Quiggin

I don't know which painters Suzanne Farrell was referring to at the National Gallery. She could have been pointing to one of the impressionist works such as Monet's Garden at Vetheuil. Or maybe to the to one of the Washington school of Color Field painters such as Morris Louis. The Monet has both color and texture, the Louises use color as structure. Monet: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.52358.html Morris Louis: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.52382.html Stuart Davis: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.166441.html Veronese [red pushing against blue?]: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.46146.html

Natalia Goncharova, who did sets and costumes for Diaghilev, and an important painter on her own, was very recently the subject of a Tate Museum show in London. The last painting in the link below, Peasants Picking Apples, looks as if it could be hanging in an Lower East Side gallery today, perhaps alongside one of Nicole Eisenman's works. What's interesting about the Russian Futurists that Judith Mackrell refers to in Buddy's link above – Kandinsky, Mondrian and all – is how they deploy space, or objects in space, as on a stage floor, like a kind of Labanotation, rather than through a proscenium or in Renaissance perspective. The pictorial elements push and pull against each another and there is no wasted space. Even in Goncharova's paintings every corner is activated, up and down as well as side to side. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/natalia-goncharova

Chester Higgins in today's Times describes a visit to Robert Frank this past January "to thank him, for having the clearness of heart to make these 1950s images that gave black people like myself the same decency and agency usually reserved for whites." One of the most moving elements of many in "The Americans." Walker Evans, whose own journey through America Frank was in part following, wrote sharply in his original but not used introduction to "The Americans" - "Since it is the fashion to say that Americans can afford everything, let us say they can afford to have an astringent, abrasive picture of America ... Those who know the language of images and the speech of the eye ... will instantly recognize this photographer's intellect, his ungentle poetry, his ferocious wit and his educated morality." And that book was basically a moral philosophy of photography, photographic aphorisms – that showed you could do and couldn't do as a photographer. It was an antidote to such overly ambitious shows such as Edward Steichen's "The Family of Man" which fuzzily said that everyone is the same person, everyone has the same experience. Frank lived all those years in a small, green-fronted loft on Bleecker Street just off Bowery, "poor as a church mouse" as a friend used to say. There was always a light bulb on during the day – or maybe it was only on when he and June Leaf were in Nova Scotia. Originally the little loft seemed to me like a fishing boat among fishing boats, and as the years went on it was still a fishing boat but now seemed to be completely surrounded by yachts (cafes, chic hat shops, etc).

I don't think what serious film audiences liked then – just as serious ballet audiences appreciated Agon and The Four Temperaments in their time – was so off base in retrospect. After all George Lucas made American Graffiti from the bones of Fellini's I Vitelloni, Martin Scorcese was influenced by 8 1/2, and Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, which was previewed at film school for student opinions, was inspired by Godard's Breathless, which for years was hugely influential. Lawrence of Arabia in its time seemed like a big old fashioned, conservatively constructed but fun, entertainment film. Panavision is less wide than mail-box-slot CinemaScope (great "envelope pushing" examples of which were Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player and Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well). The most pleasing aspect ratio seemed to be semi-wide screen 1.6, the classic golden mean ratio of 5:8, in which most European movies were filmed. In the US they would inevitably be projected in the wider and less attractive – neither this nor that – ratio of 1.85, voiding all the cameraman's careful choices. Here's Scorcese's (I can't forget the old spelling) list of Criterion Film favorites, Lourie's The River among them, and his reasons: http://www.openculture.com/2016/05/martin-scorsese-names-his-top-10-films-in-the-criterion-collection.html

I remember seeing Lawrence of Arabia back in the day at film school. It seemed like a big overstuffed armchair of a movie in faux naturalism, with its over the top wide screen landscapes and wide screen acting (with Anthony Quinn's nose looking as though it could fall off at any moment). This was in comparison to the modest New Wave films my friends and I were seeing and even the color A-grade films that those directors had graduated to, like Contempt and Blow Up. (In Contempt, which was filmed in CinemaScope, Fritz Lang says that CinemaScope is only appropriate for snakes and funerals, all the while Godard was having his mischievous ways with it.) And students in the English dept would recommend instead reading Charles M. Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta, T. E. Lawrence's inspiration ("we may write books on parts of the desert … but here it is all said, and by a great master"). What Lawrence would have thought of this film must spin between the comic and the tragic in our imaginations. An art director I knew later, Eugene Lourie – who did the art direction on Renoir's The River and Chaplin's Limelight – told me that he worked on an early film with Peter O'Toole just after O'Toole had some plastic surgery done. On the first day of shooting all of the crew pretended not to recognize him and kept looking at their watches and wondering aloud when the real Peter O'Toole was going to show up.

But this wasn't just about knee squeezing – and knee squeezing, and what Matt Damon referred to as just a little pat on the butt now and then, eventually becomes a kind of sign meaning "I own you." But this was also about sex, the compete works, in exchange for being able to keep your job.

Why didn't he just say, here's something to pay for parking with. Why did he bring the word "prostitute" into the picture? A bit of a Freudian slip I would think as far as what he really thought of his "consenting" partners.

Yes, absolutely. But there is something in us that tends to want look the other way when everything else is going so well. Sometimes an authority – say a director – will say I won't have any of that in my theater and everyone breathes a sigh of relief. I think when it happens at the board level, it's inexcusable. The strangest thing, and what blows all of Domingo's "alibis," is when he put $10 on a dresser and said it was just enough to pay for parking but not enough to make his partner into a prostitute.

The Times is $15.00 a month – 50 cents a day. Single articles elsewhere start at $3.00 or $4.00 and on up. The Times and the Wall Street Journal are the only US papers left really keeping an eye on lots of dubious things and acts on a day to day basis. Even if I don't read all the national articles, I figure in some way I'm voting for good government by subscribing (at least to the Times). Yes, a vote for Marina Harss per Marta and Kathleen O'Connell's links, most recently her well considered Dance Tabs Bournonville review.

I'll miss Ulrich's reviews which seemed strong and just. He knew the music as well as the choreography. His championing of San Francisco Ballet's production of the "Shostakovich Trilogy" helped get it a full, not partial, reprise in the following season. From the initial review in 2014 -

I'm just catching up on this, too. Wheeldon uses the dubious term "balance" several times in the interview. Balancing dark forces against rational and light ones doesn't really seem to work – and we can see the results of twenty years of such attempts in the political arena. Wheeldon: Another biography problem: While I've never followed Jackson's music and career that much, only the effect on its fans, I did find his surgeries and skin whitening treatments very disturbing. Who did he want to be, to represent? What was his attitude towards his black heritage? Who did he become? From a 2009 Rolling Stone article on Jackson's legacy: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/michael-jackson-black-superhero-71199/

When I worked in a law firm library, we kept everything in date order, the most recent memo on top (we were very old fashioned). If I were as organized at home today, I would keep all the cast lists of a company in one folder in such a date order, with colored sheet of paper between seasons. I'd put occasional tear sheet from programs in another. If I put them in my computer, they would lose a lot of their "tangible" value, though you could probably do a lot of Nate Silver/538 like statistics and charts with them. Anyway I've even kept the ticket stubs nestled in the casting sheets of my San Francisco Ballet seasons – when the dancers I most liked were still in the company and they were regularly doing Balanchine and Ratmansky – as a kind of stamp of authenticity. Some of my old City Ballet programs still contain those little slips of paper that indicated a very nervous-making when you first saw them, last minute casting change.

Reading the Wikipedia entry on "West Side Story" gives some interestingly crazy, slightly bad faith, background – which could be a play in itself, if not a musical. Originally WWS was a Romeo and Juliet story (Jerome Robbins's idea) about a Jewish girl and Roman Catholic boy set on the Lower East Side ("East Side Story"). The Jets were Catholic and anti-Semitic, the girl a survivor of the Holocaust. Later the musical was to be set in Los Angeles among Mexican American gangs on Olvera Street. Arthur Laurents. who wrote the book, said he was more comfortable setting the story among Puerto Ricans whom he was more familiar with – though he ended up coining their slang words rather than transcribing them (so that they wouldn't date). Jerome Robbins was happy that the musical had a "Latin beat." Stephen Sondheim originally wanted to write the music as well as the lyrics, but Laurents wouldn't go for that idea. Bernstein wrote some of the more florid lyrics but most of them were eventually dropped. (Bernstein was writing 'Candide' at the same time and some of songs were shuffled back and forth between the two works.) The credits were all over the place, Bernstein given the nod for some lyrics, Sondheim not wanting to be associated with them, Robbins claiming the concept – and no one speaking to him by opening night as a result. Rita Moreno was the only Puerto Rican cast member. So maybe it's alright that the afterlife of West Side Story continues on in a like manner.

nanushka: Yes, shadings of meaning contribute to clarity (and wit).The Oxford Dictionary on Historical Principles has affair as this: To back it up they cite, among others, Noel Coward: "We could carry on a backstairs affair for weeks without saying a word about it." And I'd add to my own OED: Barbara Pym, from Jane and Prudence: "It was not a very nice book – so often Miss Trapnell or Miss Clothier asked her, ‘Is that a nice book you’ve got, Miss Bates?’ – but it described a love affair in the fullest sense of the word and sparing no detail, but all in a very intellectual sort of way and there were a good many quotations from Donne. It was difficult to imagine that her love for Arthur Grampian could ever come to anything like this, and indeed she was hardly conscious of him as she read on into the small hours of the morning to the book’s inevitable but satisfying unhappy ending." In literature at least, most love affairs are unhappy affairs, while relationships are fairly (teleologically speaking) neutral.

Which Degas faithfully recorded. Link from Robert Herbert's Impressionism which treats the movement as documentary footage for a sociological interpretation. "The lives of Morny and Halevy … are very rewarding for the study of Degas’s own role as a backstage at the opera. The artist’s devotion to the dancers at the opera cannot readily be understood unless we examine the roles of powerful men." Suite of backstage monotypes begins on page 107 – https://books.google.com/books?id=p93wb_p4ndgC&pg=PA169&lpg=PA169&dq=degas+jockey+club&source=bl&ots=GjmyZVbhkI&sig=ACfU3U1Bm3hk0ogs0rmF0k_gUhOEsJ43PQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwit1LCu8K_jAhWDBc0KHaFXAckQ6AEwEXoECAkQAQ#v=snippet&q=jockey club&f=false

I think reading Save Me the Waltz alongside Tender is the Night might be helpful. Scott Fitzgerald of course drew from, and collaged in, some of Zelda's observations and letters into his own work. And she perhaps had the purer Modernist voice, something of the tone he needed to use in his own more traditional stories. From their "co-counseling" sessions as Zelda Fitzgerald was being institutionalized in Maryland in 1933 – Quoted in "Tender Is the Night and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Sentimental Identities"

Two things I'll add to my comment above: On the plus side of the Times Dance ledger is the weekly feature Speaking in Dance, consisting of Instagram clips of a fairly wide variety of contemporary dance choreography curated by Gia Kourlas. It's something we wouldn't have had in the gray old days. One of the most intriguing of the recent postings was a compilation of semaphoring Nijinsky moves from Netta Yerushalmy's Paramodernities, also a clip of Pam Tanowitz's pickup company tapping in "rounds." https://www.nytimes.com/column/speakingindance And sadly Douglas Crimp, whom I mentioned as one of the art world-dance world crossover critics, just died. He devoted a chapter in his recent memoir to his New York City Ballet going years with another October journal writer, Craig Owens. Crimp also curated an important show, with Lynne Cooke, on the gritty urban New York art scene of the 70s called Mixed Use, Manhattan (MIT Press), featuring work by Trisha Brown, Joan Jonas, Chantal Ackerman, Peter Hujar, Gordon Matta-Clark and William Gedney. Crimp's dance writings will be published by Dancing Foxes: http://www.artnews.com/2019/07/05/douglas-crimp-dead/

The Times may be having a difficult time finding the right voice for a lead ballet reviewer. Macaulay was unique in being able to create color and (melo)drama around City Ballet and ABT, always advancing the cause of seeing Balanchine afresh, introducing Ratmansky's new world to the readers and keeping an eye on Cunningham. John Rockwell's short tenure just before AM's did not work out, so maybe it's not an easy position to fill. In comparison, there seem to be three visual arts reviewers at the Times now, Jason Farago joining senior reviewers Roberta Smith and Holland Carter. Together they post on average three articles a week and then, along with two or three stringers, write a group of four thumbnails on what's current. Kimmelman does a couple of non-specialist architecture articles a month, and I hardly notice classical music reviewing anymore. Maybe part of the problem is that in the past more compelling new works came out of the dance world, with Tharp and mid-sized companies more active. In the art world painting-painting has had a big revival and there are lots of ongoing rediscoveries, so reviewing reflects that (and of course all the auction and art fair activity). In the fifties and sixties there seemed to be a big crossover between art and dance via Cunningham, Elaine de Kooning, Edwin Denby, Frank O'Hara, Susan Sontag and Douglas Crimp – lots of bouncing back between art openings and City Ballet. Don't think that's the case anymore (except for the Gala). With the exception of Balanchine, who had roots in the Soviet avant-garde and knew how to combine the traditional and radical, Ratmansky, who has a bit of this magic, the lesser but often good Peck, and the Cunningham revivals, I don't see much outside Vail and Jacob's Pillow clips that seem to catch my eye (though more a visual arts eye than dance one). Trey MacIntyre's work, Body/Poem seemed to translate downtown to the San Francisco Opera House stage quite well. But much of what I see at SF Ballet is not dangerously "highbrow" but more sleepy "middlebrow" where a few downtown ideas are borrowed and softened with generic off-the-shelf semi balletic movements. The works seem fussy and overwrought and unclear. And I find myself less interested in boy-girl, or even retrofitted boy-boy, spurned love stories anymore (except, appropriately, in the 19c classics). I enjoyed Ratmansky's Seven Sonatas because it seemed to be more about a world and a community than about individual cases. McIntyre's work too came from another point of view, the second half of Body/Poem an intriguing dance monologue. (Balanchine I always read as a world, and the boy girl relations and solos – such as in Liebeslieder and Emeralds – not what they first appear.) OT: interesting Schjeldahl review and Yau interview with the rediscovered Stanley Whitney, who easel-painted away, albeit sometimes on the floor with a mop, during the Pop and Minimalist 70s and 80 when it was totally unfashionable. https://fireplacechats.wordpress.com/2015/08/12/stanley-whitneys-gorgeous-color-inventions-on-canvas/ I don't know if anyone reads the Brooklyn Rail but it seems to regularly cover the New York Dance scene, St Marks, perhaps a bit unevenly. Has a sponsor credit. https://brooklynrail.org/

Thanks. Both might be worth owning. Craine and Mackrell seem to use as a basis, and amend, many of the old Koegler entries (though without crediting K.). The new Dictionary updates the "Germany" entry through Pina Bausch but eliminates much of the important pre WWII history, Joost, etc. Since much of visual arts of the fifties and sixties in the US (abstract expressionism and minimalism) seem to be a fulfillment of ideas seeded in Russia and Europe in the teens and twenties, this might be a significant loss of history for dance.

Some dance books I've found helpful, randomly found in used bookstores here in San Francisco: Horst Koegler's Dictionary of Ballet Oxford University Press, 1977, seems to be a sturdy and learned reference book, not outdated, but being unsupplemented might be its weakness. Don't know if there's a successor. John Percival's Modern Ballet, studio vista Dutton Pictureback, is an interesting snapshot survey of dance up to 1970, much of it European. Major companies and currents of the period, some now forgotten. Human – Space – Machine. Stage Experiments at the Bauhaus, Spector Books covers important developments in Germany in the twenties that have had a stealth influence on modernist dance of the post war period, lavishly illustrated. Theatre in Revolution: Russian Avant-Garde Stage Design 1913-1935, Thames & Hudson/San Francisco Fine Arts Museums, has chapters by Elizabeth Sourtiz and Nicoletta Misler about Soviet dance experiments which have had a trickle down influence on modern dance everywhere – and during the late twenties on the Diaghilev company. George Balanchine (New Ballet) was a junior member of this movement. The Ballet Annual, Arnold Haskell editor, published from 1948 to 1958, is a good survey of European and American ballet in the immediate post war period. (I see $5.00 penciled on the inner cover of the copies of my broken set.) Bonus: one of the last issues of Ballet Review has an article by Alexei Ratmansky on the problems and delights of restaging a Petipa ballet: http://www.balletreview.com/images/Ballet_Review_47-1-2_Alexei_Ratmanksy.pdf Always liked this bit of ballet history in Franz Kafka's Letters to Felice: And per Sandik, Horst Kroeger's succinct entry on German ballet in his Oxford Dictionary fills in the background of Kafka's note –

I enjoyed reading Artforum's recent reviews of the Cunningham evenings and found this comment about the difference between dancing ballet and dancing Cunningham helpful. From the London review: and this from the Los Angeles review: London - Michael Hargreaves https://www.artforum.com/performance/martin-hargreaves-on-the-london-celebration-of-merce-cunningham-s-100th-birthday-79580 Los Angeles - Megan Metcalf https://www.artforum.com/performance/megan-metcalf-on-the-los-angeles-celebration-of-merce-cunningham-s-100th-birthday-79579 New York - Deborah Jowett https://www.artforum.com/performance/night-of-100-solos-a-centennial-eventnew-york-79578

Tacitus the historian was pretty yappy, sharp and staccato, though Tacita Dean the filmmaker is not. I was thinking that three syllable names for dogs are good for calling them home (I always liked the four part Greek Ach-il-lay-us for that) but one syllable names are better for disciplining. Miranda (Shakespeare), Florida (Jane Bowles) and Sidonie (Colette) might also be good choices.

It should be Miss Havisham rather than just plain Havisham – always waiting for something, a little like Odysseus's dog, Argos. Moriarty is also significantly Sherlock Holmes' adversary. Of the Latins, Catullus would be a nice three syllable name (as would be Tacitus, or Tacita). And where is Asta, as in "and Asta as Asta" of "The Thin Man"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnWGRJkIRIw (There's also the Cerberus associated with Cerberus Capital management company – guarding the Hades of money perhaps.)

Good comment. And Seibert goes on to say that Huxley "could use some of Mr. Ramasar’s un-self-conscious gusto." Macaulay should have gracefully ended his Instagram comment with "... how much the directorship welcomes him back." His use of the words "stridently" and "irredeemably" is disrespectful to those made uncomfortable by the situation. Have enjoyed reading Marina Harss's reviews at Dance Tabs and the Danceviewtimes City Ballet reviewers. But the day of the long thoughtful review seem to be over. (Or else I can't seem to find my way to them as easily as I used to.)

Preston Sturges was a great men's, women's and extra's director as well as great screwball comedy writer (Easy Living with Jean Arthur for Mitchell Leisen). Created classic roles for Hutton, Veronica Lake, Barbara Stanwick, and Joel McCrea – as well as the brassy Eugene Palette and long suffering Franklin Pangborn. Now looking back, at least as I remember, Day perhaps had two big movie careers – an early group of April in Paris, Love Me or Leave Me etc – and later the racy Ross Hunter movies, with Man who Knew in the middle. Her name seemed to be perpetually on the marque of my hometown cinema as I was growing up. It's not that she took or didn't take credit, it's that the event on her show was a significantly newsworthy one and was reported on the front pages of most newspapers. Hudson was a shell of his former self and people were shocked to see what AIDS could do to someone who was so familiar to them, almost a neighbor. It really brought the epidemic home to them.