Consider the Lilies

Rebuttals Welcome

2011-12-20T08:43:00.001-08:00

In the lates series of "points" in The Point Magazine comes this: http://www.thepointmag.com/?point=53.

operaSHOP photos are up!

2011-10-09T07:27:00.001-07:00

Photos are up from Opera Cabal's brand new operaSHOP! Check out our Facebook page for the full reel ...

All photos related to Opera Cabal c/o the excellent Lara Kastner.

Twyla Strikes Again

2011-10-06T07:08:00.000-07:00

Who is this woman, anyway? Check out the new Twyla Bell in the University of Chicago's THE POINT: A Journal of Ideas.

Me, Pseudonymously

2011-08-18T06:56:00.001-07:00

A few years ago a couple friends of friends started a journal at the University of Chicago called The Point (it being a Hyde Park institution, the reference is to the beloved Point, a sun-soaked piece of land that extends into Lake Michigan from 55th street on the South Side). While most aspirants to the intellectual mag category, including such inimitables as Harper's and The New Yorker, rise and fall like dust mites in the wash cycle, The Point caught my attention. The articles aren't just clever and intelligent. They're topical, they're funny and they have a real point of view. The majority of its writers (and all of its founders) come from the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought, a name that continues to wow me simply on account of its impenetrability (what on earth is a committee? do they meet in a basement?) and whose adherents are without a doubt the smartest and most interesting people I've met at the U of C (with the possible exception of the R&L community in the Div school).

While it seems a little backa$$wards to invent a pseudonym (for the purposes of not revealing one's identity) and then to completely blow cover by blogging about it ... I wanted to share my own, little contribution to The Point's newest initiative, Pointing. Oh, wait. That's wrong. Pointers? No, anyway, I forget. Just read this.

City Opera: Off-Roading It

2011-07-13T13:39:00.000-07:00

I don't care what anyone says. George Steel is made out of smart. Check out his New Deal.

Book of Abraham - Caroline Shaw, Majel Connery, Elliot Cole

2011-06-20T13:11:00.000-07:00

From rehearsals for The Book of Abraham, a chamber pop song cycle I've been working on with Caroline Shaw & Elliot Cole, my two new favorite people, first-year composers in the Princeton composition department.

This work in progress was presented as part of a "Music + Theater Symposium" at Princeton last Friday, June 17 in the Whitman College Class of 1970 Theater. Here are a few excerpts from a recent rehearsal.

"You Are Smiling," written by Caroline Shaw (seated, Red Flyer), and performed by Majel Connery.

"The Speech of Nothing."

Elliot Cole's dance break:

And Caroline's final, beautiful solo:

Evan Curtis

2011-05-16T15:12:00.000-07:00

I don't know a lot about stop animation. Which is a nice way of saying I literally know nothing about stop animation. But I know astonishing good art when I see it.

Any of you who have been coming to the Hyde Park Salons for a time may remember a showing of Evan Curtis's The Story of Scrivener and His Aislyn from the summer of 2009.

This kid is going places. Check it out.

City Opera Monodramas

2011-04-10T18:55:00.001-07:00

I really, really wanted to like this program. Ever since New York City Opera officially nabbed George Steel my fingers have remained crossed. And even though I'm about to give this performance a bad review, I still appreciate what it represents -- it was a good try. It was a great idea. (Not to mention, what an awesome photo advertisement!)

I'll start with the great idea. What could be more exciting than John Zorn composing a monodrama? Better than an opera, because weirder. But who knew that John Zorn would write that opera? It happens sometimes that really interesting people do uninteresting things. Mark Morris, for instance, recently picked up conducting. (I'm not making this up.) John Zorn is a fabulously interesting musician. His one and only opera? Like a score from some grad student at UCSD. There was no moxy in this opera, no pizzazz. No John Zorn. I don't get it. I don't want to belittle the score, because it sounded hard as all get out. Nor do I want to belittle the soprano, Anu Komsi, who I am certain knocked her socks off to learn that role. But I don't appreciate opera because it sounds hard. I appreciate it because it sounds good, or at least interesting.

Now, this guy, Michael Counts, the director, is a super interesting choice. Michael Counts runs a gaming company. That's right, like video games. His company, Counts Media (this is from their website): "is a mixed-reality gaming company that creates arts-driven entertainment experiences which celebrate the oft-overlooked details and invisible stories that comprise our everyday lives. Based in New York City, [it] combine[s] imagination, emerging technologies and urban research to produce mobile games, theatrical entertainment, viral media, public art, and tours." How cool is that? Super cool! What a great idea! And, sure enough, there were some gaming elements in the monodramas that were spectacular. In the Zorn piece, massive thought bubbles (we're talking 5 times the height of a person) emerge to hover over the actors' heads, as though channeling their inner, silent monologue. And what appears projected in the thought bubbles are an animated version of some of Artaud's last drawings, and they're really creepy and cool to look at. Ah, it's Artaud!

Ah, it's Artaud's brain!

Also, the transition between the Zorn piece and Erwartung was by far the most nifty set change I've ever seen. Over the sound of crickets humming, another (but massive this time, massive) comment bubble appears over the head of a woman onstage, and the graphics in the bubble are gorgeous. It was pure genius.

But Michael Counts is not an ingenious director. He's pretty good as a stage designer, but when it comes to working with singers and dancers, there was just no juice. No real consensus about what was even going on. The Zorn piece opens (somewhat, I don't know, thoughtlessly? egregiously?) with rows upon rows of actors wearing very severe head-to-toe hijabs -- floor-length Islamic female coverings. But with no apparent connection to the piece on any level, the choice struck me as nothing short of bewildering.

And Erwartung, alas, was about as flat dramatically as a hysterical solo mad scene could be (and if you thought a hysterical solo mad scene couldn't be dramatically flat, well, then guess again). I hesitate to comment on the singer's performance because A. I was in the fourth ring, so maybe I just couldn't see her, but also because B. she was given absolutely nothing compelling to do. What went wrong? Erwartung should be weird and scary. Now, we know from horror flicks that the scariest thing you can do in a scary movie is to not show whatever the scary thing is until the last possible moment. The minute we get a full-on shot of the alien or monster or whatever it is, it's over. We see the goofiness of the costume, the latex, the fake blood, or whatever it is and it ruins the suspense. The same rule applies in psychological drama and it definitely applies to psycho monodrama. In Erwartung what's scary is that we don't know what's going on with this woman. So the best thing to do to keep us interested is not to explain anything. Keep us confused! Keep us guessing. (Is she crazy? I don't know! I can't tell!) Counts, for whatever reason, decided to explain the woman's madness as a literal split personality -- there are 7 or so other dancing replicas of this woman running around on stage either getting in her way or helping her out or enacting little dramas of their own off to the side. The problem is that once we see the madness running around onstage in the form of 8 little ladies, it's just not as interesting as worrying about this poor woman's inner bifurcation, the invisible dilemma that drives her endless song. And by the way, I wish I could disagree with myself on this point, but it's just a bad idea to put dancers next to singers. Unless you've got a singer who is incredibly confident and knows how to use her body on stage, next to the lithe, mobile body of a dancer, she will look stiff and hopeless and we will feel terrible for her.

In defense of this performance, I will say that the last 5 minutes were absolutely stunning. Suddenly, with no time left, the stage clears and the body of the man who has been on stage all along (looking very much like a dummy--I would have put money on it) suddenly starts to rise. But he rises from the tips of his toes in an enormous arching backbend and it happens so slowly you would swear it was digitally engineered. Behind him, the man's hat floats off its place on the ground and gently wafts toward his head. This is the kind of knock-out moment I would expect to see when a gaming wizard meets the City Opera mainstage. I just would have liked to see a lot more.

George, I really think you're making some good decisions. (Christopher Alden? Hello!) My fingers are still crossed.

Wooster & Tennessee

2011-02-27T08:02:00.000-08:00

The Wooster Group's Vieux Carré is currently playing at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (inconveniently located just west of Times Square). The space is undergoing serious reconstruction -- the elevator only sometimes works, the floor of the main lobby contains about a hundred broken-down cardboard boxes -- and you will feel either like you're walking into a construction zone, or a performance art piece tricked out to resemble a construction zone.

I rarely walk out of a theater work with an unclear reaction to what was going on, but last night left me feeling a little confused. The piece is an adaptation of Tennessee Williams's Vieux Carré, not Williams's best or most interesting play. Add to that the fact that it's already pretty difficult in the present day to present Tennessee Williams unironically anyway. But that appears to have been precisely what the Wooster Group was after. Williams's language is oh so of a moment in history (squalid and poor as hell 1930s New Orleans artistic/gay underworld) and thus can only feel irredeemably stuck in that period, like a string of floating epigrams that stick in the throats of the actors struggling with them. The Wooster Group takes this already existing fact about the play and makes it more so -- the text floats around in chunky bits, a dialogue for lost souls who are hardly hearing one another, or hardly hearing themselves. At best, the result is a delicate quality of tragic self-alienation that makes recourse to a bygone, indirect communication because direct communication just isn't adequate to conveying the complex misery of life. At worst, it's simply parodic. The black maid who drifts in and out of scenes is made to speak in a terrible California Valley girl accent that clashes with Williams's dialect. Like, duh: he done fell down those stairs again, Miss!

Which isn't to say the emotional import of the language is entirely lost from the Wooster play. The characterizations sometimes border on caricature (as with the maid) but all of the roles are so brilliantly acted that even amid the distracting, post-apocalyptic, signature Wooster stage mess, their portrayals seem forced not because of what divides 2012 New York from 1930 New Orleans but for reasons that have to do with self-denial, with the closeted and schizophrenic alienation of these characters from themselves. Add to this the fact that each of the main characters plays multiple characters and is thus in a sense literally schizophrenic. The jerk carnival barker also plays the flamboyant, consumptive queen; the half-blind old mistress of the house is also the not so young anymore Blanche Dubois type living on the second floor. The production and the performers who move it along are all very impressive: the TVs flickering, costumes flying, and entrances and exits timed within a fraction of a second to sound and light cues, voiceovers and projections... But in this case, while it was easy to admire the facility of the operations involved in mounting the show, I'm still not sure what the show underlying all the technical wizardry was actually about. Which is to say, while I'm quite sure I saw a technological masterpiece, I'm not sure what message--however fraught or unstable--that masterpiece was designed to serve. And if there wasn't one, then it was a beautifully wrought frame with absolutely nothing in the center of it.

Which isn't to say there's anything wrong with this. My companion last night, Alexander Overington, is someone who unlike me fully appreciated the technical gadgetry at work and we stuck around post-show to chat up the three men at the rear of the stage sitting at a high table outfitted with Macbooks enough to run the mainframe of the Matrix. From what little I understood of their conversation, which was Greek to me ("...which is where my outboard is connected to Ted's inboard...and he's running the old version of OS9XLS...yeah, exactly, the rear-mounted widescreen feedback loop is wired into the smallscreen mounted on the rear projector...."), their contribution to the show was nothing short of dazzling.

Sheer Genius

2011-02-26T09:21:00.000-08:00

Can someone help me find this man? Thanks to a tip from my little bro, I am on a mission to commission Reggie Watts to write an opera for me. The world will be a better place with a Reggie Watts opera in it.

Help. Me. Find. Him.

ICE at Alice Tully

2011-02-23T08:44:00.000-08:00

The International Contemporary Ensemble, which I've often bragged about, did a number on Alice Tully Hall last night. I myself score appallingly low on the new music aficionado spectrum (I only recently learned how to pronounce Rzewski) so I had a considerably puffed up attitude last night when I discovered I actually knew all the composers on the program, which were:

Morton Feldman (1926-1987): The King of Denmark (1964) for solo percussion
Anton Webern (1883-1945): Konzert op.24 (1934) for nine instruments
Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001): Jalons (1986) for chamber orchestra
John Cage (1912-1992): Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951) for 24 performers and 12 radios
Feldman: For Samuel Beckett (1987) for chamber orchestra

The obvious crowd-pleaser in the group is the Cage piece, which I imagine made most of last night's audience feel nostalgic, but which will never go out of style, because doing low-brow things in high-brow spaces will always be funny. Think of the Marx Brothers. The Cage piece makes high art out of channel surfing. Any number of pairs of musicians stand on stage, and each pair shares a little ham radio (last night there were about 10). One musician is in charge of the channel dial, and the other the volume dial. The fun part is that all of this randomness (the fact that you can never know whether your radio is about to blare out Third Eye Blind or Verdi) is exactingly controlled by the prescribed length of time allotted for each outburst (we hear exactly one and a half bars of "Stairway to Heaven" followed by one beat of deafening silence). So it's at once a fancy, serious new music piece ... and it's also pretty goofy.

Speaking of music and goofy, some degree of ink has been spilled in musicology over the question of what constitutes humor in music and why we find music funny at all, when we do. The age old example is Haydn's "Joke" quartet, where the composer endears the audience by toying with the impulse to clap at the end of a piece. He stops. And we start to clap. And then he starts again. It's funny because Haydn calls our bluff. "The rests get progressively longer, giving the impression that the piece is over many times in a row, making for an amusing ending." Um, thanks, Wikipedia!

But then come Xenakis's Jalons, during which I several times last night had to smother my own laughter with a laugh-cough (which is definitely not a laugh, but only a cough that briefly -- whoops! -- sounds like a laugh). Xenakis is a genius of the musical joke and Jalons a litany of every possibility for extracting humor out of variations in volume, rhythm, and audience expectation.

Favorite moment on the program: Steve Schick's extremely sexy rendition of Feldman's King of Denmark. If you thought Feldman wasn't sexy, think again.

More food for Paul please

2010-12-15T15:18:00.000-08:00

It has come to my attention that one of my best friends recently started blogging. All the names are changed, but if you know this guy's appetitive qualities, you'll recognize him right off the bat. (Blogger is telling me appetitive is not a word. Guess what, Blogger: you should be embarrassed for yourself.) This is a person who texted me a few days ago just to tell me he was about to sit down to eat a pastrami sandwich. My friend, a.k.a. Paul, does not just enjoy eating. The thought of incoming food makes him want to talk about it. Which is why I'm glad he's finally blogging.

Check it out.

Thanksgiving Highlights

2010-11-26T06:27:00.001-08:00

1. Mom and grandma lecture my youngest brother, Greggie, on attracting lady friends.

2. Turkey inspires existential reflection in the living room.

3. My mother ruins a perfectly good game of charades (in this stunningly well-played performance by my ultratalented actor cousin, James Safarik).

Family Resemblances

2010-11-25T08:26:00.000-08:00

One midwinter eve a long, long time ago, my mother was putting me down for the night, and when I slipped into bed, an enormous, dark cockroach slid out from under the bed covers and made a beeline (roachline) for my 5-year old butt. My mother is squeamish about a lot of things -- violence, Southpark, family secrets, talking about sex, learning new things -- but she is unmoved by the creeping, crawling things of the earth. The cockroach never made it to my rear end because it ended its life between her thumb and forefinger.

Today, my mother has Boxelder bugs that live in the warm sunlight of the living room.

Contrary to what you might imagine, Boxelder bugs are not attracted to Boxelder trees. They're attracted to my mother. They end their lives in our garbage disposal.

My mother and I are dissimilar in certain ways. I can't kill anything with my bare hands, for instance. At home in Princeton, I have a disoriented, starving squash bug who lives on the watering can and who I don't have the heart to get rid of. My mother tans easily and loves the outdoors; I have vampirically white skin and spend a lot of time in libraries. My mother loves children and is very tolerant of them. I am not interested in children and 'tolerant' is not a word people use to describe me. My mother is easily intimidated by other people and sensitive to their needs. I am selfish and inflexible and have no patience for people who need things. But as I sit here on Thanksgiving day watching her forget to put the sugar in the pumpkin pie, I'm reminded of the fact that I forgot to use soap in the shower last night. (Don't ask.) My mother and I were also last night's evening entertainment, she did a hula dance for me, my youngest brother, and my dad; I fell face first out of a reclining chair while my father took pictures.

It's not that I would actually want to change anything about the things we share or don't share, with the possible exception of my mother's legs, which we don't share, and which I wish we did. (If you ever get the chance to see them, my mother has marvelous legs.) I just want to know what it means if I am in fact turning into my mother. Wouldn't it mean that as I watch my mother move 14 house plants from the window sill to the kitchen sink (?) I'm actually watching myself, in the future, doing inexplicable things with the houseplants? Doesn't it mean I and not she just baked an inedible, sugarless pumpkin pie? That I wake up at 5am (which, dammit, I already do), that I'm humming the same effing Gilbert & Sullivan song for the third day in a row, and carrying on about turning into my mother? I guess I have that one covered, too.

Then again, as I look at my dad biking in the middle of the living room in knee-high black socks and neon green shorts ... it could be worse.

Princeton Vuja De

2010-10-16T13:47:00.000-07:00

When I was in college, my father told me he wouldn't go back to college for a million dollars. At the time, I thought, "well that's dumb!" Cause college is great, right? Well, college is great, when you're in college. When you're not in college anymore, you're just not in college anymore.

There are things that happen over and over again, like heading to the bathroom to eat snacks in private, and there are thing that don't happen again. College is like getting a polio vaccine or seeing Haley's comet. It only happens once in your lifetime.

Correction: twice! About six weeks ago, I moved back to Princeton, my alma mater. At the time, it didn't seem insane. (There were good reasons, too, which I won't go into here, but one of which is the proximity to New York without the New York rent. There have also been unanticipated perks like the fact that I have yet to fill up my gas tank. The only time I didn't have to fill up my gas tank in Chicago was when I didn't have a gas tank.) But, as it turns out, the move is making me a little insane. I keep having this strange feeling I've been here before.

At the end of Thorton Wilder's Our Town, the main character, Emily, is given a chance to relive a single day from her past. (I forgot to mention, she's dead.) The other folks in the graveyard tell her to pick a slow day--a day when nothing happened. Because to pick a really amazing day, like the day you fell in love, would be psychically damaging, like looking at photographs of someone who died and then seeing them appear in front of you. Emily picks her 12th birthday, and she lasts about 90 seconds. She hears her mother's voice and has to call the whole thing off. Don't relive your 12th birthday.

Every day I walk out onto University Place, and every day I think, What in God's Name is Happening Here? I think I see my old friends. Is that Todd on his bike? Cindy on the Erg machine? The same tan flock of men's cross-country runners blows by in the morning. The word I'm looking for is déjà vu, except you can't have déjà vu at the same time every day unless you wake up every morning having forgotten yesterday. Déjà vu is a feeling of compelling familiarity in a situation that hasn't actually happened before. What I'm having is a feeling of compelling familiarity in a situation where I have a pretty good idea why it's familiar. So why's it creepy?

For one, I've never had déjà vu. I tell people this and they don't believe me, but it's true. I would kill to have déjà vu. There's also (hilariously enough) presque vu (which is the sensation of being just on the verge of recovering a latent memory--when something is on the tip of your tongue) and jamais vu, which is seeing something familiar as though it were brand new. This is the bizarre experience I often have of catching sight of my reflection in a shop window and thinking it's my mother.

I think the word I want is vuja de. But then, it turns out, vuja de already has a meaning. (WTF?) According to the Urban Dictionary, vuja de is the feeling of definitely never having been somewhere before. To me, that's lame. I have that feeling all the time and it's not worthy of having a name. I'm gonna keep using vuja de my way.

Vuja de: the feeling you relive every day that you knew you were getting into something vaguely dumb, and you went ahead and did it anyway.

Unstoppable Drew Beatz

2010-09-01T05:40:00.000-07:00

I blogged a little over a year ago about Drew Beatz, a.k.a. my little brother, a.k.a. Drew Connery. It's possible that two people coming from humble origins in Papillion, Nebraska (affectionately known to residents as Papio) could have gone in more opposite directions. I make music that sounds like this and Drew makes music that sounds like this. But we both make music.

After being signed a little over a year ago by Outkast's label, Dungeon Family, Drew moved out to L.A. and promptly shattered his ankle into 5 million pieces. Now finally recovered, Drew and Ty-G, his collaborator, are on the move promoting their existing album, and their new one.

Check it out.

Am I jealous? Maybe. Do I want to change my name to Laydy Maj? Kind of. Stay tuned for updates on a new brother-sister RAP OPERA.

I Come from Mundts

2010-08-31T12:03:00.000-07:00

People often ask me where I come from.

It just so happens that I come from a family of stout German farmers in middle America called the Mundts. And it just so happens that the Mundts had a family reunion a week ago -- August 23 to be exact.

As you might imagine from the sound of the name, Mundts (not to be confused with Manns, to whom we're related) are a hardy people. We eat. We sweat. We plant stuff. We have large families. Well, I don't. But they do. Contrary to what you might expect, however, Mundts are unusually creative people. My grandma, Grace Safarik, sings show tunes on command. My uncle, Andy Safarik, engendered in me a longtime fascination with bent wire because of the beautiful twisted wire sculptures that fill my grandfather's basement. My mother, Candy, and her brothers appeared in countless Gilbert and Sullivan musicals when they were young, which is why I still know all the lyrics to HMS Pinafore. My brother, Drew Connery (a.k.a. Drew Beatz), writes music for the rap label, Dungeon Family, out in LA.

And because we all so love to perform, there is always a talent show at the Mundt Family Reunion, and everything counts for talent. This year, the talent show turned into a talent contest. You can check out those sWEEt vidZ on YouTube.

I Guess this is Goodbye, Hyde Park

2010-08-15T13:46:00.000-07:00

As I'm preparing to leave Hyde Park for greener pastures, or maybe just for pastures, period, since the midway doesn't count, I've been thinking about what's most Hyde Park about Hyde Park.

I lived briefly in Cairo back in the late nineties, and when I think back on that time, what I remember best are things that don't seem particularly memorable. I recall that the hemisphere was upside down (from the one I was used to), that the hot and cold knobs were reversed, and that 7-up came in tiny, glass bottles. For a brief period of time, America meant a certain alignment of the stars and being able to turn the water on without scalding myself. What will make me recall Hyde Park years from now?

Will I miss the library, where, as a friend recently pointed out to me, the same group of people has been congregating in the same room for going on a decade without introducing themselves to one another? Will I miss the Obamacade that once a month makes me curse the president for living in my hood?

I was at the Point yesterday (the one truly great thing about the south side of Chicago is our beloved, rocky beach) and I snorted in a waft of sugar, crisped skin and suntan lotion that shot me back 25 years to the snack bar at the Seward, Nebraska pool where I used to buy Laffy Taffy in my saggy kid bikini. Maybe I'll be strolling down the perfect, manicured sidewalks of Princeton, New Jersey next year and ... not remember Hyde Park's trash-riddled sidewalks covered in broken glass?

I've spent eight years telling people I hate Hyde Park. Not the people, I always say, just the total lack of respectable dining establishments, the terrible coffee, pedestrians who throw themselves into oncoming traffic, the scam artists, the optional stop signs. I've seen guys pissing against beautiful new condos and I go swimming daily in a lake that's filled with millions of tons of sewage. I hate it all. I really do. But can you live somewhere for eight years without becoming that place? A friend introduced me recently, saying, "That's Majel. She goes to the U of C. We never understand a word she's saying." I talk Hyde Park.

The first day I came here, I was walking toward campus with my mother and we were being trailed by an older man who followed behind us for blocks muttering at half volume, "Bitches .... white bitchezzzz..." under his breath. But I go to New York now and it's too safe. I go to the north side and there are too many penny loafers. Where are all the weirdos? Where are the Impalas? Where are the BBQ/drug parties? My friend got his 1991 Camry stolen a few weeks ago. Who would steal a 1991 Camry? Hyde Park would.

Shit My Dad Says

2010-07-25T13:35:00.000-07:00

An otherwise unnamed author, "Justin," keeps a rolling log of the ungentlemanly things that fly out of the face of his bigoted, racist dad's mouth. If you don't know about shitmydadsays, please consider going to this Twitter log and laughing your ass off.

Myths Men Tell Themselves About Women

2010-07-22T14:35:00.001-07:00

Myth no. 1.
She likes me.

Women want you to like them. It doesn't mean they like you. A woman wants you to be attracted to her regardless of her feelings for you and if you somehow don't already know this, or believe this only goes for some women, I'm sorry to take the piss out of your protective blanket. It's true. Knowing a guy is into you is like losing a couple pounds sitting on your rear end doing nothing. It just feels great. So when you first meet her, a woman will treat you exactly the same regardless of your status with her. "I've never seen anything so hot in my life" will look and feel to you exactly the same as "Uh-oh, here comes so-and-so." You cannot tell. Don't tell yourself you can.

What is your game plan? Assume the worst. The first thing you should do with a woman, especially one you like, is give up on her immediately. Tell yourself it will never work out. This will do two things for you.

First, it will make you more yourself. If you assume you'll never be more than friends, you'll be relaxed. You'll be funnier, you'll be hotter. Your hands won't shake and you won't smile bat sh*t crazy love smiles.

Second, it will confuse her. You project "Hey, I just wanna be your friend," she reads "I'm not attracted to you." She will wonder why. She will wonder what she can do to make herself attractive to you. Your not being attracted to her gives you social capital. You must be too good for her. If you are too good for her, she will want you. Yes, we all have jobs now, and yes, we're all assertive and whatnot. Women want men to be dominant. Read into that if you have to. Even if she's still not immediately into you at this point, at least she'll respect you and that's a giant leap beyond where you were before.

Myth no. 2.
If I don't contact her she won't know I'm into her.

We know, dude. You're transparent. You've already blown it. You're into her. Now you have to pretend you're just a flirt. The worst thing you can do is to text her. You know this already, but I'll say it anyway. Make. Her. Wait. Do not contact her. Do not. If she contacts you, fine. Write back to her tomorrow. Don't wait a week, write her tomorrow but do not write her back within 15 seconds. Why? You need to show her that you barely have time for her. Become very busy. You are popular. You are in demand. You don't need her to complete your circle. You have millions of friends making demands on your time. She and her friends are getting drinks at Jimmy's on Friday? Oh, rats, you'd love to come but you have plans. Don't be specific. Be vague. Vague is hot. Maybe your mom is in town. Make it seem mysterious. (What could he possibly be doing? Wouldn't she like to know?!)

And, this is just icing on the cake, but feel free to make it seem like you're in a slightly dodgy relationship with another woman. Don't pretend to be taken. Just possibly unavailable. Maybe she's in Berlin. This will pique her curiosity. Even if she's totally not into you, if she can't tell if you're in a relationship or not, this raise your caché.

WARNING: If you know that people occasionally mistake you for being into guys, you cannot deploy the above strategy (giving off that you might be with someone) without dropping a line about "some ex-girlfriend." Make it quick, and move on. But if you have that metro thing going on, and you're dodgy about your private life, she may think you're into men. WRONG. Don't make this mistake. Women don't wanna accidentally fall for a gay guy.

Myth no. 3
If I become friends with her When Harry Met Sally will happen to me.

This is dangerous thinking. In fact, becoming friends with the woman you want in your bed is the worst idea you have ever had. If she likes you she does not want to be your friend. She wants to be in your bed. If a woman becomes your friend, she has already decided there is no relationship. A woman who becomes your friend is your friend because she didn't want to be your girlfriend.

Your only hope at this point is to lose ten pounds, get a tan and then disappear for weeks at a time without telling her why.

Myth no. 4
That was a meaningful smile.

You are not looking for smiles. Smiles are not for you. You are in failure-infested waters. You need proof. Proof does not include 1. laughing at your jokes, 2. emailing you or texting you a lot, even incessantly (friends do this), 3. wanting to hang out with you one on one. Sorry. You are still in friend zone, my friend.

Tokens of something-more:

1. She allowed herself to get wicked drunk in your presence.
This means her guard is down. Her guard might also be down because she regards you as a terrific friend, which would suck, so be careful.

2. She looks for excuses to be physically close to you.
You know what I mean. She doesn't move her shoulder away when you're close to her at the movie, and she does weird stuff like touching your hair or your face. You can also feel free to make slightly questionable moves at this point and see how she responds. Briefly put your hand on her lower back to indicate she should walk in front of you. Easy, because it also passes for gentility.

3. She looks extra awesome when you hang out.
Again, this could just be her wanting you to be attracted to her, so you're not in the clear but it's still a good sign.

4. Her friends like you.
Good for you. This means she talks about you. Her mom accidentally spills that you've been mentioned? What's UP! Home run! On the other hand, if you've been hanging out a month and her friends have no idea what your name is, go hang out with your skateboard. She's not into you.

Hope this helps. Now get out there and get hot and unavailable.

Philosopher with an Idea for a T-Shirt

2010-07-21T08:53:00.000-07:00

I respectfully submit:

"eliminate the fascism in our heads"

-David W. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 45.

For the Love of God

2010-07-18T06:58:00.000-07:00

A couple days ago, I biked past a car parked on 55th street. The exterior and interior were painted and polished in bright purple & neon green. It looked like the Impala version of my little brother's Ghost Buster van. The entire car was purple and green. Next to the Impala was an older woman with an earnest expression. She had on a red track suit, red socks and red patent leather shoes, red sunglasses, and a massive wide-brimmed red straw hat.

You can't make this sh*t up.

I don't love Hyde Park. But it is a very special place. Among other things, it's full of under-appreciated and truly frightening people. In the last few days, what with it being the 47th 95-degree day in a row, everyone's just starting to lose it. I've had a few encounters with people who deserve some kind of a badge. Or at least they should be in the Guinness Book of World Records for most uninterpretable behavior.

You just can't make this sh*t up. I wish I had photos.

Monday.
I was reading at the Point. It was hot. Where I was sitting there's a cluster of slippery rocks that people use to get in and out of the water. At this particular moment, a large black man was falling out of the water. He very near fell into my lap. I looked up. If the point of a wet t-shirt contest is that there's something sexy and fun about seeing sleek and fit people nearly naked, the point of a wet undies contest when you're a big black dude is just beyond me. I saw everything and it wasn't fun, and it definitely wasn't sexy. This is lake water we're talking about. I felt bad for him. The really important part of the story, however, is that after climbing out of the water, this dude climbs to the highest point on this big pile of rocks, and stands up there a good twenty minutes like a Calvin Klein ad on backwards day.

Story no. 2 also involves the Point, further north.

Wednesday.
I was biking on the bike path. The path is a treacherous minefield of lost toddlers, disoriented bathers and bikers who want to kill you. I want to kill everyone on the bike path. Apart from biking, you might also see people on, around and near the bike path doing things like domestic brawling, torturing injured seagulls and sitting motionless on their big fat butts in the water. Toward the end of my ride, I approached a man on my right who was running somewhat crazily back and forth down the path. His gawkiness - his arms appeared too long and his legs too short - I assumed had something to do with epilepsy. Like everyone else within a 4-meter radius of this man, I slowed down. And then I realized that the length of the arms was due to there being shoes on the ends of the arms (he was holding onto them) and the gawkiness was due to the fact that he was running barefoot on 95 degree pavement.

Thursday.
I'm really sorry I don't have pictures of this. I don't know what's wrong with me. The last story also involves underwear but it involves the Regenstein library as well. The Regenstein is the main library on campus at the University of Chicago and it contains some curious types. There are curious types at the University of Chicago, period, but there are a few unique individuals who seem to feel most at home in the Reg. I could tell you stories about Reg patrons. There are the Chinese Gropers, the Vet, Apnea Man ... stories about exceptional stupidity, exceptional hubris, and a chronic sleep disorder. There are also the poor individuals who give the impression that the Regenstein's nightly closure is the worst part of their day. What I observed on Thursday has to do I'm guessing either with record-defeating obliviousness or possibly a brain lesion. The story begins and ends on the fourth floor of the Reg. The north side, for those of you to whom this means something. I'm sitting alone. Near me are two men, each of whom is sitting at his own table. One is around 50, one about 30. In walks a woman, about my age. She looks normal. She's not wearing all red, for instance.

Oh: one quick side note. In order to fully appreciate this story, it's necessary that you know that the Reg in the wintertime is frigid. It is the coldest place you can go in Chicago that's not outside. In the summer, it's worse. It's arctic. It's so cold that I have an anorak in my locker at the library.

So in walks this woman, and she's carrying a pair of tights in addition to other normal study materials. Obviously, she's planning on being cold so she's brought some gear. She puts her stuff down at a table and kicks off her flip-flops. And then, right in the middle of the library, in plain view of one thirty-year-old woman and two semi-horrified, semi-riveted men, she proceeds, slowly, perversely, to hike up her tights, inch by inch, over her ankles, over her knees, up her thighs. And then, tossing her skirt up over her shoulder (I am not making this up!), she works the tights up and over a pair of dowdy gray underpants. And what was truly remarkable is that after sitting still for twenty minutes she took off the tights (repeating the above sequence in reverse, so that at this point I've seen her underwear twice in 20 minutes) and left the library. And then, she came back and did the whole thing over again.

If anyone has ideas about the guy on the path, I'm actually seriously concerned so let me know if you have thoughts about that one.

ICE/JACK at LPR

2010-07-01T03:49:00.000-07:00

An excessive use of acronyms makes me cool. (Wait, doesn't it?)

ICE: International Contemporary Ensemble. I've blogged about these people enough recently to make me a groupie without, I hope, compromising my groupie status in my own group.

JACK: a New York-based string quartet, including, not coincidentally, Opera Cabal's own violinist, Christopher Otto.

LPR: le Poisson Rouge, a bar & performance space on Bleecker Street that for fortuitous reasons is interested in promoting new music. Not to be confused with Poisson Rouge, which makes toys for French babies.

ICE and Jack shared a concert bill last Tuesday night in preparation for the departure of both ensembles for the Darmstadt Summer Course. As usual, these folks' playing leaves nothing to be desired, and the sound engineering for the show was laudable. The real show-stealing moment, however, was the deafening crash of what sounded like a fish tank from the direction of the bar in the hushed silence that followed the final piece.

But the reason I'm blogging is more specific. Before Tuesday, I had never heard of Caleb Burhans. The JACK played his "Contritus" (2010), a piece that, while technically "new music," was an outsider choice on a program that otherwise featured the more recognizably new musicky sounds of Earle Brown and Jason Eckardt. Caleb's music by contrast is tonal without sounding new-Romantic. "Contritus" was like a cross between Beck's Sea Change and Ben Johnston's microtonal arrangement of Amazing Grace. I'm now internet stalking Caleb & I suggest you do the same.

Henze on ICE, Actually Anything on ICE

2010-06-14T06:57:00.000-07:00

A good reason to visit Greenwich Connecticut.

I roll into Penn Station and act like I own the place, because I don't want anyone to detect I no longer live there. I am excessively put out. I wear heels. I am tall. I know where I'm going. I am on the phone. I won't look at you.

But I try too hard. I am an ex-New Yorker. I refrain from suggesting meeting locales because they may no longer be hip. They may no longer exist. I am attracted to major shopping areas. I call the 1/9 the red line. I drop my car keys in the middle of Whole Foods. Worse, I no longer like New York. It contains multitudes. I used to like New York because it was crowded and impossible to figure out. Now I don't like New York because it is crowded and impossible to figure out.

Yet another reason to visit Greenwich Connecticut.

On Saturday, I clumsily made my way to Grand Central Station. It's been years since I was there. What the hell is Metro North? Like a tourist, I gawk at the beautiful ceilings until realizing I look like a tourist. I have no idea where I'm going. Connecticut is a state. Shouldn't I be going to LaGuardia?

If I were a New Yorker, I would have known that Connecticut is merely a train ride away from Manhattan. On a Saturday, you can catch a 6:10p train and be in Riverside, CT by 6:55p. Arriving at the train platform, you can mount the stairs to find a little country road that has all the cuteness of the country (stone walls, looping vines, cats in the road) and all the convenience of fat pensions (a Balducci's greets you at your destination; watch that you don't hit a road sign while checking your Blackberry). About a mile down the road is the Theater at St. Catherine of Sienna, where the Greenwich Music Festival has erected a small but efficient playing stage.

Last Saturday my travel companion and I took the train to catch the International Contemporary Ensemble in a version of Hans Werner Henze's El Cimarron. The program book blurb calls the piece "a remarkable work of music-theater narrating the true life of Esteban Montejo." Montejo is an Afro-Cuban born a slave on a sugar plantation in 1860 who escapes to live in the jungle. During one of the most beautiful moments in the piece, Montejo, the narrator, lies down in the middle of the stage to converse with the birds. In one of the more shocking moments he talks about how he occupies himself in the absence of women (it involves horses). For my money, El Cimarron is the best kind of opera, by which I mean it is musical and theatrical, and involves extended vocal technique. It is short rather than long, impressively well acted, cheap, intimate and just as involved with story as with music. The libretto isn't always weird enough to be interesting, but this particular staging included some of the most compelling choreography I've seen recently -- look out for this fellow, Zack Winokur, the choreographer.

It's hard to find adequate praise for the musicians of ICE. As I've swooned about them before on this blog suffice it to say here that in this case Nathan Davis (percussion), Dan Lippel (guitar), and Claire Chase (flutes) do Henze better than Henze even deserves. Claire also played an instrument that looked something like the Guitar Hero version of a Bandoneon with greater enthusiasm and sex appeal than the composer could possibly have envisioned.

I'm sorry to say the piece has concluded its run but if you're in New York, check out the ICE/Jasperse collaboration that's coming up -- it was very good in Chicago.

This Weekend, Vesalii Icones

2010-05-19T14:06:00.000-07:00

Opera Cabal's one-time showing of Peter Maxwell Davies' Vesalii Icones is this weekend only. In fact, it's Saturday only. But it's in the afternoon! So you have all the time in the world to catch the most insanely interesting dance piece Opera Cabal will ever produce (until we do it next year with the full orchestra: stay tuned).

The following poster for the Praxes of Theory Conference of which this is a part (you can tell the conference is happening at the U of C because of the substitution of an exciting, difficult word, Praxes, for a boring one, Practice) is illegible at this resolution, but the levitating guy at the bottom, he's in the show. So come :)

Vesalii Icones: Theory & Practice at the University of Chicago

2010-05-11T09:29:00.000-07:00

David Levin makes a plug for Opera Cabal's Vesalii Icones!

(Click on the second video under "All Videos")

The Buzz about Vesalii Icones

2010-05-11T09:11:00.000-07:00

Many of you will remember Opera Cabal's partial staging of Peter Maxwell Davies' Vesalii Icones which I directed last summer in a workshop version at High Concept Laboratories. Please join me for a single, preview showing of the full version Saturday, May 22 in Fulton Hall on the University of Chicago campus. The performance is part of a conference, "Praxes of Theory," organized by David J. Levin and sponsored by the Franke Institute.

VESALII ICONES
Directed by Majel Connery, with choreography by Adrian Jevicki (Movementpants Dance, NYC). Sam Goodman & John Rich, dancers. The show runs 45 minutes and is followed by a discussion with the audience moderated by David J. Levin.

Saturday, May 22
4:30p - 6p
Fulton Hall
4th fl., Goodspeed Hall
Dept of Music
University of Chicago
5845 S. Ellis Ave

Details on the show & the conference.

Map the venue.

About Vesalii Icones:

Conceived at the height of his career in experimental stage music, Peter Maxwell Davies’ Vesalii Icones (1969) is based on the unlikely superimposition of 16th-century anatomical diagrams (Andreas Vesalius's *De fabrica corporis humani* or *On the fabric of the human body*) with the fourteen Stations of the Cross. As one of Davies’ only choreographed works, Vesalii Icones permitted experimentation on a new level with two of the composer’s perennial preoccupations: excessive embodiment, and the slippery division between sacred and profane.

It is the task of the current production intelligibly to engage two systems of representation very much at odds with one another: art (religious iconography) and science (the medicalized representation of bodies in decay). As part of a conference that explores the intersection of practice & theory, the production foregrounds the interpretive and intellectual work that precedes the creation of a stage work, and the ways in which stage works can in turn reflect or reject intellectual craft.

Photo by Lara Kastner.

GIASONE at the COT

2010-04-29T07:23:00.000-07:00

Consider the following excerpt from the plot synopsis of Giasone:

Orestes, sent by Isifile to search for Giasone ... (sounds like a normal scenario so far, but keep reading) ... meets the stuttering hunchback Demo ... (stuttering hunchback? Now you're talking!) ... from whom he vainly attempts to extract information; the two then retire for liquid refreshment.

But drunk, stuttering hunchbacks are just the beginning. Giasone isn't an opera about Jason's mistreatment of the women in his life, of Medea's brutal string of murders, or her dead babies ... no, it's about all these things, and how strangely hilarious they are. There are no deaths in Giasone, but there's an attempted death, an attempted rape, one attempted suicide, and a whole lotta sex. But it's all ... pretty funny! What's the trick? Giasone begins in the world of myth, in the tabloid grotesquerie of Greek and Roman legends. But it ends in the world of opera, another narrative form whose plot structure relies on its recourse to sex, death and other upsetting events -- but one that also revels in the fact that when you try to put these things on a stage, they often end up undoing their own gruesomeness.

So in Giasone Jason nearly blows his opportunity to steal the Golden Fleece because he's perilously hung over from a wild night out with Medea. And the actual fleecing happens offstage so we can't see any of Jason's illegal activity, and it's so brief he wouldn't even have had time to go to the bathroom. He's gone! No, he's back! Even the one sad moment (Isifile's outlandishly long final rant about cold, dead breasts and babies drinking blood) is so long and so ponderous it's almost funny. Our boredom with Isifile's apparent distress is underscored by the entrance halfway through the aria of Delfa, Medea's nurse, who, having spent the entire production trying to get laid, finally wanders onstage in post-coital bliss with a martini.

If Cavalli is a hoot, Justin Way is not far behind. Like all good stage directors, he seems to find, rather than invent, his best moments right there in the music and the scenario. Delfa snorts cocaine in preparation for an aria that features wild, unpredictable tempo changes (hence the cocaine). The Argonauts, who are all but redundant in Cavalli -- they may as well not even be there, they're so underutilized -- are always trying to hide themselves on stage but doing so in the worst possible ways. Their uselessness to the opera is magnified in Way's production by the fact that they're always on stage ... with absolutely nothing to do. And more than that, they're really bad at staying out of the way. Dressed conspicuously in bowler caps and unnecessary umbrellas, they creep around attempting to blend in by crashing into main characters, curtains and baby carriages.

Another endearing Way-ism is the break-out dance. Way loves him a dancing opera singer and there are several in this production, including a large dancing countertenor in drag. Tyler Nelson, who plays Delfa, developed a drunken wobble for the role with that he uses to convey himself, wobblingly, around the stage. Demo, the stuttering (and dancing!) hunchback, has a leg length discrepancy in this production, so that he emerges at each new costume change with a newly matching giant platform shoe on his left foot. Demo, played by Julius Ahn, brought the house down. Every opera should have a drunk, stuttering, dancing hunchback.

Definitely see this opera. May 2nd is your last chance.

John Jasperse at the MCA

2010-04-10T06:30:00.000-07:00

I don't know a lot about John Jasperse. After last night's performance at the MCA, I want to know a lot more.

Lights up on a vaguely Middle-Eastern looking and somewhat hairy short dude standing on an enormous roll of pink-patterned wallpaper. He's wearing an unflattering mesh t-shirt like the kind you can buy from American Apparel. Really, really loud rap starts to play and smoke from a fog machine billows around him.

Jasperse appears not to go for dancer bodies. He works with people who can commit to his vision, whether it's a strenuous version of Elaine's notorious party dance in Seinfeld or four butts singing an ensemble rendition of Prince's "Kiss." Oh, yes, Jasperse likes him a good gag. For example, after a period of what one should maybe call degenerate dance last night (each dancer in turn essentially comes undone, loses his/her choreographic way and starts wandering around the stage with his/her costume half off), all four of the dancers couldn't then manage to get offstage and spent minutes pawing around in the folds of the fabric looking for the gaps. I'm sure the MCA's prohibitively heavy black stage curtains provoked the thought, but it takes a choreographer with a good comedic instinct to incorporate something like this into the body of an actual show. After finally making their exits, one lone dancer with his shirt now entirely up over his face accidentally stumbled back on stage, oblivious to the laughing audience.

Like a composer using silence to enhance his music, Jasperse uses theater and mime to enhance dance. We even saw a bit of vaudeville last night -- and, oh, yes: T&A. Jasperse himself makes several appearances onstage, his bean-pole-with-paunch figure accentuated by a tacky skin-tight black leotard. He carries a microphone onstage and then attempts -- badly -- to execute a ballet turn. Each time he tries and fails, he offers an explanation of the problem into the microphone: I think, um, I think I just need to ... to feel my chest over my pelvis ... yeah, that time I just let it go entirely .... I'm not getting the, uh ... my skull, maybe it's just too ... lemme just try it again.

The show plays through the weekend and I highly recommend it: see this video and interview with Peter Taub.

"Colon Fluid"

2010-03-23T23:14:00.001-07:00

I just passed a sign on the highway in Barcelona clearly marked, "Colon Fluid." Is it my eyes? It's one thing to feel duped by another language. It's another thing when the language you speak starts speaking to you in another tongue. The verdict on Spain? Let's do the math.

Caffeination
Espresso is as common as water in Spain. There's coffee with breakfast, but there's also coffee with lunch, and then coffee after dinner. But dinner is also at 10p. Need a nap? Have a coffee! If you're coming from the States, you need to lose the idea that coffee is functional. It's not about staying awake. It's just an ongoing part of the day.
1 thumb up/1 thumb down

Smoking
It's cool to smoke in Spain. I had a fleeting moment of nostalgia yesterday as I enjoyed my lunch indoors under a cloud of smoke ... and then I felt like throwing up. Restaurants and bars bear encouraging signs: "Smoking Permitted!" If you want the nonsmoking section, that's outside, and it's 20 degrees cooler out there. Not cool.
0 up/2 down

Time
No clocks in Spain. Don't have a watch? Too bad! There are no clocks out on the street, no clocks in or outside shops and restaurants, none in hotel rooms. And of course, your cellphone won't work. When you're traveling, this is just downright dangerous.
0 up/2 down

Airport
You could eat off the floor of the Barcelona airport.
2 up/0 down

Accent
The Barcelona lisp? Come on! Totally adorable.
2 up/0 down

Seaside
Didn't see it.
0 up/0 down

Fat, Greedy, Ravenous Old Women
I spent twenty minutes in a bakery yesterday trying to buy a croissant. Ten small, squat old grandmas yelled their orders over my shoulder and I couldn't get mine in because new ones kept coming in the door and cutting in line in front of me. They also cut at the airport.
0 up/2 down

Spain: -34 points (not recommended)

USW reviewed in Princeton Alumni Weekly (and maybe something about me, too)

2010-03-22T15:52:00.000-07:00

Not that I think I'm cool or anything ...

Read the full story.

The Final Resting Place of Brünnhilde's Helmet

2010-03-22T15:34:00.000-07:00

It's a bird. It's a plane. It's ... Flight of the Navigator?

Folks, this is an opera house.

This is not a joke. The coolest opera house in the Universe is in Valencia, Spain. It's cooler than Sydney (which looks like a giant white pirate ship) and it's cooler than Oslo (which looks like a half-sunken Titanic). And the best part is that the inside of the coolest opera house in the world looks like Sea World without the water. It's navy blue, turquoise and aquamarine all over. Opera singers aren't quite as cool as sea life, but it's not far off.

A Little More Valencia with that Barcelona, Please

2010-03-21T09:37:00.000-07:00

I've often thought that if I could do without sleep I could do so much more. I could learn things. Go places. Today started at 3am. Not by choice. My neighbor at the hostel, who, as I learned, is a soccer fan from Manchester, is an enormous big man and an Class A snorer. In the wee hours, I banged on walls and doors to no avail, except that I managed to annoy the rest of the people on the hall. So finally I got up and went outside. It's surprising what you'll find on the streets of Barcelona at 6am on a Sunday. Crowds is what. 10 men standing around an abandoned piano. Roosters crowing inside padlocked boxes. And lines of people getting espresso. I'm not sure if they were just waking up, or struggling on through the day before, like me.

You can have your Barcelona. What's to like? Beefcakes from Manchester? "Dunkin' Coffee" and Starbucks on the Rambla? Basta! Last night I saw The Opera Show downtown, which was truly amazing as long as I thought all the performers were men in drag. Suddenly Lakmé was riveting. How are they hitting those notes?! Then I realized I was wrong. Now all I can say is I've seen the Alice in Chains version of the Queen of the Night aria. I've had too much tapas and mediocre wine, and I'm ready to move on.

Valencia, fortunately, allows me to at least fantasize that I'm in a Mediterranean country. The plants look all twisted and queer and on the train from Barcelona we passed the most gorgeous golfing club I've ever seen in my life. The whole country is a big golf club. (Tip: when traveling by train in Spain, do book yourself in preferente class. They will throw snacks at you like it was part of a parade.) Also, do bring good walking shoes (I didn't) and for godssake avoid hotel elevators (I had to get pried out with a crowbar).

A Day of Magical Snoring and Baby Aliens

2010-03-20T02:20:00.000-07:00

At 5a last night the snoring through the wall of 320 Operaramblas was unbearable. Given other circumstances, it would have been hugely funny. Given present circumstances (jet lag) it was not. I trooped down to the front desk, explained my situation, and moved to room 420. I eventually started to fall asleep as the morning light came through the windows. And then I heard a huge, loud snore from the room next to me. This snoring was different. Louder and more desperate. I moved back to 320.

But another and stranger encounter with snorers of this world (I actually feel pity for them, in addition to hating them -- surely they haven't had a good sleep in years?) happened earlier on the plane to Zürich. Back in the rear of the plane with the hoi polloi, a large Indian man on my right feel asleep 2 inches from my ear and snored into it for the first leg of the trip. Desperate to improve an impossible-to-improve situation, I woke him and asked, Was there anything I could do to help him sleep better and snore less? More pillows? Some water? He replied in broken English that he would strive to do better, and then fell immediately back to sleep. And he stopped snoring. Completely. For the next five hours.

And now, apropos of nothing at all other than sheer shock and awe, some photos from the morning market fare in downtown Barcelona. I can't read this sign but I think it says BABY ALIENS.

Why anyone would be eating this is ...

... uh ...

Oh God!

The Things We Forget

2010-03-18T16:47:00.001-07:00

Two years ago I got trapped in International Terminal at O'Hare on an empty stomach. Not knowing any better, I had swept past security and into the terminal only to discover that there was no food there. I don't mean there's no good food (and hence I'd eaten a half-smashed Snickers before boarding and felt nauseous for eight hours....) No, I mean there is literally no food. The international wing at O'Hare is the only place on American soil where there are no vending machines. There is one fold-out, painted plywood box from a third world bazaar, with a couple neat rows of disposable cameras and Advil 2-packs, and its vendor goes home at 8pm.

Today, I mosey up to the man guarding the first set of security stops and offer him my ticket. He says, Have you eaten? (Who is this guy? Do I look hungry?) I point to the sign leading down the terminal that says "SNACKS." He says, If you haven't eaten, go back. NO SNACKS IN THE INTERNATIONAL TERMINAL. Duh! How could I have forgotten? Solo travel rule number one: bring your own snacks. Do not rely on the concerns of the international wing on behalf of its travelers. It doesn't care about you.

The Unperformance of Fitness in Ratner Gymnasium

2010-03-07T12:09:00.000-08:00

A couple years ago I blogged about the strange fashion I saw in Berlin's women-only gyms. According to a similar logic that enables female fashion in eastern Nebraska to lockstep one decade behind the times (if in the late eighties women were doing this with their hair

in Papillion, Nebraska, they were still doing it when I went to college in 1997) Berliners still lift weights in thong aerobics leotards. But in both of these cases, I have to assume that these fashion choices are choices. (Someone took the time to make a decision and follow it through.) Maybe they're misguided, maybe they're slow. But they're still deciding: this looks good on me. I'll take it!

On the other hand, the fashion cluelessness at the University of Chicago is just that--complete unconsciousness. And I mean fashion not only in the sense of what one wears (pocket protectors, hair nets, coke-bottle glasses) but as comportment generally (how one walks, talks, poses, assumes an attitude). In short, if fashion = the sum of all the choices that go into determining how one's body is presented to the world, in this case, fashion = 0. (I'm not sure that was actual math.)

One has to assume that the students here are simply too overworked (under-exercised), overstimulated (caffeine replacements) or underexposed (to other human beings?) to think about what they're doing with their bodies at all. (What, commit myself to conscious action when I get dressed in the morning? You must be crazy! I have to get to the bottom of Lacan's &<>$!!) This might make the U of C the one place on earth apart from Moore's utopia where everyone might as well be wearing unisuits because what they're wearing conveys exactly the same information as a unisuit: "what I'm wearing is of no consequence; it is not integral to who I am." But of course, it's entirely integral to who we are, because if we care not at all for what we wear, that says a great deal about our attitude toward our bodies. It says my body is beside the point.

Case in point? Back to Ratner. I'll give a quick run-down of my choicest choices.

There's Speedo, the guy with a military haircut and a vigorous ballet routine who drags his "girlfriend" to the gym and then stares at his crotch in the mirror for 45 minutes while doing every exercise that involves legs spread apart. There's Thirsty, who needs to drink at least once a minute, who gets perceptibly nervous when anyone else tries to use the drinking fountain, and who has difficulty navigating space with other bodies in it. (About a week ago, Thirsty threw himself down onto the ground 3 inches from my right elbow, did 10 crunches, noticed someone at the fountain, sprung to his feet, and nearly crushed my skull. I don't pity these folks. Self-absorption & stupidity in one case, obliviousness and a possible proprioceptive injury in another, do not trouble me. But then there's Priceless, the woman who looks like she escaped from the exotics wing of the Salpêtrière who walks up and down the hallway ... sideways. With a book. And today, a man pedaled a stationary bike so violently that it hobbled like a bouncing laundry machine all the way into the center of the gym and straight into the triceps dip station. I think I'll call him Time to Finish My Dissertation.

Opera Cabal and Time Travel

2010-02-23T09:58:00.000-08:00

Opera Cabal's final performance of USW sold out Galapagos Art Space last night. Due to some last minute tinkering (on a whim, Alex & I ordered a giant 7X10 screen that hung under the disco ball in the center of the space and looked like one of those awesome LCD display screens at the Super Bowl, plus Habib jerry-rigged the onstage scrim to sweep up and down like a massive sail, and the bartenders dyed the water under the audience's seats black, the better to reflect all the projections in the piece) the show was, in short, spectacular. Yesterday I didn't like New Yorkers. Today, I'm in love with them.

From a personal standpoint, I highly recommend doing something interesting enough that people you haven't seen in half a lifetime are tempted to come and hang out to see it. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven yesterday -- but literally. Every 10 seconds someone I hadn't seen in between 5 and 12 years walked past me and then we recognized each other ... and then had nothing to say. Excellent!

Things that don't change in a city that is otherwise always changing:

I hit up the Verb café in Williamsburg this morning, an old haunt of mine from 2005. Back in the day, when most other coffee houses, especially hip, progressive ones like the Verb (started by the man who married the girl who played the crazy pretty princess in The Neverending Story) were sporting fancy hi-speed wireless internet access, to get internet at the Verb you had to walk out of the cafe and down a weird, slightly deserted hallway to this grungy little tech hole called the internet garage to buy -- in person -- a faded little internet day pass (User Name: BH#cInQ$3h, Password: IcY*007) that didn't even work 60% of the time. It was very 1998 in 2005. In 2010, lo and behold, the internet garage is still there, and you still have to walk back in time and give your paper money to Marty McFly to be able to use the internet. In spite of this, to all you friends of mine who pooh-pooh Williamsburg and refuse to go there anymore because it's so developed, GET OVER IT. New York will always be developing. Williamsburg is awesome, even with all the strollers, and there is no competition for the runny oatmeal at the Verb.

Opera Cabal rehearses USW in Oberlin

2010-02-13T07:27:00.001-08:00

In preparation for a move to Chicago (February 19 & 20) and NYC (February 22), Opera Cabal spent the last week rehearsing its newest work, USW, here in snowy Oberlin. USW was commissioned and written by & for Opera Cabal in 2008 by Lewis Nielson, chair of composition at Oberlin Conservatory. We spent the summer workshopping the piece at High Concept Laboratories (one of Kevin Simmons' many projects) and are now putting on the finishing touches.

Some photos from the production process this winter, c/o Kevin Simmons...

Me, playing Rosa Luxemburg.

Sarah Kozinn, our new actress, cowering next to the newly-built chair.

Me, trapped behind the scrims.

Chair building.

Me & Sarah: hair-pulling (yes, these things are ALL in the show).

And finally, our creative team, from left: Habib Azar, director; Sarah Kozinn; Lewis Nielson; me, floor; and Molly Feingold, assistant director.

Peter Maxwell Davies in NYC

2010-02-05T06:52:00.001-08:00

I left for New York at the beginning of the week intending to interview Peter Maxwell Davies (whose mid-century, incendiary works for theater are the subject of my dissertation). (BD, I have you alone to thank for this. You know who you are :) In 1969, Davies left Manchester and retreated, literally, to the Orkney Islands, where he now lives with his partner, Colin Parkinson. Instead of interviewing Davies, I spent two hours talking to the two of them about Orkney -- Davies' cow, who lives with them, is affectionate & pliable and stays with the neighbors when its two dads are out of town. Colin owns goldfish that are a foot long, and nearly twenty years old. Both have eaten swan. No one in Orkney locks his doors at night, and Davies has been known to wander into neighbors' houses to make himself a sandwich.

But it's not as if any of this is incidental to Davies' career, which is overwhelmingly public -- apart from being Master of the Queen's Music, Davies' Orkney Island Festival has attracted the likes of André Previn and Vladimir Ashkenazy. Rather, Davies' career is a remarkable instance of how to disappear completely and still remain in the public eye. I, being very much the perpetual traveler due to all this Opera Cabal fuss, spend inordinate amounts of time with inordinate numbers of people & in the intervals when I'm not, feel like climbing into bed with a shot glass and noise-canceling headphones. Davies has managed to strike a balance. When he's not jet-setting across the Atlantic or meeting disorganized graduate students in music, he's chilling with a cow, a couple of goldfish and a sunset (and, of course, the company of a compulsive urge to compose). But the two clearly enable one another. It's time to move to Orkney.

Rebekah Heller in concert

2010-02-05T06:29:00.000-08:00

As if I needed further evidence of the superiority of the I.C.E. musicians, not only as musicians, but also as human beings, enter Rebekah Heller.* I heard Rebekah, a bassoonist, last week in a private concert along with fellow I.C.E.'er William McDaniel (piano) that included works by Vivaldi, Edgar Guzman (a special 2008 commission that called for amplified bassoon, coordinated with live tape loop), Gubaidulina and Astor Piazzolla.

It was an exemplary concert in every conceivable way. I'm obviously a fan of intimate spaces and here there was intimacy to spare. I'm also a fan of performers who not only know how to speak about complicated music in uncomplicated ways, but can do so and disarm their audience in the process. And the programming was superb -- if I may attempt to package and resell the effectiveness of the arc of the evening's concert for my fellow musicians:

Start with 1 something that shows off a technical & lively command of the instrument, followed by 2 a total contrast, in this case the arresting quality of VERY new music, followed by 3 an emotionally unchecked outpouring of virtuosity and, then 4 end with tango, because it's just awfully sexy.

*Don't believe me? Check out the dueling oboes concert at MoCP next Friday, February 12. And don't get there late, because you may not get in.

Bluebeard at the CSO, and how about that ending?

2010-01-08T17:58:00.000-08:00

Something is not quite right about Bluebeard's Castle. Following the production of the opera-ette back at the Harris Theater in 2007 (dir. Ken Cazan, although the credit for pairing Bluebeard along with Erwartung goes to COT director, Brian Dickie) I blamed it all on Cazan (KAZAAN!). In the final moments of the opera, three brightly-colored ladies in gauzy Bollywood outfits mince out of a little cellar (in Cazan's version, the doors Judith insists on opening are, for no particular reason except that they're probably cheaper to build, trap doors) and dance a sad little dance around Judith before pushing her down the steps and flouncing in after her. It's not scary, it's not thought-provoking, it's just plain strange. Last night at the CSO, I realized it wasn't all Cazan's fault.

What makes an opera? In this case, it's all about redundancy of information. Bluebeard broadcasts well in advance how things are going to turn out. And, in addition to being highly redundant and slow-moving, Bluebeard is also scary, which makes for an awkward combination, but also makes the opera more like a scary movie. We know, or at least we imagine we know, that Bluebeard is a homicidal maniac and that Judith, being silly enough to run off with him, bless her heart, is about to get herself chopped up for dogmeat. But the only thing that actually happens for the duration of evening is that Judith will seven times override Bluebeard's request that she not open a set of seven doors in his castle and that, gradually, each of the doors will come open. The suspense centers on two things. One: the mystery of what in God's name Bluebeard has hidden up in his weird old bachelor pad, and the fact that Judith will insist on opening up every single one of his doors (euphemism?) until something really, really bad happens. (Yippee!) Two, and this is the one I wanna talk about, because I think it's where Bartok misjudged things: the impenetrability of Bluebeard as a character. We can't get a read on him. Does he love Judith? Why does she love him? Is it the beard? It seems possible, if unlikely, that our suspicions about Bluebeard are wrong. Sure, he lives all by himself in a scary old castle ... but it's not because he's a crazy psychokiller ... he's just really different, and maybe a little depressed (and what woman wouldn't love that?) Bluebeard rises and falls on Bluebeard's indecipherability. If we knew what was really going on behind that massive beard, we wouldn't have to spend all night guessing, but we don't, so we do.

Up until the final moments of the opera, Bartok successfully drags out a plotline in which almost nothing happens, but it's just the right of something to keep us on the edge of our seats. Doors are unlocked at a painfully slow rate; we're waiting patiently to get to the last one, the one that really matters. We're willing to wait because we assume, and hope, that something terrible will happen when Bluebeard finally loses his cool: Judith will insist on unbolting that final, fateful door, she'll be murdered in cold blood and the curtain will come ringing down. (Judith, it must be said, could have avoided her own death simply by not being such a terrible nuisance about the doors* and then Bartok might have left the last door locked for eternity, leaving us to imagine what might have been there, a device which, as we know from scary movies, works wonders. Aliens are always scarier before we actually see them.)

But when Judith insists on unbolting the final door and finds herself in the company of Bluebeard's other undead wives, Bluebeard does exactly nothing. He doesn't lose it. He doesn't fall down weeping. He just stands there. Suddenly, the suspense upon which the opera depended (our worry or hope that Bluebeard will turn out to be a raving madman and that Judith will die a horrible death) is made to seem rather silly. Unless we have reason to believe that Bluebeard is, despite his apparent love for Judith, a total maniac, the entire story falls apart--and in the end, when we find out he's not, or at least that he's more Henry Darger crazy than Clockwork Orange crazy, it does. To complete the disappointment, Judith simply accompanies the other women back into the wardrobe of eternal boredom. We get no fits, no screaming, no temper tantrums, no aria of regret, and worst of all, no death. Bartok's crucial misstep in an opera that is otherwise pretty fabulous (hey, it's short!) is an ending that offers neither the excitement of blood and gore and the confirmation of Bluebeard's truly psychotic nature, nor a reversal in which everything is turned upside down and Bluebeard is revealed as a man of exemplary character. (Hey, it happens: ever see Beauty and the Beast?) Instead, Bluebeard turns out to be crazy lite and the opera can't decide if it's a tragedy or a comedy (on the aspect of comedy, some of the dialogue between Judith and Bluebeard ["I want to open the door." "No, you can't open the door." "Open it, open it!" "No, no!"] is highly reminiscent of stand-up comedian Billy Connolly's take on opera). In a choose your own adventure of endings, Bluebeard makes all the most uninteresting choices. Bluebeard neither triumphs nor is he redeemed. He walks away, logs wife #4 in his diary and takes a nap. There's no bloodbath for Judith, and of course, she can't escape. She holes up in a cupboard to trade sad stories with a bunch of other slightly stupid women.

On last night's performance: I don't generally like concert stagings and I like concert performances even less, but Michelle DeYoung, last night's Judith, did a spectacular job of turning the concert performance prohibition on wandering around the stage into a dramatic strength. She looked as though she'd been nailed to the floor. It was spooky. Bluebeard, Falk Struckmann, on the other hand, couldn't have been less disarming. His glances across the stage at Judith seemed motivated by uncertainty (did I just hear a fart?) or maybe boredom (why is she still singing!?) And the CSO, while plaintive and tinny with its Ravel earlier in the evening, totally smothered the poor singers. Maybe Boulez needs an earhorn. Or maybe light travels faster than sound in that hall. There's a marvelous moment mid-Bluebeard where Judith opens the door to Bluebeard's enormous, vast kingdom and she's so overwhelmed that all she can do is belt out a huge, loud, sustained high C. Last night, Michelle's mouth came unhinged at the appropriate point, but all she managed was a silent scream. For a second I thought she was miming ... oh, my bad, that was the high C.

*Poor Judith's treachery is unenviable--for her to prove good on her word, i.e. not to ask what's behind the doors, would derail the unfolding of the plot so she must for dramatic reasons have a weakness for spoiling a good secret. Wagner understood the usefulness of such a predicament, since without Elsa's betrayal of Lohengrin in the final hour, the two would be fated to live happily ever after with an enormous elephant in the room (who in God's name she actually married). Instead, Elsa is forced to understand how entirely she's blown it, learning (what we knew already!) that her husband is not only an extremely good fighter, but the holiest bachelor in all of Brabant, but only at the moment she's lost him for good.

Katya Kabanova at the Lyric

2009-12-13T07:24:00.000-08:00

The legitimacy of parental control mechanisms rest on a giant assumption: older people know better than young people what constitutes healthful entertainment and what harmful, dirty smut. But who's controlling the parents?

Three years ago my father discovered TiVo & immediately taped Topsy Turvy, the not exactly box office hit about Gilbert and Sullivan's rocky (to put it mildly) professional partnership. When I visit my parents in Omaha, among the usual questions (do I want some of my aunt's special sweet raspberry sauce made from fresh raspberries from her garden which she was kind enough to make specially for me and which she'll be devastated if I manage to avoid) is the unavoidable: do I want to watch Topsy Turvy with my Dad? Usually, I do. (I've seen it probably 9 times, which really begs the question of how much Dad's been dipping. Yikes!) On one hand, it's the equivalent of a child wanting to read Pooh or watch Bambie for the 9 millionth time and it's kinda cute. But if discerning the difference between an obsessive but cute habit and an obsessive and dangerous one is the job of a parent, shouldn't it be the job of the child to mitigate a parent's desire for the same when it becomes overwhelming?

Last night at the Lyric, when the curtain fell on Katya's dead body, the entire audience shot out of their seats in an ecstasy of applause. I've never seen enthusiasm like this at the Lyric. And in this instance, it struck me as particularly strange. There was nothing special about the performance. Some of this may be Janacek's fault. There's too much moaning about how things are gonna turn out (badly) and not enough doing, so that the whole opera becomes about Katya predicting her own downfall, and there's nothing less interesting than a character who ruins the ending in scene 1. The twentieth time Katya howls about how she's going to betray her husband, we ought to be thinking "OH GOD NO! It pains me when you say that, Katya!" I was thinking, "For Pity's sake DO IT!" But the set was blander than bland (intentionally and, I think, for obvious reasons, but nevertheless, something closer to what you'd expect from Les Noces) and there was very little in the way of acting. I have a brain condition that makes auditory processing impossible when there's nothing to look at (thus the inverse of the blind leading the blind ... the as-good-as-blind leading to auditory failure? Nevermind...) but my sense was that there was also very little in the way of singing. Karita Mattila, who plays the principal role, could barely carry over the orchestra. I have a theory (which won't hold up) that Kartia Mattila is a countertenor. Her consort of conspirators (including Liora Grodnikaite, Garrett Sorenson, & Jason Collins) were -- thank God -- stronger & brighter.

But I wanna get back to this ovation (because really, what's the point of reviewing an opera if not to emphasize what happens in the moments just after [what?!]). There could not have been more excitement if the orchestra had come up onstage bearing Janacek's body in carbonite and laid it on a giant dessert tray. Last night I saw the kind of crowd behavior I expect at a rock concert; it was a collective biological urge, a swarm. The woman to my right hadn't been able to get out of her seat all night, forcing me to climb backwards out of our row to go to the WC at the break. But she shot up like some crazy zombie at the end. I think some drool might have fallen on my leg.

I'm gonna float a suggestion. The Lyric needs a mandatory parental control/threat advisory screening for subscribers as they enter the house (perhaps administered by the people in bat capes who take tickets). A short and easy questionnaire would suffice: Does this patron know and use the various gendered/plural variants of bravo (brava, bravi)? If so, add 1 point to their threat rating. Does he/she have an assigned seat that pales in comparison to his/her regular seat? (What is this, 1828?) And so on. A patron who emerges with a rating of 3 might be encouraged to stay away from the drinks table and receive a free bottle of water at the entrance to the theater plus free tickets to the next Michael Moore documentary. Patrons with a 4 would be restricted to viewing one act at a time in a separate, padded room and encouraged to review sobering financial portfolios between acts. For 5 ... barbed wire ... tranquilizers ... but what could stop these people?

eighth blackbird Pierrot lunaire

2009-12-09T06:13:00.000-08:00

Eighth blackbird's new Pierrot with staging by Mark DeChiazza debuted last night in the Harris Theater. DeChiazza is a choreographer, not a director. (This is an opinion, not a statement.) I got wind that some tech'ing problems earlier in the day had caused a bit of concern prior to the performance, and Lucy Shelton mentioned something in the talk-back about not having "lived" with the piece, code for the feeling among performers that things haven't quite got settled. Apart from the lighting, which was shady (no small task, to invent lighting cues for 21 separate pieces unto themselves; there is an opera of lighting in this short little guy), and a couple supertitle snafus, the production itself was slick. The point of the production, however, left me hanging. And the problem may have been that 8bb also felt a bit left out to dry.

Pierrot lunaire is a work all its own. It exists according to its own impenetrable logic, propelled by its own strange momentum. The point of any staging of Pierrot shouldn't be to crack the code and expose the real story because we all know there isn't one but to elaborate on that story in a compelling way. The story has 1 character, the singer, or 6 if you count the instrumentalists as characters. So, 6 characters plus in this case a dancer and a Pierrot. 8 people in a room. Good. Now, what kind of relationship do these people have to one another? It doesn't have to be transparent; in fact, it can change, continuously even. But the characters should know what these relationships are. Do they like one another, or do they not like one another? Does one character adore another who loathes him? And then, what is this landscape? Why are these characters here? Does it feel comfortable to them? Is it a place they like being? Are there memories here? And so on.

There was no text painting per se in this production, and that's fine. But there was also a marked disconnect 95 percent of the time between what Lucy was saying and what the rest of the cast was doing. To the point that the singer could be moaning about blood and gore and the 8bb'ers were simply hauling chairs around the stage. (I'm exaggerating. Somewhat.) I don't expect someone to literally stage "He stuffs a little parcel / Of fine tobacco, with finesse, / Into Cassander's shiny skull." That's not the point. But do stage something that suggests a logic of its own. Do create a stage language that's coherent unto itself and do give the people on stage a deep understanding of how to communicate in that language. Shouldn't that be top priority? Unless you convince your actors of the value of what they're doing, the risk is that they look like so many automata in a series of rotating positions. Lights up, so-and-so moves chair stage right. So-and-so dances with Lucy. Someone climbs up the ladder. No one moves. Pierrot pulls out an umbrella. If you can't convince your cast of the worth of what they're doing, they can't help but show it.

The choreographer emerged after the piece along with Lucy, Matthew Duvall (the percussionist, who had dressed up in an oversize white suit to play Pierrot himself), a single female dancer (Elyssa Dole) and the violinist (the other Matt, Matt Albert), who managed the questions. I floated the suggestion that perhaps matching text to sight had been low on the choreographer's priority list. That instead of mickey-mousing, he'd intended a world apart for the bodies of the musicians and the dancer to live in, a world full of symbols that interacted with one another in meaningful ways, and that perhaps he wouldn't mind explaining the work this world was doing and indeed, what that world was. He seemed very pleased with the question. After listening to the music, he reported, he'd begun "hearing shapes" in the music, shapes which he then translated to stage. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to hear shapes in the music. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to put them on stage. I'm afraid it just wasn't the really the cipher I was looking for to decode this thing.

I got even less help from the rest of the audience who were more interested in noting Lucy's habitation of the role (she did inhabit it, marvelously) or from the 8bb'ers, who were more interested in noting, jovially, that Matthew, the percussionist/Pierrot, had never had so few things to hit onstage. Sigh.

Among other things (George Perle, hallo?), there was a Weill set on the program. Lucy sang "Mack the Knife" very sprech, with an understated and very effective pizz'y arrangement for 8bb by 8bb'ers Lisa Kaplan (piano) and Nick Photinos (cello). The arrangements were adorable. (And thus, alas, perhaps at odds with the original spiciness of Weill, or just an indication of how long ago the firey bite of the Brecht/Weill project actually began to die.) Also on the program, Berg's Adagio from Kammerkonzert for clarinet (Michael Maccaferri), piano and violin, was by far the most enticing part of the evening. These three have done due diligence getting to know one another's musical impulses to the point that they crafted a truly a collective notion of how the piece was meant to go. The beginnings and endings of phrases could not have been better timed if they'd had a metronome on stage. My only complaint, which was foreseeable, is that -- god almighty -- whose idea was it to put these folks in the Harris Theater? I like the hall. But it swallowed this trio alive. I would have liked to hear them in a suffocatingly small space where the pianissimos had a running chance to contrast with the crescendos, and the crescendos could have had a shot at being deafening, as they should.

eighth blackbird, Tuesday November 17

2009-11-24T20:05:00.000-08:00

The University of Chicago programming entity, artspeaks, opened its 2009-10 season Tuesday of last week with a performance of Osvaldo Golijov's "Ayre," featuring Dawn Upshaw and the members of eighth blackbird (yes, I've not only confirmed, I've been admonished: it's all lowercase) in addition to a few other players that included Jeremy Flower (laptop and sound design = thumbs up) and Michael Ward-Bergeman, who in my opinion stole the show (more on him later).

Upshaw's coloratura has justly earned her a reputation as an angelic singer (figuratively in Handel and literally as the Angel in Messiaen's Saint Francis of Assisi). But this particular performance involved her doing a lot more than angelic coloratura; I wish I could remember verbatim Golijov's comment about what he had in mind for the piece -- it was something along the lines of "I got really sick of writing Dawn Upshawy kinds of music for Dawn Upshaw so I decided not to this time." Has anyone ever heard Dawn Upshaw not sing like Dawn Upshaw? That's kind of what we got on Tuesday. Dawn Upshaw sang 1. mic'ed (and with variable mic levels, so that you never knew just how loud she was going to sound) and 2. in chest voice. The piece rocked out in certain places (at which points, parts of the ensemble would stand up like a big, jazzy Argentinian klezmer band and rock out with her, a nice touch of staging) and the chest voice kinda worked. Kinda. But ultimately, if you want a singer who can sing loud and chesty, you wanna write for a singer who doesn't need to protect her voice. Dawn sounded great. But somebody with a little more Arethra would've brought the house down.

I promised to say something about Michael Ward-Bergeman, who plays something called the hyper-accordion. It's as cool as it sounds. (Michael is also the only person I know who's ever been referred to as an accordiopimp.) Check him out here.

Baby Bro Done Did It Again

2009-11-20T07:17:00.001-08:00

A shout-out (isn't what the cool kids say?) to my brother, Drew Connery, is in order. I blogged about his radio exploits less than a year ago; now it seems he's poised to become famous overnight. (Can anyone say jealous older sister?)

Along with his singer pal, Tyg, with whom he's worked on several albums, Drew has just gotten himself signed to Dungeon (otherwise known as the label that signed Outkast).

Their music is available on iTunes (The album is called "I'm a Nightmare.")

Drew, I am sincerely proud.

University of Chicago Magazine article on Opera Cabal's "USW"

2009-11-20T06:20:00.000-08:00

This article on my beloved project, Opera Cabal turned up yesterday on the University's main page -- I'm not sure how I feel about the picture :) But press is press. Is press.

In other news, we've managed to raise half of the money we need to take this very same piece to Oberlin in February. We'll finish it there, then move on to Chicago & New York to do shows at Curtiss Hall & Galapagos!

IMPROMPTU rides again...

2009-11-11T05:39:00.000-08:00

The Mozartfragmentarypantomimereconstructionproject which I was recruited to direct for the Chicago Humanities Festival and which I've blogged about before appeared this past Monday at the University of Chicago Theater and Performance Studies Workshop . Minutes before the workshop kicked off we discovered 1. half the costumes were gone, including Jonathan DeSouza's entire costume and that 2. toenails (mine) react badly to being mowed over with pianos. Undeterred, this weekend we/the show travel/s to the American Musicological Society annual conference in Philadelphia to participate in its first year of experimental performance panels ... whoo hoo!

Anne LeBaron @ U of C

2009-10-24T05:56:00.000-07:00

Anne LeBaron presented this past Friday to a (rather poorly -- yikes!) attended colloquium in Fulton Hall. The subject: her opera, Sucktion. LeBaron's work sounds immediately fascinating. Here's a random selection from her very impressive CV: she won a Guggenheim, studied with Ligeti (not in that order), has written a "dance opera" called Pope Joan, and Wet, another opera about the big business of water and the horrors of floods and she, I'm quoting, lectures at CalArts on the "concept of HyperOpera." (I don't know what this means but surely it is meant to address the hyper, erratic, overblown aspect of opera--aspect, or sine qua non--that is, the histrionic too-muchness of opera, perhaps in order to address what happens when the "Opera/Too-much" dial continues to be turned even further up, up, up?)

In the beginning of her lecture Anne charmed us by revealing a years-long fascination with old vacuum cleaners and vacuum cleaner sounds. She played us early samples of her work, female vocalizations layered on top of recorded & processed vacuum sounds. At times the two seemed uncannily to merge, and at one point, LeBaron had the vocalist spit and buzz into the vacuum mouthpiece to produce a series of fun sounds that would probably make Kaija Saariaho jealous. LeBaron's collaborators on Sucktion include the poet Douglas Kearney, whose libretto is a clever homage to Marinetti typeface. This all seemed promising.

LeBaron saved the nugget of her presentation for last -- that is, the semi-finished, workshop staging of the opera in L.A. But this is where things started to go downhill. LeBaron later mentioned she feared that 40 minutes of vacuum sounds weren't in and of themselves interesting enough to justify the ticket prices (okay, I made that part up, but she did say she was worried the vacuuming lacked moxy) so she crafted a heavy-handed scenario to go along with them. (For the record, vacuum sounds are TOTALLY interesting. Maybe not for forty minutes, sure, but for at least 25. If John Cage can get away with Points in Space, I say go for it!)

Oppressed housewife cleans house, anticipating the arrival of her husband home from work. (The singer/actress in this case was Asian, and one grad student floated the thought that LeBaron intended the opera as a critique of interracial marriage. Or better, I thought, that the Mail Order Bride phenomenon in this country replicates/updates in the 21st century the phenomenon of the overbored, undersexed housewife of the 1950s? But LeBaron seemed uninterested; or else this was my private flight of fancy. Anyway.)

The husband arrives home (a recorded voice-over, "Honey, I'm Home"; i.e. there is no "husband"), finds the place a mess & retires for the night. Depressed, the housewife turns melancholy. A vacuum arrives. A present from her hubby. She falls in love (with the vacuum), sprawls on it orgasmically and thus the comedy endeth.

To put it simply, the problem? Too much scenario and too literal.

1. Put the husband in a locked closet stage left so that the "housewife" (or is she a dominatrix? an updated Alcina?) controls his exits and entrances.

2. Or make it Erwartung Appliance! Instead of losing her fiancé, this poor woman is in denial over the death of her beloved vacuum.

3. Or make the husband's cleanliness phobia the center of the (o_p)/e(r?)a and his hapless wife the Mrs. Haversham of the Ace Hardware Cleaning aisle.

A dash of the intellectual wit that has made LeBaron such a successful composer and a writer is needed. Instead, the staging we saw consisted of the soprano (who, by the way, is a musicologist and member of the group that commissioned the opera) putting on and taking off rubber gloves, stuffing them into her oversize apron pockets, dropping them, and putting them on again. LeBaron's score, and her ideas, play happily far off of the beaten path. But this opera needs a director so that the curiosity that motivated its inception gets taken up a notch. Staging, to honor its points of origin (the ideation of the opera, the wit and spirit of adventurousness that composers like LeBaron bring to the table), should amplify, qualify & problematize that origin; not bow to it.

I think I might be famous...

2009-10-23T07:05:00.001-07:00

... but I'm not sure. Does a photo in the Hyde Park Herald constitute arrival, recognition, everything I've been waiting for?

(Confirmation pending.)

Lucinda Childs at the MCA

2009-10-20T09:36:00.000-07:00

I fell for it. No, I TOTALLY fell for it.

The MCA press for its Lucinda Childs show last weekend advertised not "Lucinda Childs Dance" or "Lucinda Childs, Adapted, Updated" but "Lucinda Childs." Period. And the only accompanying photo on their website is a lithe Lucinda Childs doing something extremely cool with her arms that I can't reproduce. (I tried.) I don't mean to accuse the MCA of false advertising, but they really had me: I thought, despite her being 70 years old, Lucinda Childs herself was going to walk up on the stage and dance. And come on: I'm not insane. Dancers age better than the rest of us. Look at frigging Baryshnikov! But I should have known. There's an age at which respectable artists of all stripes stop publishing photographs of their current selves and use the same one indefinitely. Lucinda looks a little too gorgeous in the photo to be 70. But then, who knows? It seemed to me at least plausible that if she were 70, and that picture had been snapped when she was 60 (it's a stretch, but not totally ridiculous) it might be the case that the show was not just a showcase of her work, but that Lucinda would appear in the flesh. And in a way she did.

"Dance" is a reconstruction commissioned by the Richard E. Fisher Center at Bard. The original piece (1979) comprises three 20-minute pieces with music by Philip Glass. Rather than simply reenacting the piece and having done with it, the creative team last weekend thought it would be a good idea to project a live recording of the original, 1979 version on top of the live dancers. A very, very thin scrim divided the audience from the stage making this possible. The video was rarely in sync with what was going on onstage and the projected dancers were also very, very large by comparison so that they dwarfed the live performers.

Childs' choreography Mickey Mouses Glass's music. (Translation: it's repetitive.) 20 minutes kinda crawls. The problem wasn't that the dance was boring. In fact, the video projected dance was riveting. If the MCA had shown an hour of the video only (by Sol LeWitt) I would have left, a happily paying customer. The problem was the discrepancy between the live and the video-projected dancers. On the video (which included a breathtaking solo dance by Lucinda for Lucinda), Childs' choreography worked. It was repetitive, but in a good way, because the ingenuity of the movements bear repeating. The dancers are poised on a giant grid, 12X12 squares. They skip along the grid at breakneck speed as though it were propelling them along. LeWitt's camera follows the dancers, making it seem as if they're actually hopping up and down in place on a moving sidewalk. The effect is a bit like Irish dancing, to use a terrible comparison -- the torso stays totally upright; the feet do all the work. Childs' facial expression in her own dancing is also unusual--rather than looking out at an imagined audience, she looks inward. She's doing this dance for herself and we're incredibly lucky to catch her in the act. I almost felt voyeuristic watching the video. But the live dancers on Friday dispensed with everything that made the original dancers so unearthly. Theses were rule-bound, balletic, posed. Less skittish, more robust, more effortful. They looked like they were trying very, very hard.

In case you'd rather hear it from someone who actually knows something about dance, read the Laura Molzahn review in the Trib.

Chicago Humanities Festival

2009-10-17T05:44:00.000-07:00

I'm directing a show at the Chicago Humanities Festival here on the University of Chicago campus this afternoon: come!

The show, which is improvised, is based on an incomplete fragment of a commedia dell'arte pantomime Mozart sketched out for himself and his pals to play in Vienna during carnival. Mozart reserved the role of Harlequin for himself and had his dad Fed-Ex his Harlequin outfit for the occasion. Unfortunately for us, only Mozart's violin line survived the centuries, along with an extremely spare, and often confusing scenario (including, for instance, that Harlequin goes from being alive in one scene to stone dead in the next for reasons that are not apparent, or the instruction that the "Doctor" is to exit and then that the Doctor then ... exits, again [from offstage?!])

Fortunately, the violin part alone is worthy of an Animaniacs appearance -- it does half the work of inventing action for us. Roger Moseley, who found the pantomime & engineered its musical reconstruction is jaw-droppingly good at revivifying 18th-century musical topics. He directs the ensemble from the piano bench.

I also decided to insert a couple other extraneous Mozarty bits into the score this time around: 1. Mozart's Turkish March for piano solo (which accompanies the otherwise totally unmotivated entrance of a "Turk" in Mozart's scenario, hence the appropriately out-of-place music) and 2. an aria for Columbine -- at Martha Feldman's request, Barbarina's aria from Figaro. The aria (accompanied by Pierrot) is a total red herring (no one has uttered a word thus far, let alone belted out opera), recalling, I hope, Christina Ricci's completely bizarre and wonderful tap dance in the middle of Buffalo 66, which has a similar effect.

As an additional layer, thinking the commedia relationships bear a striking resemblance to day-to-day academia (lecherous old professor, scheming post-doc, emo undergrad, innocent English major from Minnesota) the characters are dressed in U of C nerd wear.

There is a typo on the Chicago Humanities official webpage, which, alas, lists Roger Moseley as the sole director. Anyway, come, and while you're at it, try to pass yourself off as an "Educator" at the door so you can get in for free (think pocket protector, bedhead, fanny pack).

Feat.:

Harlequin: Jon Eliot
Pantalone: Greg Anderson
Pierrot: Peter Schultz
Columbine: Majel Connery
Doctor: Jonathan DeSouza
Violin: Emily Norton
Clarinet: Danny Gough
Piano: Roger Moseley
Cello: Emily M.

2p-3p

Mandel Hall

1131 E. 57th St.
Chicago, IL 60637
Adults: $10.00

Educators & Students: FREE

Monday, Oct 12 Workshop on Peter Maxwell Davies

2009-10-10T17:58:00.001-07:00

Oh, shameless plug!

My work on Peter Maxwell Davies (dissertation in embryo) is finally taking form. I'll be presenting next Monday, October 12 at a newly-constituted workshop in Theater & Performance Studies at the University of Chicago, run by David J. Levin & Christopher Wild. The paper is slated to appear later this winter (don't be deceived: it isn't actually winter outside, though it feels to be) in the Oxford University Press journal, The Opera Quarterly.

Come see me embarrass myself:

Monday, Oct 12
Germanic Studies Department
Wieboldt Hall, Rm #206
3-5:00p
there will be wine

-majel.

The French are So Unimaginative

2009-10-10T17:48:00.000-07:00

This was passed along to me by a friend of mine but it belongs in a museum. It's the graphic on the vomit bags for Polish Airlines. I haven't flown to Poland lately, but really: could there be a better way to say VOMIT HERE NOW than Torba Chorobowa? ... but then, what about Spuckbeutel? A close second. Oh, my.

ICE @ MoCP

2009-10-10T16:49:00.000-07:00

Or is it MCoP? Or MoCoP? Here's what I don't understand: Mo = Museum, right? Yes, I know, MoMA started it, and little 'o' stands for 'of.' Fine. It still looks bizarre. I think MuCPhot works much better.

ICE never does anything half-assed. David Bowlin was the only ICE'er on the program last night, but there were more in attendance. Claire Chase had an outfit that would have made David Bowie jealous if only he could fit into it. The exhibit at MoCP (MusoCoP) was spectacular and went well with the spectacular program. The image they have on the museum website really doesn't do justice to it. Behind David was what appeared (from my position 40 feet back) to be either a shattered adult toilet seat (the kind you put over top of the regular seat, presumably to make it ... more accessible to the adult butt?) or a life raft exploded into about 7 pieces. Each of the pieces had wild colors all over it & it was positioned at times more or less directly above David's head when he moved toward it, making him appear to have a psychedelic halo radiating from his brain. On the opposite end, equally thrilling, was a bird's eye view of a small city coming directly out from the wall in 3-D. The image I want is the expensive holiday cards with complicated embedded origami that shoots out at you when you open the thing. Except 10 times larger.

David played the first piece, Sciarrino's first two capricci from 6 Capricci far fresher than I've ever heard Sciarrino played. It was so fresh I kept thinking someone with a crush on Sciarrino had cribbed his style. Like the Borges story where someone other than Cervantes writes Don Quixote exactly over again, word for word. But it's somehow different, because it comes from a different person in a different time & place. 6 Capricci written by Barry Manilow wouldn't be 6 Capricci written by Prince, even if they'd written the exact same piece, because their authors are such different people. Is anyone following me? It was fresh. Fresh, I tell you! And Berio's Sequenza VIII was stunning.

The people who actually had seats experienced Nono's La lontananza nostaligica utopica futura (and, forgive me because my Italian is awful but I'm guessing the piece is something about a faraway nostalgic, utopic future) in surround sound. The piece is for 8-channel tape and solo violin, so there were four speakers placed around the audience & David's playing was seconded by violin, vocal and other unidentifiable sounds that flitted between the speakers. I'm not qualified to judge the piece because I couldn't really hear it. Nick and I got stuck in the back of the room due to the unfortunate route Nick chose to get to the museum. But I might go ahead and judge the staging of it -- yes: the staging!

The piece itself is ages long and so the sheet music that corresponds is likewise long. 6 stands long, to be exact. Rather than having David play from stand 1 through to stand 6 all in a row, which one would expect, the stands were instead distributed around the playing arena at odd angles so that when he finished with one stand, he would then be forced to head off to the next. But someone had had the bright idea that he should not simply move to the next, he should be gripped by the need, the desire to find the next stand! He should be compelled by a strange interior voice: where, where is your stand, David? Thus, one ream of music finished, David would stop playing and pull a sudden, odd "what's that smell?!" face, and then would appear to be following the sounds of the music coming out of the speakers as though they sang a sweet, sweet tune only he could hear, as though the music, not he, was leading him blindly on. Then suddenly (what, ho!) he would land smack in front of the correct stand in the sequence and then begin playing again.

I'm making it sound funnier than it was. It was actually just a little hokey, so my thought, I suppose, is that actors should act, and musicians should play music.

Anyway, the concert was fabulous, and I'm sorry it was only one night.

Officially the Funniest Thing I've Seen in Weeks

2009-05-28T15:08:00.000-07:00

Adrian Jevicki is a Wild Man

Fortunately for me, Movementpants is choreographing Opera Cabal's brand new Vesalii Icones (by Peter Maxwell Davies, 1969) this summer. Get ready, Chicago.

Cliff Notes Carmen at COT

2009-05-13T19:48:00.000-07:00

It's no use pretending. Peter Brook is a genius, but there's no Peter Brook in the recent La tragédie de Carmen at Chicago Opera Theater. In fact, last night's production proved a long unsubstantiated theory of mine that Peter Brook's younger brother, also somewhat unimaginatively named Peter Brook, wrote La tragédie and passed it off as the work of his older brother, hoping to ruin the poor man's career. How else to explain a canned version of Carmen that seems programmed to put people to sleep? If you sit back and close your eyes, which I'd advise you to do if you go to the final performance tomorrow, you might even hallucinate that you never left home ... drifting off in ye old armchair listening to "Renee Fleming: Great Opera Scenes," the iPod shuffle randomly selects "Carmen: Hottest Hits" and away you go ....

There were two moments of potential greatness in the production, when I thought or maybe just hallucinated I was dealing with the real Mr. Brook.

Hallucination no. 1: About 20 minutes into the opera, Carmen has already sung three arias back to back, and it starts to seem like something might be wrong. She finishes one and then, whoa, it's another aria from Carmen! And another! But then I thought, ah, yes, how clever (here's where the hallucination begins) ... the insinuation is that Carmen is literally a singing fool. She has to keep looping the same arias endlessly because the forward motion of the opera depends upon the enchantment her voice produces. The minute she stops, everything spirals out of control and her hot-headed lovers start killing each other. This theory of mine also (brilliantly!) explains why Carmen would fall for the slightly metro Escamillo instead of Marlboro Man José. Why? Because Escamillo is also a singing machine. Obviously! The girl who belts out the Habanera has to go home with the guy who sings "Tor-e-a-dor en ga-ha-ha-harde!" They're made for each other (until they run through their entire playlist and then discover they don't actually know one another ... no, wait, that would be the Sondheim Carmen). José's problem, like Eminem in 8 Mile, is that he can never get up the guts to sing in public and then when he does, it's just not very catchy. His only good aria comes too little too late, and Carmen's offstage anyway so she misses most of it. Oh, no ... I'm coming out of my reverie and ... it's a terribly choreographed fight scene! Aack!

Hallucination no. 2: I thought I detected a little prank, directed at the ultimate 19th-century tragic opera cliché -- the way the audience always knows what's going to happen, but the characters never catch on until it's too late. The same conceit drives scary movies. (We think: don't open the door, for chrissake! Don't answer the phone! Stop! He's got a knife! But of course the door is opened, the phone is answered, everybody dies.) It works the same way with opera. Except that the last scene of Carmen violates the rule. In the final duet, José plays the hapless lover who still believes he can make things work. Carmen is the dejected ex-lover who thinks it'll never work.... but then, suddenly, Carmen looks out at the audience ... she seems to know how the opera will end ... she's stepping outside the operatic frame! Carmen is half audience, half Carmen! She knows how it's going to end, but she still has to play out the scene. But José, poor boy, he's still trapped inside the tragic spiral. Their dialogue becomes strangely disordered. He says he isn't going to kill her. She says just do it! He says he loves her, they should go. She says, hey man, will you just drop it? José gets angry and kills her but not because he wants to. He kills her because she threatened suspension of belief, because Carmen was about to kill the very premise of opera itself! Oh, no ... the man behind me just snorted at Garcia's totally hilarious fake death.

I know, I know. The ravings of a madwoman. None of these things happened. But really, now, I'm trying to be funny, because I'm sad. I tried, I really tried, watching this production, to find a reason to like it. Actually, there's one reason: no intermission.

Office Space Opera

2009-05-02T07:38:00.000-07:00

I witnessed an understudy performance of Clemenza di Tito yesterday afternoon, behind the Harris Theater mainstage. It was produced by the various assistants (to the conductor, the director, even the rehearsal pianist) who get together with the understudies to the main roles, and in the space of one week develop their own reading of the opera. But there are caveats. The performance lasts one hour, instead of two and a half. And there's no stage, no backstage, and no lighting. The performance happened in a kind of dance/conference room with space enough for about twenty people, two upright pianos, a handful of chairs, classroom track lighting, a trashcan, a clock, bad ventilation, and a couple exit signs. In other words, a lot like the last place on earth you'd wanna sing an opera. Unless you're Peter Sellars. (His infamous Marriage of Figaro, set in New York City's Trump Towers, substituted an uncomfortable opera-in-your-dorm-room kind of thing for the stop-everything-and-just-sing decor typical of a [say, 1998] Met production of the opera.)

R.B. Schlather, who assisted Christopher Alden on the set for Tito, did a good job of using what he had, i.e. next to nothing, rather than fighting it. Characters who were supposed to be offstage either sat lifeless at the long conference table planted in the center of the room, or huddled in the weird, dark exit corridor at the back. Rabihah Davis sang Vitellia's last aria (which maybe ought to have been sung from inside the corridor) slouched against the long dance mirror stage left, playing with her reflection. It was a nice effect, since Vitellia at this point literally retreats into a world of her own. Other characters, with no recourse to escape heady dramatic confrontations, occasionally turned face-first into the wall and remained there in an abrupt gesture of total helplessness.

The scenes that worked against the anti-operatic qualities of the room were less successful. In the finale, Sesto is about to be condemned to death and he/she simply walked up to the table and laid down on it. It would have made more sense, given the space, if he had been condemned to a paper shredder and a Kafka-esque never-ending stack of bills. No one, to my dismay, pointed a gun at the microwave, threatened to tear down the clock (which ticked and shuddered noisily throughout the entire "production"), or shouted at the pianist, who was four feet away, to play play more like an orchestra. There wasn't actually a microwave, but you see my point.

Ultimately, the condensed aspect of the performance was its most bizarre feature. How do you slim down a Mozart opera to one-third its original size? The production team solved this dilemma by eliminating everything except the recitative until halfway through Act II. At that point the characters suddenly began singing arias, precipitating a swift return to operaland. The problem with recitative-only opera is that Tito, Mozart's late return to buffa style, depends for its effectiveness on moments of pause -- the arias, which give space to thoughts and feelings. With nobody pausing for reflection, with nobody pausing, period, the characters ran around for the first forty minutes speaking very quickly to one another like they were acting out some weird Italian theatrical form that died out centuries ago because it didn't make any sense.

Especial pplause is due to Julia Hardin, who played Sextus like a champ, especially given the circumstances.

Baby Bro Goes for Broke, Takes Bank

2009-04-28T05:08:00.000-07:00

Drew Connery, a.k.a. my brother, is a performing fool. After hunkering down in relative isolation for years -- years during which our family quietly wondered what the hell he was up to and I was forming an avant-garde opera ensemble -- Drew emerged from his cocoon this past weekend with a couple single tracks that are so good I almost cried. The studio execs over at 89.4 in Omaha ("The River") must have wept, because Drew's hit single, "Omaha," went straight into regular radio play yesterday, skipping the usual months-long vetting process.

In spite of their name, there's nothing avant about Drew's group ("Random"), unless you count the fact that in addition to singing like a lark, he can also rip out high-pitched melismatic vocal lines as good as the best Hindustani classical singer. And he can rap. Drew specializes in what an old teacher of mine, Daron Hagen, calls doing cliché well. Hagen used to say that the problem with 99.9% of composing artists is that in trying to be wildly creative and different, they lean too far in that direction and end up composing stuff most people wouldn't give 5 seconds of their time to. The creative genius is the person who creates art within the boundaries of the known. Drew's talent is to absorb the essence of a musical genre, its unmistakable imprint (in this case, Third Eye Blind, with hints of Led Zeppelin and Eddie Vedder [Drew, by the way, can I have my CDs back?]) and then churn out perfect facsimiles of the songs these guys ought to have written. Maybe he's spent the last several years creeping into the bedrooms of famous rockstars and writing down the stuff they say in their sleep.

In any case, I'm proud as hell, Drew. Listen to RANDOM on MySpace.

Mozart's Carnival

2009-04-23T16:56:00.000-07:00

A few photos from a recently concluded project involving the improvised reconstruction of a pantomime for Mardi Gras never finished by Mozart. Roger Moseley, a younger version of Robert Levin, and resident 18th-century improvisation fanatic at the University of Chicago, unearthed what remains of the score: 1. the first violin part and 2. an extremely sketchy scenario, written by Mozart in German. In other words, not much.

Roger headed up the music side of things, and recruited me to be the project's stage director. Maybe it's my bad German, but the scenario I inherited contained a few leaps in logic. It wasn't immediately obvious how to effect, for instance, an unprepared transition from "Dottore sieht auch zärtlich" to "Pantalon, Piero und Dottore liegen auf der Erde." (The Doctor "looks tenderly" at an undetermined object, and then the next minute everybody's lying kicking and screaming on the floor). Or what about when "Pantalon and Doctor go off" and suddenly "Piero comes onstage loaded with weapons." What?! Well, on one level, this is Commedia dell'arte, not Shakespeare. The scenario isn't supposed to make sense -- or rather, the fact that the characters do things that don't make sense is what makes it funny. But the best non sequitur in the scenario is also an embarrassing reminder of Commedia's historical trajectory, and the social hierarchies it pokes fun of. After depositing his cache of weapons, Piero is instructed (presumably to our great amusement) to "spot the Turks." For Mozart, as anyone who's seen the Orientalist classic, Die Entführung auf dem Serail, knows, Turkish folks step up as the dead-ringer bad/stupid foreigner stereotype in a lot of Mozart's operas. Sadly, the stereotype exists in Germany today more or less unchanged, maybe with slightly more sublimation. (For productions of this opera that attempt to render transparent or completely ditch its colonialist fantasy aspect see Entführung on a yacht, Calixto Bieto's infamous staging or [my personal favorite] Neuenfels' production for the Staatsoper Stuttgart, available on DVD -- yipee!) If I were as bold as Sasha Baron Cohen, I might have used the Turks moment to make a political point about how far (or not) we've come since Mozart, but I tried to bail Mozart out by simply giving everyone mustaches, à la Groucho Marx.

Here, the cast (Shawn Keener as Pantalone, Jonathan DeSouza as Doctor, Alyssa Mathias as Columbine and Peter Schultz as Piero), armed with kitchen utensils, sneaks up on an unsuspecting Harlequin.

Columbine, a kind of urban-dwelling hipster, is being sneaky.

Pantalone, à la Billy Crystal's "You look marvelous" lounge lizard, is also very sneaky.

Pierrot (here, Lenny from Of Mice and Men?) is never sneaky, even when he tries to be.

The show is ended (Harlequin-cum-Afghani aerobics instructor [me], far right).

La clemenza di Christopher Alden

2009-04-19T13:31:00.000-07:00

Go see this opera. Now. Go see it now. Please. Don't do it for my sake. Just trust me.

When I first heard Christopher was coming to town to direct La clemenza di Tito, my first thought was, "Yeah ... hmm, Italian ... Mozart ... sounds familiar ... sort of ... wait, what's it called again?" I went to the library to get a recording and discovered there are actually a couple a-v recordings floating around. A VHS exists of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's Tito, which, apparently having been hit by the stupid bat, I somehow decided not to watch in favor of a DVD made-for-TV version by the BBC. I grew up on "I, Claudius" (which, confusingly for a first grader, they spell the fancy Roman way: "Clavdivs"), "Upstairs, Downstairs," and "Brideshead Revisited," and came away mightily persuaded of the superiority of British acting. (According to the rule by which things denied us as children become addictions in adulthood, I am now incapable of skipping an episode of Law and Order.) So when I watched this particular Tito and decided it was one of the worst operas ever written, it didn't dawn on me that it was the fault of the production. I assumed, as it has been common to assume since Mozart's death, that it's a completely lame opera. In fact, British television actors just can't sing.

Christopher Alden arrived in Chicago last month announcing that in this new production there would be none of the usual flouting of all historical referents. As he put it, "I'm over that." His Aida at the Deutsche Oper last year is a good example of what he's apparently over. Aida was an exotic-looking maid who worked for an unhealthy little cult of Evangelical power mongers hunkered down in what looked like a Radisson convention center in the heart of gun country, U.S.A. Christopher's particular brand of flouting has over the years attracted a lot of critical attention, and while the majority of people seem to hate what he does with his operas (Berlin booed Aida till they were hoarse, so I think it's safe to say that they're also "over that"), enough people with intelligence and political nerve think he's the greatest thing since sliced bread that he's gotten himself quite a reputation, if a mixed one. Whatever. Press, as we all know, is press. During the intermission of the Tito dress last Thursday, a man on my right mumbled, "Well, there's just absolutely nothing right about this opera," while a woman on my left shrieked, "Whoever this director is, I wanna marry him!"

Part of the problem is that Christopher's reputation precedes him, which means that a cast generally has a pretty good idea of what they're in for before the thing ever gets off the ground. Christopher's instructions to his singers usually ask for a recreation of something like the group therapy sessions in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: a bunch of crazy people on the verge. You know, one person's trying to figure out how to throw himself out of the window, someone else is losing it in the corner. Which, let's face it, is what operas are written about. But singers, especially accomplished ones in the European circuit, offer up a fair bit of resistance to this. You can't teach an old dog new tricks (like, how to act). But because Christopher's overall conceptions already demand a lot imaginatively of the audience, without everyone's participation on stage it can't get off the ground. In Berlin, there were a bunch of old-school singers rattling around like ghosts in a production where they simply didn't belong. I've always wondered what a Christopher Alden production would look like if his singers dared to act like he wanted them to...

The brilliance of the Chicago Opera Theater model is that, like Rome under Titus, absolute monarchy works when the ruler is a pretty awesome guy. Brian Dickie effortlessly commands devotion and loyalty from the people who work for him, and he's talented at assembling knock-out young singers into cutting-edge casts. COT is the MacBook Pro to the Lyric's PC. It's lighter, it's cooler-looking, and it frigging works. It was a little startling to walk into the first run-through and realize that these singers were literally in their twenties. But far more astonishing is that by opening night (last Saturday) they were all doing a pretty good job of embodying Christopher's wild-eyed schizophrenic thing. The scenic conception is a little lose. If you squint, it looks a little like sixties neo-Greco architecture: Lincoln Center, is how Christopher put it. And the costumes are, I dunno, I guess they're a little confusing. There are togas, but then Servilia has dreds, Titus is in his jammies, and Sextus has a kind of Kenneth Cole/runway thing going on. But the personal dynamic between singers, especially Sextus/Titus, is riveting. It just doesn't get better than this. There's opera, and then there's Christopher's Tito.

Three more performances. No excuses. Go.

Note: For a review of the opera (what you've just read, as Brian Dickie helpfully pointed out, is in fact a "review") see Andrew Patner's take.

Eight Songs for a Mad Queen

2009-04-04T12:31:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday I stepped out for a little late-night Maxwell Davies. Back in 2005, the International Contemporary Ensemble developed a reading of Eight Songs for a Mad King with director Lydia Steier. Last week's resurrection of the same production took place at the hip new Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village (what is it about venues with color-coded animal names? Remember the White Dog Café?) Fortunately for me, Eight Songs, which was wild and incendiary when it was written in 1969, is still weird enough in 2009 that hip young groups like I.C.E. are willing to take it on. I have yet to be underwhelmed by these folks, who pulled off Xenakis's bizarre Oresteia last year at the Miller Theater with what I can only call style. For the Davies, they actually went to the trouble of memorizing the score. So it was somewhat disappointing that in spite of such a colossal feat, the instrumentalists were deliberately sidelined in the production by the King's antics.

Davies' idea for the original production had the King (modeled on King George III, the sole singer in the score) interacting on stage with each of the instrumentalists, who are all in cages, representing the bullfinches that crazy George III allegedly played with during his 60 odd years of royal insanity and seclusion. There are no cages in Steier's production. And the question of whether the King is performing at all (is he performing nuts, or is he just nuts?) is updated into the psycho-scape of the ultimate vanity press: YouTube. The instrumentalists crouch on either side of a giant stage-size screen onto which the King's singing face is projected. The King himself sits behind the screen (we cannot see him, but we hear his voice), but the liveness of his performance is belied by the intervention of a camcorder. What we see is much less like a performance, and more like a blown-up home video of a guy screwing around in his bedroom.

Steier's conceit is that the singer gradually makes himself up as King George. Over the course of roughly 45 minutes, he applies a generous white base, pencils in eyebrows and beauty marks, does up his lips, and finishes off the costume with a powdered wig (which he powders, hilariously). Partly because of the making-up bit, and partly because much of the vocal part lies in a falsetto range, the effect is a bit like Dame Edna after five tequila jello shots. Peter Tsantis is a creditable singer and his rendition is not coincidentally very singerly. He has exceptional technique and despite all the noisy racket he's required to make didn't appear to be straining. The problem is that without the sense of geniune strain, the sense of genuine madness flies out the window. Other interpreters of the role (Roy Hart or Julius Eastman), have voices that seem literally to come apart as the King's reality comes apart. With Tsantis, I wasn't on the edge of my seat. (Although that may also have been due to the unwelcome narration from the man behind me who felt obliged to fill in long and goofy explanations for the benefit of his young girlfriend: "Now, you know which one's the cello, right? ... Oh, this bit's from the Messiah! Do you know the Messiah?" I turned around at one point to ask him if he'd like to step outside to fight, but came face to face with a waitress presenting him and his girl-teen with an enormous Lobster Crostini plate. Don't go to the Poisson Rouge if you like your voyeurism without the annoying chatter.)

If you're familiar with the piece, you know that the King has to emerge from under the screen at some point because there's the bit about him breaking the violinist's violin. He does eventually come out, appearing onstage in the flesh for the first time. This ought to be a big moment and it is. The screen is simply a backdrop now, and we're in the familiar world of theater. The King dutifully smashes the violin. But then, oddly, Steier has him return behind the screen, and finish the rest of the piece from there. In retrospect, the entrance onstage appears not to have been an interesting staging choice (shattering the YouTube illusion and replacing it with real-time theater), but merely the shortest way to get the King and the violin close enough for the one to beat the other into submission. The problem is that having once tossed out the YouTube conceit, it makes no sense to have the singer step behind the screen again. Once we know that the Wizard of Oz is the guy behind the curtain, he has to stop doing the schtick behind the curtain and come out and face his audience like a man. Or a queen.

There was also very little ... no, I'm gonna go with no attempt made to integrate what was happening on stage with Randolph Stow's lyrics, which are thoughtful, bizarre and strong, and which will contradict what you're doing if you're not careful. (Why would this particular King, dressing up as a woman, suddenly start raving about Esther, his queen? Whoops!) I'm all about artistic license, but if there's no attempt to align what's going on action-wise with what the King is saying, it becomes Eight Mumbles for Some Sick Sonofagun, which isn't half as interesting as what's printed in the score.

I'd still tell you to go see it, but that was the only performance. Next time.

Cav & Pag at the Lyric

2009-03-29T05:23:00.000-07:00

My understanding of the philosophical method consists of a line of inquiry introduced to me by Mark Johnston, a Princeton professor, in 2001. To avoid the trap of making assumptions that anything in this world is simply the way it is, we imagine ourselves instead as outside observers coming fresh to the world and finding it strange. Beaming into the upper balconies at the Lyric what, Lord have mercy, would aliens have made of Cav and Pag?

Having off-beat or at least against-the-grain tastes regarding opera (what is avant-garde opera anyway?) I spent the entire concert thinking about aliens instead of opera. What could save Cavelleria rusticana? I imagined each of the singers doubled by massive, larger-than-life helium puppets who wobbled and bobbled behind them, sporting similar hair-dos and mimicking their ground-level melodramas from 20 ft up in the air. The problem is that Italian verismo is inherently funny, or ought to be -- what is realistic opera? -- and when you suppress that fact it's bound to gum up the wheels of production. The Road Runner is irresistible when he races around to Rossini because cartoons resist seriousness by design; refusing to take opera seriously, cartoonishness starts to get at the essence of operaness. Which is another way of saying cartoons are a lot like opera.

Carlo Ventre (Turridu) has all kinds of quintessentially tenorish moments in Cav, flinging his torso around like Darth Vader taking an acting class, and Dolora Zajick weaving in small circles around him like a tugboat... There was one particularly bad/awesome bit of acting in the first act. Dolora is instructed to grab hold of Carlo's jacket (lying on the back of a chair) to prevent his departure, but Carlo/Turridu violently intercepts her hand, precipitating dramatic tension. Instead, what happened was that Dolora made for the jacket, but Carlo missed his cue. Operatic singers aren't hired for their improv skills, and Dolora, unsure what to do, simply froze in an awkward "I'm gonna grab that jacket" position for about 10 seconds till Carlo caught on.

The libretto doesn't help the situation. It's high-stakes from the moment go with everyone hollering about "Traitor!" and "Vendetta!" so there's really nowhere to go.

Mascagni's music is a great example of the fact that opera is the mother of film. Cav is basically a soundtrack. Is it a coincidence that the opening scene of the opera, an extensively choreographed people-bustling-about the town square sort of thing (I love watching singers try to act the "silent" conversation onstage), so resembles the opening sequence of Walt Disney's Beauty and the Beast? This particular scene is also a lot like the complicated goofing off that precedes the entrance of the magician/uncle guy who presents Clara with her Nutcracker doll in the Tchaikovsky ballet. But at least in Beauty and the Beast and The Nutcracker the protagonists are attempting to escape the trauma of the everyday (in Beauty's case, into an less provincial, more individualistic habitus, and for Clara into a genuinely strange and hallucinogenic dreamscape). Saturday night at the Lyric the audience was trying to escape into the play.

Look: I'm a minority. If everyone felt the way I do about operatic staging the Lyric would be dead and gone and the people who donate to the Lyric, if not dead and gone themselves, would have to give their money to, oh, UNICEF. Which, of course, would make the world a better place, but who's paying attention. The huge surprise of the evening was that, made to stay against my will for the second half of the program by David Bashwiner (fellow U-of-C'er and film komponist), Pagliacci was absolutely brilliant, the best bit of comic acting I've ever seen in an operatic production. And, unless I traveled on an alien spaceship Saturday night, it apparently happened at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Where and when it was meant to be set was lost on me (and on the singers I interviewed afterward). I'm guessing some kind of fairground/playground on the outskirts of interwar Italy... And I had one flashback to a recent Three Tenors broadcast during Pagliacci's big aria. Otherwise, the Commedia players (the Lyric hired first-rate professional clowns, but the opera people absolutely held their own next to them) in the second act erect a flimsy carnival stage and proceed to entertain the hell out of the townspeople. Frumpy Nedda looks very hot in her Colombina outfit (which includes an enormous blue wig), and I audibly BAAH-HAH'ed when Canio, the creepy old man who woos her, opens his mouth and ends up hemming like a donkey.

If you can get in at intermission, do it.

How Many Kinds of Artist

2008-12-28T18:12:00.000-08:00

Matt Morgan, are you out there in cyberspace? You need to know how profoundly happy I am to have discovered George Steiner, and my gratitude to you (as the intermediary who arranged that discovery) runs deep. I had started to think that religious feeling meant academic suicide. God + academia = lost cause. But lo! As it turns out, one can turn to academia, and, in the best of cases, do it precisely as a theologian.

But there's more! And more important: George knows about art.

Art is life. For me. I'm not trying to be pretentious. And here's how I know I'm not being pretentious: it's a drawback. It doesn't win friends.

I can't stop acting. Or, can't ever make the feeling of acting go away. It doesn't mean I'm faking the whole way through life. It's just how it is. If I were a book binder I would be binding up things all over the house and if I raised butterflies for a living I would sleep in butterfly gauze and dream butterfly dreams.

George says that all art is an attempt at communication (not necessarily communicating, but definitely trying). And why? The dread of solitude. "The rapture of Narcissus is, tautologically, that of suicide." Ack! We who need other people need art because we're hopeless at talking to other people. We'll try anything. But whoa there! Some people who need art ... don't need people. {??!!}

Yes, George. There are! "The notion of a poet writing verse in a private tongue or destroying what he has written, of a painter refusing to show any canvas to an eye other than his own, of a composer 'performing' his score in mute, purely inward audition, is conceivable" but unlikely. You're implying it doesn't happen, George, but it does! (George says that Gogol burned the second half of Dead Souls out of fear of the "other's intrusion." I'm doubting.)

There is another kind of artist, the kind I am not, the kind I envy with all my heart. How many artists I know crave aloneness and lavish their attention on the gritty pleasure of making. Not making for. These are the good little players who as four-year-olds sat all day around tiny creations arranging, enacting, dissecting. I spent my childhood terrorized by lonesomeness. I have a terrible imagination.

When I'm afraid of isolation I drive around all night to be surrounded by other people driving. I'll sit in an airport to see people walking around.

George, as far as I know, you've written a lot of books. Which means you probably spend a lot of time alone too.

At least I have the endless vault of cyberspace to project my woes into. What would I do without you?