun-dress, chunky-heeled sandals, woolly cardigan and string of beads — didn’t exactly exude country music heroine cool. But as soon as Dement started paying, I certainly forgot about her entrance. Or, rather, the quirkiness of those opening moments coupled with her slightly frumpy appearance, only served to endear her to me.
I was struck by the contrast between the sweet, pleading penetration of her singing voice, the husky, I-just-got-out-of-bed-stoned timbre of her speaking voice and the Tom Waitsy rocking of her piano style. As far as I recall, all of the songs in Dement’s spiraling, close-to-two-hour unbroken set were strophic. And every time the chorus came around in her melodies on such themes as enduring love, spiritual wonder and soaking in nature, the songs seemed to get more and more under my skin.

Dement’s songs have a candidness to them that’s at once inspiring and refreshing. She tells it like it is without being cynical. One of my favorite songs from the concert was “Let The Mystery Be”. The open, sparse chords sounded as truthful and free-ranging as the philosophy of the lyrics, which explore our attempts to understand “the great unknown.” With its jaunty stride bass and cracked melody, “Mama’s Opry”, a memoir about Dement’s relationship with her mother, is as much an exasperated appraisal of — as it is a tribute to — the tough, 91-year-old woman.

Dement’s performance also presented an interesting combination of extreme self-absorption and brazen worldliness. At one point, she commented about how much she loved playing the piano at Yoshi’s (“This piano sounds so good to me; if I’m not careful, I’ll forget you’re there.”) At another, she played a few bars of a song then changed her mind, saying that she suddenly didn’t feel like performing that number anymore. On the other hand, her commentary included pained thoughts about the state of the nation (“I’m not too happy with the way things are going in this country right now”) and her decision to join a new church, inspired by a Kansas City pastor she heard on the radio who stated “christianity and capitalism don’t go together.”

A friend who attended the concert with me was unhappy that Dement spent so much time behind the piano. He prefers her guitar-playing, of which she did very little during the set. But I didn’t mind the keyboard-centric bent of the evening. I found myself completely absorbed in the singer’s sound. My first impression of seeing Dement perform live will probably stay with me forever. But the thing that will stay with me the longest, I think, is the memory of her wonderfully humorous, bitter-sweet ballad about an aging couple entitled “This Love’s Gonna Last.” I will never forget the lyrics of the refrain for their pungent imagery. I’ll leave you with these words:

Some days together we’re like baseballs breaking glass
Still, I think this love’s going to last.

Chris Jeffries’ stimulating, funny and clever musical Vera Wilde juxtaposes two seemingly very different characters from the same era. The quirky, homespun-melodied work, produced by the Berkeley-based company Shotgun Players and featuring a five-piece folk band comprising of upright bass, guitar, banjo, fiddle and drumkit, extrapolates on the lives of Oscar Wilde and Vera Zasulich.

Za who? I hear you ask. The the story of the great Anglo-Irish playwright is well known throughout the world. But Zasulich, despite being dubbed the “mother of terrorism” for taking Russian feudal law into her own hands in the late 1800s, working closely with Lenin during their exile in Switzerland, and playing a fundamental role in bringing about the Russian Revolution, barely registers as a footnote to most people today.

Zasulich and Wilde probably never met, though Wilde was enough inspired by news reports of the Russian radical’s stand against the Czarist authorities (she shot a sadistic prison commander for flogging a defenseless, physically-depleted student 50 times for the crime of not removing his hat) to write his first (extremely unsuccessful) play Vera, or The Nihilists (1880) about Zasulich.

Employing a mercurial time structure which moves forwards in time through Zasulich’s story and backwards through Wilde’s, Jeffries shows us, by the end of the play, just how the reputations of the two figures stand today. Our final impression of Zasulich is of a crippled, old woman, barred from an important Community meeting and already practically forgotten by the people who had heralded her as a hero in her youth. Wilde, meanwhile, is in his prime by the end of the production. As portrayed by the flamboyant Sean Owens (a talented Bay Area actor and playwright who seems to view Wilde as a sort of alter ago) the character exudes confidence at the end of the play. A vision in green velvet, Owens’ Wilde stands proudly at the start of his career. He embodies the idea of promise.

The start of the play paints the opposite picture of the two protagonists: Zasulich is at the height of her powers: As brought to life by a willowy, determined Alexandra Creighton, the character is fearless, radical and committed to shaking up the system. An overnight sensation, Zasulich becomes a figurehead of dissent. Wilde, on the other hand, is at his lowest ebb when we first meet him. Broken by his years in Reading Gaol for “gross indecency” and unable to return to England, he dies a pauper in Paris. His shimmering resume as a dramatist is even tarnished by the fact that his most successful plays are performed without his name on the billboard.

At one point in the middle of the play, the two characters’ lives physically intersect. Jeffries imagines them meeting in London. Wilde is in rehearsal for — ironically — his play A Woman of No Importance, when Zasulich seeks him out ostensibly to interview him for the revolutionary newspaper which she edits in Switzerland. She hopes to inspire the man who wrote a play about her to jump on the revolutionary bandwagon, but instead leaves disappointed without even telling the playwright her name.

Though the opening scenes could use more punch, and the singing could overall be better in tune and more clearly enunciated, director Maya Gurantz delivers a clean, well-balanced staging of the work and coaxes energetic, performances from all five members of the ensemble.

Set against Lisa Clark’s claustrophobic backdrop of grey, narrow, precariously inward-leaning Victorian facades, Gurantz, Jeffries and their collaborators evoke a history of heroic outcasts from Galileo to Joan of Arc to pose a provocative question about the nature of revolution: Does change happen at the heart of public life or on the fringes?

There’s a passage from Amy Tan’s novel The Bonesetter’s Daughter which won’t leave me alone.

It’s the section describing a book of Chinese brush paintings called “The Four Manifestations Of Beauty.” According to an interview with the novelist in Fate! Luck! Chance! , Ken Smith’s new book about the making of the opera version of The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Tan filched this idea from her friend Bill Wu, an Asian art expert. Wu had developed his ideas about aesthetics through studying the calligraphy of the famous Chinese artist C. C. Wang. I’d like to quote the passage as I think it’s one of the most resonant descriptions of beauty I’ve ever come across:

‘With any form of beauty, there are four levels of ability. This is true of painting, calligraphy, literature, music, dance. The first level is Competent. ‘We were looking at a page that showed two identical renderings of a bamboo grove, a typical painting, well done, realistic, interesting in the detail of double lines, conveying a sense of strength and longevity. ‘Competence’, [Kai Jing] went on, ‘is the ability to draw the same thing over and over in the same strokes, with the same force, the same rhythm, the same trueness. This kind of beauty, however, is ordinary.

‘The second level’ Kai Jing continued, ‘is Magnificent. ‘We looked together at another painting, of several stalks of bamboo. ‘This one goes beyond skill’ he said. ‘Its beauty is unique. And yet it is simpler, with less emphasis on the stalk and more on the leaves. It conveys both strength and solitude. The lesser painter would be able to capture one quality but not the other’.

He turned the page. This painting was of a single stalk of bamboo. ‘The third level is Divine,’ he said. ‘The leaves are now shadows blown by an invisible wind, and the stalk is there mostly by suggestion of what is missing. And yet the shadows are more alive than the original leaves that obscured the light. A person seeing this would be wordless to describe how this is done. Try as he might, the same painter could never again capture the feeling of this painting, only a shadow of a shadow.’

‘How could beauty be more than divine?’ [LuLing] murmured, knowing that [she] would soon learn the answer. ‘The fourth level,’ Kai Jing said, ‘is greater than this, and it is in each mortal nature to find it. We can sense it only if we do not try to sense it. It occurs without motivation or desire or knowledge of what may result. It is pure. It is what innocent children have. It is what old masters regain once they have lost their minds and become children again.’

He turned the page. On the next was an oval. ‘This painting is called Inside the Middle of a Bamboo Stalk. The oval is what you see if you are looking up or looking down. It is the simplicity of being within, no reason or explanation for being there. It is the natural wonder that anything exists in relation to another, an inky oval to a white paper. A person to a bamboo stalk, the viewer to a painting.’

Kai Jing was quiet for a long time. ‘This fourth level is called Effortless,’ he said at last.