Quiggin

But Farrell’s Balanchine is quite different than anyone else’s -- a combination of gothic (Paul Parish used this in his review) and introverted and also sweet and somewhat precious. So different from sunny and brilliant Villella’s. Maybe against Farrell's words, I’d say while the Balanchine pas de deux holds the whole together, it’s not romantic, or only romantic in the 19th century sense, in that it’s most always an essay in loss and the porosity of love. Anyway it was a thrill to see the Ives piece at Zellerbach, which I had never seen and has so much fascinating development within the walls of such a restrictive premise. The La Valse excerpt was very finely done, but Stars and Stripes was a bit wilted. La Sonnambula was best of all -- even though the recent performances at NYCB with Nicolai Hubbe seemed to be the ultimate version. Farrell’s was a close up section, and I had never really looked at the part -- and never been so moved -- as when the poet goes over the dreamer with an overhead, reverse examining ring or halo, over the length of her body and in the process collapses behind her. Paul Parish had this nice image of the ballet in his review:

Zizek was being playful, but his point was that the movement of fast capital of the last ten years -- totally untethered from any reality or responsibility, almost a pure abstraction -- has caused turbulence for lots of poor countries. John Maynard Keynes -- hardly a Zizek (and married to Russian ballerina Lydia Lopovoka!) -- has pointed out roughly the same thing in his image likening capital to a school of goldfish lying in a pond in peaceful suspension at one corner. Then suddenly, in the flash of on eye, they are in another corner for no good reason. Keynes was for some sort of tethering of capital (one imagines Roman goldfish on chains). Today's Financial Times "Long View" is, in the same way, nervous that the nervous capital of hedge and other hair-trigger funds -- the "dollar carry trade" -- will not stay in place long enough for solid "long-term buy-and-hold investors to put more more money into markets." Lots of everyday lives are tied to these marionette movements of money. Zizek has made lots of complicated ideas fairly accessible -- Terry Eagleton and Frederic Jameson have some quibbles but have given him good marks -- and he spoke at the same forum Jane Jacobs and Joan Didion do here in San Francisco and also at a small down-at-the-heels book store on Valencia Street. At least in that context, he did look like someone having taken something of a of vow of poverty -- and genuine in his concerns about the loss of culture, in the broadest sense. One of Z's themes was about fast middle class normalization of previous dangerous ideas and zones -- which as someone interested in city planning these days, I see in the shockingly rapid assimilation of the Meat Packing District in Manhattan into grand hipness, without a even decent period of mourning for the old. Hopefully Mr. Koch's nervous capital is at finally at rest in its new seats, viewing Opera & Ballet. John Maynard & Lydia lighting up

It's interesting that Gates who has developed the devilish software system is so publicly generous and that Apple which has developed the angelic software system has a rather obscure philanthropic program -- one of "America's Least Philanthropic Companies" :Stanford Social Innovation Review. Even more devilish than DOS is Slajov Zizek's London Books riff on "Liberal [in the old fashioned economic-liberalism sense] Communists": "Nobody Has to be Vile"

Dale, this is indeed cause to celebrate. But public access to a great many of these tapes is sometimes iffy. In theory they're supposed to be available through research libraries, but in practice -- at least in my case -- it seemed not so easy to arrange.

The Guardian has a good overview of Levi-Strauss' life by Maurice Bloch, professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics: Guardian obituary And from Tristes Tropiques:

It looks as though they've corrected the Firebird error. I remember the TLS captioning a photo of Balanchine and Allegra Kent as "Balanchine and his wife Maria Tallchief." Bee Wilson is not a dance writer but does review for the London Review of Books and the New Yorker, and writes often about food. She does make the book sound perhaps like a better read than it is (maybe she should have written it!) but I'm always hooked when someone says something is like a story out of Chekhov: Added: no, the Firebird reference is still there on second viewing.

Wheeldon's ballets are stunning & virtuosic -- especiLly when done by SFBallet and he's just been here and put all the finishing touches in place -- but I can't sY they're wonderful. They don't really develop and I agree with alaistair M that he can't do variation form which is at the heart of ballet -- even Cunningham has maybe a form of it in his wit and Michael Clark Company despite its punky dishelvedness has a nice musicality and fills the stage like a painter does his or her canvas. I can't imagine seeing three W's on one program. Disclaimer - typed on an iPod touch while hard drive is in shop being replaced. Many happy go lucky defaults -- especially it's / its --must be overridden.

I was originally upset about the Koch renaming, but a Marxist friend -- and a great Balanchine fan -- has said it's alright. Anyway it's better it goes to NYCB & the Opera than to a football stadium or a presidential library. In "The Recognitions" I think one of the benefactors, or someone like one, has happily confused Das Rheingold with Miss Rheingold.

Austerely beautiful, once a year I listen to a recording of Wozzeck -- Erich Kleiber/Annelies Kupper -- that I just happen to have because Szigeti is doing Berg's violin concerto on the other side (an Lp and mono!). This sounds about which Bart may have a word or two. * Regarding Benjamin and the reproduction of performances, I just reread the essay after even more than ten years -- and we should perhaps revisit it at another time when a film discussion is up and running. Thanks, Patrick -- and Drew. The original text is chock full of interesting things. Some favorites: And Benjamin brings up the difference between a clock on stage that should never tell time, and the clock in film which is "made beautiful" because it does.

It is difficult with that essay -- I've never quite figured it out. But it was addressed to how the "aura" is missing in photography, in duplication and mass dissemination. Benjamin seems rather melancholy about it. A good topic perhaps -- I think Patrick's point that more is lost in reproduction of music is true -- part of its very soul. In the mechanical reproduction of ballet the mundane and and extraneous details are "noticed" and raised to the level of the good stuff. Again it's another topic.

Thanks, sunday. I forgot about Hedy Lamarr as a scientist -- or mathematician. She was indeed the inventor of Wifi, along with George Antheil who helped her set up the 88 or so frequencies specified. Thanks to them all our phone calls or rather emails now go through a sort of Ballet Mecanique before they finally get to their destinations!

I tend to be suspicious of "realists" like Ross Douthat, especially peevish comments like -- Hardly worldly and statesmanlike ... The problem with Friedman is that he goes "on this hand" & "on the other hand," for example on Egypt: I see elevator operators with prayer rugs in the corners of their elevators saying prayers before we go to another floor (=the past, to be jettsoned), but from trains I see camel drivers with mobile phones (+the future, heart thumping in his chest). His waffling on Iraq War II didn't help -- he ended up seeing a shining peaceful kingdom just within hands' reach, on the windowsill of history -- though he had previously done so much on the spot reporting that would have told him to be very, very skeptical -- as were most other Middle Eastern reporters of all political persuasions. The Nobel was a real hot potato and I don't think Obama could have refused it. It would simply have be too impolite and insulting, and it wouldn't be in his character to do so. We'll have to see what he says in Stockholm. (And JFK didn't do much but give inspiring speeches and yet he seem to have a good effect on the world.) (The FT suggests that one of the worse things to have happen to Obama was the resignation of Tom Daschle; with him on board none of the health care craziness would have happened.) And OFF TOPIC, I did like this award to Carol W. Greider by the "obscure Norwegians." A bit of an interview with her from the Times (warning: a mild but substantial slap at Lawrence Summers ahead). The part at the end about her children is nice:

Bart, until recently I had Pierrot Lunaire on my ipod Touch and would listen to it on my walks through the financial district. I associated it with someone on the 1 California in bankers pinstripes who would scramble up onto the bus each morning in a zig zaggy way. I tend to like lieder more than opera, Elizabeth Schumann singing Hugo Wolf, and the stray paths the voice and piano take, criss-crossing here and there. Cristian's Callas clip appealed to me, the concentration and barebones simplicity of it. I second your idea of developing a set of common denominators.

Stephen Press in his solid "Prokofiev's Ballet's for Diaghilev" says this in the Pas d'acier chapter: Regarding Balanchine -- who seems a force apart from the Ballets Russes (look at his 1933 season without Diaghiliev) -- Elizabeth Suritz says Balanchine was exposed to and participated in the best of the Russian avant garde: Lopukhov, Goleizovsky, Gorsky, he worked closely with the Factory of the Eccentric Actor, he saw Meyerhold, Tairov, Vakhtangov, he was exposed to Tatlin and Malevich and Akhmatova and Acmeism (Tim Scholl makes the literary connections). Suritz: There was most likely no equivalent to what was happening in the arts in Russia in Paris -- or London: who was the equivalent to Tatlin and Malevich in England: Duncan Grant? Vanessa Bell? (O K maybe Wyndham Lewis). Cubism was in the doldrums and Picasso was in his conservative neo-classissism stage, as was Stravinsky. Kochno was the person who talked about the changing Ballets Russes audience and it was admittedly very late: Massine was the choreographer with unruly accents, not Nijinska -- apologies. According to Kochno, 'Rossignol' had to be rechoreographed by Balanchine: Toklas I misremembered. She was talking about Post World War II Paris: She does later add this interesting observation:

Simon and Leonid, I'm off for an architectural walking tour, but I'll look for my notes this (California) evening. My immediate sense is that the Russian avant garde in the late teens and early twenties was a highly significant factor in all the arts, not quite the father of it all but of a lot, my bias of course ... Leonid, who were the dancers in the Scheherazade you saw in the 1960s -- and in some of the revivals of the other Ballets Russes pieces that you especially liked?

I don't know if it's been posted here but I read somewhere that Willy Brandt got his Nobel fairly early on and Gorbachev did too. I think it helps nudge the President to his best side and give him some backup. Here is a tuber of a link, hopefully not too controversial, by Gary Wills, on how President Obama is somewhat a prisoner of history -- New York Review article

There may be a bit of rose colored glassiness to our admiration of Ballets Russes. I don't have my notes but according to Alice B. Toklas and Boris Kochno, the audience had changed greatly by the mid twenties -- the smart people weren't going any longer, and the real innovative work was being done in Russia -- that's why Diaghiliev commissioned Prokofiev to compose "Le Pas d'acier" and why he hired Balanchine who had cut his choreographic teeth on the Russian avant garde. Diaghiliev gave him some guidance but he was pretty full formed, and D's attentions were then on Igor Markevitch ("half-Igor"), I believe. Some of Nijinska's choreography had to be abandoned, the accents were so impossible, even "Les Noces" is supposed to be hellishly difficult to bring off -- I can't remember if it's Maria Tallchief who talks about this. "Petrushka" does holds up, but does "Sheherazade" -- as much as say "La Bayadere"?

I thought I'd add some of Anthony Tommasini's review of Gustavo Dudamel's inaugural concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It touches on some of the points discussed above. The concert consisted of the premiere of John Adams' "City Noir" which Tommasini found "riveting" but whose architecture was a bit elusive, and the Mahler First ... Los Angeles Glows ...

Great post and development, Patrick, especially how with France... The Anglo-Saxon world -- perhaps with the help of the Murdoch press -- seems now to be structured so that it's only defined by outrageous acts -- or just the endless possibility of outrageous act.

Simon, I'm not try to argue, just calm things down a bit. This is a very slippery slope ... what will we do with Rimbaud and Baudelaire and even Diaghliev if we follow out this thinking? And the English Baudelaire, Swinburne?

Very sad. He was the first love of me and my photographer friends -- we'd flirt with the idea of Avedon but always return to Penn. Penn & Avedon -- and other gods of photography such as Diane Arbus and Louise Dahl Wolf all came out the head, thigh of the same crusty and enigmatic teacher -- Alexei Brodovitch. Like Brodovitch ("Ballet" 1933-37 ~ Cotillion) Penn took great ballet pictures, like the one of Tanaquil Laclercq from the Balanchine's (he's at her feet) "Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne." Here's the likewise crusty John Szarkowski on Penn: from Boston Globe obit

There are some good conductors still out there. No one does Mahler like Abbado -- incredibly textured and nuanced though a bit sweet -- and there is the subtle Vladimir Jurowski with the London Philharmonic and Russian National Orchestra -- whose quiet and intricate hand gestures are endlessly fascinating to watch. It's not the goldenest of ages but pretty good. Regarding differences in conductors, it was always interesting to hear what Klaus Tennstedt could get out of the New York Philharmonic that others couldn't -- struggling and calming their nervousness and nervyness to get the slow movements just right. The reclusive and demanding Sergiu Celibidache took the student orchestra from Curtis Institute and got an amazing sound from them, played like one person, at Carnegie Hall. And Los Angeles Philharmonic seems to have been fortunate to have Dudamel succeed Esa Pekka Salonen and Carlo Maria Giulini, all with their own way of doing things. Regarding the salaries, they're tiny compared to financial experts and bankers -- who have conducted some very bad music lately.

Two or three year differences at most. And this all seems to have been happened in a much more naive and trusting time ... But I didn't intend to sidetrack the discussion and agree that we should return to the ongoing developments of this case.

Simon, Camille Paglia is so nutty and unscholarly and uncitable and the least good part of your argument. Homosexuality is a part of human nature -- a constructive one -- and has run through history like Prokofiev says like a red thread of a minor key through a Beethoven symphony. There is no love poetry in all of ancient Greece that is not same sex driven, check out Mary Beard at the TLS or K J Dover. Only in the late Hellenistic novels does heterosexuality come in the picture, so you could argue the opposite. The case Cristian cited is not so different than what happened when I was a child at Young Mens Christian Association camps in the Sequoias in the part of California known as the Bible Belt. Young people, same age, older and younger, had their crushes and meaningful and trivial romances under the big trees and stars and then went back to real life and school and it was all part of growing up. Didn't Margaret Mead cover this ground years ago? But eros and youth has nothing to do with the Polanski case.

Again I can't help but wonder what combination of things people were thinking when they signed the petition. Nadine Marquand, whose daughter's was killed by a popular singer, who got off to her dismay with a light sentence, signed it. It may have had something to do with another case of the US overreaching or cynicism about the Swiss protecting swindlers' bank accounts. So maybe we should withold judgment a bit on this. -- And again if we stop seeing and discussing their movies here on Ballet Talk, it's going to be pretty slim pickings movie-wise from now on. (Hopefully Claire Denis did not sign -- 35 Shots of Rum is well worth seeing!)