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Quiggin

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Everything posted by Quiggin

  1. Thanks for the alert, Kathleen. and hope you've shaken this off soon. Here in San Francisco omicron has not yet really hit, though our R number has doubled in a month to 2.1. We're pretty well vacinated – 80-90% – and most everyone in my neighborhood seems to wear a mask on the street. So that's a little reassuring, though the fact that omicron is just a notch behind measles in its transmittability is not. Bob Wachter at University of California, San Francisco, while concerned, says, "Omicron may turn out to be a 6-8 week hurricane, doing a lot of damage but moving through quickly." That's based on numbers from South Africa. More here of his level-headed commentary: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1473787861056901124.html
  2. Gia Kourlas makes some good points: that the dances are more about the camerawork than the choreography, and that the sharks don't move differently from the Jets. And while the choreography is good, it's not part and parcel of the whole work – which was the whole idea of the musical after "Oklahoma," where everything, including the songs and dances, were there to advance the story. She also wishes that they had included the dream ballet – and the nightmare that turns into – to provide more dramatic heft. Maybe too many people – Spiellberg and his cameraman, Kushner, and Peck – working in different directions?
  3. That's why John Coltrane's version exists – as an exorcism of sorts. I'm reading a book of Adalbert Stifter's short stories, just reissued by NYRB, which may in a way be a Christmas movie / TSOM substitute. They take place in the mountains or unpopulated countryside, there's snow and significant weather, they move slowly and describe the landscapes they move through in meticulous detail. "Limestone," about a surveyor taking the measure of the geology of a poor and remote part of the country, was an influence on Kafka as he was describing the adventures of the surveryor K in "The Castle." I just finished Anuk Arudpragasam's finely crafted, Stifter-paced "A Passage North" and have started up "Gravel Heart" by Nobel prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnash, which seems to have been rushed back into publication on paper stock just this side of newsprint. Both are about childhood homes and homecomings which I guess Christmas narratives are about.
  4. Sylvère Lotringer's obituary was recently published in the Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/books/sylvere-lotringer-dead.html In a 2006 interview in the Brooklyn Rail he talks about how middling works of art and general cultural infill increasingly obscure our view of the genuine. https://brooklynrail.org/2006/09/art/a-life-in-theory
  5. Some strong comments in a Times piece, The 'West Side Story' Remake We Didn't Need, about how the producers were super-conscientious about getting all the details right, while on the whole perpetuating many of the same old problems. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/opinion/west-side-story-remake.html
  6. With all due respect, I suggest giving this new movie a chance when it comes out streaming on HBO Max. I probably should say that I'm not an ideal audience person for this type of musical. In general I prefer the pre-improved, pre-Sondheim/Hammerstein works of Rodgers & Hart ("I was reading Schopenhauer last night/and I think that Schopenhauer was right"), and among movie musicals, "Singing in the Rain" is probably my favorite Hollywood concoction. It is what it is, nothing more. I was curious though why critics like A O Scott jumped on the new West Side Story bandwagon. (And The Bandwagon is another fave.)
  7. Thanks, On Pointe, for your corrective review. Seemed hard to match up the effusive review by A O Scott in the Times and the online trailer with its heavy-handed camera work. Perhaps it's time to retire tracking shots for a couple of years, even a decade. And yes it is odd that Elgort towers over Zegler. In life or even on stage that may be fine, but in films every mismatch becomes exaggerated by a couple of magnitudes.
  8. I apologize if I've given the wrong impression of Jennings's whole article which does cite sources. Unfortunately for many readers (but fortunately for the writers), it's behind a paywall. Of Scarlett's abstract ballets, which Jennings admires: A letter to the editor somewhat substantiates his findings: It would seem that Scarlett was following what he thought was given the ok, but didn't quite learn all the rules, or was clumsy at it, and got caught.
  9. Luke Jennings did a good background piece on Liam Scarlett and the Royal Ballet that helped reset my thinking on this subject. More complex than it first appears. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n18/luke-jennings/learned-behaviour
  10. Tom Daley in a Guardian interview says he became very aware of his weight: Which links to another Guardian article about eating disorders in men: Part of this may be the 24 hour public relations age we live in. I've noticed people preemptively apologizing for all sorts of imaginary offenses. Thinness may be a form of self-apology. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/oct/07/tom-daley-on-love-grief-and-health-it-was-hammered-into-me-that-i-needed-to-lose-weight https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/sep/22/male-anorexia-shame-still-stops-men-getting-help
  11. Will Heinrich in the Times has a good analysis of the paintings of Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938), now at the Barnes in Philadelphia. In some ways Valadon seems to be throwing the ball of who's looking at who back to Manet and Matisse quite forcefully. You could perhaps say that her painting career might have some parallels with Colette's as a writer. Interesting how her reputation as a painter was eclipsed for a while by that of her son, Maurice Utrillo. A comment from one of the readers tries to set the record straight about when Valadon began painting: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/arts/design/valadon-painter-barnes-philadelphia.html
  12. : James Stewart to Kim Novak in Vertigo Men's bodies have also gone through a change in the past 20 years – though men are not particularly criticized or held down on this basis – and you see it in male dancers' builds. From swimmers' bodies and lightly toned bodies, the ideal has gone to bulked-up and surrealistically defined gym bodies. Muscle Beach, "Charles Atlas" bodies which used to be considered coarse are a model for men to aspire to. Perhaps they're kind of an analogue to the SUVs everyone drives now. In a way both of these things – womens' thin bodies and mens' overly muscular bodies – are a function of the hyper visuality of our time – of how well they photograph to be posted on Instagram, how one's efforts to bulk up or stay thin can be visually quantified. I wonder if Justin Peck's choreography lends itself to a greater range of body types.
  13. I remember Silas Marner being read in high school and Emily Dickinson much discussed in third year English. My community college English teacher admonished us for not all having read Dorothy Baker's Cassandra at the Wedding – Mrs. Baker lived nearby and her daughters "Cassandra" and "Judith" had been our high school classmates. My favorite Austens are the "autumnal" Persuasion, and Mansfield Park, which is a big novel, almost like one of Henry James. I liked how the narrative switches towards the end to an exchange of letters and you follow it thirdhand, through a kind of telescope. The Crawfords are not particularly "nice" or "good" people, and the father may be a bit compromised by owning a plantation in the Bahamas, but both he and Fanny Price seem to be pretty clear-sighted. After you ran out of Jane Austen books to read, you were supposed to go on to Barbara Pym as a kind of dessert. Recently I came across Charlotte Brontë's impressions of Jane Austen in her friend Elizabeth Gaskell's biography that Brontë's father commissioned. Brontë writes to G. E. Lewes, George Eliot's partner, on January 11, 1848 and says:
  14. I read the whole thing and have highlighted some of it below. I think he makes the whole matter worse. Macaulay should simply say he was trying to be witty in a way that no longer has much standing and that he's learned to move on.
  15. How the spoken name sounds with "Ballet" matters too. Chicago sounds better than Illinois, Cleveland than Ohio, Houston than Texas. Philadephia and Pennsylvania, on the other hand. are equally appealing – and in my California imagination equally exotic. At one time I associated them with "The Philadelphia Story" and "PEnnsyvania 6-500" from "The Glenn Miller Story". Or with Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians. At least ballet companies don't complicate matters by pulling up stakes and moving as sports teams sometimes do, like the once Los Angeles Rams or the Minnesota Lakers.
  16. Both Louise Fishman and Joan Mitchell were represented by Robert Miller Gallery and later followed John Cheim to Cheim & Read. Some very nice catalogues on their works are available to page through online here – https://www.cheimread.com/publications Poem Read at Joan Mitchell's I hope there will be more more drives to Bear mountain and searches for hamburgers, more evenings avoiding the latest Japanese movies and watching Helen Vinson and Warner Baxter in Vogues of 1938 instead, more discussions in lobbies of the respective greatnesses of Diana Adams and Allegra Kent, more sunburns and more half-mile swims in which Joe beats me as Jane [Freilicher] watches, lotion-covered and sleepy, more arguments over Faulkner's inferiority to Tolstoy while sand gets into my bathing trunks ...
  17. Another cohort that might be of interest are the "women of Ninth Street" – Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Elaine de Kooning (who also wrote about ballet), Lee Krasner and Grace Hartigan – all of whom held their own at the "Club" of Abstract-Expressionists of the 1950s. Frankenthaler's complex woodcuts are currently on view at the Dulwich gallery in London and a large (underlit) Joan Mitchell show is on display here in San Francisco, after which it will move onto Baltimore and Paris. Ninth Street Women – https://www.google.com/books/edition/Ninth_Street_Women/afQlCwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=ninth+street+women&printsec=frontcover Frankenthaler at Dulwich – https://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk Nice talk on Mitchell's work at SF MOMA by Stanley Whitney – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_bxpmwYdqg
  18. Natalia Goncharova is indeed a major artist – you can see traces of her influence in New York gallery painting today. We mustn't forget that the Soviet Union of the 1920s was a very encouraging climate for women artists – for Lyubov Popova and Alexandra Exter (who also did sets and costumes for ballet), as well as Goncharova. From the Tate show The short life of the equal woman – https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-15-spring-2009/short-life-equal-women
  19. It's a rather effective episode of Anatomy of a Dance – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKKt2mSPI-8
  20. Good discussion. I think Balanchine may have had trouble with Onegin based on the distortions to, and sentimentalization of, Pushkin's story. (And what Balanchine himself could have done with Tatiana's dream!). Also the British were a little cool on Balanchine in general in the 50s, complaining that his choreography of ballets like Symphony in C was cold and mathematical. I find Peck and Ratmansky works inventive and witty enough to fit into the City Ballet repertoire and hold up their end of the evening programs. Russian Seasons can be very affecting and Ratmansky's recent Bernstein Bubble for ABT was full of wonderful variations. What's nice about Pam Tanowitz's work is how it cleanses the palate of postmodernist empty gestured, live-fish-in-a-basket choreography such as Wayne McGregor's and treats the parts of dance as simple set of materials to be assembled and incrementally varied. Well, Balanchine was a unique phenomenon and it's difficult to hold him a kind of norm. He brought the inheritance of the traditional Russian ballet, the radical Soviet avant garde of the early twenties (out of whose style book The Four Temperaments comes) and ideas he had worked on in Diaghilev's company. Only Ratmansky has some of that depth of experience, with the Bolshoi and via the Taganka Theater productions he watched closely. In the art world the parallels would be with the Black Mountain College where young artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly were exposed to the Bauhaus teachings of Kurt Schwitters and Josef Albers. Now it's Matisse who often seems to be a point of reference in the art world, not only with his color sense but with the way he pushes the dynamics of the painting right to the edges of the canvas. I wonder if there's a point of reference in the past that young choreographers could open and and have a dialogue with – Ballets suédois, Kurt Jooss – that would enrichen their work and help them use the space of the "canvas" in a different way. Some place outside the closed loop of the usual influences.
  21. I left out "these days" to reflect my own thinking on Spielberg. I imagine Justin Peck's choreography getting lost in all the restless production values – hot colors, big sets, camera movements, etc. Translating the stage musical and choreography to the screen is always problematic in that film basically a realistic medium. Its tendency is to document everything, major and minor, with a ruthless eye that gives every element an equivalent value, whereas on stage you only notice the magic, not the clunkiness of the sets and furniture and the awkwardness of physical space. Directors who might have been interesing choices: 1) small scale - someone like the Chantal Ackerman or Jacques Demy who in different ways would have separated the everday actions from the songs and dance, foregrounded Peck's choreography against simple backgrounds, thus making them discrete elements – two films checkerboarded or running in parallel. Or 2) big scale - Martin Scorsese, who has a subtler sense of the craft and better understanding of cinematic values than Speilberg. Even Julian Schnabel would have been a more sober choice and would have cooled everything down a couple of notches.
  22. From Gia Kourias's article in the Times today, a collaborative video between Madeline Hollander and David Hallberg cataloguing all the varieties of the balletic bow – a typology of the art, endlessly fascinating. Funniest of all for me was the self-effacing New York City Ballet female bow. https://theshed.org/program/219-madeline-hollander
  23. I have a big pair of classic 7x35 binoculars which do allow a fairly wide view – 4 or 5 dancers worth from the rear of orchestra with a fairly natural amount of 3D. But switching between my single lens distance glasses and binoculars is always a bit of a comedy routine with me. And then deciding between the intimacy of a close up vs the overall view – have I missed someone entering and exiting?
  24. A closer look at the order list shows there may be some duplications, so that number should perhaps be readjusted to 30-40-50 copies? But there are also three electronic resource vendors providing online copies – Alexander Street, Axis and Overdrive. https://sflib1.sfpl.org/record=b4829437~S1 https://sflib1.sfpl.org/search~S1?/aPazcoguin%2C+Georgina%2C/apazcoguin+georgina/-3%2C-1%2C0%2CB/exact&FF=apazcoguin+georgina&1%2C6%2C
  25. I'm number 32 of 40 on the waiting list for Swan Dive at the San Francisco Public Library. It turns out it might not such a long wait as I originally thought since, digging deeper into the record, I see that the library has ordered something like 83 copies! In comparison they purchased/leased 10 copies of Rachel Cusk's Second Place and only two of Susan Bernofsky's well-reviewed (except by Joy Williams in Bookforum) biography of Robert Walser, the last two books I've requested. Anyway I look forward to reading Swan Dive, at least from the intriguing excerpts.
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