papeetepatrick

Indeed not, but from what I just read with NYTimes rave review of 'Enchanted', they might do this sort of thing with a ballet theme like that, I can easily imagine cinematized Disneyfied Sleeping Beauties and Swan Lakes, half-animated--which is what I envisioned, but not that I thought they might really do it even all digitalized up like that. First time I ever read a rave review and decided from that alone that it would be the last thing I'd watch beyond the online clip.

Yes, and the part of 'Elusive Muse' with Bejart and Farrell reminiscing is one of the sweetest parts of the film. I'm still so grateful I got to see 'Nijinsky, Clown de Dieu'.

LOL! Even so, they might insist upon doing it. My Bollywood experience is limited to one film 'Lagaan', and this supposed to be one of the best ones. It's according to how much singing about Radha and Krishna you are willing to have interspersed. I don't see how it sounds desirable to have these big cinematized, opened-up-for-the-masses ballets. They rarely get it right even when filming Broadway musicals. And the general population is not thinking about ballet in quite the same way as they are many much easier things--there's no budget for ballet-movies in Hollywood, that's just over, I think. Maybe Chinese or Indians will try something, but it will get that theme-parkish look, and there's enough trouble with such things in ABT stagings of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty already. I can see why you, scherzo, might dream of this, but I can't imagine it happening (even with poor products.)

When I was about your age, a dancer told me I had a perfect dancer's foot and genius thumbs. While undoubtedly true, I have nevertheless never pursued ballet classes even when I was young enough, but have always been a good yogi in a rather arcane sense mostly, but also could do all the things you need to be double-jointed for even in the more traditional yogas. Of course, people are often multi-talented, and this can be very inconvenient for concentration, of course. I once read a quote by Garbo, saying 'I never thought to be an actor. I would have been good at a number of things.'

A little bit of all of the above, and yes, bart, i would even add the "self-satisfaction" issue on the list...why not. At the end, everybody seems to agree that in Nureyev's case, for instance, his art was a product of an inner urge, a vital need, something in which HE was involved with himself, (even during PDD's, and oftenly very obvious). Don't we breath to supply OUR OWN body's needs of O2...?, don't we eat to satisfy our PERSONAL hunger...?, hence, artistic creation goes on the same boat sometimes... I agree with cubanmiamiboy, but I would just say it can include anything, and I don't think it has common denominators, at least in terms of 'good character'. Maybe there cannot be any artistic creation by someone with 'no character'. There are too many different kinds of artistic creation too exclude anything. You could even include extensive selfishness as in the case of Picasso, and few are going to argue that he was untalented, and it was all too well-known how monumentally selfish he was. Even evil and insanity can stimulate it, but I only mentioned these because they are the most hard to accept. We tend to want our artistic heroes to be exemplary people, and they are sometimes. But they are not nearly all the time, and sometimes they are only through their art--which in some cases has to depend on the 'bad parts.' But the easy example of how we want our hero artists to be perfect people is the way people follow celebs and pretend they don't care about the bimbo ones, although all you have to do is take a quick look at TMZ to find out that people are extremely concerned over these bimboes' traffic violations. In the past, people got upset with Ingrid Bergman for getting involved with Roberto Rossellini, that didn't fit their image of her. Heavy scholars often talk of the artist is being a kind of custodian of the artwork anyway, so if that's true, and I think there is some truth in it, then the artist could be just as unlike what people find most appealing in his/her work as one of those spiritual channelers tends to be from the lofty Chanellee..

Farrell definitely did and was all those things (and good point that she definitely knew it), and after I wrote the previous to Bart I was outside and kept remembering when she first came out on that runway--gorgeous beyond describing and those eyes never bigger and more exotically catlike. Even so, I imagine it's Makarova's role, because that touch of the outrageous doesn't hurt here, and especially must have sometimes been celestial after about 2 years of performing it: She had a way of totally entering her roles as if they had never been danced before, and to do that with Odette, as I thought she did (and I hadn't really been paying attention, all of a sudden I was transfixed), she has not only some talent but some nerve.

Thanks, sidwich and bart, all of these details are delicious! Here's a CD I just listened to about half of, it's marvelous: Romberg's The Desert Song and The New Moon recorded at the Drury Lane Theater, London, in 1927 and 1929 respectively, and The Blue Train of Robert Stolz recorded at the Prince of Wales Theater 1927. Both with Prince of Wales Orchestra. There is beautiful singing here, with Harry Welchman and Edith Day in Desert and Evelyn Lay, Howett Wroster, and Ben Williams in New Moon. Will listen to Blue Train later. As has often been the case in this survey, I find songs whose origins I had not known. I had no idea 'Lover Come Back to Me', so often a jazzy standard, especially as done wonderfully by Streisand back on the 'People' album (I think that's the one). I knew 'Stouthearted Men' was Romberg, and that, again, we have Ms. Streisand doing a lounge version of it on 'Simply Streisand' (of course, that was not representative, but I disliked it quite as much as her version of 'My Lord and Master', all sluttish, tramplike seduction that might as well be used by Carmela Soprano, I guess--or one of her young rivals...). But Romberg's operetta scores are very beautiful music, much better than I had ever given them credit, and some of the ones like 'Romance... a playboy who is born each spring' are best sung by a pure soprano, as it is done here. I also watched Alexander's Ragtime Band the other day, forgot that to get a Merman version you look to recordings, although I like Alice Faye in this more than I usually do. Still, Ethel steals the show later on with a terrific 'Blue Skies'. Bart--I think the Balanchine/Suzanne Farrell 'Slaughter on Tenth Avenue' enjoyed some success, and I saw her do it with Joseph Duell about a week before he died. I believe Helene said she remembered this too. But while I thought she was perfection in it, I imagine Makarova is the better casting--there are some areas in which emphasizing the elegant and tasteful may work, but still may not be the truth of a...striptease artist, and Makarova knows a lot more about that sort of overt thing than Ms. Farrell does. I also saw it at NYCB a few years ago, and can't remember who was in it. It's always a crowdpleaser, full of clowning. We're talking about the same thing, aren't we?

dancerboy--I liked this a lot too, it was like going through the whole process with you in getting work together, envisioning it and developing it in the mind; and then completing it. The description of the costume and performance is first-rate--so that this turns out to have been one of the nicest threads I've seen on Ballet Talk.

Apologies for any remarks ill-placed here due to this unfortunate occurrence, and thank you for clearing it up. I think we did know that 'all they have are' was not in quotation marks, but still find it nearly impossible to believe that journalists will take that sort of liberty, no matter how many times we've been proved wrong. I know I cannot imagine how writers with serious responsibility and with prestigious jobs see fit to do this. I think it was worth it to go through this process to find out a number of things, and journalistic sloppiness and falsification is something I'm always anxious to expose. You've rendered the coup de grace here, and this should give other interviewers pause if they look at what happened as a result of absurd liberties taken. One wonders if it's a matter of fact or nuance they think they are tampering with. I'm beginning to think they don't know the difference. Interesting that a remark by Georgia O'Keeffe would have stimulated all this. I'm a huge fan of her, but she clearly said things that were meant to be provocative--and all of us who do this get it right a certain amount of time, and wrong the rest, with the ratios differing. Ms. O'Keeffe's use of language can be understood from Joan Didion's excellent essay on her from 'The White Album', which you may know. She describes her as 'a hard woman', that the usual words like 'crusty' and 'tough' (I believe she included that one as well, although I don't have the book at hand) were not sufficient to apply. There's also a documentary with her last companion, I think it's sometime in the 80's in New Mexico, in which she said that the people who saw in her paintings sexual imagery that might somehow reflect on her own sexuality 'are just talking about themselves.' It was not really clear that that was so, certainly not always, but that's just the way she talked. She was asked why she stayed in New York so long, when she obviously preferred the country and describes herself as a 'country person.' She just said 'Because Stieglitz was there.'

People have told me about visiting Russia in the 70s and the insulated life of the great dancers, which fascinated me. I'd find it even more interesting if this were true of Moscow than St. Petersburg, which has always been a draw because of the Hermitage, etc., but probably not everybody knows that many of the great Russian jewels were brought back to the Kremlin from St. Petersburg after the fall of Communism. This was one of the more interesting things I heard Geza Von Habsburg lecture on a few years back. Moscow I always picture as rather dark and dreary, and images of Lee and Marina Oswald out of American novels about the JFK assassination. But it must be equally so of the Bolshoi dancers in that period. I hope someone does a whole history, a gigantic one, of dancers in the Communist period of USSR, including every possible anecdote. There must be some of this in the Kavanagh bio of Nureyev that many are now reading.

I finally finished Defoe's Roxana, the Fortunate Mistress, and think it is an astonishing book. Works that explore morals and worldly vice a hundred years later, no matter how brilliantly in Hawthorne and Austen, aren't quite as powerful for me as this little-read book. The fierce rigour of Defoe's style here is almost overwhelming. His last 'strange novel' should be read by feminists as well, and could also supplement the discussion about Fournier and women's empowerment and motherhood. Of course, a courtesan like Roxana or Nell Gwyn is not what Betty Friedan ever had in mind in terms of women's rights, but some of the ideas do have an early form here, and the term 'roxana' had been a stage character used to refer to an actress, and so I guess it wasn't really until the 20th century that the concepts of actresses as 'immoral women' began to fall away. One of the most amazing subtexts is a kind of 'psychology of money', as Roxana becomes a big-time operator in her wicked profession, and eventually a Quaker. This a 'wages of sin' book, but also an 18th century book, which convinces me a lot more than the 19th century ones do. Defoe mastery of sums and accounts and the monetary worth of things is astounding, and yet this may bore some people to death. There isn't a thing like the endless discussion and mulling over of value of jewels and plate in Roxana, and interest earned courtesy of advice by Mr. Clayton, and husband and wife determining who will 'run the money'--there is not any of this in Hawthorne or Austen. And with all the guilt Roxana experiences, she got more sympathy from me than did Jane Austen's depiction of Mary Crawfold, who was not entirely averse to letting a few things slide--Mansfield Park was a bit much, with preachers as especially desirable husbands and extreme judgment of even the slightest moral misdemeanour. It's always interesting to see that it's also the Becky Sharps who interest people most in the long run, although that doesn't mean they're wiser. I'd read Moll Flanders years ago, but Roxana is tighter and fiercer. Some modern journalists at their factual best have written like Defoe, who also wrote a lot of non-fiction. What a GENIUS! He can portray wickedness in such a way that it does not seem like the oppression of the Puritan, so that you can look at the concept of 'swingers' more objectively, rather than merely rejecting or idolizing it.

Keeping my 'study club' or DIARY or what-have-you going here, as The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle made me end up researching George M. Cohan's early shows from the 19 00's, continuing into the 19 teens, and even looking up all sorts of fascinating stuff about all the music and/or lyrics Nora Bayes wrote in many shows besides just 'Shine on, Harvest Moon.' Talk about necessary information for the business of living, Nora Bayes songs have got to be it! The Fred and Ginger movie made me finally concentrate on those very early 20th century songs like 'By the Light of the Silvery Moon' and 'Moonlight Bay' and 'Oh You Beautiful Doll' and 'By the Beautiful Sea', which have more or less gone the way of all flesh, even if they were revived in Doris Day 50s movies--they're not really standards in the sense of Gershwin and Porter and Rodgers and Hart. Speaking of whom, Ginger seems very much like Doris Day at the beginning of the 'Castle' film, which I like only for the numbers. Do sidwich or carbro or dirac or bart or anyone else know if those ballroom dances are the actual Castle dances? I realize I don't much care for Ms. Rogers as an actress, but do like her as a dance partner for Astaire. Also think that the talk of Fred looking like an 'ordinary guy' who therefore could appeal to ordinary American men is overrated--that's an amazing face, and there's nothing ordinary about it. Like a real leprechaun. Not handsome so much as 'bigger than life' in an almost inscrutable way, and therefore beautiful. No wonder the title song of On Your Toes says 'the dancing crowds look up to some rare male--like that Astaire-male'. This has been fun to survey and keep at it, because I now end up an almost-completist of Richard Rodgers, only to find that my favourite score of his by far is On Your Toes, which I never imagined would be the case--not only because of 'Slaughter', but also because it really has as many well-known tunes as any Rodgers and Hammerstein show--without all that heavy solemnity. I hadn't, at last posting heard the early 80's version as well, and although surely the biggest thrill of seeing the show must have been Makarova doing the Balanchine, the delight on the CD is Dina Merrill's Peggy Porterfield. When she sings 'Dear old mother was as wise as ten folks...and she knew her way around the men folks...' and 'Muuu....thah...told me...there's no use asking why...she loves he and he loves she...the heart beats quicker than the eye..' and 'Dear sweet mother...was careful and so sly...but my dear, you see I'm here...the heart is quicker than the eye.' Delightful in every possible way, so that you get to meditate on Mrs. Meriwether Post ALL YOU WANT! Who else could possibly do this song and it be so amusing? Ms. Merrill has always been one of the most gorgeous women in the world, and she even has a style that is so warm that you get an idea of what Park Avenue can be at its best--besides just the money and Sister Parrish living rooms. And I've been going around singing the title song all week, I never get tired of it. Also heard Do I Hear a Waltz? where Rodgers collaborates with Sondheim, but the result is not impressive, but does explain where Sondheim derived some of his own compositional habits, and how his lyrics informed Rodgers to some degree; good singing by Sergio Francchi. No Strings is far less interesting still, except that the famous 'The Sweetest Sounds' really is beautiful and wonderfully sung by Diahann Carroll. The lyrics are pretty clumsy by Samuel Taylor, with whom I'm not familiar. I dread listening to Two by Two, with Rodgers collaborating with his own lyrics. [edited to add: No, that's Martin Charnin, and some of it's pretty good, even though a bit much to do Noah's Ark, even though by way of Clifford Odets. But there's a song called "An Old Man", that is touching, especially given that Rodgers is pretty senior by then.] [Edited yet again to add that No Strings is the one with Rodgers's own lyrics, and they are the least impressive of any. Interesting.] So much for my ignorance of Molnar. After managing to get Ohio Light Opera's beautiful CD of the real Chocolate Soldier score, which was based on Shaw's Arms and the Man, I find that the tedious Eddy-Stevens movie was based on The Guardsman, which does not seem ridiculous in the gorgeous film with the LUNTS--I just didn't know about it. This is onscreen-theater in the best possible sense, and the silliness is run out the door by the brilliance of the leads, of Zasu Pitts as a weird sort of domestic, and Roland Young as dapper as any London Man could be. The Lunts were both nominated for Oscars for this. I appreciate Ballet Talk for letting me do this research project here in part. I have ended up finding that my all-time favourite scores are On Your Toes and Urinetown! which I have both fallen in love with. I think Urinetown singlehandedly saved Broadway, and has saved me much money on shows whose scores I find vastly inferior without exception.

dirac--you read more than I did, and only got to him in the last 2 years, except for 'Marilyn', which I think is marvelous in its way too. I love 'The American Dream', 'the Deer Park' (exceptional Hollywood novel), the Picasso bio (this has incredible insights), and 'Harlot's Ghost', which I read sometime in the spring, and had also never though I'd finish it, but it's riveting. Mailer was going to have to talk about the CIA every chance he got, and he obviously talked to some real operatives, which he admits, but is not going to name. There's also that movie with Ryan O'Neal, which I watched a few years ago, but wasn't bowled over by--up at some New England beach house, but Mailer made the movie. Always had an interesting article when any of the hot topics came up, whether O.J., or in the last few years, there was some political writing in NYRB. I haven't read the Hitler book, which I assume is his last big piece.

Of course it's not you. That was a tacky thing to say, but sort of wet-blanket and cowlike, rather than sharp--not amusing like Marlene Dietrich when she really gets vicious in her last years talking about Joan Crawford.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/books/11mailer.html?hp This one quite shocked me, I would have thought he had another 10 years at least. I didn't get to big chunks of his work until the last 2 years, and they have all affected me powerfully--a truly baroque and profuse talent.

I thought the brevity of the men’s sex scenes was in clear contrast to the relative candor with which the collapse of Ennis’ relationship with his wife is shown. (There are no equivalent scenes between Jack and his wife, but they’re clearly intended to be the lesser couple in terms of plot interest.) The point of the sex in ‘Lust, Caution’ is that merely having the characters talk about it (as the Tang Wei character does, late in the film) wouldn’t be enough – it has to be seen. Her speech has greater impact because we in the audience know exactly what she’s talking about. I haven’t. I’ll have to look for it. It’s venturing off topic, but what did Jack do that was so horribly decadent? (No, Ennis didn't do any cruising and it's impossible to imagine him doing so, but I couldn't decide if that was because he wasn't really all that gay or he was merely not that highly sexed - Jack was enough for him, as Ennis' wife would have been enough for him if he'd been genuinely straight. Whereas Jack you can imagine looking around a bit even if circumstances had been different and Ennis and he could have lived together.) I don't personally find it so horribly decadent, but it is true that there were certain ways he seemed to demand the continuation of the relationship and meetings and depend on them more than Ennis, who was nevertheless the more 'faithful' one; so it's possible that his attachment to Ennis was more of an almost textbook sex + love thing, and Ennis's emphasized the strong affection. But cruising for hustlers in Mexico has not, for example, come into favour with the Establishment to the degree that, say, even gay marriage has, and Rosie O'Donnell being allowed absurd amounts of time to parade her opinions to a mass audience--THAT'S decadence for me (the latter, I mean)...I mean, I'm sure it came only too naturally, but it's slightly sad, that scene in the dark Mexican streets. Well, maybe one can imagine things about them if living together, but people were right to point out when the film was released that there was little in the way of role models in that period, it was pretty ad hoc--or they wouldn't have been so careless when they saw each other the second time. But I heard people coming out of the Arclight in Hollywood, where I saw it, even say things like 'well, why didn't he just get out of Dodge!...' which was a little too campy even for me. Also probably you're right that Ennis was 'less sexed', but this could also be only the attitude of the 'top', because it has to be shaped differently psychologically. 'Pola X' is based on Melville's 'Pierre, or the Ambiguities', and the 'pola' is initials for that title (in French), the 'x' is for draft 10 of the script. He had a nerve to use a title like that--very flamboyant. It also does occur that Flesh in the Devil('Diavolo in Corpo II') has Maruschka Detmers performing oral sex in it (1986!), and she was seen in highly compromising positions again in Godard's 'Prenom Carmen'--so this still doesn't happen a lot, but has already, and surely will again.

Have you seen Leos Carax's 'Pola X' from about 1999? This is Guillaume Depardieu, Deneuve as his mother (although she calls him 'my brother', rather playgirl-mom that, I guess),and Yakatarina Golubeva as his sister. That does go all the way in terms of explicit sex (and the characters are blood sister and brother, it is made even more powerfully extreme) in a mainstream film; this is the only time I've seen this, but it's probably happening more. And I think it's a brilliant film. baroque, flamboyant in many ways, very rich. I haven't seen 'Lust, Caution', but I thought 'Jack and Ennis in bed' was clear enough--the first time was repeated. They even talked about it in explicit terms in their last meetings. And Jack's marriage and Ennis's were very different. There was also Jack's promiscuity in Mexico, which you wouldn't associate by any stretch of the imagination with Ennis; his homosexual activity was literally a form of fidelity within itself, and he also cared about his wife despite all. No matter what, Ennis was involved somewhat less with activities usually associated with decadence than Jack was. (Not that I'm sure this means anything.)

This is terrible news for me as well as Mr. Gomes, as I was hoping I'd get to see him in it Dec. 23rd at UCLA, when I'm going to see it. I wonder why LA Ballet performs at these different venues; I suppose Nutcracker would have had to move the Philharmonic out of Disney, but the opera is over for the time being at the Music Center, I believe. Oh well, this is a real pain, so I'll have to pretend I'm truly interested in that version of 'The Nutcracker', which I probably can muster, since I bought the ticket before I found out he was planning to guest, and would have not known which performances he was scheduled for.

That's cool, good words--that 'lack of perfume' I wouldn't necessarily agree doesn't match 'boyishness' (because it might--think Bjorn Andresen in 'Death in Venice'), but I do agree it doesn't match Misha, at least most of the time. Something otherworldly in another sense is the quality seemingly being reached for here. He's otherworldly in lightness, but the aura is fairly ordinary in some ways, yes, and definitely not feline no matter how agile.

Is Misha usually considered 'earthy?' I hadn't thought so particularly, but the term may mean something in ballet I don't know about. Nureyev is obviously earthy, but I don't think I know what 'ethereal' may mean in ballet, after all. I just know things like Merrill Ashley is not supposed to have been 'ethereal', but rather 'athletic', that someone here recently spoke of Sylvie Guillem as 'chic and earthy', that I probably imagine Alla Sizova to be ethereal, and that I think Suzanne Farrell is thought to be 'ethereal', but she also seems very earthy to me. This is somewhat , but not entirely, could be a good separate thread. Dancers like Adam Luders look ethereal, I guess, but I don't know if I think the physique always determines that. I can't for the life of me see Anna Plisetskaya as ethereal in that tape of 'Swan Lake', but maybe she is considered to be to those who are looking more purely in a balletic sense. Most NYCB dancers haven't seemed to me to be particularly ethereal or earthy, but maybe I imagine more of the Russians to be ethereal.

Exactly, and the fact is that snobbery is everywhere, including quite low places. The 'pleasure of snobbery' is not known only to inner-city journalists who want to hang out with ballerinas and ballerinos (with or without tattoos). But The New Yorker would naturally want to pick and choose among pet snobberies to condemn + envy, being one itself and competing for the best seats at the Snobbery Awards. They get sillier by the year, and seem to imagine that it goes unnoticed. Their ads alone have always been tell-tale, even though it's not down to a lone single-malt whiskey ad and summer houses in Tuscany quite yet (they're not quite ready for the 'Paris Review' look).

Thanks, Mel. I didn't know that. Brooks was a real star for us regulars at the City Opera. I knew she'd done other types of singing, and straight acting as well, but never knew about the modern dance. I didn't know that either, and did see her do Melisande twice, which she sang beautifully. But she was quite a beautiful physical presence, so it's not entirely a surprise in a sense.

That is what the article was referring to, yes. These 'privileged' were not 'supposedly' anything, by the way. They were everything they said they were, in the most absolute of certainties. Early 'royal-watcher' material... Not precisely, because it doesn't cover enough of what was implied, and also because I didn't personally mean anything by it, I was merely reporting. There could be noblesse oblige, but that was not the emphasis in any case.

Good job indeed, Cristian! and I hadn't seen it when you wrote it 3 months ago, so thanks to dirac for putting up a new article which I haven't had time to read yet. This is quite fascinating, and I had no idea anything like this existed--one of the few examples of something that is both 'inspiring' and 'inspirational', which is not so frequent an occurrence.

Sander0's point is good on this, and there are ways in which the biggest opera stars become far more famous than ballet stars ever could--through things like 'The Three Tenors', or all of Kiri TeKanawa's gorgeous recordings of English folksongs and musicals like 'West Side Story' and 'South Pacific'. Pavarotti singing for many thousands in Central Park. But I won't read this article, if that's the theme of it, I don't care what she has to say, and that one sentence is quite enough. 'Clad in snobbery' indeed..indeed all journalistic standards would seem to be going to hell if it weren't for the fact that Seymour Hersh is still writing for The New Yorker--and that sometimes really good articles like the one Bart linked to about the Fake Pianist and her Fake Entrepeneur and the Fake Recordings are still very good. How about all the snobbery in the magazine itself when Tina Brown was the editor? Everything was meant to be titillating, from Randy Becker nude in 'Love! Valour! Compassion!' as assessed for size by audience members in the Notes & Comment section (this was idiotic and trashy in the extreme), to short stories about paedophilia in Scotland (this was actually a fine piece of fiction, by someone named MacCann, but I doubt that was the main reason why it was chosen), to Brown herself writing, in the words of NYTimes editorials, during the beginning of the Lewinsky business, about President Clinton's 'heat' and his 'present tense.' You'd have thought you were reading some snob version of 'Modern Romance'--the Times just called it 'an inane entry by Brown herself'. This subject is so irrelevant that it defies credulity; it's been discussed here at Ballet Talk, even if usually called 'elitism' most of the time, to a farethewell. If anything, ballet needs even MORE snobbery, not less, when you hear such phrases as 'clad in snobbery'. I recall something in the late 70s in the New Yorker, already doing a big bore of its Anglophilia, in an interesting article called 'Aristocracies', which was all about the 'privilege' that came of the 'sense of duty' of the English upper classes. This was febrile enough, but when the author finally started doing the academic number too, we got fatuous stuff about the profundity of Oxford and Cambridge as compared to U.S. universities in the form of 'Harvard and Yale will not do.' The New Yorker, failing at its own love of its own snobbery, is now jealous of a domain it feels is more snobbish than it can manage to be! Good for Ballet! Wake up and smell the Snobbery!