Quiggin

I've never understood Jed Perl's project or taste. At one time he didn't like Jasper Johns, but now he says the Rauschenberg is less important than Johns. He doesn't like Pollock and Kline, but champions far less interesting artists like Jean Helion and Kitaj. He seems to want set up a topsy turvy, artistically old-fashioned, Huntington Hartfordy version of the Museum of Modern art, without walls. John Updike, of all people, takes Perl to task for his conservative taste and fuzzy critical vocabulary: "The words 'existential' and 'empirical' remain hazy, as much as Perl loves and uses them. And I can't find 'existentialize"' in my dictionary."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/books/re...perl&st=nyt

And Kimmelman's obituary does, as dirac says, seem a bit bland and cozy. He characterizes the great period of the 1950's, when Rauschenberg's best work was done, thusly "[he began] by making quirky, small-scale assemblages out of junk he found on the street in downtown Manhattan..." Hardly. It was a brave and passionate and nutty period in which Rauschenberg erased a deKooning painting and signed the erasure as his own, and did these annoyingly interesting all black paintings on a support of woven of newspaper.

Way before he met Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg brought Cy Twombly to Black Mountain College where they studied with watchful Charles Olson and sweet but cranky Joseph Albers. Albers had been at the Bauhaus with Rauschenberg's seemingly greatest influence, Kurt Schwitters.

Here is a bit of a 1953 review by "N.N." of a show in Italy from "Writings on Twombly" as a example of a rare positive review.

"The two artists demonstrate a quality of outrage. To leave behind such a clamorously dynamic and standardized world as North America so as to engage with cutting-edge European sensibility by making signs and magical objects that echo mysterious and disconcerting ancestral cultures, as Rauschenberg evokes and expresses them through his haunted gaze, and through Moroccan tapestries aimed, according to Twombly, at soliciting an esthetic response of a penetrating and subtle kind, is evidence of an imaginative sensibility verging on distressed oddity."

Another, but on Twombly alone, by Copeland C. Burg in 1951 goes: "The most curious and worst exhibition of paintings I ever saw in Chicago is hanging in the handsome new Seven Stairs Gallery at 670 N. Michigan av...The paintings are revolting--nothing else describes them. They are strong in the sense that they repel, as a rattlesnake in the hot sand. It is truly shocking to confront them...." Perhaps this takes us full circle.

Does anyone know the title and year of the Kenneth Koch poem about New York City Ballet? Arlene Croce quotes three lines from it in Going to the Dance:

...the blue-white sea

Outside the port-hole: Agon, or Symphony in C.

Unlike a painting or a building, dance is of the moment, lining is a stretch of time, and even video recordings are but a shadow of the real experience. The tradition and knowledge of ballet requires rigorous training, and it is essentially being passed from person to person through time. This is one of the special things about classic ballet which makes it so precious to those who love it.

The continuity of ballet is indeed miraculous.

It's also interesting that as high culture as it is, in the 20th century at least, ballet seemed dependent on dancers from working class families to keep it going. I'm thinking of Nureyev, Villella, Farrell, and all the dancers from Cuba that we depend on so heavily. They seem to remember how to possess a lucky bit of space and remember how to tell stories. Or am I romanticizing too much?

papeetepatrick and dirac, I apologize for my Rechy / Anger dyslexia -- I sometimes cross them up. I remember once driving to see Anger films passing along Rechy's Santa Monica Boulevard to see them, maybe that's some of it.

To add to the growing list: Susan Sontag, who (I think) went to Hollywood High and listened to Arthur Schnabel records at listening booths at (I assume) at Music City at Sunset and Vine (she didn't specify where and I didn't ask her the one chance I had), also wrote a nice account of going to visit Thomas Mann in Pacific Palisades (where Nijinska also lived).

Romantic banality, instead of banal romanticism I would have it--or yes, banality and romanticism side by side, marbled as in marzipan.

Has "The Last Tycoon" been mentioned as a book on LA? It is dated and as romantic (romantic and banal is the maybe the general tenor of LA) as the Chandler books are, but I think the part about the cameraman who can't find work--there is a rumor going about that he is losing his sight--is very true to life. When I lived there, everyone pretended Los Angeles was easy going and there were few rules but there were and they were invisible and lethal.

It's also interesting that everything real in Los Angeles is seen from through the eyes of a detective. Or the ex-patriots: Stravinsky, Renoir, Adorno, Brecht, or the Swiss photographer Robert Frank.

Musso & Frank: I was not yet up to the Martini stage, papeetepatrick, (it sounds like I missed out on something very interesting) when I lived on Poinsettia Place, but many of my afternoons were saved by the luxury of Musso's dependable 1.75 soups. They did bake their own bread when no one else did, made bread pudding from the crusts and their hearts of iceberg lettuce salad was always a great treat. The chef used to cut out coupons from newspapers with his carving knife at the lunch counter late in the afternoons. And what the waiters referred to as "new" room had been built in the 1940s.

John Rechy: The church, whose steps he is standing on--he's dressed in a rather strange, fairly unerotic huster's jump suit--in the author's photo of his new book, is just around the corner from Musso's, on Las Palmas, just beyond the outdoor newsstand. Dirac's warning is correct, Rechy's retelling of moldy old Hollywood tales is very untrustworthy. His fiction is, at some level, untrustworthy too. Alfred Chester got in lots of trouble for panning Rechy's first book in a review that begins this way,

"This is the worst confection yet devised by the masterminds behind the Grove epater-la-post-office Machine. So fabricated is it that, despite the adorable photograph on the rear of the dust jacket, I can hardly believe there is a real John Rechy—and if there is, he would probably be the first to agree that there isn't—" [Full text at NYRB - $]

On the side of the Trust there are probably horrendous difficulties getting clearance rights from all the people who were ever involved in the production, even at this late date, it seems.

As far as Symphony in C there seem to be two great accounts of the second movement from Allegra Kent and Conrad Ludlow, in color and another (maybe) in black and white. The big thing is that students are watching the Paris Opera Ballet and Kirov's versions and learning from those, rather from the vintage Balanchine footage. So these version are being transmitted. It's like learning your Haydn through Brahms (though Balanchine himself did prefer Brahms to Haydn)--or something like that.

Excellent post, popularlibrary, especially

emptiness, gesture as poetry, non-explanation

I think Darci Kistler says somewhere "You're in love with your partner / you never look at your partner." The pas de deuxs in Balanchine--especially in Stravinsky Violin Concerto--are mostly really dual monologues. That's why I--I know I'm really in the minority on this--find it so hard to watch the Paris Opera Ballet Jewels; it's nuanced out with coy looks and extra gestures and extra elasticity (with the exception of the great solos in Emeralds). Balanchine should be sharp and full of shifting planes. He's a high cubist, by way of Braque of 1911 and Tatlin and Constructivism.

I did enjoy the couple (I couldn't really make out what the corps were doing) in the third movement of the Kirov hand-held Symphony in C, sort of in tandem, Gene Kelly/Fred Astaire-ish for a stretch.

The second movement looked a little Allegra Kent-ish to me--very beautiful, but the narrative thrust seems to be lost. It's maybe a string of quotations. And yes, "molassassy."

Part of the slowness or deliberateness may be the Russian style, where every movement seems to reach through a series of plateaus or locks or channels before it finishes. At least with the women in my limited experience--watching the lovely Maria Kotchekova here in San Francisco, and the Kirov here on its last two tours in Sleeping Beauty and Jewels (that Jewels performance was really something). The men, Korsakov, and Konsuntsev and Zelensky always seemed much freer.

Why do companies always smudge--even SF Ballet does--one of the most profound parts of the second movement of Symphony in C, the part where the foot of the ballerina--often a stylus or cursor in Balanchine--is guided to penetrate, and hold there for a beat, the space of the virtual hoop held up by two of the secondary dancers? The Kirov breaks it up and treats it as if it were a bit of court politeness. It becomes modest and inconsequential.

I thought this Times reader's comment was interesting in that it touches on the issue of the wide-bore hot-rodding of horn instruments:

Hearing the Philharmonia at the Festival Hall last night coarsely blasting through Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, I was pining for the better blended and less harsh sound made by the narrower-bore, older brass instruments such as played by the Vienna Philharmonic. With shrill upper woodwind, trumpets and trombones making twice as much noise as half-a-century ago, noise junkies may get their thrills, but the orchestral balance is all off-set, and the result is ugly, if not on occasion, painful...Time for London brass players to ditch their modern wide-bore American instruments or for conductors to take control over the unruly brass-blowers on the back row!

And wasn't the English sound once wonderfully burnished and subdued but still played with great authority--say in the days of Aubrey and Dennis Brain?

Expanding on Bart's last comment, here's a link and quote from a Rolling Stone article by Robert Levine on how our MP3 players are addicting us to loudness for the sake of loudness.

The Death of High Fidelity

David Bendeth, a producer who works with rock bands like Hawthorne Heights and Paramore, knows that the albums he makes are often played through tiny computer speakers by fans who are busy surfing the Internet. So he's not surprised when record labels ask the mastering engineers who work on his CDs to crank up the sound levels so high that even the soft parts sound loud…

Producers and engineers call this "the loudness war," and it has changed the way almost every new pop and rock album sounds. But volume isn't the only issue. Computer programs like Pro Tools, which let audio engineers manipulate sound the way a word processor edits text, make musicians sound unnaturally perfect. And today's listeners consume an increasing amount of music on MP3, which eliminates much of the data from the original CD file and can leave music sounding tinny or hollow.

"With all the technical innovation, music sounds worse," says Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, who has made what are considered some of the best-sounding records of all time. "God is in the details. But there are no details anymore."

But so many dancers have done the second movement of Symphony in C in a dreamy classical way, taking all the time in the world--Allegra Kent (in her Joseph Cornell period), Suzanne Farrell later on, and, in San Francisco, Julie Diana, (more classical than dreamy). Good question.

(But aren't the Brits just now warming up to Balanchine--after all these years.)

It's interesting that after all these years that questions of masculinity in dancers (which as Little Tomato points out is not the same as sexual orientation) are still with us. After all the Edward Villella documentaries in the 60s about baseball and ballet, and the pictures of Ethan Steifel in the 1990s with his motorcycle.

Perhaps we are not living in the best of times.

There are perhaps two questions here. That of masculinity, which eventually passes, the question that is, and of being an artist v. being normal, which stays. Being an artist is always tough; you are an outsider, but you make art.

The story of Tonio Kruger of Thomas Mann about being an artist and longing for a sort of normalcy, always stayed with me. Also Baudelaire's poem about the Albatross. And don't dancers walk a little like albatrosses in ordinary life?

Lots of writers are apparently getting the axe at the LA Times under the new owner, Samuel Zell.

Here's a link to the LA Obervered on cuts, via the good media watch site, Romenesko / Poynteronline.

LA Observed

Romenesko

Perhaps something along the line of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela might serve as a model in the US. Their recent Mahler Five was supposed to be top knotch. From the Carnegie Hall brouchure:

The Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, founded in 1975 by José Antonio Abreu, has continuously aimed to create new opportunities for Musical Excellence in Venezuela for the past 30 years. Heading a national system, the State Foundation for the Venezuelan System of Youth and Child Orchestras (FESNOJIV), this orchestra comprises more than 200 young musicians between the ages of 16 and 20, all products of a system that is of equal social, musical, and educational importance in Venezuela. The orchestra has worked with such conductors as Claudio Abbado and Sir Simon Rattle. They tour with their Music Director and colleague Gustavo Dudamel.

Leigh has nailed it. Sarah Van Patten is sort of the Maria Calegari of SF Ballet. She did everything right and brilliantly so (in an less than overall crisp production of Diamonds).

In 7 for Eight, there was a lot of very very good work, especially from Pascal Molat (our Nikolai Hubbe?), and Joan Boada & Jaime Garcia Castilla (beautiful follow-throughs, but with each of them there is a slightly different locus point). Then there was Dores Andre who always draws my eye, no matter where she pops up on stage. She's sort of Manny Farber's ideal of the 'termite artist', who deals in little throw-away, off-to-the-side performances that nibble and burrow through the whole.

On the broader topic of the use of binocs, what are other "looking at" with the increased magnification of vision?

Inspired by this thread, I just ordered a pair of Russian 5x30 wide angle binoculars--one of the hunting or butterfly (like Nabokov at the Ballet Russes) types--and hopefully they'll arrive in time for the San Francisco Ballet Gala next week.

That said, I do have some reservations about using them. Binoculars tend to compress everything, and pull everything into one plane. And the interaction bewtween dancers gets left out.

Also I feel that when I put them to my eyes, I'm leaving the communal experience of watching ballet and am watching television instead, or jumping into my car while others are riding the bus.

From what I've observed of the actions of most binoculars people, they occasioally check up on what the soloists are up to, or on some member of the corps whose identity they are not sure of, and after this they pass them over to a companion. Or--most discreetly, as if in a 19c novel--on some member of the audience across the way.

On my last two visits to New York, Antonio Carmena's dancing really caught my eye. He put in an great appearance in the third section of Symphony in C, brimming over with lots of old time NYCB exhurberance. Also Adrian Danchig-Waring seemed to be a very articulate dancer--I hadn't noticed him before.

Bart,

Charles Prendergast was the editor of the new Proust translation; Lydia Davis was responsible for the first book only, "By Way of Swann's". I believe she didn't read the others until later.

Over at the Yahoo Proust Discussion Group Lydia Davis has gone over some particularly sticky problems of translation (dog roses v. sweetbriars; the proper rendering of the fine fleur de silence, etc).

About Scott-Moncrieff, she says, "Moncrieff really did embellish and color the original. And make it wordier and more 'poetic'--Proust was plainer. This is not to say that Moncrieff did not do a remarkable job. As I worked with his translation, I came to admire it greatly. (Had more quarrels with the reviser Kilmartin.)" She also noted she wanted to write an article on Scott-Moncrieff.

As far as Proust new and old, the title I miss most of all is "Within a Budding Grove" which seems to have given way to "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower." I've seen it on so many bookshelves over the years. "Finding Time Again"--for "The Past Recaptured"--seems to be the weakest. Finding time for what?

cheers,

q

Here's another review--if everyone doesn't have review fatigue by now--and if it hasn't been posted before. From James Davidson at the London Review of Books at www.lrb.co.uk, to subscribers only (worth subscribing).

"No Beast More Refined: How Good Was Nureyev"

Three snippets:

For there is something else about this biography that reminded me of books about Alexander the Great: the question of Nureyev’s ‘greatness’, which is often hopelessly mixed up with questions about his goodness as a human being and his technical ability. If Nureyev really was ‘one of the greatest artists the world has ever known’ [:Jane Hermann] then we might be happy to put him alongside any number of men and women who behaved appallingly but are nevertheless admired for their cultural impact, Alexander among them. What is most extraordinary about Kavanagh’s biography, however, is that she doesn’t really seem to share Hermann’s opinion about the man on whom she has spent ten years of her life.

* * *

But Kavanagh’s technical knowledge also means that she is too attentive to the not infrequent deficiencies of Nureyev’s technique, as if she were constantly grading him for an exam. Other dancers are often said to be as good as or better than him; indeed, reading the biography one gets the impression that the second half of the 20th century was chock-full of wonderful male dancers, although it is always a good idea to check her more flattering assessments against the list of names in the acknowledgments; and there does seem to be a tendency for London-based dancers to get more frequent and more effusive praise than, say, Parisians.

* * *

So I, who was born three years after Nureyev’s defection and never saw him at his best, still think that Nureyev was probably without peer, not as a teacher, but as a dancer, and that he will remain without peer for many more, though hopefully not too many more, years to come. Such a combination of grace, fire and strangeness, tiger, wolf and stallion, King Kong and a Stradivarius, is not likely to be repeated any time soon, and certainly not by today’s managed and sensible professionals. When the channels were fully functional, as quite often they were, the music and the role would fill Nureyev, Nureyev would fill his body and his body would fill the stage.

Actually the new translations of "In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past" are as controversial as any new translations can be.

Part of the problem that there are now six different translators-- or voices---and this may be fine for Bob Dylan but it gets complicated with Proust. And the translations themselves are of varying quality, Carol Clark's and Lydia Davis' being the best.

The other problem is that Scott-Moncrieff’s original is considered something of a masterpiece in English ("beautiful, but slightly period")

Andre Aciman in his review of the new translation talks about how Scott-Moncrieff worked hard to on a method to preserve the word order of Proust and the surprise or reversal that the last word brought in with it. He also lamented the awkwardness of the new titles -- ”The Way by Swann’s” for “Swann’s Way” and “Finding Time Again” for “The Past Recaptured.”

Anyway I do like some things about Lydia Davis' translation of the first volume, but I guess I have a soft spot for Scott-Moncrieff's reassuring gentle prose, like a soft rain--and in the original uncorrected version no less, which nobody reads anymore!

I've watched the tape over and over, and what I like is the crispness of the movements, the knife blade flashes of the hands and feet, and the full realization of the counterpoint, especially in Diamonds with the series of brilliant and passionate leaps in the background. It's so different from Farrell and Martins in the PBS tape, which now seems a bit slow and muted and overly distended--like a mannerist painting.

The rehearsal clips of Jewels are still up at the Miami Herald website, at least as of Friday the 12th.

http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/story/262785.html

I liked the opening closeup a lot. Nureyev looked a little like Pierre Clementi and Godard could have been the director. I don't think it was bad as those documentaries go, though the shadow of the projector whirling away was pretty hokey, and it obscured some of the footage. The Bluebird footage was thrilling.

The restaging of the circumstances of Nureyev's flight to the West very moving. It wasn't inevitable, just a sort of existential choice (with a little prompting) and you wonder what his life would have been if he hadn't made the leap. To leave your homeland: not a just a little walk across a field. I wonder how much chaos his defection did cause in his friends lives, or if it was just another trouble that everyone had then.

He cried at St. Chapelle.

I'll pipe in to say that I liked Persausion the movie because it was the only one of the movies with subdued production values, and they seemed appropriate to the modesty of the novel. (The movie versions suffer from the Laura Ashley effect of the props taking on a dramatic value almost that of the characters.)

Persuasion--disagreeing a bit with Aurora here--Mansfield Park I would have to say are my favorites.

Mansfield Park, with a small character on the large horse of a novel, has all sorts of things to recommend it: one of Jane Austen's greatest cads, Henry Crawford; the great scene of Fanny Price not being able to pass through the turnstyle (a situation I identify with all too readily); and the device of having the last part of the novel told at a distance through letters, which sort of threw everything into another key. It's a novel Henry James could like (but probably didn't).

Just a note that the Joffrey did the old version a couple of years ago, Winter 2005. John Rockwell liked it and said:

This version is a long way from Balanchine's abstract revision, seen in New York and San Francisco. The original's juxtaposition of country-and-western accents, Baroque violin concertos and academic ballet made Balanchine's jokey premise more pungent. And it's hard to resist a cowboy carrying on, amid pirouetting ballet dancers, about ''the cat in the barn with a rat in her mouth.''

In an informal talk here in San Francisco Helgi Tomasson commented that San Francisco Ballet tried to do the original version, but it didn't seem to work, that the orchestra and the onstage musicians and the caller weren't able to couldn't hear each other.

There is a nice clip of the old version on the PBS Balanchine bio CD, and Patricia Wilde did an interpreter's archive video for the Balanchine Foundation, which is long and dry but good.

For me it was always at the starburst figure and ascension at the end of the shorter Apollo. It may have had to do with the fact I was living in a apartment next to Russ and Daughters at Houston & Allen (not terribly fashionable then) and would soon have to take the pungent F train back to my dreary quarters and leave all of the Apollonian glory behind.

I didn't cry at Carousel (a dance) this year here in San Francisco, but I was quite moved by it. It is the best Wheeldon I've seen so far, his most Balanchine-like ballet, perhaps because of way the leads are kept apart by the corps.