The Times Quotidian

Isha Upanishad, as read by Christopher Isherwood
By Nancy Cantwell

Hollywood was first exposed to the philosophical and religous texts of India when Swami Prabhavananda was charged with opening the Vedanta Society of Southen California (VSSC) in 1930. It was Prabhavananda’s discourses and ministries that attracted southern California cultural luminaries Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Gerald Heard, Henry Miller and composer Igor Stravinsky to Vendanta.

Isherwood went on to collaborate with Swami Prabhavananda translating “The Song of God: Bhagavad Gita”, 1944, “Shankara’s Crest-Jewel of Discrimination (Viveka Choodamani)”, 1947, and “How to know God, the Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali”, 1953. Isherwood’s involvement continued when he became Managing Editor of Vedanta and the West, the official publication of the VSSC, from 1943 until 1945. It offered essays by many of the leading intellectuals of the time and had contributions Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, Alan Watts, J. Krishnamurti, W. Somerset Maugham, and many others. Together with Huxley and Heard, Isherwood served on the Editorial Advisory Board from 1951 until 1962.

I knew Christopher Isherwood briefly. I had been a model for his longtime partner Don Bacardy and on one or two occassions was priveledge to join them for dinner at their Santa Monica home. I never got the impression that I was in the presence of an “enlightened” spiritual personality, but I always felt that I was sitting close to a source of great spiritual intelligence.
Here is a sound clip of Christopher Isherwood reading the first 8 verses of the Isha Upanishad (there are 18 total). In Hindu scripture there are Shruti, “revelation”, and Smriti, “tradition” texts. The Upanishads belong to the former and as “shruti” are a continuation of the Vedic revelation. But the Upanishads go beyond Vedic ritualism to teach esoteric wisdom and practices that result in transcendental knowledge. These verses are classic examples of the first Upanishadic teaching keystone; that the transcendental ground of the world is identical with the ultimate core of a human being. The ultimate reality of the universe is absolutely identical with our innermost nature; that is to say, brahman equals atman. The Isha Upanishad is significant amongst the Upanishads for its description of the nature of the supreme being (Ish).

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Brophy Bros. is a Santa Barbara institution. It is located in the marina just across from the city college. I never tire of the experience, never find it touristy nor cliched. It just a great way to spend time. The sound bites at Brophy’s are as entertaining, if not more so, than the food. There is not a shread of remorse about that mid-morning, mid-day cocktail. That’s just how things roll here.

This is a long counter and our girl and guy worked it. Both sides bustle, particularly on a stunning day like this where outside and in are equally attractive.

© Nancy Cantwell

From “The Curtain“, An Essay in Seven Parts,  by Milan Kundera

Part One: “The Conciousness of Continuity”

Kundera addressing a Concenration of Events:  

It brings to mind the libertine bohemia of my youth. My friends used to declare that there was no more gorgeous experience for a man than to make love to three different women in a single day. Not as the mechanical workings of an orgy, but as a personal adventure resulting from some unexpected confluence of opportunities, surprises, lightening seductions. That “three woman day”—extremely rare, dreamlike—had a dazzling charm which, I see today, consisted not in some athletic sexual performance but in the epic beauty of a rapid series of encounters in which each woman, seen against the backdrop of the one before, seemed even more unique, and their three bodies were like three long notes played each on a different instrument and bound together in a single chord. It was a quite particular beauty, the beauty of the sudden density of life.

Hot Women is a compilation put together by Robert (Keep On Trucking) Crumb of  ”Women Singers from Torrid Regions of the World Taken from Old 78 RPM Records, 1920 to 1950s”.  
Here are two sizzling samples!

From the Liner Notes:
Clemona Falcon: “Blues Negres”: Accompanying herself on guitar, with Joseph Falcon on accordion; Recorded Dec., 1934, New York City, Decca 17004. 

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She has been fairly well researched. Born Clemona Breaux in the Acadian, or “Cajun” county of Louisiana, she came from a musical family, played and sang in the family band, and with the band of her husband, Jospeh Falcon, in local dance halls and roadhouses, the only woman known in the region to perform in public for money. The Falcons were the first Cajuns to make phonograph records, beginning in 1927. Clemona died in 1941 at the age of 36.

Rita Abadzi, accompanied by instrumental trio: “Mimi Stelis Mana Anastin Ameriki”; Recorded in Athens in the mid-1930s; Issued on Orthophonic S-319. 

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Of all the old ethnic music of Europe, Greek music contained a special dynamic, emotional power, forged by the intensive mixing of cultures that seemed to come together there — Western Europe, The Balkans and Turkey, even Albania — creating some of the strongest most compelling European ethnic music recorded in the 78 RPM era. 

Rita Abadsi, born in 1903, was one of the more prolifically recorded singers in “The golden Age” of Greek music, 1930s. She sang in the “Smyrna” style, which had an Eastern Turkish flavor, and fed into the hugely popular “Rembetika” genre, all of this music originally from the culture of poverty and low-life cafes. Smyrna, a port city on the Eastern coast of Turkey, facing onto the Aegean Sea across from the peninsula of Greece, was home to a large population of Greeks until the Turko-Greek War, which ended in disaster for the Greeks in 1922. The result was the massive flight of a million Greek refuges back to their ancestral homeland, where they found themselves for the most part huddled in squalid shanty towns on the outer fringes of Athens and Piraeus. Rita Abadsi, with her mother and sister, were part of this tide of unfortunate people, who brought back to Greece several generations of adapted Turkish cultural habits, including musical influences. Thus the “Smyrna” style, of which this record is a fine example, both vocally and instrumentally. I could gather little else about Rita Abadsi’s life. She began recording in 1932, went on to record over two-hundred songs, ended her recording career aroud the beginning of World War Two, and died in 1969. The song title, by the way, translates as “Mother, Please Don’t Send Me to Amerika”!

In which a cheerful, sometimes obtuse, young female primary school teacher takes driving lessons with a rage-ridden instructor, helps a child in need, and ultimately finds her Prince Charming.
by Rita Valencia

All I knew was that in Happy Go Lucky,  Mike Leigh had come up with this truly repellant character that made people want to gouge her eyes out or spit on the ground with disgust, because she was too damn happy. I put off seeing it, although I was intrigued. Then Nancy asked me to write about it.

So I watched the IMDb trailer first and saw as cloying a scene as I could recall, though every millimeter a Mike Leigh joint, with Poppy (Sally Hawkins) in a fabulously fake-y fifties-style flirtation with the handsome and equally fake Tim (Samuel Roukin). Not auspicious.

But as I read the IMDb responses to this film, overwhelmingly negative, complaining about this horrible female character, who wasn’t nearly as good as Amelie (!) I realized Leigh was performing one of his infamous experiments pushing the boundaries of dramatic art. Audiences generally despise such efforts, which do not allow them the comfort of entertainment and require a bit more reflection–in this case, probing one’s own self-hood, to which the Average American responds, fuck off, please pass the Paxil. It is amusing to read the responses to Happy Go Lucky and then compare them to the letters written in response to Naked, which he made in ‘93 about a (male) character who was the diametrical opposite to Poppy, the dark and maniacal Johnny, meandering through the broken world of Thatcher-era London. Where Johnny suffers, and speaks in a tortured and strange poetry, Poppy seems to be immune to suffering and speaks entirely in silly jokes and cliches. Too bad for her us. The letters in response to Naked describe it as brilliant, a work of genius. The letters about Happy Go Lucky seem to be from a different ilk of film goers altogether, angry philistines who were affronted by a film that did not satisfy their expectations. One notable exception is “willywilly” who writes, “I think this is quite an unusual film. What usually happens with unusual films is that distributors misrepresent them as something familiar that they know how to sell and audiences know how to be sold on. I think it’s not about Poppy and an example of human nature. I think Poppy is a ‘what if’ construct designed to goad the characters around her and show how people attach to and identify with their unhappiness. Leigh has described the film as ‘anti-miserabilist’. So it’s actually about misery – and an attack on misery. Poppy is the assault. And miserable people get angry. “

To see Happy Go Lucky is not a movie-watching experience. It is a fascinating ride through a filmic funhouse of 60’s musical comedy tropes, TV sitcom muzak and Doris Day/Julie Andrews archetypes. You can feel the puppetmaster’s hand pushing personal buttons you may not want to have pushed. And Poppy is the puppet. Your irritation and impatience with her are an unsettling creep over the fourth wall that separates us from those on that stage, whom we prefer to see suffer like Hamlet or Oedipus, not to cluck and shrug, “Well I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye” when her bike is stolen. Watching the Poppy in her idiot bliss is a true deconstruction of character and its function in drama. In Happy Go Lucky we ask WHY more than in any film in recent memory…why am I envious, why resentful, why so irritated, why angry, why intolerant, why uncompassionate. What is the nature of compassion and how does it figure into drama (yes, this film is ultimately a drama, not a comedy). These are questions which bounce back quick as a mirror image at us from her, her quirks, her giggles, her Shirley MacLaine grin. She is a character who is the inverse of the acutely pain-ridden Johnny of Naked. Yet hers is a world of pain, suffering and anger, through which she strolls like a child in the zoo, and all to our horror, which gives way to bemusement, or maybe not. Because this film is experimental in the most essential sense, positing a character and then seeing what falls around it and how that lays, this film is deeply foreign to the Hollywood culture industry for whom questions are out of the question. To say that Poppy is a cipher is something of an oversimplification. She is a foil in the figurative sense, and also in the literal sense, poking some of her playmates to respond/reveal, as “willywilly” notes. One of the many masterful scenes in the film has Poppy wriggling her way into a crowded bus and giggling with an indecorous joy. Leigh’s camera captures the faces of the extras responding, a man who smiles generously, others who scowl. We cringe, fearful of what she might provoke from what we know to be a cruel world. Do we want her to be punched in the face? Or are we afraid for her, afraid of what her behavior might provoke? Indeed, what does it provoke in us? Ultimately, Mike Leigh does intercede. The film is structured around her driving lessons with Scott, (Eddie Marsan) who chews the furniture to splinters with his depiction of a cartoon bigot whose hots for Poppy ignite the climactic explosion. Leigh pours into this explosion all that you’ve been waiting for. But there’s a Poppy Ending.

These are the Dharma Family cats. Zen to the core. Who is watching the store, after all?

An Introduction to the Dharma Family

Ed Wortz was my friend and mentor. He ushered me through some bad times and was there to toast me when the sun was shinning bright. Thich Thien An was Ed’s mentor and initiator in Buddhist philosophy. Ed and Thien-An first met the Ven. Dr. Thich Thien-An when Thien-An came to Southern California in the summer of 1966 as an exchange professor at UCLA. Thien-An’s father had been one of the monks who self immolated to bring attention to the world of the horrors being perpetrated in Vietnam by the Diem regime. When Saigon fell in 1975, Ven. Thien-An saw his responsibility and helped the boat people and other refugees from his homeland. Thus, the International Buddhist Meditation Center in Los Angeles, the first Vietnamese temple in the U.S, came to be.

For Ed, Thien-An was the real thing. He studied Zen meditation with Thien-An and conscripted this Buddhist training as part of his psychotherapy practice. “Good Luck, Bad Luck” is a favorite parable that Ed used to tell. How true it is.

Thien-An’s Story: Good Luck, Bad Luck?
This story, a favorite of Thien An, and one that I’ve told to many clients and groups, is set in a valley in ancient China. The inhabitants of this valley were very poor. Each year none of them managed to store away more than just enough grain and other food stuff to make it through the winter. One of the families consisted of just a farmer, his wife and son, and they each worked very hard just to maintain this subsistence level. One night, at harvest time a herd of wild horses found an opening in a fence and broke into this family’s field. They ate much of the grain and trampled and ruined a lot of what they didn’t eat. The next morning the family was really bummed out about this turn of events and neighbors added to mood by saying things such as; “Oh my!” “you poor people”, “what will you do”, “we all have so little to eat and there is none to spare!” ,”we have our own mouths to feed”, thank the gods this didn’t happen to me”, “we can’t be of much help to you”, “You will certainly starve to death this winter”, “we cant imagine what awful deeds you must have done in your past lives to warrant such an awful fate!”

The farmer shook his head and said “It really does look bad but good luck or bad luck you never know!”

The next day the farmer and his son were working in the fields trying to recover what they could when the herd of wild horses, lured by their memories of the good grain, came back into the field. Well the farmer and his son, seeing this, hastily put up the fence rails and effectively corralled the entire herd.

The family was of course delighted. And the neighbors, hearing of their good fortune, came by and said: “what lucky people you are”, we thought that certainly you were going to die this coming winter”, “this is the most amazing turn of events in our memory”, “you have certainly beaten the fates”, “now you are the most wealthy family in the entire valley”, we can’t imagine what wonderful deeds you must have done in countless past lives to deserve such a reversal of fortune”.

The farmer listened to them all, shook his head and said again, “well good luck – bad luck you never know”.

The farmer and his son, being good business men, decided to break the horses before they took them to market and thus make a larger sum. The son was riding the wild horses, in an attempt to gentle them, when the horse he was on, reared into the air, fell over on his side and crushed the young man’s leg. The damaged leg was so bad that it had to be amputated.

Well, when the neighbors heard of this additional turn of events they were truly concerned and distraught. They came to the farmers house and offered their condolences “You unfortunate man”, “What a truly terrible thing to have happen”, “your only son”! Who will take care of you in your old age”, “we can’t even begin to imagine the awful things you must have done in countless past lives to have your apparent good fortune marred by this truly catastrophic event”.

The farmer said in response to their concerns, “It really seems like a tragedy but good luck – bad luck you never know”.

Well, hardly a month passed before young man was up on his one leg with a crutch serving for the second when the army of the Khan came through the valley and took away all the young men, never to return, except one.

So good luck – bad luck you never know.

Personally in my own life it seems to take me at least ten years or even longer to assess the significance of major life events. – Ed Wortz

What draws me to this work is the contrast in texture. One gets to experience the fuzzy turf rooftop, the glossy, sparkly interior dome, then the smooth velum like dioramas and finally the brittle exterior entrance.

I have come to feel that very few photographs can be seen as single or standalone statement. Relationships are the key to resonance. The Rooftop photos alone are awkward, but together they form a gentle curve, a hint at infinity. Our antelopes and zebras co-exist, the stealth and stolid attributes are two sides of the same coin. There is a collusion between the fractured ceiling and the faceted dome that the quartet of pictures makes plain. An eminent sense of shelter, with its foreboding saw like edge, becomes a shaded refuge despite the rigorous geometry.

© Nancy Cantwell

Achim Freyer’s Redemption through Geometry, Metaphysics and Light Sabers
by Rita Valencia

Although I am focusing on design and direction in these notes on LA OPERA’s Ring Cycle, it would be a travesty here not to applaud the spectacular vocal performances last night. I would single out Anja Kampe, whose performance was jaw-droppingly powerful, tender and transfixing…but then that would leave out Placido Domingo’s powerful, expertly polished performance with its subtly Italianate flourishes so right for the part of Seigmund; or Linda Watson’s spectacular Brunnhilde. Eric Halvarson (Hunding) has a basso so profound I would be terrified to be in the same room with him singing, and Vitalj Kowaljow performed a nuanced and complex Wotan. Michelle DeYoung ’s power mezzo gave Fricka some real muscle, and the ensemble of Walkuries was as exciting a moment in opera as I can recall.

With some trepidation I approached the second installment of Achim Freyer’s aggressively designed Ring Cycle. I came prepared for the Tacky, Ornate and Silly and was delighted to find a thoughtful execution which had a fine sense of human scale and movement that was carefully calibrated to the music. The slow motion choreography is a signature of Freyer’s style and here it works brilliantly as a visual complement to the story and score, in contrast to the imposed stiffness that was so awkward in Das Rheingold. There was still some silly stuff: a heavy reliance on light sabers that reminded me of the toy department at the now defunct Kmart on San Fernando Road, but I cannot really fault Freyer for that–I doubt that he has shopping for young boys at KMart in his lexicon. (He has a daughter Amanda, who is his co-costume designer.) And he probably is unfamiliar with the local connotation of a large eyeball he places high stage left–one can’t expect him to be familiar with L.A.’s Lowbrow Art movement which years ago took the emblem for one of its own. As The Ring plays out, I am sure that the style of this idiosyncratic designer/director will become less chafing to some in the audience, especially as his thoughtfulness and conceptual mastery of The Ring’s resplendently layered matrix of mythos and narrative is fully revealed.

Die Walkurie opens with a dark dreamscape centered on a large rotating clockface disk upon which a solitary black figure moves in an excruciatingly slow clockwise orbit, dragging with it the hand of the clock–a white illuminated tube–which turns on the spindle of a tall glowing blue tube. These two projectiles form the central thematic objects–literally poles–on which the story turns: the blue tube stands in for the magic sword which Wotan has planted in the tree outside Seiglinde’s home, for only a true hero to extract, and the white glowing tube represents Wotan’s spear, upon which is written the law. An emblem of heroism, the sword is double-edged. On the one hand it represents empowerment of the Hero, who is the soldier of forces of love, hope and freedom of humankind; this sword will enable the twin lovers Siegmund and Seiglinde to successfully escape Seiglinde’s cruel ogre of a spouse, Hunding. The other edge of the sword is its function to enable the more destructive and venal desire of Wotan, arming the hero to get back the Ring. Just as the sword is double edged, so is the Hero, who is both a vehicle for goodness and innocence, and also the most brazen and foolish evil. The second “narrative pole” of the myth’s geometry is the spear upon which the Law is written. Law plays a crucial role in the story that unfolds. It is the law written on that spear which thwarts Wotan’s desire to obtain the Ring. The giant Fafner’s claim upon it is legal and binding–a chafing worry for Wotan whose doomed desire for the Ring subverts every action he takes. The Law drives the force with which Fricka commands Wotan to bend to her will in her vendetta against Wotan’s beloved children, Seigmund and Seiglinde. Their love is verboten: breaking laws of marriage and against incest. Even though we know that Fricka is motivated by more petty motives of envy and spite, the Law is on her side, and the law is binding.

That these two objects form a clockwork has deep significance to the story: the abstracted timepiece reminds us that each scene we see unfold has its roots in actions of the past and will have deep ramifications in the future. Using two poles as a geometric analog to the pivotal narrative forces is a brilliant design strategy, as is the clockface with its circumambulating figure who moves clockwise when the action is moving forward, and counterclockwise when the drama is reflecting on past actions. Freyer uses the rotation of this clock as choreographic device, creating the illusion of flowing movement, with the actors moving hardly at all. It becomes the long space strangers must traverse to become lovers in the slow arousal of lust between Sieglinde and Siegmund in the first act. In the stunning climactic scene of the ride of the Valkyries, it becomes a demented carousel spinning strange broken bicycle horses ridden by the enchanting and wild females who are palpably gleeful in their performance.

The stage does occasionally creak when it rotates though–which wasn’t anywhere near as distracting as the cell phone that went off in the first act or the man who tried to sing along with the Valkyries who was sitting next to my friend Martin. Now if only Freyer would lose that dangling igloo shaped castle that he uses for Valhalla…he’d have a whole-hearted fan.

I usually like to keep my art and fashion in separate silos. Seeing each product in context can make all the difference. Crossover rarely is of interest, appropriation that mimics style and lacks insight. Recently I have seen two spreads that make the handshake between fashion and art palatable, maybe even tasty.

Egon Schiele was a truly tragic, memorable artist whose works penetrate the retina with as much passion as they penetrate the psyche. In this spring’s NYTimes’ Men’s Fashion Season Premier 2009, photographer Eric Nehr offers up a fashion editorial based on Scheile’s work that is eye catching. The posturing is perfectly reminiscent, the gaze of the eyes disenfranchised, the makeup and brushed in background painterly. But after sitting with these images what I began to take away was their sense of emergence. Gone are the heavy outlines, somber colorings and erotic confrontations. Instead soft pastel colors gently and delicately define the figures and urge them, along with the charming sartorial display, to materialize.

Like insects hatching these models transpire as springtime heralds.

The next image, also produced by NYTimes, was extracted from the spread titled “The New Collections”, photography by Maciek Kobbielski, fashion editor Anne Christensen. A plug for the print media is now in order. This ran as a full page in the Times Magazine February 15, 2009 and there are details that may not be adequately supported by a web presence. On initial examination, one is overwhelmed by reflection and refraction. The house of mirrors tells the story of a community shattered by flood and neglect. Meanwhile our model is all a glitter like some roaring twenties disco ball, she literally sports stars in her eyes! But what most piques my interest is the presence of the photographer himself. Like Jan Van Eyck’s Bride of Arnofini we have to excavate his presence. Follow the flash produced constellation.

And what is most delightful is the fashion lampoon. His worn dungarees and serious work boots are the perfect foil for our night clubbing girlfriend dressed in crystal overalls, white rimmed goggles and tufted shoes, all by Proenza Schouler. Did she stay out all night or just take a wrong turn?

An old friend of mine recently commented, “you always have had the best taste in music!”  Well thank you, but Alan Rich is the man! He has been the voice for Los Angeles music criticism for 20 years and I have learned more than a thing or two by keeping abreast of Alan’s work. Now, we are so lucky to have SO I’VE HEARD, the blog.

To say that this is a Rich resource would not only be a bad pun, but also an understatement. So I’ve Heard has cataloged reviews going all the way back to January 1983 when Alan Rich and Steve Reich discuss together Reich’s, then new recording, “Tehillim”. It’s heaven!

When I was informed of So I’ve Heard, I immediately added it to my blogroll. I encourage everyone to spend some quality time browsing Rich’s reviews and recommendations. The rewards are great.

Here is a sampling of some current material:
Devastation, March 22, 2009

The slow movement of Mozart’s G-minor Quintet is as heartbreaking as any music I know. I have written about this music before – a couple of pages in the foreword to my book of this same name repeat an article from New York Magazine in the 1970s, which in turn regurgitates wisdom verbatim from the classrooms of David Boyden and Joe Kerman at UC-Berkeley in the 1950s. Hearing it again last Friday, wonderfully played by the Calder Quartet plus Paul Coletti’s second viola at Zipper Hall, I found myself reacting more strongly than ever before to the G-minor outcry that begins the next movement, the ensuing Arioso – Mozart’s refusal to let go of the agonies he has shared with us over the eight minutes of the previous movement – and I ended the evening aware that my years of adoration of this one Mozart revelation so far have been in no way adequate.

That movement remains unique. Just the subtlety in the range of its tone color makes it so, in demanding that its five instruments perform muted until that overpowering release, the single high D that proclaims major triumphant over minor. In schoolboy enthusiasm I once proclaimed that D my favorite note in all music, and friends came over and asked me to play it for them – the one note! That’s nonsense, of course; a note is only a note in context. And when Ben Jacobson played it on Friday, because of the way he and his four partners had gotten themselves into the context of that amazing entire work, that stupendous panorama of suffering and irony and, in its final movement, an almost insolent masque of resolution, that high D had once again become, indeed, my favorite of all notes, ever. …

Also friends, please support the arts. Amazon purchases support So I’ve Heard. Use this sponsorship link for all your Amazon purchases and help support a Los Angeles cultural icon.

This is my Valentine to Baseball. And what better day to post than the opening of the 2009 Season, the Dodgers vs. Giants!

These are photographs taken with a stereoscopic camera. They were shot at the Polo Grounds(IV), dated 1951-52, I am not really sure. But what I do know is that the Great Willie Mays is playing, Bobby “The Shot Heard Round the World” Thomson is playing and Leo “The Lip” Durocher is managing the New York Giants. This Giants’ roster also included Sal “The Barber” Maglie,  famous for throwing “chin music”, hence the legacy, effectual, close shave.

My grandfather is the photographer and my grandmother is the silver haired lady with the best sunglasses on the planet! They were friends of the Durochers and when Leo came to California to coach the Dodgers, I too, got to sit behind home plate and get a close-up view of Don Drysdale go into a complete meltdown. The drama was spectacular!!! And I was hooked.

This post marks a bit of new technology for Times Quotidian, a Slideshow. So click on any image and you can thumb through the slideshow. Please spend some time with the captions. They contain many play by play details.

[View with PicLens]

“a shimmer of possibility: Photographs by Paul Graham” is on view through May 18 at the Museum of Modern Art. I had been unaware of his body of work before I read this review in the NYTimes and being very intrigued decided to rectify that circumstance. After spending some time on Paul Graham’s site I am now excited by the non-linear approach of his books, an strategy he calls “filmic Haiku”. His work bypasses mere road work documentation and pursues vernacular accidents to “replicate the episodic, Chekhovian experience”.
Fine Deal!

So I passed these treasures onto my friend Paul Cabanis whose work has quite a similar bend. Paul doesn’t oft answer my emails with more than one word responses, but this time he spent some time in crafting a response. I knew I had a co-conspirator at hand.

Here is Paul’s List, in order of preference:
The Great NorthRoad
End of an Age
Troubled Land
Television Portraits
Beyond Caring

Here is Nancy’s list, in order of preference: 
Ceasefire
The Great NorthRoad
New Europe
Television Portaits
Shimmer of Posibility

Here is my favorite shot from his New Europe, 1986-1982. It says everything to be said about “waiting”.

Here is my second favorite shot from his A1-The Great North Road 1981-1982. I feel like its Alice looking back through the mirror to the last century. Will this photograph hold up in the long run? Will it become some specific irony or will it tell a more commanding story? In all  fairness, to isolate a picture from a Paul Graham “short story” is silly. But still, I am seduced.

The Dilemma of Watching Wagner – By Rita Valencia

Theatrical eminence Achim Freyer has an astonishing portfolio: please check out the photos of the productions he’s done at his own company Freyer Ensemble.

http://www.freyer-ensemble.de

The task of staging the mythic, grand and otherworldly works of the Ring cycle involves scholarly mastery and a theoretical rigor. Any major opera company needs to engage a theater artist who is credentialed and bears the imprimatur of a cultural establishment. Wagner after all is the epitome of a grand master, a model for the hyperinflation of artistic importance…big themes set to brilliant grandiose music, and backed up by the most refined musical skills that Western culture can provide. The musical experience of Wagner is the rush of mainlining the Profound. Wagner’s work is the musical incarnation of spiritual ecstasy: he has heard something, and his music makes you feel that you heard it too, when you were a god, in the vast millennia bygone.

But the mystery of aural experience translating into the literality of visual theater is inherently problematic. Pop culture has always viewed the theatrics of Wagner opera as slightly absurd. The fat lady with a big open mouth, funny hat and frumpy robe has become a sad visual emblem of general philistine scorn. However ignorant, there is also some truth here. It’s easy to be pompous or tacky or silly in an era where most all the cutting edge artists have all been taken by the cause of irony. For all it matters, my personal choice for a designer would have been Anselm Kiefer, who hasn’t to my knowledge designed any theater, but in the visual art realm he seems the closest analog to Wagner living today. Los Angeles, FINALLY getting a production of the Ring cycle…alas, couldn’t afford George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic (thank gods!!!) and mercifully, they didn’t approach Spielberg. Given all this, presenting the Ring constitutes the artistic equivalent of a field of land mines. Enter Achim Freyer, a practitioner of German Expressionistic theater whose career comes with impeccable pedigree.

Some critics praise this production for not being Marxist, Keynesian, etc–implying that it is a disservice to Wagner to politicize the work, presumably by staging it as a contemporary political morality play, spelling out what the mythic tale of greed and moral corruption means in the here and now. The here and now for Wagner may not have been as isolated from the gods as popular and even high culture is today, but within the tradition of German Romanticism there was a deep horror at the alienation from a moral and spiritual groundedness which capitalism in its infancy was instigating. Wagner was as deeply concerned with this as Dostoevsky was in pre-revolutionary Russia. In a similar vein, only a generation or so preceeding, Goethe, in Faust, critiques the concept of a financial system based on paper money (in the little read second act.) The relevance of the Ring cycle today is pretty obvious given the financial crisis. But there is more here than relevance…for serving Wagner means serving the gods and heroes he invokes, and the godless (with a small ‘g’) and mundane realm of current politically engaged art runs the risk of trivializing the authentic grandeur of the work. Reviewing a sampling of the commentary on recent productions of Wagner’s Ring you’ll find consistently problematic attempts at “re-approached” stagings.

This one is also in its way “re-approached,” with a heavy-handed Expressionistic style. I am actually a big fan of the raucously visual, surreal, post-modern, post punk, but this staging amazes in how little sensitivity is shown to the music. There’s a fine line between bold visual style and visual bombast. Wagner calls for extreme theatricality–it’s in the DNA of the work to create an alternate universe of form and color and magic. Freyer would have seemed an appropriate choice, given his resume. The major misstep here was that the opera was fashioned into a Freyer piece, and there was an uneasy competition between music and visual style, in which style was like the ugly gnome who stole the show.

This production was too often crudely rendered and physically cumbersome. There were some “wow” moments– the ethereal Rhinemaidens ensconced in wafting blueness, their images reflected by silent mimes, subtle scrims crossed with soft light beams; there was a cleverly engineered transition from the mountain home of the Gods to the torture mines of Alberich; and an equally amazing flood of blood that heaves and undulates over the stage after the Giants’ fratricide. But these moments were undercut, particularly in the sequences where Wotan and Fricka are stationed in rigid symmetry around their clock faced mountain, stuck into clunky costumes. Key moments of the drama were undercut by just plain bad decisions of stagecraft and design that came off as amateurish or silly. Alberich’s arm comes off as Wotan wrests the ring from him and it bounces comically on the floor. There was an inexplicable cartoon airplane hanging in the sky. Valhalla is represented as a small crude drawing that looks sort of like an igloo with a blue stick of light protruding inexplicably from it. Why did Fricka have to have two (ugly) costumes and on top of that, have to carry one of them around? Major problems with the scale, size and manageability of the costumes distracted from the music. And there were notable instances of neglect: the deterioration of the gods after they lose the golden apples was never addressed at all visually.

The flaws beg the question of whether this practitioner is so confident and pumped up by his successes that he doesn’t sweat the details. And Freyer has an awesome photographer, so we won’t remember any of the stuff that didn’t work.