The Times Quotidian

Thinking about Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia
by Rita Valencia

Behold the bride Justine, her name plucked from a novel by de Sade, her body bedecked in crinoline, lace, satin, and bone stiffeners. Her voluptuous skin pillows at the edges of her wedding garment, which squeezes her bosom tightly and blossoms open below the waist. She is a vision in white as she runs across the neatly cropped lawn, dragging ragged rope chains behind her. A cumbersome sort of froth envelopes her, marks her as special and sets her apart from the herd of onlookers, the wedding guests who watch, each regarding her with his/her own form of desire.

To shun their desire, one after the other, is the project of Lars Von Trier’s “melancholy” bride, played by Kirsten Dunst (Justine), whose face, described brilliantly by cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro, is much better than beautiful as it expresses her mercurial moodswings. We find ourselves ensnared in a madness that would be Cassandra-like if Justine were willing or able to express it coherently.

As do all brides worthy of the gown, Justine has a secret. Her clandestine date with doom is something which she is not able to share, although it is, ironically, something all will share in. The astronomical anomaly which is the domain of scientists she has stolen and adopted into her feminine aspect: a planet which is no more than a sparkle of red in the sky has fallen into her mind’s orbit. Hers is the intelligence of the seer, the shaman, the witch or the saint. She has no power that is superhuman, but the sensitivity she possesses has no place in polite conventional society, a world in which she is still trapped. Having not found any alternative universe, she grows morose and pensive. She has only a partial, truncated faith in herself, which is more problematic for her than no faith at all and yet makes her easier for us to deal with (i.e., medicate) than a true yogi, or a believer like Johannes of Dreyer’s Ordet. Justine’s acts of kindness and cruelty may appear random and arbitrary, though she is unfailingly loving to the child in her life, her little nephew.

Dunst’s bride is exasperating to the audience (turned rather cleverly into extended wedding guests). We see the bondage of the bride as privilege. The conventions demanded of her on her special day are our gifts to her. To refuse them, to try to make “her” special day into her special day is an offense. She only displays “rudeness” to the most arrogant of guests, her boss, whose hideous egocentrism demands the harsh treatment with which she blesses him and leaves him to degenerate into speechless, impotent apoplexy.

The opulence of the wedding party is essential to Von Trier’s strategy, as is the Wagnerian grandiosity that underlays the sumptuous images. The magnitude of gifts granted the bride reflects the profundity of her renunciation. Faced with the ire of her family, she protests to her rigid sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg): “…But I smiled, I smiled a lot!” The bride can smile all she wants, but even these guests, obtuse as pigeons, know there is something awry.

Lars Von Trier has avoided the traps of genre conventionality that turn any filmmaker broaching the subject of the end-of-the-world into a bride getting married to a particularly boring groom. He dances with his subject with characteristic delicacy, care and fine poetic instinct, alluding to a host  of great masters whose work informs his:  the elegant planet choreography of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Shakepeare’s lovely suicidal Ophelia, Antonioni’s refractory beauty Giuliana of Red Desert, Resnais/Robbes-Grillet’s scenic mystery of Last Year at Marienbad. His artistic/cultural bloodlines are Ingmar Bergman and  Carl Theodor Dreyer. But his fusion of wedding movie, family drama and apocalypse is a reinvention and a subversion of genre that is uniquely Von Trier and defies labels, much  like Kubrick, Godard, or Fassbinder, who have pretty much invented their own way of “doing” film that can’t be easily categorized as “post modern”, “neo-realist” etc. His work has the quality of good fiction or philosophy leading us into a dark vast forest and leaving us there to contemplate rather than showing us the way back (which always ends up being wrong).

The openness of the result, conceptually, is what will frustrate ordinary audiences and create an attitude of dismissiveness, quibbling and even scorn. But it leaves the rest of us open to speculate. Justine is privy to an apocalyptic vision which is as subtle and elusive as it is inexorable. It drives her into behaviors that have the appearance of rudeness, craziness, or extreme narcissism. “I know things”, she confides to her sister Claire, who has limited patience, as an ordinary woman steeped in the mundane world.

The nature of Justine’s specialness, her alien planetary madness, suffuses the wild poetic vision of Melancholia, a  movie whose notion of the end-of-the-world eschews flying dirt and ruptured concrete. Von Trier sees the annihilation as the display of a single mind so powerful that it is able to magnetize other minds into actually experiencing the same vision. The idea of melancholia, “refined” by modern psychiatry into a concept of endogenous depression, not caused by “outside” factors and characterized by a sense of foreboding, is a clue to this more ambitious project of the film. The sharply abridged world of the grand estate of perfect isolation and prestige is bounded by hairpin turns that frustrate the bride and groom in their attempt to enter it in too large a vehicle. It is reminiscent of Dogville in its self-enclosure. The tiny domain is abandoned by all guests at the end of the misbegotten wedding party and human anxiety is left to fester and infect the imaginations of the beings left behind.

When the planetary disaster is imminent, Claire rounds up her son and tries to escape the estate in a golf cart. “Where are you going Claire?” Justine asks. “The village,” Claire tearfully replies. “This isn’t about the village,” responds Justine darkly.

The experience of the end is shared only by the sisters and the child, Leo. Claire’s husband John (Keifer Sutherland), the bourgeois scientist, has killed himself, more from shame at facing his calculation errors than end-of-world terror. They come together, under no more than a sketch of a shelter created by sticks, a purely architectural form of whimsical surrender, and join hands in love as they merge into Justine’s apocalyptic crescendo. There is no more than this, what we see–what we think we see–and doom.

Revisiting the World of EASY RIDER
by Rita Valencia

I vividly remember paying not a shred of attention to Easy Rider in 1969. Whatever it was about, it wasn’t Ours, but was pretending to be. The idea of re-presenting the present out from under Us was still too new. It was a given that Hollywood wouldn’t, couldn’t ever “get it”, that the portrayals of sixties youth culture would always fall flat. People from the Hollywood establishment were untrustworthy observers: too old, too embedded in cliché and conventionalism for even the best of intentions to salvage them. This went for movie stars too, even “hip” ones like Dennis Hopper, who was, at  34, trying to play a 20-something in this film. Nobody with the wherewithal to mass market, on 35 mm film, a message or representation, took the notion of questioning consumerist and capitalist values seriously. Perhaps they knew that, as sure as four kids at Kent State, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy,  and Fred Hampton, were dead, the idea of  world peace and a society free from corporate sponsorship was doomed.

Today’s youth culture is a brand that is readily accessible: it exists in a cyber world of signs, tweets and emoticons written in code for all to see in the realms of Facebook and Twitter. Style and language is a uniform code vertically integrated through age, socioeconomic demographics–instantly, globally. In those long ago times before the internet there was a private and unspoken aspect to the communal youth experience that defied facile representation. But Easy Rider went ahead and did it, grossing 60 million dollars worldwide by 1972 off a $400,000 budget. Someone was paying attention, or at least watching in gape-mouthed silence.

There was a deep establishmentarian aversion to looking at the genuinely radical ideas behind some of the social trends of that decade. ‘Free Love’, for example, in its filmic representations and in its reiterations in the 70s, looks like swinging or other forms of narcissistic hedonism. Hedonism and narcissism were symptomatic of a boisterous boom economy, but the ideas that generated free love were based on socialist ideals. The marriage institution was a consumerist exercise in purchasing a biological mate. A utopian ideal of communal loving kindness, and ultimately peace, required that people eschew “ownership” of a sexual partner. These ideas sound laughable today, but I grew up schooled in the view that all the rituals of courtship–rings, gifts of jewelry, formal dating etc. —were bribes and ransom for the procurement of access to, followed by ownership of, my body, and that love (relationships, sexuality) needed to break free from the capitalist consumerist model that underlay it. Free love was meaningful, at least superficially, to women more than men because the concept would presumably free them from an essentially passive and reactive role. But somehow the mass media re-presentation of “free love” became horny male hippies skinny-dipping with hot “chicks.” Easy Rider was cast in that pre-feminist mold.

As I reach back to try to remember why I ignored Easy Rider, I recall an amazing array of culturally trenchant films that had credibility at the time: Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1969); Don’t Look Back (D.A. Pennebaker, 1967)  with Bob Dylan at the center spinning poetry and attitude; Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil, (1968) with its long long takes of Mick Jagger singing in some kind of sexual ecstasy intercut with protest signs, graffiti, and Black Panthers. Panic in Needle Park (1971)—which, incidentally, starred Al Pacino—was also a favorite: it evoked the smell associated with crash pads, bad drugs and wasted kids. 1969 was the year that Midnight Cowboy came out, one of the darkest, saddest and most soulful films of the decade. A year earlier, the spectacularly creepy and poetic 2001:A Space Odyssey, had captured the paranoia of the coming digital surveillance space age. Warhol/Morissey were in their prime, with a prodigious output of B films that covered urban subculture–a long list that includes Lonesome Cowboys, Flesh, and Trash.

Although Easy Rider may fall short as cultural analysis or filmic poetry it undoubtedly marks the successful branding of a generation. As of 1969, advertisers had not yet figured out the youth market and had largely ignored the counterculture. Life magazine was just beginning to show photo essays about hippies, as some odd wackos living out in the country. Hopper and Fonda were the perfect frontmen for the opening salvo in a campaign to gather the flocks of disaffected youth, or, more importantly, disaffected youth wannabes, for after all, it’s the aspirational character of mass market that drives consumerism. Dennis Hopper grew up in television. Peter Fonda was part of Hollywood royalty. They never become fictional characters. Compare them to Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo and the Jon Voight’s haunted and sweet Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy. Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) come off as two fairly well off Hollywood actors who dress up like hippies and ride shiny motorcycles. Peter Fonda’s Wyatt is amiable and narcissistic, tilting his well-sculpted head to capture the light just so on his high cheekbones and patrician profile. He wears the shirt of a dandy and has the whiff of natural privilege and superiority about him. His famous line, “I never wanted to be anybody else” says it all. Why the hell would he want to be anybody else? Hopper’s Billy is the more interesting of the two: a confused, irascible, paranoid, and sometimes unpleasant misfit. After they do a drug deal with Phil Spector–whose genuine unwholesomeness seems downright eerie given recent events–the two set off  to a grand soundtrack of “classic” sixties pothead music, through the glorious landscape of the West. Jack Nicholson plays himself lusciously, with a nod to his character “George”; good fun but ultimately disappointing. His memorable moment is his “They fear you for your freedom” speech, that has all the depth of Jefferson Smith’s climactic rant in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I for one don’t buy the argument that people down South are “fearful of freedom”. They just don’t like Yankees, queers or Hippies: the bias is wired into their brains from long-standing cultural practice. Importantly, cultural practice is subject to influence and change, however glacial.

Landscape is really at the heart of the film. Lovely to look at, vista after stunning vista appears like flapping pages on an Arizona Highways calendar. The magnificence of the American desert is a tacit expression of albeit bland religiosity embedded in Easy Rider. The message goes something like: out here you can see the majesty of the Creator at work. This is sacred land, once tended by indigenous peoples whose dead are buried under the places we buy and sell, get high upon, or otherwise profane by our presence. Notions of property are mundane held up to the pristine and ancient openness of the desert, and  ideas of time are petty, held up to the eternal Presence of the land.

The American roots of this mode of thinking are the Transcendentalists of the 19th century, whose ideas were in turn derived from the English Romantics, from German Idealism…and the Hindu Vedic tradition. Even though there was a small but important hippy subculture that returned to the land who did adopt these values, to look too deeply into those sources in the context of Easy Rider is misleading. The landscape is really more a decorative mood motif than a source of genuine reverence, more a backdrop for dudes on shiny motorcycles than an allusion to transcendence.

The encounters of Wyatt and Billy with the others they meet are  laced with paranoia, conflict and strangeness. With the exception of  George Hanson–the small town ACLU lawyer played by Jack Nicholson–the people of the road never whole-heartedly welcome them, and the trip gets progressively darker, but unfortunately not in a very illuminating way. (It is instructive to note that if you decide to drop acid after a friend has been murdered, don’t do it in a cemetery.) Billy’s line after their journey is (almost) all over is “we blew it”…meaning they had made some unnamed, perhaps unnamable, irreversible mistake. The koan-like remark, left unexplained, promises more than it can ever deliver. Yes, it’s a good idea to leave it unexplained, but it does beg the question, what was their plan…the “it” that they blew? Even in 1969 it was pretty obvious from the start that these guys were too old to be excused for having a hare-brained idea like taking off and retiring to Florida on the proceeds of a drug deal. There was no idealism, no altruism, no cynicism, just an experiment with mindlessness. Yeah, whatever.

Now that I am an old geezerette, and not an 18-year old with a bad attitude, I smile a little at the kindness in Hopper’s portrait of a generation that, at his advanced age of 30-something, he could easily have derided. Alas, the kindness was too soft in the head to shed any light on what was really happening. As political agitprop it falls almost tragically flat. Tragic because it’s crucial to understand what happens when people begin to rise up. Yes, rednecks hated hippies, but rednecks were never the real problem, and the “hippies” knew that. Rednecks weren’t responsible for killing the kids at Kent State or the Black Panthers. That was the National Guard, called out by the State government of Ohio; that was the FBI. It was never the country people who presented much of a challenge to the counterculture, as a matter of fact, the stylings and costuming of Easy Rider were ironically taken from them and then re-adopted in relatively short order by rural America. By the early seventies a whole vein of rock’n'roll had gone southern (Allman Bros, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Ry Cooder, etc). Style and costumes became the only lasting legacy of the time.

The sixties was the only decade where three grass roots political movements–anti-war, feminism and civil rights–actually gained traction; but the social movement of the counterculture, the utopian dreams, died, and all that was left us was granola, tie dye and Rolling Stone Magazine (which in the 70’s claimed to have “sold” the 60’s generation to advertisers). The reasons are largely structural, with institutions of media, finance and governance playing major roles. The ignorant redneck with a tumor on his neck (played by an actual resident of a tiny Louisiana town known for its gambling dens and brothels) who shoots Billy and Wyatt may have been a villain once upon a time, but today he’s the victim of a health care system that gives him the choice of losing everything he’s got to pay for his disease, or dying in the same ditch as the killed hippy.

Rem Koolhaas’ CRONOCAOS at New Museum, Lower East Side, Manhattan
by Rita Valencia

Architecture is monstrous in the way in which each choice leads to the reduction of possibility.
—Rem Koolhaas

May 2011: New York City is at its greige gritty best. It is springtime and the promise of a rain is unfulfilled as storm clouds scutter uselessly across a blue sky.  In the lower East Side, where the New Museum now occupies its splendid SANAA designed building of stacked white boxes, the word CRONOCAOS is lettered in white Helvetica Medium on a chrome yellow awning on the museum’s homely neighbor, the site of a former wholesale business. The Helvetica poses as a kind of institutional graffiti, jaunty and cool in a “made ya look” way. The signage of the defunct business is still readable: “7 floors of Restaurant and Kitchen Equipment” in tasteless but functional sans serif. A large banner printed on vinyl is stretched across the windows above the awning with 4-color images of different pieces of food storage and display furniture. The names of these items are inscrutable to the uninitiated. “GVRB, GLDO, GRSD,” read captions below the images of shelving units that seem to float on sky blue backgrounds. A tagger’s mark has defaced the upper section of one of the banners, advertising a different sort of product for a different market. Art citizens might be proud to have wrested more real estate from low rent commerce. Koolhaas has something to say about that.

 

Inside, the floor plan of the show gives equal time to the vestiges of the previous occupancy. The floor surface is worn and creaky. A big reception counter still stands at the back of the space. Plaques and certificates declaring the integrity and skill of the deceased business owner hang on the wall beside the exhibition posters. A giant orange floor pillow sits glowing in the sun by the window facing the street. The Koolhaas exhibit, in disarmingly plain and direct fashion, guides the viewer along a path marked by white arrows on the floor, past hanging placards sequentially numbered and jam-packed with text. There’s an undeniable frisson that arises from the juxtaposition of the defunct commercial zone and the deliberate cultural zone.

CRONOCAOS is an essay/installation/manifesto, first presented at the 2010 Venice Biennale, in which Rem Koolhaas takes on the concept and practice of Historic Preservation, the darling of NGOs and city planners. This has been a surprisingly unexamined concept. It is inevitable that any architectural practice must confront a past that lives in structures guarded largely by the twin gargoyles of philistinism and committee-think. CRONOCAOS presents an impressive collection of hundreds of case studies and reports on recent developments/destructions. Bringing them together in one place exposes deep flaws in the current system of “preservation”.

Koolhaas builds his case on a large number of facts, many of them astonishing and absurd. To name a few: 12% of the world is inaccessible to new building or design due to its status as historically significant; the moon landing site has been been given U.S. Historic Preservation status; there is actually an acronym, IUJ, created by an international historic preservation NGO, for “Insignificant Universal Junk.” Koolhaas declares that in the countryside foreign farm workers have replaced farmers, a further demonstration of the replacement of the authentic with the ersatz, the enframing of the old natural-traditional order by a new techno-economic one. The story unfolds of preservation criteria that are vague, subjective and politically determined. Given this analysis, standard items of bourgeois cultural agreement such as “Postwar Architecture is Ugly and Deserves to Die,” don’t hold up. Koolhaas poses, “What Deserves Eternal Life?” and in so doing warns that the combination of a weak public sector and a decision-making bureaucracy keen on “preemptive mediocrity” will lead to the disappearance of architecture as a social project and the promotion of bland and faceless standardization which has no relevance to actual local human needs or cultural vicissitudes.

Koolhaas makes a compelling and lively case for rethinking the whole process by which structures or neighborhoods are selected for demolition or preservation. He has been ruminating on this idea for several years (see his article in Future Anterior, 2004) and the insights at the heart of his thesis are sound.  Koolhaas states  “…preservation is not the enemy of modernity but actually one of its inventions. That makes perfect sense because clearly the whole idea of modernization raises either latently or overtly the issue of what to keep.” Koolhaas’ archi-philosophical system addresses many specific cases. An entire wall of the exhibition is devoted to a make-it-yourself book: neatly arranged padded papers printed with pictures and text describing various restoration/renovation projects OMA (Koolhaas’ firm) has spearheaded, along with examples of  “progress” that has gone to seed. You can tear off as many sheets from the pads as you wish to create your own free catalog of the show. The catalog quickly becomes a disorganized mess but reminiscent of a McLuhan screed. He speaks of the status quo’s aversion to the “non-planned city”, using Lagos, Nigeria as an example, which arises from the exigencies of its residents and the broken social contracts of its governments. For Beijing he proposes a stripe-like  plan in which new and old are evenly divided within the city limits. This formalized and nondiscriminatory plan would ensure a more equalized distribution of old and new, where “historically significant” status is not conferred using sentimental, political, or crassly economic criteria.

What if, he asks archly, all architecture over 25-years-old were scrapped? The concept of abandoning one set of worn and uninterrogated values–authenticity, beauty, significance–for a more arbitrary and categorical system is one way of showing how a truly “democratic” system exposes the subliminal issues of preservation, which declares itself to be innately virtuous but in practice has become aesthetically corrupt, standardizing and, worse, boring.

Koolhaas’ argument builds up a head of steam that isn’t diminished by its lapses of fact or logical leaps–but they are worth mentioning. He cites the demolition of Berlin’s Palast der Republik as an example of the desire to symbolically destroy the last vestiges of communism. Although undoubtedly there were politics at play, he ignores the fact that this was a troubled building site where asbestos contamination played a big role in the decision-making. In calling into question the repurposing of decommissioned factories and warehouses as art galleries, he asks, “What is the effect on art if it has to animate larger and larger spaces that were dimensioned for industry, not for the intimate confrontation with art?” In fact, the confrontation with art has never been exclusively “intimate”, and art has a long history of animating enormous spaces from Greek temples to Gothic cathedrals, to the vast outdoors. To name just a few here in the US, MassMOCA, the Geffen Contemporary, and Dia Beacon show that these formerly industrial spaces can be exciting and effective venues where art seems to thrive. Koolhaas careens forward along this line of thought, asking, and “Is it a coincidence that these spaces have engendered an Apocalyptic Sublime?” “And how different is it from Hollywood?” By way of illustration, posted on the far wall as a sort of  “off the deep end” kind of zone, are works by fine artists alongside analogous works by their counterparts in the Hollywood culture industry; renditions of the monstrous, the teetering, the devastated and the dangerously large in nuclear glowing colors, or burnt and ashen grays. These juxtapositions are mostly fatuous and add little to the more rational aspects of the exhibition’s discourse. The cross pollination of iconography between the cultural realms brings up issues that are complicated and beyond the scope of Koolhaas’ manifesto. Still, it seems like the Romantic period’s Apocalyptic Sublime is due for reconsideration after the nuclear meltdowns, tsunamis, monster hurricanes, wildfires, and killer tornadoes of the past decade. If nature continues to have its way, Koolhaas will be assured of a long and prosperous future despite preservationists.

Even if the smell of uber-sophisticated marketing pitch under laces the Koolhaas manifesto, there is always the charming threat of iconoclasm to the Koolhaas mystique. If the concept of architecture were a building with columns, Koolhaas would have had the columns removed and replaced by invisible spheres of energy. The roof would become a forest, and the basement would be excavated until it was open to the sky. Any architecture worth attention is at heart a utopian proposition not subject to the laws of gravity, but subjecting the laws of gravity to its own unique vision.

[the author wishes to thank J. R. Bob Dobb for the title]

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, 2010, a documentary by Andrei Ujica
by Rita Valencia

“We were told to fire 30 rounds each into them. From the hip. As paratroopers. Not as a firing squad, where some of the shooters have real bullets, some blanks, so that no one has to live with the feeling of being an executioner. We fired live…

“After shooting seven rounds into Ceausescu, the gun jammed. I changed magazines and shot a full 30 rounds into Elena. She flew backwards with the force of it all. We started at about a metre range and then walked steadily backwards, still firing, so that we wouldn’t be caught by a ricochet.”

Elena’s blood splattered on his uniform. The back of her skull had fallen away. “She didn’t die easily. She was in spasms,” Mr Cirlan shook his head at the memory. “I had never even killed a chicken before.”

—Dorin-Marian Cirlan, one of the Ceauscescus’ executioners, from a 2009 interview in the London Sunday Times by Roger Boyes

Perhaps the most unsettling thing about the purely sensual, filmic side to this extraordinary documentary is the unfailing beauty of Nicolae Ceausescu’s hair, and the pure pleasure that sparkles on his pretty face as he enjoys his glorious life: the parades, the pageantry, the state visits, the swank vacations. There is no sense of a grim or troubled soul, and his public remarks always seem well-reasoned and intelligent. Hitler, by contrast, always seemed a bit angry or agitated. Nixon was sweaty and anxious. Bush had his edge, with the hangdog look of a dry drunk. Perhaps this could be accounted for by different drugs. We know Hitler was a speed freak. Ceausescu seemed…high on life.

This film, by Andrei Ujica, is constructed entirely of archival footage, documented by state agencies. The destitution of late 20th century Romania is hidden in plain sight, as  staged scenes of supposedly well-stocked markets appear absurdly barren and phony to Western eyes (ironic, considering), and the parade routes of the later years of Ceausescu’s reign are thinly lined with conscripted citizens who made little attempt to disguise their lack of enthusiasm. Formally excluded from this documentary is any direct indictment of Ceausescu. This lies exclusively in the great space that the film opens up by building a framework out of the celebration of the life of a Great Man. The filling of this great space has been carried out by mainstream media critics who are in basic lockstep with the official line, that Ceausescu and his wife were corrupt monsters and deserved to be tried in a kangaroo court and shot dead within the hour of their sentencing on Christmas Day.

That the realities of the revolution in Romania were the result of more complex and sinister forces is not surprising. The General who ordered the execution has claimed that the Soviet KGB was instrumental in Ceausescu’s downfall, having been involved in planning it for a year or more. With the track record the IMF has accumulated over the past twenty or so years of being the world’s most brazen loan shark, one has to look at Ceausescu’s act of going into debt to that organization as a terrible blunder indeed; but given the number of people wanting him out of the way, the disaster that ensued seemed almost scripted. His “maverick” status within the Soviet bloc, along with his staunchly nationalist ideology contributed to Romania’s isolation. At the same time it was the principle of state sovereignty which formed the basis of his philosophy of diplomacy, a philosophy that proved largely successful until the tide turned. He seemed to relish the notion of having skilled statesmanship, creating and keeping alliances with strangers, but as the infrastructure of his own nation decayed there was an air of sham and delusion to his career which became increasingly piquant as his stature declined.

Ujica builds an exquisitely subtle tragic drama without dialogue, interview or narration. His authorship is entirely intelligent and completely invisible. This self-effacement itself has a dark edge: an eloquent a comment on the voicelessness of a population under the hold of a dictator—and perhaps there is something of this carried into the current Romanian political climate, where positive comments about Ceascescu and negative comments about his opponents are illegal. In am atmosphere of silence, scene by scene, the arc of a man’s life unfolds: beginning with a portrait of ambition, loyalty, and sincerity; building into a fantasy of pomp and self-importance, until the bloating and hollowing of the machine of state collapses, and there is nothing left of the man, only slogans, anxiety, and bald lies.

Always, it is the unstated that takes center stage in this tragedy…what we know, or think we know, what we’ve heard, what we wish to be true. Was he a delusional madman, a foolish dupe, or a cruel tyrant? A metanarrative emerges which affords us only signs.  This documentary—which ought to be considered a classic of the form—somehow seems to demand that critics and viewers fill in the spaces it leaves with what is known, or thought to be known, about the history of the time. We feel that such a construction of materials produced with an entirely “positive” viewpoint on the subject must be “corrected.” However, the blanks the filmmaker leaves, intentionally and formally, in no way compel us to fill them in. The compulsion to fill in lies entirely with our own discomfiture at any whiff of real openness—of heart or mind. Begin your story with the downfall of any man or woman—begin by showing her to be a corpse—or a prisoner rendered powerless, and somehow the jeering ceases and fascination begins, that is, unless the audience is addicted to the anger porn peddled by the mainstream broadcast news. The tension that animates this film and gives it its power is the unknown: the mystery at the heart of a subject and in his wife, and the hidden clockwork of a megalomaniac turned tragic antihero in the grasp of a skilled  historiographer.

George Herms: THE ARTIST’S LIFE, REDCAT February 3, 2011 - February 5, 2011
by Rita Valencia

“Loving everyone. Knowing nothing.” —George Herms, on himself

In this joyously messy, shambling show, jazz fan and beat generation icon George Herms put together a happening/opera, framing his assemblage art with an all-star ensemble of L.A.’s jazz legends, the Bobby Bradford Mo’tet and  the Theo Saunders Group. Herms tuned in to the audience with bat-like radar, waiting for the last program to cease its rattling and the last guy to stop chattering to his girlfriend, then announced that we had just experienced The Afterparty (listed as the first piece in the program) in the lobby beforehand. Indeed, I reflected, my lobby experience had been really fun and party-like, running into old friends and being de-recognized by some people who had slipped my mind entirely. Then George lined up the (nearly all-male) ensemble of instrumentalists for intros that are usually saved for after a couple of sets and named this, his second piece,  “Curtain Call”. During “Darkness”, we were requested to turn on our cell phones in order to make some noise (as luck would have it mine was programmed for silence.)

“Opera” was used loosely–there was a soprano, Diana Briscoe, who didn’t really find a groove that night–but the jazz was tight. It was easy to be carried away by  solos from the likes of Vinny Golia, Azar Lawrence, Chuck Manning or Don Preston. Coltrane and  Monk, of course, had something to do with this. The show also channelled some of the spirit of L.A. jazz genius and musical bodhisattva Horace Tapscott (Herms listed him in the dedication) whose brilliant free jazz narrative experiments were as breathtakingly intense as they were heartbreakingly secret (largely unrecorded). Herms being the quintissential fanatic, the energy feedback loop only amplified the prodigious muscianship onstage.

Surrounding himself with this kind of heat, Herms stayed cool and in control. A huge video projection played across the back of the stage, its camera focussed on Herms’ handicrafts. He stamped letterforms on paper plates and tossed them out into the audience, made different shapes with cut up photographs, and used as interstitials slides of old work. During “Trane Cycle” stagehands rolled out a large rust bitten spiral staircase which was set dangling in clockwise motion upstage and used as a percussion instrument as Herms whacked it with short lengths of 2 by 4s. Later in the show he tethered it with an ungainly wired up mass of glittery trash and chicken wire. A giant beaten up metal buoy hung like a beautiful dead thing stage left. In the final act, Herms traipsed across stage encased in a giant triangular-shaped assemblage, putting the intrepid Briscoe at risk of sudden impalement. As a crescendo, the wiry Herms ran around the theater with two fists full of  demented pompoms devised from Venetian blind slats which made a delightful clamor as he shook them. Then Herms wriggled into a harness and had himself hoisted far above the stage, where he dangled for a while in the spotlight. It was a sort of grownup art kindergarten, to the tune of ultra-sophisticated sounds, and Herms revelled in his angst-less-ness most of the time. He did set aside a part of the show (“Facing Death”) for reflecting wistfully on friends and loved ones who had died; without any great sentiment or attempt at ‘wisdom’. Herms left us us only the faintest and most delicate brushstrokes of an abiding loneliness and anxious confusion.

This was not a show steeped in art theory. The Beats, as Herms has been known to say, were truly  “conservative” in hewing to romantic values of Beauty, Truth, Art, and anti-materialism. They were about undercutting Eisenhower America: a squaresville that nurtured burdgeoning consumerism, eschewed sincerity and embraced status, and tossed out any idea that threatened its zeal for comfort, conformity and conventionalism.  Appropriately, Herms went to junkyards and picked up trash to make art that recognizes a certain equality of form related to Zen philosphical ideas, but also has a gently political, anti-bourgeois slant.

The Beat generation was dissipating even as Herms came of age. It had had a good long run, starting in the late forties and extending into the early sixties, linked to a fast-evolving flow of jazz music. Even though the Beats emerged from the shadow of the Bomb, radical political analysis was never their bag. The Beats were into spiritual liberation, the liberation of the word (Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia and on), the alteration of consciousness, shifting frames of reference, exploring eastern thought–particularly Zen–getting high, and freeing the “self” from the strictures of straight life. The way history went down, with the Vietnam War, the draft, Civil Rights, and the Black Power movement, assassinations, conspiracies, riots, bloodied heads and students killed; the Beats were bound to become obsolete. The more trenchant and radical groups like Weathermen, Yippies, and  the Situationists (who were around even before the Beats and who attacked the Beats on the grounds of their slack political analysis) saw their relevance and visibility rise. It became more urgently necessary, given the challenges of civil rights, the draft, and the brutal realities of war and protest, for art to expose the underlayment of social repression in the very institutions of art and the academy, as well as commerce and the “apolitical” realm of entertainment.

There is an interesting interview with Herms on netropolitan.org where he speaks ruefully about his associate Ed Keinholtz, an artist who framed his work in the context of social protest and who cultivated a bad boy image to his advantage. His implication is clear, that Keinholtz was better at marketing, and so was able to take the kind of work that Herms was doing and build an art-star career out of it. “I owe it all to you”, Herms quotes Keinholz as telling him when they were alone together and nobody was listening.

Herms’ intentional playfulness and studied lack of rigor are all about staying open and free–terms that seem utterly anachronistic to an uptight urban art culture–but are singularly appropriate to reconsider in this ironic world we inhabit. Of course, the greatest irony is that this very enjoyable evening of music and happening by a cool, maverick artist is presented by Roy and Ed Disney Redcat theater, as part of “Pacific Standard Time”, a series presented by the Getty about the birth of the L.A. Art scene, and it’s sponsored by Bank of America.

A Ramble with Michael Rotondi
By Rita Valencia

Stylish and relaxed in his Japanese farmer pants, Michael Rotondi greets me from a slightly raised platform which serves as the reception desk, where he is working with the only two staffers present on a Saturday. I am directed to the library, an open space with generous windows spilling in light from the clear autumn afternoon, illuminating the cerulean blue painted plywood floor. The vast and impressively eclectic collection of art and architecture books surrounds a spacious conference table swept clear of all but a few random notepages. There is a huge open workfloor with dozens of project stations active, a creative hive of hands-on activity: models in various stages of completion; plans, books and sketches.

Mr. Rotondi walks me over to the wooden model of Zangdok Palri, the planned 3-D mandala (temple) for the mountain retreatland in Tehachapi, that was recently the subject of a brief  but very popular exhibit at the Hammer Museum in Westwood. Rotondi lifts the roof like a kid showing off his new toy. Inside is the radial ribcage of the mandala. The model shows only the bare structure of a building  intended as an expression of a complex cosmology which will be both elusive and accessible, both grounded in tradition and shatteringly new….

Through mutual friends, Rotondi met Ven. Lama Chodak Gyatso Nubpa in 2002, and the two quickly sparked to one another. As part of his dedication to conserving and propagating the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, Lama Gyatso aspired to build the Zangdok Palri, a painstakingly researched and precisely crafted work of art and engineering. The site is a picturesque and rugged canyon that lies in a north facing mountain at the southern fringe of the Sierra Nevadas, amidst a stand of Ponderosa pines and adjacent to a stream fed by natural artesian springs. Rotondi has partnered with Lama Gyatso and his team, and continues his consultation on the project, which is just completing its planning phase and is now seeking sponsorship. In addition to the contemporary work he is known for, Rotondi has a background working with Native Americans–who have suffered a similar fate to the Tibetans over the last couple of centuries–as well as other Buddhist groups and indigenous peoples. But at the heart of his engagement is a feeling of personal connection with Lama Gyatso…who passed away just last year.

What follows are excerpts from a long  relaxed audience with Mr. Rotondi, which wove through his personal and artistic history–a sort of mind-in-progress snapshot…

family structure

My father was the youngest kid in the family… my father and mother wanted to invent a life, not merely inherit one predetermined by family hierarchies and ethnic traditions, so they moved west to ‘the coast’. At dinner we were never required by tradition or my father to sit in the same seat–we sat down wherever we sat down. When I went back east the first time, to visit my mother’s family, I was 4-years old. The second time I went back east  I was 24-years-old. And I sat down at the dining room table, same people, just  twenty years older. I sat down, but no one else would sit down. Finally my uncle came over and said “Could you sit over here?” So I moved to the seat he showed me, and immediately everybody fell into place. And I realized that I was now sitting in exactly the same seat that I had been sitting in 20 years earlier.

teaching and learning

One afternoon as we walked the site in Tehachapi,  our conversation focused on the design of buildings on the site, and Lama Gyatso asked me, “What should they look like?”

Trying to help him understand the limits of  ’style’ I responded,  “They should be invisible.”

He stopped and turned to me and asked me to explain how this was possible, and I turned and pointed to a huge extraordinary pine tree that we had just walked by without noticing, and said that this tree was an example of invisibility: this tree was hiding in plain sight and we had to look twice to see it once.

Again he asked me to elaborate. As I began to explain it, I realized that he understood it so quickly that he already knew what I was telling him but had not heard it expressed in this way. Through questioning and dialogue, he kept drawing things out of me; each thought was impetus for the next. It wasn’t the typical Socratic question and answer. I continued that this tree, in its full character, had become what it was because of its context, which created the conditions for this tree to manifest as it did. It’s size and character were inevitable.  Inevitability and invisibility are the same in this context, I said.

When I finished my thought, his face expressed the joy of a teacher who was pleased by the student’s discovery.  I realized what I had just said, having spoken extemporaneously, was inevitable as well…the context of being there at that moment in that natural environment walking and talking with him created the conditions for these thoughts which I had the opportunity to express. Being around some people, you can not help but learn. This for me was a lesson on how to teach.  True learning is an act of discovery of something that was always present.

in-sight

In the first four years of a human’s life, all of the cells in the visual cortex are waiting for the light on the outside to come through and basically trigger the light on the inside. We hold images in our visual cortex. After reading this I began to wonder,  “how do you actually see”? Where is the image? Is it the actual object we see or is a memory of the image of the object stored in our brain and retrieved at the appropriate time?  The eyes are just bringing the light in.

If you’re born blind, and you have a transplant anytime after four years of age, you only see in proportion to how much time has passed beyond those four years. If you have a transplant at 20-years old, you can’t see at all. It’s no longer possible because the cells in the visual cortex that ‘hold the images’ have disappeared and other senses have made up for what the eyes couldn’t do. The memory is formed by all that we see in our early years. This memory is selectively triggered when outer light ‘carrying form’  meets the ‘inner light’  and the image emerges from our memory into our ‘mind’s eye’.

So, images are stored within us and are retrieved when triggered by an external context. Is it possible that ‘all knowledge necessary’ for our survival is stored within us, transferred epi-genetically?  Is it possible that at the moment of birth we are potentially all knowing and our intelligence is latent within us and we are not born ‘empty’ as we are told, and the experiences we have, in context, determine the degree to which our intelligence unfolds? The cells in our body innovate in this way.

The concept of scale is essential to visual thinking.

Also, facts can not  get in the way of a fluid imagination.

ordering principles

What I didn’t know before I started this project is that a sand mandala [a two dimensional mandala] is actually the roof plan of a building. You grab the center and lift: it’s a pop up. Not literal in the sense that it is precisely what the building will be, but in the sense that the entire story is written down below. The size and the proportions of it are set by tradition and transferred from one person to the next by spoken word.  In a stupa–a common building in Buddhism–the structure is ‘regulated’ by numerical ordering systems that are based on sacred geometries and proportion systems. It’s generally two to one ratios. In western architecture, proportion systems which began in the Age of Faith bridged into the Age of Reason through all of the arts, but it was advanced through the harmonic systems used in music. The architecture of the Renaissance took it to a greater scale and purpose. Proportioning systems were understood  as both sacred and secular numerology.  The goal of a proportioning system is to produce a sense of coherence and harmonic wholeness on a site  or in a building. The human body has a capacity to autonomically sense this.

beauty

Beauty–thought about in a cursory way, you say ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’…I do not believe this is correct. There is something universal about beauty.

It’s presence can supercede the idiosyncrasies of taste or style. When a cross section of  people, with different ethnicities, educations, and life experiences, were observed identifying beauty, each had an  identical internal chemical reaction. Beauty seems to be biological necessity, not personal taste. So, what was their common ground? what did they all ‘see’? Perhaps we ‘see’ ourselves in a deeper way. We ‘see’ the  inevitability of form, behavior, and intentions manifest in material form. We ‘see’ proportion regulating the process of growth into form, we ‘see’ coherence as wholeness.

symbolic meaning

The entire mandala with all of its symbols, is a gateway for the consciousness through all time to come through into this time. So nothing is superfluous on [a mandala like Zangdok Palri]. Now, there’s interpretation involved; whether it’s this big, or that big, this color or that color, this material or that material.

Generally this particular mandala is about light, enlightenment. So, instead of just being symbolically about light, it is the experience of light as well. I showed Lama Gyatso certain materials, types of glass, and there was one called dichroic glass: when the light hits it, becomes prismatic from the inside and it changes colors, as the sun moves throughout the day.’ He says, “Wow! Can we use this on the building?” We talked about many different materials that could basically solve the problem. There are performance criteria, but then there is how you actually go about it, which is open. That openness was basically Lama’s M.O. You can interpret lots of things as long as  you can get to the core meaning of what we’re trying to do.

integration

There was a point in time when I became interested for a number of reasons in integrating the mind and the heart. The question, ‘is it possible to integrate intellectual and spiritual activities’ needed an answer. Architecture is primarily an intellectual activity although throughout its history it has had a peripheral focus on matters of the heart. I was interested in the most fundamental type of integration. So I began to study certain precedents.  I got the American Indian  creation stories, and I drove to the Southwest, to the Canyon de Chelly. You read the stories there because then you’re in the spaces described in the stories and all your senses are present. During this process I started to understand how everything is integrated. It isn’t just a conceptual decision to integrate. There’s the land, the physical characteristics of the place, the power that resides in the unique landforms, the animals and vegetation, and humans. The stories describe how and why all of these parts co-exist  symbiotically, harmonically. These pilgrimages to particular places to read particular stories grounded in these place enhanced the world I already knew. Sacred events were place and time based. The practical and profound were the flipside of each other. Ideas and experiences enhanced each other. Everything was in motion yet in dynamic equilibrium. Everything was one thing.  This whole learning process for me was a reenactment of how I/we learned as children. Our body was present when our mind was engaged. Dewey called this ‘experience based learning’. Thoreau might call it ‘synesthetic’, all the senses, basically kicking in at the same time.

When I was telling a couple of new friends about my travels and what I was discovering, it happened that one of them was the head of a foundation interested in working with Native Americans. So, together we  worked with American Indians for some years. [Rotondi worked with the Lakotas, designing & building Sinte Gleske University on the Rosebud Reservation and designing the Oglala Lakota College Fine Arts Building on the Pine Ridge reservation.]

I  was taken to Wounded Knee with one of the women from the reservation and we walked around for a few hours…we weren’t talking the whole time, we were just walking and standing wherever she decided to stop, that’s how I figured she was teaching me. We finally stopped right next to the obelisk that has the names of all the chiefs who’d been shot down, and the most uncanny thing–and it’s the first time I’d ever felt this…I could feel–it was like the equivalent of cognac going down—except something was coming up through the bottom of my feet. And it hit me. And the most profound sadness that I’d ever felt came into my heart. It just–I couldn’t talk for the rest of the day. I looked over at her, and she looked at me; she knew that I’d gotten it, and she just said, we’ll go now.

It wasn’t physically painful. It was a different kind of pain, it was…I was sad for our species, just totally sad for our species and our capacity to let our dark side manifest so thoroughly.

And from that moment on, I was really clear that we/RoTo were on a mission…and we had to do the stuff that we would normally do but still had to dedicate a whole lot of time to doing other things to rebuild trust, and to restore our humanity.

Over time, that led me to American Buddhists and the Tibetans.

dividing and connecting

The East and the West is not, for me, the dichotomy. The east is where the wisdom resides and the west, in its youth, is where inventiveness resides.  I began to define it as  earth-based societies (east) and sky-based societies (west). We’re sky-based, basically. Sky-based societies see the mind–or what we think–as independent of the body. Then, all the technology that we produce–all of society is structured on that technology, and you are further and further  removed from the earth. Take telecommunications–a sky-based technology. Totally conceptualized. Now, what is rarely talked about is that any of the technology that we produce  comes from intuition about how the body works. All knowledge is primarily body-based. The fact that this is an arguable point among intellectuals is the crux of the problem.  And now  digital technology has been amplified out to the conceptual body, the ‘global community’ through what we define now as social media. There’s an upside and a downside. The upside is that in a fractionated society–we’ve become more and more fractionated– social media is connecting people, at least technically. The downside is, because there’s no gravity in the computer, literally and figuratively, people think they actually have friendships when they don’t. I mean it’s kind of weird to be calling people “friends” when you’ve never met them before.

If we know we are being surreal then it is okay but when we actually believe it, the term friend is seriously diluted.

In earth-based societies, there were consequences when you made decisions that were based on lies: things didn’t grow. You didn’t have storage…especially if you were nomadic. There were no stores. There was no Costco. You basically had to live the right life in order to be in the kind of intellectual, and emotional, and spiritual zone to get return from your efforts. You had to walk the talk. Negotiating with God is not an option. The practical and the profound were connected in their stories so they were connected in their lives.

We don’t have practical and profound being connected. You can’t make these connections  conceptually. In an earth-based society a building or an object, or piece of clothing can have very practical applications but at the same time, the way it was made, the material that was used, and the particular aesthetic, is profound. And so every day, you’re reminded that every moment is a sacred moment.

dominion

The contested territory of what’s sacred and what’s profane is always a big debate. It’s not a debate when for example the U.S. government put Mt. Rushmore on the Black Hills–knowing exactly what they were doing.  The Black Hills in South Dakota were the main sacred spot for the Lakota. Like every other emperor or power that takes down this temple and rebuilds it in another way, this was the U.S. government’s way to finalize its dominion over these peoples.  The ultimate dominion of one civilization over another is always spiritual. It’s never political. And spiritual is where you rip the heart out.

giving back

Instead of prayer being something to put you into an altered state, we’re raised to think you have to be negotiating with God all the time. I was invited to the most sacred of ceremonies at the reservation — and you find enlightenment here only exists in giving it back to everybody else. That’s what you read  about in the Vision Quest.  The vision–which should happen individually only by one person facing four directions over four days–if he has a vision–the only way that vision could ever be realized was for it to be enacted  as an opera with the rest of the tribe.

It wasn’t proprietary. The greatest period of invention in America was when Ben Franklin was alive and nobody patented anything. Why? Because people were putting ideas back out into the community, and they were growing, everything was growing on itself.

That’s what  barn-raising is. That’s what cooperative living is about. We see it primarily as competition. The question is, is it possible to have competition and cooperation? Yes: you cooperate with each other to raise the standard and then you compete against the standard instead of each other.

 

When I started to change everything in my life,  it came to me that my body was an encyclopedia of 15 billion years folded in. I wanted to know, how do you get access to it? And now, what I’ve learned…it’s not out there. It is all stored here. And when your body becomes utterly still, your mind becomes totally quiet, which happens for a nanosecond. That’s all you need. You can see all the way to the core of the earth. And you become weightless for a moment. Something happens. It’s not something you can even describe or say what you’ve learned from it. You can’t describe it, but you’ve basically evolved to the next level in terms of the inside. The index of this is how your relationships with other people change.

There are certain kinds of projects that allow you to evolve as a person. You have to become transparent. So I have to bring my consciousness as opposed to personality. It’s not about me. It’s about this: whatever we’re doing becomes a medium for establishing a relationship with somebody else who can teach you. And I’m most interested in learning right now.

The Zangdok Palri project  has to do with cultural sustainability. When you’re doing work like this mandala, it’s cultural sustainability that leads to the regenerative…as Pema Thaye would say. The only way you can do this properly is by trying to lose yourself. So what this helps me do, what it forces me to do is to move further along in my own practice, my own personal practice. The work is not about producing a building, the architecture becomes a pretext for the relationships.

Ven. Lama Chodak Gyatso Nubpa —Like thousands of other Tibetan monks, nuns, and lay people, Lama Gyatso, a Nyingma lineage holder, survived a forced and difficult journey out of Tibet as a small boy with his family. After extensive education and training and a distinguished career with the Tibetan government-in-exile as representative of the Nyingmapa community, he came to Los Angeles at the request of His Eminence Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche. He established a center in Los Angeles to teach the Dharma and to preserve truly traditional Tibetan culture in ways that it can no longer be preserved in Tibet.

Michael Rotondi —Co-founder of the renowned architectural firm, Morphosis, and SCI-Arc School of Architecture in Los Angeles, Michael Rotondi is now the principle of RoTo architects, a firm located on a top floor loft space in the Brewery.

The Mandala Project, Hammer Museum, Oct. 26 – Nov. 7, 2010
By Rita Valencia

The invasion, occupation and exploitation of Tibet by the Chinese that began in 1951 has left a unique cultural and spiritual tradition in tatters. Massive engines of information and misinformation variously describe Tibet before the Chinese as a sort of spiritual paradise or conversely, a hell on earth whose cause was taken up by the evil CIA. The ordinary citizen is often left distressed, guessing, interpolating and trusting blindly. I recently asked a Tibetan gentleman about his 1959 escape from the Chinese government troops who had come to his small hamlet. Surely there was a friendly taxi driver, a delivery truck or creaky bus to assist them. His golden, ravaged face breaking into a gentle smile, he told me, “There was nothing mechanical in Tibet. No machines, no cars, nothing like that. We [the extended family] loaded what we had on our yaks and horses, and left in the night ” …for journeys of hundreds of miles, through treacherous mountains. Several of the man’s young family members died of exposure and disease on the journey, and one of the young cousins, aged 8, was called upon to do their powa (the Tibetan Buddhist ritual for the dead). For the survivors of the escape/expulsion, there were years of life in refugee camps, and gradual resettlement in Sikkim, Nepal, Bhutan; then on to the Far East, Europe, South and North America.

The 8-year old who was charged with administering powa for his siblings grew up to become the Venerable Lama Chödak Gyatso Nubpa, worked briefly as representative of the Nyingma community in the Dalai Lama’s government in exile, founded Ari Bhod Center for Tibetan Cultural Preservation in Tehachapi, California, and was the resident lama for the dharma center T’hondup Ling in Los Angeles until his death in 2009. Lama Gyatso and his students take as central to their practice a commitment to preserving to the minutest detail the Nyingma tradition of Tibeten Buddhism.

Lama Gyatso was author and driving force behind a unique mandala project underway at Ari Bhod and which is the subject of an exhibition at the Hammer Museum scheduled to open Tuesday, October 26 until ending ceremonies on November 7. The exhibit is installation, performance, and meditation all at once, with a sacred complex of meaning. Four Tibetan lamas of the Nyingma tradition will be in public view working in the gallery for an 11-day period, constructing a sand mandala, an intricate design which radiates symmetrically from a center. It is made of different colored sands painstakingly sprinkled into place a few grains at a time using a tubular pencil-shaped implement. The mandala design itself is both a sacred artwork which has its own symbolic content, and a graphic representation of a 3-dimensional mandala, which can be of a particular size, depending on its purpose. Alongside the work of the lamas, the Hammer will have on display the one-of-a-kind 3-dimensional mandala and scale model of the planned 4-story shrine Zangdok Palri, to be built in the mountain retreatland of Ari Bhod.

Zangdok Palri, which translates as “copper-colored mountain”, in the Nyingma tradition, is the sacred mystical mountain dwelling place (“celestial mansion”) of Guru Rinpoche (Padmasambhava, who established Vajrayana Buddhism in Tibet). Under Lama Gyatso’s guidance, the 3-dimensional mandala was researched and constructed by Tibetan master artist Pema Namdol Thaye. Along with Lama Gyatso until his passing away, Pema Thaye has partnered with eminent architect Michael Rotondi in drawing up the intricate plans for this project, which will be on display at the Hammer as well. Pema will also be showing his Thangka painting of Zangdok Palri, a different sort of visualization of the sacred edifice, depicting Guru Rinpoche ensconced on a delicate pink and white open lotus throne, flanked by his eight manifestations and other figures from the Nyingma pantheon.

The elaborate and profound iconography of the artwork on display, concentrated into these multidimensional works, represents even more than meets the eye, on many levels. The time and place of this exhibit exists in the larger context of recent historical events in Tibet, which are having repercussions worldwide. The Zangdok Palri project is one of several which Ari Bhod has underway as part of an ongoing commitment to disseminate and preserve Tibetan Buddhist teachings in the Nyingma tradition. The mission takes on an urgency as the situation in Tibet continues to devolve. Jamie Price, who is a founding member and executive director of Ari Bhod, speaks of her recent trip to Tibet:

“I’ve been to Tibet three times: in 2000, 2004 with Lama Gyatso, and just this year. I have witnessed first hand over these years the decimation of a cultural heritage.The first time I went was as a tourist. I didn’t know anything about Buddhism… Lhasa wasn’t developed at all, maybe a few hotels, but other than that, pretty wide open. The second time (2004) when we went with Lama Gyatso there was a lot more commercial activity, stores and such. You started to see signs in Chinese with the  Tibetan  underneath and smaller. This time (2010), the development was exponential. The fields outlying the city of Lhasa have been completely developed into Chinese factories and there are a lot of  stores. You see commercial advertising everywhere, which was previously unheard of. The Tibetan language is being replaced with  Chinese so you are starting to see more signs written just in the Chinese language. That in and of itself is a really significant change.

The control that the Chinese government has over the city is very much in evidence. In particular, the main temple just outside of the Potala Palace and square that is the center of  Tibetan spiritual life, where countless pilgrims come to circumambulate and make offerings at the shrines inside the temple–is highly regulated. Chinese police are photographing everybody at all times. The photographers with the big paparazzi lenses aren’t dressed in military uniforms at all, they look like “undercover” agents (although they’ve got that huge camera so it’s pretty obvious.) They are on the rooftops and they are on the ground, they’ve got their camera lens in your face, and they are documenting everybody and everything at all times. In that particular square they have a sensitivity to people gathering and protesting. Generally it has a very controlled repressive feel.

We left the city and went out we went to Dorjedrak monastery. On the one hand, it was incredible to find there a new sprouting of dharma, where for the first time in years,  since 1959, they had lamas come and bestow Gang-Ter (Northern Treasures) transmissions and empowerments– which is extraordinary. There were several hundred monks there and you could see authentic Dharma being practiced, real kindness pervading, real Dharma. It was so moving to see this happening…but then we were told that the monks, in order to go anywhere, have to get permits from the police. They can’t just come and go. There is a resident policeman at every location at that monastery as well. So for us to seek participation to stay or visit, it’s up to the policeman, not the resident Lama.

Samye, where King Trisong Detsen invited Guru Rinpoche to come to Tibet, in 9th century, and where he then built the Samye monastery  is an incredible historical location for the Nyingma lineage in particular.When you go there you can see the Chinese government making efforts to restore the place…but with tourists in mind, not with the goal of restablishing Dharma or preserving authenticity. You see the damage that was done to the existing ancient murals and mandalas: eyes scratched out of the Buddhas, and in the temples themselves the murals completely deteriorated. But as they are repainting things, they are doing it without any regard to proportion, accuracy or authenticity at all. That’s not preservation. As they’re repainting, the authentic teachings that went with these works of art are being lost.

We  went to visit nearby Lama Gyatso’s family region, a stupa by the name of  Chung Riwoche an area where Tangtong Gyalpo (1361-1485) built  some of the first iron bridges  ever constructed. In this particular stupa traditionally you have mandalas painted on the walls, and statues. Every element is a piece of a whole instructional map–essentially for attaining awakening. We walked into this stupa and of the statues that remained, the heads were broken and the hearts were hacked out. The mandalas on the wall were faded and barely perceptible.

I don’t want to represent myself as an expert because I’m not, but what I understand is that  during the Cultural Revolution, a mass of people came through, they cut down the trees, shipped them off to China, and a lot of people felt impassioned about destroying some of these spiritual representations, and that’s when a lot of this happened.

I can assure you that there is no one left who could tell you what existed there.

We are at the point of authentic Tibetan culture in Tibet being lost , which is why I feel so passionate about accomplishing these projects here, particularly to the level of detail that we plan to adhere to in the Zangdok Palri USA, the 4-story mandala. It simply won’t exist if we don’t do it. And those with the knowledge to really help accomplish this with accuracy are very old. Once they are gone, this knowledge is gone. It’s not like there is some library somewhere  where all this information exists. A lot is in their heads.

It was Lama’s passion and now ours to do what we can while we have the opportunity.”

I posed some questions to Pema Thaye about the project, starting with how those who may have with little or no familiarity with the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition might approach the sacred work on display.

Pema Thaye: You can simply observe the mandala with an open heart and mind without too many pre-conceived concepts and other distracting thoughts and just allow whatever you feel at that moment to arise. It is best to have a clear, open mind and view it with appreciation. By simply doing this you will get some subtle positive effect which you will probably be able to feel as a kind of sense of peace and awe.

The mandala is one of the most holy objects in all existence. Its design was given to humans by divine beings whose sole motivation was pure, non-discriminative compassion for every sentient being – no matter what race, color or religion. Because of the divinity and celestial nature of the structure it is the artist’s responsibility to depict it in as beautiful and accurate a manner as possible. This serves a two-fold purpose:

• To honor the divinity of the structure and represent it as an offering to the deities.

• The celestial beauty, if the artist is successful in creating it in this manner, will draw more beings to view it and thus increase the number of people who are then able to receive the blessings.

RV: The design of the mandala dates back to what point in time?

PT: Many traditional cultures use the circular design of the mandala in their rituals to some extent. In the case of Tibetans and their use of the mandala in Tibetan Buddhism, it dates back  to Buddha Shakyamuni, then later introduced by Guru Padmasambhava at the same time as Buddhism was introduced to Tibet in the 7^th century. As far as pictorial records go, antique thangkas and cave paintings have been discovered from circa 9^th century, but the textual source goes back to Buddha Shakyamuni time. As far as the actual starting point of mandalas in the celestial realm, they have been there for eternity.

RV: Who was responsible for its design?

PT: For Buddhist mandalas in general one could say the historical Buddha is the first divine architect. Similarly, in layman’s terms, each successive deity manifests their own mandala/ celestial palace within the parameters of what the Buddha introduced.

RV: Imagine we are standing facing, say, the east portico of Zangdok Palri. Can you describe the imagery we would see and what it symbolizes?

PT: On the east portico of the main floor of Zangdok Palri we would be standing on the second floor of a four-story structure. Looking inside, the main imagery we would see would be a life-size statue of Guru Padmasambhava facing the east and seated upon a lotus throne, which is raised so that his eyeline is higher than the viewer or any of the other figures around him. He will be surrounded by a series of approximately 90 smaller raised lotus seats, upon which sit the various deities of his retinue.

This symbolizes the Nirmanakaya level (the human form) of the abode of Guru Padmasambhava.

RV: There is a very strong and vibrant color palette…can you elaborate on the significance of the different colors (red, royal blue, light blue, green, orange, gold). Why is there no black, gray, or brown?

PT: The colors of the walls relate to the colors of the four directions and the five Dhayani Buddhas. In this case the usual yellow of the south direction is replaced by blue – lapis lazuli – which is the healing color of the Medicine Buddha.

Overview of the colors of the walls:

Red – west: the precious stone of ruby. Signifies Amitabha Buddha, from  which Guru Padmasambhava arose (from his heart as a red Hri).

Green – north: the precious stone jade. Signifies activity.

White – east: the precious stone of crystal. Signifies  purity.

Blue – south: precious stone lapis lazuli. Signifies healing. These healing qualities encompass every direction, not just south.

Other main colors:

Gold – precious metal. As a celestial mansion it should be made from the most precious and durable substances available.

Copper – signifies the element of Zangdok Palri.

The vibrancy of the colors emulates the quality of precious stones as much as possible through paint, since it was not practical or affordable to use real precious stones.

No black, gray or brown are used as these colors are not associated with anything precious or significant to this structure. Also, with all the other colors, there’s no room or necessity for these colors.

RV: What will the interior be like?

PT: The interior will be even more elaborate than the exterior. Apart from over 100 statues, some of which are life-size, there is almost an unlimited amount of traditional ornamentation which is crafted onto the architectural structure itself.

RV: Have there been any changes to the design of this sort of mandala since its original conception?

PT: The original concept should never be changed; otherwise we lose its profundity. However, the outcome depends upon the experience, full knowledge and skill of the artist creating the mandala to enhance the aesthetic quality– especially with the interpretation of 3-dimensional mandalas.

RV: Can you tell us about the process of building this scale model? How long did it take? What sort of materials did you use? What was the most difficult and/or painstaking aspects of the project?

PT: The very beginning of the initial concept for building a Zangdok Palri monument began a few years before 2000 when I met Lama Gyatso. During the time I was here doing the Shi-tro mandala [another 3-dimensional mandala which is currently installed at Ari Bhod's retreatland] in 2000, we discussed it further. I then completed a concept line drawing in 2002 while concurrently doing specific Zangdok Palri research.

The research involved compiling information from more than 15 different texts (sourcing them and studying them), and consulting various high Lamas to glean the information they had gathered over the years on the subject, including Lama Gompo Tenzing (Ashang-La) [Pema's uncle and teacher].

This process continued over the ensuing years until I arrived back in the U.S. for this specific project in 2007 – and continued until the completion of the model in April 2009. From these two activities I gained approximately 75% of the information I required to design the structure. For the remaining 25% I had to rely upon all my years of artistic training, research and experience with mandala and celestial structures in general, as well as painting, sculpturing and crafting in all mediums.

The resulting structure is the culmination of 30 years of this, because the structure is a celestial design outlined by the Buddhas themselves–there is no manual out there as we get in these modern days; no step-by-step how-to guide, especially in the case of  a mandala such as Zangdok Palri. So I had to make significant interpretations based on my experience of 3D celestial measurements to bring it to its current form. So you could say it was the research that was the most painstaking and time-consuming aspect of the project for me.

In December 2007 I began the initial blueprints and completed these in approximately four months (not counting the time to create the initial concept drawing of Zangdok Palri in 2002). This was the most difficult aspect of the project – designing it in such a way as to bring what is essentially a celestial visualization tool, into a functioning mundane structure was quite difficult.

These plans were then shown to Michael Rotondi, [who is working alongside Pema to address practical structural and zoning code issues].  Michael requested a small model for his team to better understand  the architectural complexity of the structure. This was completed in approximately four months. It was a bare wooden structure with no ornamentation, but a complete replica of the larger one architecturally.

I then commenced the larger model which is currently on display at the Hammer in August 2008, completing it in April 2009. The materials used were primarily wood for the architectural skeleton and some carved ornamentation and trims, polyurethane resin for much of the detailed work, cast from a wax master sculpture, semi-precious stones and bead ornamentation and some metal work.

[ I have to insert here that the painting work on the model was no small feat. Pema, a highly skilled artisan himself, had the help of a small, talented crew of  artists and patient determined practitioners who could stay up all hours of the night painting perfect ornamental friezes.]

RV: In Tibet are there any monuments like Zangdok Palri? Were ordinary people allowed access to sacred spaces such as ZangdokPalri or were they only available for special religious ceremonial purposes?

PT: There is one Zangdok Palri monument in Kathok, Tibet. Anyone is allowed entrance to the general areas, but there are some special sacred areas and only those initiated into, and undertaking the practices to which these areas are dedicated, are allowed to enter.

The Tibetan Buddhist tradition has been scattered like seeds, and now on exists on almost every continent of the world. In forms both extremely pure to extremely diluted, Tibetan Buddhism is taking root, finding converts, and challenging Westerners steeped in scientism, modernism, and materialism. Robert Thurman, in his introduction to the Bantam edition of Tibetan Book of the Dead, speaks of the essential contrast of minds: “The Tibetan character [perceives] all things as infused with spiritual value, as interconnected with mental states…that the spiritual is itself an active energy in nature, subtle but more powerful than the material.” The active dialogue between western perspectives and the cultural-traditional mindset has been a source of inquiry and introspection for architect Michael Rotondi, who is charged with making the Zangdrok Palri mandala structurally sound in the remote mountain terrain where it will be built.

“The first thing you learn”, he says, speaking of the Stupa project he worked on in Santa Cruz, “is that this sort of project is not about interpreting. In the language of contemporary architecture you could view the elaborate ornamentation of Zangdok Palri as pastiche, but try to remove any small part of it and you have erred. In conversation with Lama Gyatso, I came to see that it is our cultural conditioning that causes us to regard the ornamentation or peculiarities of  the Zangdok Palri mandala as cursory, or as matters of convenience or taste. If you remove one gateway, a whole type of consciousness will be lost. Similarly visualization–so detailed and specific in this mandala, corresponding to spiritual realms of essential compassion–is something we actually practice all the time here in the West, in our blogs, in our internet…we live in a universe of visualization, but so often with denser lines, infused with fear, as in politics and news media.”

For the culmination of the exhibit at the Hammer Museum, the artist Pema Thaye and architect Michael Rotondi will be having a conversation about the traditional art on display, and the Lamas will dissolve the mandala and carry the sand off to the ocean to return it, transformed, back into the world.

Above is the representation of the Rigdzin Duepa Sand Mandala that the monks will be constructing at the Hammer Museum commencing October 26, 2010.

* Special thanks to Joseph Dick for rigorous fact checking

Life During Wartime, 2009 (in current release), a film by Todd Solondz
by Rita Valencia

The first shot of Life During Wartime has Joy (Shirley Henderson) quietly weeping, as she sits across from her boyfriend Allen (Michael Kenneth Williams) in a restaurant booth done in upholstery inspired by strychnine hallucinations. Framed in a peculiarly awkward way by crooked bangs and virgin eyebrows that appear never to have been tweezed,  her lovely face will not remain still, but continues blubbering. The upholstery and her tears taken together is alienating–passively aggressive and demanding–and yet whatever your emotional response, the scene has an unsettling quality, as though you have been manually probed and your fraudulence has been exposed. What do you care more about–why she cries, or her bad hair? How Michael Kenneth Williams got that awesome scar across his face? What was the very bad thing he did?  Why do you want to know exactly–so that you can then spit in his face too?

There is no point in denying what you stand accused of, for the faster you set your tongue clucking at the lameness of these characters, the faster you realize how stuck you are, essentially, in the same misery. The impossibility of forgiveness and the continuing cycle of transgression is philosophically rich. It is one thing to critique the shallow mores of post-post-Woody Allen America, with cleverness and outrageously on-target satire. But the project of this film is more ambitious, less comical, and darker. The sentient viewer is more deeply implicated, and the stakes are higher…the word “War” has not entered the film’s title frivolously: it plays its own role of haunting the proceedings by reminding us of the ultimate consequences of clinging to the joyless satisfactions of retribution.

Life During Wartime is a challenging experience, in the way previous Solondz films have been: refusing comfortable illusions of a pleasing entertainment. It is a web of inversions and repetitions, of scathing admissions and crushing deceits. Much of the time you are either forced to retreat emotionally or relent, but inhabiting this cinema is never easy, where perhaps the only crime worse than serial pedophilia is sentimentality. Naturally, this film has provoked one of the most churlish  reviews I’ve ever seen, by Marshall Fine in the Huffington Post (who sanctimonously claims to have tolerated, even enjoyed, Solondz’ other films); as well as a comparison to Rainer Werner Fassbinder by J. Hoberman in the Village Voice.  I’m with J. —this film brought to mind for me Fassbinder’s heartbreaking I Only Want You To Love Me (1976), which explores wrenchingly cold family life in post-postwar Germany.

Because it is necessary for any “genuine” artist to begin with irony–if only to go beyond it–and eschew the grandiose in this anti-culture we inhabit, the comparison to the Promethean Fassbinder may seem unclear, yet Solondz is the only American filmmaker today seriously critiquing the uniquely American form of moral corruption embedded in its insistently bland conventionalism, and exposing the banal righteousness of the culture of punishment, the punitive impulse that drives Americans to view victims as “the good people” (Solondz’ words) and perpetrators as always and forever bad and deserving of social deletion.

Hypocrisy is only beginning of this corruption: the project of Life During Wartime is to explore the territory of forgiveness and investigate the harboring of spite. Both spite and forgiveness depend upon a relationship to the past, and a constant repetition of the offense that generated the suffering. The formal genius of “Wartime” is how the sequence of scenes,  and the cast of characters are haunted both literally and figuratively, by their former incarnations (Happiness, 1995). The surprise of Timmy cumming in Happiness is transposed into the surprise of his committing the first sin…which is an inverted form of the sin (pedophilia) of his father. The pedophile father, Bill, is now incarnated by Ciaran Hinds, whose broken rock of a face is spellbinding and grave.  The scandal-haunted Paul Reubens plays Andy, the ghost of Joy’s boyfriend. Along with Shirley Henderson, these actors bring a new sense of gravitas to their redux roles. This film could be appreciated entirely through its performances, for it gives the actors what it gives the audience, a brilliantly crafted wordplay that realizes a tragic dimension.

Coming of age in such a world as this, a world that demands war,  enmity and anger, means a right of passage that inverts the prayerful bar mitzvah ritual. Set in the midst of emotional devastation created by selfishness, cruelty, and banality,  the boy Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder), on the cusp of puberty, does what any normal boychild would do when his mother shows signs of interest in a man: derails the relationship by any means necessary, in this case,  he falsely accuses the innocent and tender-hearted Harvey (Michael Lerner) of pedophilia. Timmy is naturally close to the concept of a pedophile; his father was incarcerated for serial boy rape, and so his mother Trish (Allison Janney) has warned him, in language inappropriately vague, that he should respond to any man’s touching him with a loud, rousing scream. Trish, hopelessly philistine and obtuse, freaks out, and Lerner is X’d from her affections. His heart is broken. As for Timmy, an innocent boy’s first experience of sin is a surprise. Nothing has really prepared him for the freakish pain of realizing his responsibility in creating another’s suffering. It sets him running backward in a romantic escape scene from his bar mitzvah party: he is a man today, but last week–when IT happened–he was only a boy! It is a failed excuse. Today he is a man, and there is no turning back.

Our insistence on spiteful reactivity has created continual war, out of the quandary of the Middle East and the infection of 9/11. One of the most striking images from the film is a shot of Helen (Ally Sheedy) spewing a cruel rant at her sister Joy, poised in front of a giant photographic blow up of an Israeli tank bearing down on an unarmed lone Palestinian. Solondz inserts his knife in the neck with lines like, “We [the Floridian Jews] only voted for Bush because of Israel, but we really thought he was an idiot.” The political analysis is tense but oblique.  This intentionally remote “war” exists offstage, in the realm of the moral and ethical, where it acts as a carapace of suffering that holds its set of characters exercising demons in the Florida sunshine within an unseen but everpresent darkness.

Photography by Catherine Opie. Please click image to enlarge for detail information.

The Red Desert and The Question Concerning Technology
By Rita  Valencia

Even though we don’t realize it, our lives are dominated by industry. And by “industry”, I don’t just mean the factories themselves, but also their products*

The new release by Criterion of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert comes at a moment when the ecological crisis that was in its infancy in 1964 has matured into a full blown demon with multiple emanations. All cries to end the blind and ludicrous march toward oblivion that “progress” has become are drowned out by the roar of exploding oil gushers. Optimists may claim that the disasters we are seeing are the result of greed and incompetence. Technology and the science which supports it, they would argue, can also be used to solve our ecological problems and create comfort and edification.

They are all over our houses, made of plastic or materials that, up to a few years ago, were totally unknown. They are brightly colored and they chase after us everywhere. They haunt us from advertisements, which appeal ever more subtly to our psychology, to our subconscious.*

Today I read a fascinating piece in the New York Times about the beneficent use of artificial intelligence in making little critters to keep the company of patients with dementia, A Soft Spot for Circuitry. The discussion of brain science often has the feel of an excited girl telling her friend about a first date. “He showed me how a meditating brain has a different color on a CT scan or pattern of brain waves that looks different from that of a “normal” person!” This brightly colored new technology may some day–well, maybe not prove, but posit–that mind exists as an extra-organic noumenon which is at once nonexistent but detectable and measurable and, most importantly, manipulable. The kind of shallow investigation of the measurable raved about on TED, should never excuse us from questioning the phenomenological issues associated with new science in its marriage with technology. Required viewing certainly includes Antonioni’s Red Desert.

Heidegger, in his essay The Question Concerning Technology (1954), examines the troubling ontology of the industrial and post-industrial age. The essence of technology, as Heidegger explains, is exploitive and utilitarian. Instead of the field being a place where the farmer brings forth the fruit of his labors through tools and toil, the field becomes a natural resource that must be regulated and secured for the production of crops. Heidegger calls this transformed entity “standing reserve”, which assumes a position in a process of ordering and managing, cause and effect, in service of a particular set of human demands. The human becomes a subordinate to the process, and though she never entirely succumbs she also is bound into a play of illusory mastery of, or domination by the system. It is a role Heidegger defines as “enframing”. Heidegger sees dangers in this system of enframing. “The unconcealment in accordance with which nature presents itself as a calculable complex of the effects of forces can indeed permit correct determinations; but precisely through these successes the danger may remain that in the midst of all that is correct the true will withdraw.”

I would go as far as to say that by setting the story for Red Desert in the world of factories, I have got to the source of that crisis that like a river, collects together a thousand tributaries and then bursts out into a delta, overflowing its banks and drowning everything.*

The cries within Red Desert are both eery and plangent, but none articulate so well the danger within technology’s reign as the poetic juxtaposition of the sound (electronically manipulated from site sources) and image of blighted transmogrified environment with the beautiful but hysterical victim of her time, Guiliana, played by Monica Vitti. Vitti, in a performance that is at once mannered and uncannily intense, never stops moving, her nervous fingers scraping at an unseen botherer, her eyes strange and shifty. She wears inappropriately elegant shoes for the grim muddy landscape. She is unable to connect, especially with her would-be lover Corrado, played by the very sultry Richard Harris, in the most indefatigable pursuit of an object of desire ever filmed. Giuliana’s bourgeois life affords little in the way of comforts: her mental condition has deprived her of the pleasures of her rank in society and thrown her into a spiraling downward of misery. She is the sort of character contemporary marketers (or audiences in a marketing-savvy time) would reject as “not relatable”, for she remains aloof and self-involved, brittle and skittish.

The “character” with which she is set in conflict is not any of the humans, but the extraordinary environment which Antonioni has so carefully painted her into: shades of ash torn by shocking hues of red, green and yellow, massive pipes and towers, smokestacks spewing. In a tale reminiscent of one of my favorite scenes from Alice in Wonderland, Antonioni describes a night of painting a hapless stand of pines. or rather ordering a team of workers to do so. He had decided they must be white for just the right effect in the dank fog. It was a bitter cold night, with a stiff wind, and the workers were high up in the trees, clouds of white paint billowing around them, all working to exhaustion, some of the men quitting outright. But Antonioni was indefatigable, and scrupulous in describing a world which is not real, but hyper real. Alas, after the rigors of all night painting, (and his best effort at transforming the stand of pines into “standing reserve” in service of Art), his shot was ultimately ruined. The next morning the sun came out, so that the white-painted trees became black silhouettes against the sky.

The dramatic heart of the film is a strange extended scene where Giuliana and a group of her husband Ugo’s associates and friends, including Corrado, gather in a river-side hut for dinner and a swinger party. Starting with an inane conversation about the aphrodisiac effect of quail eggs, Giuliana takes over, in a forced and awkward display of uncool, a cringe-worthy Italian film version of dancing with a lampshade on her head–sexy but underlaced with anxiety. Just in time to forestall even deeper embarrassment, one of the workers walks in on them, accompanied by a sensual low-caste woman. The two are welcomed with an exchange of bawdy, coarse language, but clearly the mood is ruined.

In the party’s denouement, it comes out that the owner of the hut has sold it to the intruding worker, a fact passed over very lightly. A woman complains of the cold. There is no fuel for the woodburning stove. Someone has the idea of pulling slats from an interior wall and breaking down some furniture. Madness ensues: the cruel gaiety of a mob taking delight in the destruction–of property the bourgeois has already sold to the worker–which therefore, is now worthless. Giuliana has taken part…one of the first and only times we see her happy, or at least, savagely gleeful. This orgy takes the place of the sex that never got off the ground–all of the sexual tension is released as destructive and sadistic violence.

In a pause, the party sees a great ship come to a halt right in front of the hut. It hoists a flag to signal the fact that there is an infectious disease on board. On seeing this, Giuliana becomes hysterical and forces the group to leave. Giuliana exists in a toxic world, but the toxic is far preferable to the septic. Although the others are indifferent to any danger, they follow her out–it is cold and the party a failure anyway–Giuliana drops her purse as she leaves but doesn’t realize it before the group has gotten back to the cars. Her emotional state further devolves as Corrado steps up before her husband to fetch it back, and her emotional outburst in pleading with him not to go becomes an unbearable humiliation. Shown POV of Giuliana: the party guests stand in a fog suspension, their bodies fading and blurring before her. They are at once a mob on the verge of stoning the village outcast or a coven of indifferent gaping strangers, but the unsettling shimmer between these two inflections of their gaze is a moment of pure hell and as perfect a filmed poem of alienation as you’ll ever see. Spiralling down, Giulianna gets in her car, drives off into the fog and stops just short of plunging it into the port. Giuliana has taken the scene as far as she could. She has led the action, from eating the libidinous quail’s eggs to rousting the group from its apathy over the boat’s septic threat, and now an attempted suicide shaking them from emotional torpor.

I think that in the next few years we will see some major violent transformations, both in the physical world and in man’s psyche. The current crises derive from this spiritual confusion, which is also moral, religious and political.*

1964 was the year R.D. Laing published Sanity, Madness, and the Family. In eleven case studies, Laing demonstrates the way in which families will take their most non-adaptive member and create a sort of emotional scapegoat of them, depositing in the “neurotic” (or “psychotic”) all the emotional dysfunction of the family, identifying the member as the sole one with the problems, and thus absolve themselves of any responsibility or need to examine their own behavior. This is a microcosm of the larger process of scapegoatism which Girard examines in Violence and the Sacred. Giulianna the “non-adaptive”, will continue to be in a metaphysical sense the dousing rod for the ecological-industrial travesty around her, resisting the process of enframing by failing to comply with a new normalcy, and yet, remaining capable of carrying the load of poisons that lace her environment, inasmuch as she is incapable of figuring out how to put it down.

Antonioni is not consistent in his remarks about Guiliana: sometimes he says the environment is only a trigger to her emotional breakdown–a suicide attempt that has preceded the timeframe of the film–asserting that the ground had to be fertile for her problems to mushroom as they have. In other statements he claims her neurosis is a product of her failure to adapt to her environment; a failure which he sometimes sees as social dysfunction, other times as ecological malaise, and as well in psychological terms. But the poetic truth of this first-ever film in which ecology and psychology are juxtaposed in a meaningful way is undeniably mysterious and anxious. Yes, Guiliana is non-adaptive, but it seems that if she were to “adapt”, the result would necessarily be cynicism and despair…or self-deluded complacency. In his interviews, Antonioni tries to maintain that he is not against progress, and this film is not by any stretch a moralistic diatribe against industrialization. But one needs to imagine a Giuliana who could accept the brutal beauties that meet her gaze: the fruit (painted) gray on the stand outside the empty shop she hopes in vain to open some day, the dinghy smokestacks spewing poison smoke, the brackish polluted water, the heaps of steaming refuse in vacant lots that resemble a sort of charnel ground. Only a yogi–or an artist–would see such a world as “alive and serviceable”–Antonioni’s adjectives. The question also arises, are the objects of the camera’s gaze a symbolic projection of Giuliana’s psychic malaise? Significantly, not. Antonioni is not interested in symbols, but he is keenly observing a remarkable phase of human endeavor, where the forest is just something that gets in the way of industry, and has no business being there–any more than the difficult and maladaptive Guiliana. This problem of functioning/adapting within a context of the Heideggerian “enframing” becomes even more metaphysical than psychological.

The scene of the giant oil tanker sliding anomalously, monstrously, behind the pathetic stand of pines demonstrates the visceral and unnerving process that enframing engenders; the sea transforming from living waterway (see the new dvd’s extraordinary doc fragment, Gente del Po) to standing reserve–a channel for commercial shipping that is open for exploitation. It follows thematically that Corrado, the reluctant entrepreneur with a surfeit of capital to float, finds a new business potential in the tankers for hauling his freight at low low rates–an inspiration he draws from the anchored ship of contagion outside the orgy hut.

The men who comprise the inner circle of Giuliana’s life are her husband Ugo, her 7-year old son Valerio, and Corrado, her lover. She is as it were, their “standing reserve”; for husband, a duty-bound desirable wife; for son, a serviceable mother even in her madness; and for Corrado, a mysterious challenge and conquest. In woman’s traditional role as caregiver and object of desire, happiness has never been a requirement, any more than a donkey is required to enjoy pulling its cart. It is impossible in the red desert world for love to exist, it can only or cohabit with indifference, demand or exploit. In the interpersonal, there is only the decency of exchange, and human decency is thin when it is unsupported by real compassion or ethics. The story which Giuliana tells her son, or rather which her son wrests from her, is a lyrical respite from the desaturated and raw hues of the red desert world, into a world of pink sands, fleshy rocks, and a sea of clear aquamarine…a wistful, narcissistic idyll, gathered into the bosom of a nurturing Nature. This is a world as limpid and light as the voice singing that emanates from “everything”.

I have to say that the the neurosis I sought to describe is above all a matter of adjusting.*

Corrado, after a decent amount of time stalking Giuliana in his polite and patient way, ultimately rapes her. Yes, she shows up at his hotel room, but Giuliana is incapable of wholeheartedly giving herself over to anything as simple as going to bed with a man–and indeed going to bed with a man is anything but simple given the state of things, the hidden dangers, the unspoken cries, the surrender of ego to strange and possibly alien forces. She says she wishes for a circle of people who love her to form a protective wall around her…and then…her limbs twist and fold away from Corrado at odd angles…she jumps out of the bed and must be brought back, again and again. He is never really cruel, but relentless and insentient, as he goes about stripping her and folding her into compliance. Would he be any less so if she were more complicit in his goal?

“The essential unfolding of technology threatens…that all revealing with be consumed in ordering, and that everything will present itself only in the unconcealment of standing reserve.” —Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” Heidegger is speaking of technology not as the “machines” that ease, and increasingly define, our lives but the Machine that is in manifold ways pressing us into its service as it refuses to show its aims, its ends or its face–a fact Heidegger sees as the “machines” with a lower case m but the Machine that is in manifold ways pressing us into its service as it refuses to be show its aims, its ends or its face—which Heidegger sees as a great danger and one which is only to be defused by art and the questions it poses. The Red Desert is truly an answer to this call, with its sad forest of skinny pines, beings of a ghostly realm; where sailing ships linger and the yellow clouds no longer kill the little birds who now know to avoid them.

But before getting carried too away with the poetry of it all, follow this link…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/7862914/Shakespeare-plays-help-boost-cows-milk-production.html

*Michaelangelo Antonioni’s quotes from the interview with Jean-Luc Godard published in Cahiers du Cinema 160, Nov 1964

In this, the second installment of a two part interview, playwright and Times Quotidian contributor Rita Valencia speaks with associate artistic director (and co-founder) Lex Steppling about his motivations to form the new Los Angeles based laboratory theater group, Gunfighter Nation. Gunfighter Nation debuts “The Alamo Project” at the Odyssey Theater, May 28th and 29th, 10:30pm.

Gunfighter Nation presents The Alamo Project
An Interview with Rita Valencia and Alexis Steppling

I meet Alexis Steppling, associate artistic director (and co-founder) of Gunfighter Nation, in an Altadena coffee house where he is hanging out with his wife Suzanne and their toddler daughter, the lovely and good-natured Stella. Lex has a friend along who is wearing a fitted tee-shirt and tells us he has just passed the bar exam with the intention of becoming an entertainment attorney. This is a very complex world, I am thinking, as the late middle-aged man starts singing a folk song. The friend leaves and Lex and I retire to a table in front, where it’s quiet except for a nervous female vocalist waiting to perform, who it turns out, knows Lex slightly from high school and wants to chat. Alas.

Rita Valencia: How did Gunfighter Nation emerge into your life, and why?

Lex Steppling: A long story…Since my teens I’ve had many experiences of building spaces for change.

RV: What do you mean by the word “space”?

LS: In my teens I was having a pretty hard time of it, and then I went to a transformative camp program “Brotherhood/Sisterhood”, run by a group called National Conference for Community and Justice. It was an intensive experiential program about breaking down barriers, encountering racial, gender and class issues. In America we are hyper-obsessed with class bias around difference. The goal at the camp was to build a safe environment, to acknowledge, take responsibility for bias. People would fight, scream, dialogue in a frank way. Then we realized, experientially, it was possible to make positive change. Breaking down barriers is not pretty…encounters around these issues are cathartic.

So this first “space” for me was a physical place where accountability, responsibility and trust existed, where transformation could come about.

I continued to work with the organization, eventually became a counselor at the camp, got involved in community organizing with different groups…and it gave me the opportunity to travel to Cuba and then to Venezuela under an educational research license. There, people did not have a black and white viewpoint about the revolution, but there were acutely aware of their sovereignty.

In my travels, working in public health and other community issues, too often in these contexts, critical thought was never encouraged, nor was asking questions.

Socialists and communists organized with goals for certain projects–and you do gain skills in that way.

But often activism is doing for the sake of doing. There are signifiers to being an activist. Some of these folks still have a doomed ideological Che Guevara syndrome: “worship me for saving the world”… There is only so much to be done against Capital. Revolutionary language does not work. To think change comes from protest is ridiculous. It’s not enough. I want to work to create functional models. Make a space for people to come to solutions…meet the practical needs of communities: FOOD, SHELTER and EDUCATION (read, writing, arithmetic) If you want people to change…you have to do something tangible…for instance feed them by creating a community garden, create a sustainable experience.

RV: How did your activism start to engage with the arts?

LS: I had a turning point doing this show called Soul Rebel Radio on KPFK…I hooked up with some of my rap buddies and we decided to do these skits about issues in current events. We started with a six month commitment, and though I left it a couple of years ago, now the program’s been going 5 years.

I don’t think of myself as an artist, or writer. If you want something to happen you do what you have to do. It was my goal with the KPFK show to get younger people to listen…I wrote plays as part of that project.

Every step is a SPACE. There are skills that one learns, which arise from hands-on practice, with resources to exchange–not just cooperatives, not just living off the grid — such living doesn’t exist…

Gunfighter Nation is a way to bring people together to be better artists and to create a space for critical thought and developing a critical vocabulary, a space of discipline where people really are learning, primarily: “DON’T look at things a-historically.”

It’s also a space for youth to learn from elders and elders from youth.

I’ve brought in friends, Efe, the drummer who was a friend from childhood…a friend who’s a stand up comedian…

RV: What did your friends in the activist community have to say about this project? Any resistance?

LS: Many agreed that old models are fixed on IDENTITY. “I’m a somebody in the activist community”… you take on certain signifiers, and reject others.

This group (Gunfighter Nation) is intentionally ambiguous.

RV: Art is all about ambiguity. How does this work in The Alamo Project, where you’re taking on an historical subject with so many facets?

LS: Memory itself is ambiguous. The Alamo is all about Revisionism, history under attack, deconstructing an American myth.

The way language is debased [through mass culture] it can mean anything. Lots of people don’t know how to read, or don’t choose to read…but they are literate in new ways. Language is changing…but we must try not to shy away from how it changes, but head first into it…with skills…conditioning–if we continue to find signifiers that keep us in a comfortable place we’ll never get anywhere.

We have to engage with each other instead of nestling into our own circles; question each other with respect, not validate, but challenge one another.

Art triggers critical thought. Euphoric or painful…

The Alamo project will put people in a strange place…it’s a relentless and weird deconstruction of western revisionism…after the show, in the night and the days that follow, each person will have echoes, hopefully for a long time to come.

RV: Is there a goal for Gunfighter Nation?

LS: As a group we need to shed any kind of vanguard mentality.

We are throwing stones into the water, making ripples.

In this, the first of a two part interview, playwright and Times Quotidian contributor Rita Valencia speaks with Gunfighter Nation Artistic Direct John Steppling about his motivations to form the new Los Angeles based laboratory theater group. In Part Two Valencia will be speaking with Lex Steppling about the youth connection and contributions to Gunfighter Nation.

Gunfighter Nation presents The Alamo Project
An Interview with Rita Valencia and John Steppling

The Alamo Project is an evening of short plays about the Alamo. The Alamo, the legendary 1835 seige of a Texan mission, is emblematic of the ease with which past events can become myth, and how myth serves the purpose of the mythmakers. As part of this process, history, real history, becomes irrelevant…but there is the devil to pay. And that’s where Gunfighter Nation steps up, with a body of idiosyncratic plays that twist the tale in totally unexpected ways. It’s a late night event to begin after the regularly scheduled play at the Odyssey Theater. So have an dopio espresso after dinner and head on down.

This is the first group project of Gunfighter Nation, a new coalition that has formed of young, socially and politically active youth and experienced writers and actors. Many of the older people have a history in this town as a sort of underground literary movement. Some were members of Padua Playwrights and others have joined the fold more recently. They share a unique utopian, idealistic vision that contrasts with the latent cynicism of commercially driven art-making which dominates the current cultural domain. (And it’s a membership that’s had multiple theater awards, grants and productions to their credit, but have eschewed a commercial or academic/institutional career.)

The name Gunfighter Nation comes with a quote by D.H. Lawrence: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer”. At the outset, the group embraces the notion of owning a legacy which is steeped in the ugly stereotypes that we recognize as American, but wish to disclaim, and transforming these ideas by actively inhabiting them. I took a few minutes to speak with Gunfighter Nation’s artistic director, John Steppling, at Burrito King in Silver Lake about the genesis of the company.

Rita Valencia : What is it you are trying to accomplish with Gunfighter Nation?

John Steppling: I returned from living out of the country eleven years and wanted to start a group, but had no grand plan. The idea was to start with people whose work I respected and create a laboratory setting for theater and eventually film. Crucially, we would work without joining into the competition for turning out an economically determined product. No auditioning. No ulterior motives to be adopted by Hollywood, or a big institutional theater, or ANYBODY. So I got together with my son Lex, and Wes Walker, Guy Zimmerman, others like Harvey Perr, and we had a discussion about the idea of putting on work with “no critics”, and also to make this be an educational process: a laboratory setting for theater and film with a pedagogical dimension. We felt it was important to attract people who had not necessarily worked in theater: young writers and community activists. My question was, is there a hidden voice within the culture that we can develop?

Now, “Alamo” is a theater project, and to that end we’ve developed a mutually satisfying relationship with Ron Sossi and the Odyssey Theatre which is free from bureaucratic hysteria, political correctness and the unnecessary pressures of unrealistic economic goals. But even though we have been able to pull together a show and a venue, we are emphatically not creators of product. This is perhaps an impossible thing in a society that is over saturated with commodification…

RV: Theater has been dying for years, trying so hard to be financially viable.

JS: It is interesting, after being away from L.A., to come back to the institutional theater scene in Los Angeles, and to find that the Mark Taper Forum not only has no interest in creating art, but a vested interest in destroying it. Art is challenging to people’s conventional concepts about the world and as such it is not a stable business venture. Entities like the Mark Taper Forum are closed to the community on not just an institutional level but on a psychic level. This is precisely why there needs to be a group like Gunfighter Nation, creating a community which is process-oriented, not goal-oriented, where we are looking for what works in a piece of writing and what does not. As soon as the economic is prioritized you have created the first and most profound obstacle to transformation, and you will be crippled. There are economic realities which of course we recognize, and we are not offering solutions, only attitudes and techniques. That’s why we have reached out to people who are engaged in social justice issues.

RV: Don’t social activists tend to be suspicious of artists?

JS: Well now, on the left wing, or “progressive” side, art is supposed to be morally instructive and supportive of the ideology of progressive politics. On the right wing, “conservative” side of the culture, the arts are seen as entertainment, escape, and a vehicle for celebrity. Both are wrong. The problem on the left, with its demand for moral instruction, and then its marriage with political correctness, results in this confusion about the anti-hierarchical, and the confusion leads us to a lack of discrimination, a lack of rigour. You don’t do anyone a favor by lying to them. So where we are at with “post-modernism” is that there are questions that need to be asked and are not being vigorously pursued. Perhaps only a full economic collapse will open the dialogue on these questions. You cannot separate the economic and the cultural.

RV: Hasn’t high art, art that requires a certain level of training and knowledge to appreciate or enjoy, always been an experience for the very few?

JS: You cannot sustain any communal memory or consciousness with mass media product. The country is starving–psychically and spiritually. High art is unavailable to the culture at large–so how can anyone even have a chance to develop a taste for it? Big theater/art institutions have become culturally irrelevant. But they have the potential to reclaim relevance. This is a question that education needs to address. A great number of people, given access and tutelage, would make art and respond to it. But there is a vested interest in stopping that from happening. It is like being at a supermarket with only Pepsi and Coke. Buying up the cultural shelf space right now are the big media empires. Theater becomes pathetic–maybe they put up an August Wilson revival with a movie star in it–to what end? The Taper, the Geffen, South Coast Rep–are on tenuous ground financially. They should all go out of business. Young writers need a place to experiment, to fail, to succeed, to learn; not to aspire to these middlebrow graveyards that are institutional theaters. The Taper and its ilk are totally irrelevant. Can ANYBODY in this city actually say, “I can’t wait to see what the next season of the Taper is going to be”?

RV: You mentioned excluding theater critics from the group and from the shows.

JS: The reason we decided we didn’t want them is because they are part of this problem. What use are they to artists? They don’t help getting audience to shows, they are a nuisance and an irritating insult. On the whole they are uneducated, philistine, and interested only in pandering to the institutional theater they serve.

Art must be disruptive, awakening, and personally transformative. Adorno said that the rise of fascism in Germany was largely a result of the destruction of education after World War One. Today we are besieged with a vulgar barbarism that we have to stand up to if we are going to survive as a community of artists and thinkers.

Bigger Than Life (1956), directed by Nicholas Ray
Re-released by The Criterion Collection on DVD and Blu-ray disc
by Rita Valencia

“When a friendly, successful suburban teacher and father (James Mason) is prescribed cortisone for a painful, possibly fatal affliction, he grows dangerously addicted to the experimental drug, resulting in his transformation into a psychotic and ultimately violent household despot.” (IMDb.com)

The word normal is of relatively recent origin, coming into usage in 1828 to mean “conforming to common standards.” The notion of a such a thing as a common standard to which behavior conforms is so deeply ingrained in us that it resists analysis, and yet, it is a uniquely contingent idea, falling apart with the least pressure. In the course of a day, one can move from home to school or work, to recreation, to cultural or religious activities and cross through different zones of “normalcy” where entirely different sets of behavior are expected. The fact that it was 1828 before this word became part of the vernacular hints at its scientistic origins, in new sociologies and psychologies that measured, tested and categorized human behavior. The concept of normal appears to be deeply connected to systems of social control and to rationalism, although the latter connection is ironic, for normative behavior is culturally determined and based on a subtle web of largely irrational behavioral cues which go mostly unstated (and thus elude people with maladies such as autism or schizophrenia). People are said to be behaving “rationally” when they are acting in a normal way, and so the “rational” conflates with the conventional, and meaning quickly evaporates as the actual agenda for normality emerges: social control. Intrinsic to the concept of normality is the silence of fear, anxiety and dread–hidden, but badly.

Nicholas Ray, in his 1956 melodrama “Bigger Than Life“, creates a mythical normality, infused with reason and rationality, as a frame for a tale about the descent into madness and disorder. If his characters were any more “normal” they would become self-parodies; as it is, my fascination with this artifact of the 50’s lies with its creepy flatness and lack of any UNexplainable behaviors or feelings. Once his illness is diagnosed and his pharmaceuticals dispensed by the gravely rational doctors–the heirophants of this terrifying order–the madness that overtakes James Mason is an entirely sensible plot development. Although Mason’s behavior is aberrational, there is no mystery as to its origins in the demands of a normal life, where he has to work two jobs to make ends meet, and breaks down physically under the pressure. It seems that the appearance of normalcy entails social and economic dysfunction, although the larger implications of this dimension of the story go unexplored in favor of lingering in a domestic terrain of almost bloodless virtue. (An interesting quote of Ray from another project, “It’s not blood, it’s red”.)

Ray’s zone of normality in Bigger Than Life is a protean handiwork of veneers and signs, a clinically perfect film vocabulary, much admired by Godard and other New Wave directors. The coming darkness of Mason’s breakdown is presaged by a scene in which Mason follows his wife through the rooms of their home turning out lights on her. She is angry and suspicious of him because of his unexplained absences (which of course have an innocent explanation), but he is oblivious to her feelings in his desire to seduce her–a scene which Mason masterfully infuses with subtle menace. Sometimes Ray’s use of symbolism is clumsily overt, as the bathroom mirror which Barbara Rush breaks in a fit of pique over her husband’s irascibility, followed by a camera angle of his face in the cracked shards. More successful are the architectural details. The house is small, and movement is tight, especially around the water heater, standing in the passage from kitchen to dining room; an anomalous, intentional, eyesore, streaming drips of rust from its cap. The ugliness of this object is a silent marker of a family in economic stress. Color is a character: red in Bigger Than Life is a sumptuous visual sign pointing the way to the madness that unfolds. In the opening scene, a cascade of children coming out of the school where Mason teaches are spattered with red articles of clothing. Mason develops a taste for red during his spree of psychosis, insisting that Barbara Rush pour herself into in a stunning Dior party dress, hardly the thing to wear to church, though it makes for a brilliant image.

The neat equivalencies between symbol and symbolized is steadfast, and although sometimes dull (a word which emerges from the generally aseptic dialogue along with the famous, all-time-great line “God was wrong”) it creates a compelling unity of style and content. There are moments in this film which quickly graduate to a sort of postmodern fever dream. The most notable is when James Mason, emerging from a psychotic crisis where he has fancied himself the Biblical Abraham about to slay his son, wakes from his delirium and he claims to have seen Abraham Lincoln. Then, with his family close, he recalls which Abraham he is actually talking about, and remembers the horror he came so close to perpetrating. Conflating of a Biblical figure of such intense gravity as Abraham with the patriotic icon of Lincoln, our own American saint, could only have occurred to the minds of successful Hollywood screenwriters engaged in a rare moment of free association. (Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum wrote story and screenplay, with several others “uncredited” including Clifford Odets and James Mason himself). The staunch rationalism of this mythic story serves to define the ethos of its era and simultaneously, with its curiously disturbing message about how easily the nuclear family can devolve to mayhem and madness, belies the dull verities of “normal” society’s values. The great irony here is how normality, which is the moral determinant of all action in this film, is subverted by delusional promises of science (pharmacology in this case) and by a madness so clearly driven by socioeconomic distress. Given the inevitable ramifications of the psychosis portrayed here, the neat conclusion of this film is uniquely unbelievable. The nuclear family of the post-war decade, along with its the normality myths, would ultimately prove fragile, delicate and filmy as the celluloid on which Bigger Than Life was exposed.

The White Ribbon (DAS WEISSE BAND ), 2009, a film by Michael Haneke
By Rita Valencia

The White Ribbon, the award-winning new film from Michael Haneke, is sub-titled A Children’s Story. The children of a small village in Northern Germany are at the heart of this film. Haneke contemplates the process of evil’s origination in the raising of these children, a process that requires the repression of all joy and openness and the nurturance of fear and loathing. The titular white ribbon is tied onto Klara and Martin, two young teens, by their father, the town Pastor, who explains that the ribbon serves to bind them to innocence and purity. Of course that is a lie, just as the quiescence and purity of the village is an illusion that conceals horrors. The cruelty shown the children is normative behavior in the village’s rigidly patriarchal, feudal environment. The placid town slumbers, its resentment and fear festering, as we know full well that its reawakening will be in the Third Reich: the village children are the generation that will form the backbone of Nazi Germany. From one languorous and bleak scene to the next, the psychopathology of fascism unfolds, with methodical precision. The breaks of sweetness, a romance between the town schoolteacher and the nanny of the town’s manor house, only serve to heighten the contrasting gloom and cruelty. Haneke drops into this setting several unsolved and seemingly random crimes and fatal accidents, from which a mysterious horror hangs in the air like a tasteless and odorless poison.

A group of village children march in step on what they claim is a kind-hearted mission to see Anna, a girl whose father (the town doctor) has been injured in a riding accident. On its face the spectacle of the girls walking in unison is a bit somber, but innocent enough–still there is an unsettlingly sadistic shading to their mission. Anna’s father had fallen victim to a deliberately strung wire that tripped his horse. Are the children really on a visit of good will, or are they returning to the scene of a crime? Later, the same children are seen being severely reprimanded at dinner for being out too late. Their father, the town’s pastor, announces he will beat them all on the very next day, a form of sadism which I only hope is rare these days (my Italian mother used to tell me with great disdain that only cold-blooded Germans allotted time between the sentencing and the execution of punishment, and boasted that Italians believed in beating their children only in the heat of anger!!) The horrific anticipation drives one of the young victims to a suicide attempt. Some time after the pastor canes his children, the child of the town patriarch is found half dead and half naked, having been served up an uncannily similar beating. More incidents follow, all of them seeming to make a certain sense, but blame is never fixed, and despite the lumpen attempts of an outside police force to solve the crimes, no single culprit ever emerges. The townspeople are frozen in silence.

In an extraordinary scene, the town’s schoolteacher, an innocent man who is an “outsider” from a neighboring village, and therefore out of reach of the psychic oppression that rules these folks, confides certain suspicions to the Pastor, bits of evidence that imply the Pastor’s own children may have something to do with the crimes. Of course, the Pastor becomes enraged and threatens the schoolteacher with ruin. But nothing ever happens. The final sealing over of the mystery occurs when the housekeeper of the doctor claims that she knows who is responsible for the crimes. She rides off on a bicycle to tell the police, and we never hear from her again.

This unwillingness to investigate, to purge, to accuse, to “bring to justice” represents a collusion of the oppressor and the oppressed–and here is the real mystery that Haneke presents to us: why this silence? The core thesis of The White Ribbon, and the reason for Haneke leaving unsolved the crimes of his allegorical village, is all about the human desire to remain sleeping, to resist the psychic rupture that truth threatens, to resist change even when the habits and practices that bind us produce illness and misery for ourselves, our loved ones and our children. The people of Haneke’s village will slumber on, through dreams, through nightmares, through self delusion (the Pastor really believes he loves his children). The political, economic and social repression so imbue the personal realm that individuals are immobilized in a sleep-like passivity, that is, until “the reawakening”, that age-old tragedy of Oedipus, finding the remains of crimes scattered about in so many open graves. The themes that Haneke opens up in The White Ribbon may apply pointedly to the process of fascism, but are deeply resonant wherever a culture of concealment and repression buries the hope of significant social or personal change in falsehoods, trivialities and distractions.

[Academy Award nominations for Best Foreign Language Film & Cinematography--Christian Berger]

R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis, October 24 – February 7, 2010
The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, October 4 – January 3, 2010
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
by Rita Valencia

It shouldn’t really surprise anyone that the author of Zap and Mr. Natural, Robert Crumb, has undertaken the Greatest Illustration Project Ever Drawn–the Book of Genesis. Any narrative with all those “begats” would have to exert a certain charm for Crumb. The generally naughty R. shows himself to be extraordinarily obedient to this text, and demurs from any interpretive flourish in his cartoons–a wise decision, as the plain act of Crumb undertaking this work is its own statement which promises plenty of fun. His cast of characters includes a scowling, hirsute God, thunder-thighed Crumb-girls, and swarthy hangdog males, all tormented by the kind of terrible behavior that makes it obvious why God needed to give these people the The Ten Commandments.

R. Crumb’s drawings possess sweaty rigor and sturdy line. It makes the live ink on display in his Genesis cartoons glisten in a sensual and oily way. You can feel the fleshiness of his human figures; you can almost smell their dank perfumes. Slightly simian, utterly approachable, like soft homunculae you could take in your hand, the actors Crumb has drawn to populate the often horrifying saga of Genesis are as profane as Mr. Natural and Devil Girl. The irreverence is the point: there is no mystery to Crumb’s cartooning, only dogged workmanship, and a passion for drawing, indeed his project seems to reinforce a literal, mundane and pragmatic view of the “sacred” literature he is illustrating.

Genesis is probably more widely read by the general public than any of the other literature in my library, even though the ornate and downright strange prose can be daunting. Crumb’s graphic treatment brings you through the semantic jungles into the real juicy narratives whence all of our western values emerged: stories of Jacob, whose shrewd practices of animal husbandry and entrepreneurship out-maneuvered his crafty, deceitful father-in-law; or Joseph, the best of Jacob’s sons, who became the equivalent of Chief Executive Officer in Pharoah’s organization, and foresaw advantage in laying away grain for years of drought and famine. (Once the drought arrived, he finagled a way to swindle the starving farmers of Egypt into selling their land to Pharaoh in exchange for the grain he had been prescient enough to store.) Although there are stories here that are shocking in their seeming brutality (Noah’s Ark, Abraham and Isaac) Crumb’s sensual, expressive pictures, with their unsparingly frank visual style, seem to enhance the pathos in the narratives. Perhaps because Bible stories are a staple of kid’s literature, it seems natural to see the Word of God in cartoon form, and Crumb has performed a magnanimous coup with this new work, proving himself again as a consummate illustrator and, surprise, a Bible scholar. [Be sure to read the Commentary to the book, where Crumb writes about some fascinating research by a feminist Biblical historian that explains some curious anomalies in several of the stories.]

Charles Burchfield, like Crumb, was an artist who became a great commercial success, but he was never as sanguine and straightforward about it. As a designer and illustrator, Burchfield defined a certain look in the 20’s& 30′a both in his floral motif wallpapers (I grew up with floral wallpaper derived from his designs) and stolid magazine illustrations which were both comforting and promising. He was set to work during his military service designing camouflage patterns. In the late 20’s he quit his day job to become a very successful watercolorist who made images that captured the zeitgeist of depression era Americana.

The recently closed Hammer show was a comprehensive retrospective that covered his entire body of work, including occasionally unsettling quotations from the artist:

“What is man composed of anyway? I shudder when I think of the bestial impulses that so often flood my imagination. I am considered a decent citizen because I manage to keep these mental debaucheries from becoming antisocial actions; but as far as I, a lone individual, am concerned, I am that depraved being. And perhaps these orgies of imagination are all the worse because they are never relieved by actions. Yet may God confine them always to the mind (if they must exist anywhere and it seems they must.)” —Charles Burchfield. Gardenville, April 10, 1938

This quote appeared in a gallery full of somewhat creepy–though vigorously beautiful– paintings of snake like trees and burnt looking houses, ashen skies and the occasional insect-like floral motif. This soulful, strange and eccentric work gives pause to wonder what sort of “mental debaucheries” he was talking about, and one suspects they are something on an entirely different level than ravishing the odd wood nymph. The fascination with Burchfield’s work must be entirely connected with his psychological and spiritual journeying, for these paintings are more than pastorals, they are diagrams of nature overlayed upon a human personality and consciousness: an excruciatingly personal language and alphabet. Although his career trajectory coincided with the great cultural shifts of Modernism, Surrealism, and later, Expressionism; and despite his fame and populist themes, there is an outsider quality to much of his work.

Counterposed to Burchfield the accomplished designer/painter and placid family man, there was Burchfield the brooding transcendentalist who rejected the religion in which he was raised, but passionately sought the sacred imprints of spirit in the forms of nature. Early in his life he had a special affinity for nature, carefully digging up favorite plants he found in the forest and transplanting them to his garden. Late in life, after twenty years of success, he rejected the work that had brought him renown and refocussed on a series of glyph-like drawings he had produced during what he called, his “golden year”, 1917. These curious drawings, made with graphite and china marker, are simple biomorphic forms with unsettling titles: Fear, Morbidness (Evil), Insanity, Hypnotic Intensity. They are collected in a folio; its cover an age-stained sheet of manila paper with the following title drawn in pencil in a very controlled, but rather puerile hand: “Conventions For Abstract Thoughts”. This was the first in what became dozens of these sketch journals. In his maturity Burchfield underwent an epiphany in revisiting the work of his youth, realizing that he had ignored its mysterious power and so reconnecting with what he saw as its seminal virtues. In the late work of Burchfield, motifs and obsessions coalesce; he builds out with paper from core imagery often created in his early career, and so the drawings grow in an almost vegetal way. Plunging himself into the sacred character of the landscape which he came (again) to see as an objective correlative to his inner life, Burchfield seizes upon the demonic within but never with the notion of exorcising, only guiding and bending it into form.

“All at once I felt that I was the most lonely person on earth, and it seemed to me that I could not endure the solitude; and yet it was so overpowering I could not leave it. I was, as it were, a prisoner who loved and hated his isolation.” —Charles Burchfield. Gardenville, November 6, 1947

Five Fav’s from 2009
by Rita Valencia

Always bold, Rita Valencia looks back on 2009 and hand picks some beauties!

1. Mad Men, Season 3, Episode 6, A Man Walks Into an Advertising Agency.
Anybody up for a little lawn mowing?

2. My New Kindle with computer-voice man reading Dante’s Inferno.

3. The Ride of the Valkyries scene in Act Three of Achim Freyer’s Die Walküre at L.A.Opera.

4. Tom’s Vegan Wrap Boots

5. Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children, a play for Gaza (which is in no way “anti-Semitic”).

Watch Jennie Stoller perform Caryl Churchill’s play, Seven Jewish Children- A Play for Gaza, which was written in response to the situation in Gaza in January 2009. This link will also give you the access to the written play. No children appear in the play. The speakers are adults, the parents and if you like other relations of the children. The lines can be shared out in any way you like among those characters. The characters are different in each small scene as the time and child are different. Please feel free to download the play. This play can be read or performed anywhere by any number of people.

CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY and THE INFORMANT!
By Rita Valencia

And again I say to you: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 19:24
________

When assuring your friend you aren’t lying say:
“Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye”

One of the common strategies of the contemporary “issue film” is to lull the audience into the comfortable state where it is assured it will not be hearing anything it does not already know. I tried to figure out why Mr. Moore sub-titled his movie “a love story” and my best guess is that he’s referring to this pleasure zone of agreement. His movie is ideological porn, where your righteously progressive opinions are massaged and amplified, and all you need to do is sit there and nod vigorously. In Moore’s Manichean universe there exist the evil rich perpetrators and the innocent poor victims, helpless and wronged–and Moore’s narration in case we don’t get it. He even enlists the aid of Catholic clerics he’s recruited to weigh in on the right side of good and evil (he finds two who condemn capitalism)…a welcome relief from the lurid tales of sex abuse with which OTHER documentaries have regaled us.

There are a number of interesting threads that start, then unravel. Franklin Roosevelt gave a speech a few brief months before his death on the need for a new Bill of Rights which would assure all citizens the right to health care, a decent home, and a good education. There is no follow through to this story. According to Moore’s fast, loose history, the Roosevelt era progressivism of America starts to decline with the advent of Reagan. The efforts to destroy Roosevelt policies started well before Reagan, but Moore evidently had a happy childhood and wasn’t aware of any problems in the late 50’s/early 60’s. His parents could afford vacations, as, he thinks, all working class people did. Yup.

Moore does a sort of historical hopscotch, a chart here, a graph there, Katrina, the foreclosure epidemic, the growing gap between rich and poor, the Great Bailout of 2008, where Moore shows just how there is indeed a sort of Illuminati that control this nation’s economy. (Ohio 9th District Rep. Marcy Kaptur does a star turn as one who balked at the strong arm tactics, heroine of an opposition that was pre-destined to be plowed under.)

It turns out many publicly traded companies buy life insurance policies on their employees, with themselves as beneficiaries. Check www.deadpeasants.biz. “Dead peasants”, a Gogolian concept which has been reinvented by corporate America, is perfectly legal, but ethically appaling. Moore tells the horror story of an ex-Wal-Mart employee who dies of an asthma attack, leaving her family destitute, while Wal-Mart collects a hefty sum in life insurance. This case was particularly shocking because the woman had not worked for a couple of years, and her family was dead broke, but this policy still paid out a hefty sum to Wal-Mart.

A critical mass of this sort of vignette would really make for a fascinating film, but there isn’t. Instead we get the familiar Michael Moore set pieces where he confronts security guards and is escorted from the premises. He rolls out a spool of crime scene tape around a bank building–embarrassing to us but not to him. This not an essay film, it is a screed: too much of the burbling Moore and too little about deregulation, deteriorating public education, lobbyists–and nothing about media consolidation–all essential plot points in any story about Late Capitalism.

Yet another essential plot point in any story of Late Capitalism is the endemic criminality and everyday deceit of our corporate institutions. Millions of people are employed by these megaliths like ADM, Citibank, Dupont, Proctor and Gamble, Xerox–companies that have their moral compass set the polar opposite of the ethics we learn in kindergarten or Sunday School. Compliantly their minions labor along, ignorant for the most part of what the masters of their little universe may be plotting… that is until reality snaps shut and the job disappears, the pension is stolen, the health insurance is withdrawn, fields can only grow corn if anything at all, and the mortgage is in foreclosure.

Steven Soderbergh’s skillful allegory, The Informant!, takes us inside the world of corporate masters, conducting an incisive exploration of the mind of one of non-fiction’s strangest characters, Mark Whitacre, the whistle blower of the 90’s who managed to put execs from Archer Daniels Midland behind bars for price fixing, but himself got busted for massive embezzlement. The man was a pathological liar, to use a psychiatric term completely alien to the spirit of the film. In the world Soderbergh weaves for us, Whitacre is uncannily like us, with his unceasing monkey mind and his facade of normality which lures everyone into the illusion that their lives are real.

The title role is played by Matt Damon, wearing a prosthetic nose and gut, melting entirely into the Whitacre character, a man who himself melted into corporate culture like margarine on Wonder Bread. The Informant is a story told in sideways fashion, incidentally, as an afterthought interspersed between hilarious and random internal monologue. Damon deadpans his absurdist voiceover patter: lines like “I read this thing about mustaches on the flight back from Zurich…What facial hair says about a man’s level of honesty. Some psychological theory ” or, “It’s not really lying when you’re doing it to serve some greater purpose…I think that’s what God would say “… “Porscha or Porsch–I’ve heard it both ways. Three years in Germany–I should know that”.

Before long you realize you have watched the incredible disintegration of a man’s life and, by the way, a corporate cover blown wide open, then sealing itself right back over. Whitacre’s disintegration reveals much about why our culture is degenerating, without ever saying anything. It lays cards on the table and then matter-of-factly wipes them back up again. Bloodlessly, it describes a most horrific horror, one that is easy and pleasant to watch and one that shows why everything happens as it does in the Moore film, but without need for explanation, only the post-Faulknerian patter of a moral imbecile, signifying literally nothing. Marvin Hamlisch’s score is brilliant, and Soderbergh positions the camera as beautifully as he conceals his rage.

Nature Morte, paintings by Constance Mallinson
Pomona College Museum of Art, through October 18, 2009
by Rita Valencia

As a fiction writer, you learn first that as it addresses narrative, a great piece of fiction is like a path into a forest that never shows the way out. The same is true of poetry as it addresses the act of thought, or of painting as it addresses the act of seeing. (Such desultory ambulations are the crucial difference between these forms and the theory or philosophy that swarms around them, maybe with the exclusion of Derrida.)

Woodland Seen, Oil on Paper, 54×96 inches, 2009

In this new work of Constance Mallinson, the act of seeing goes into an imaginary forest from which an essence has been gleaned and transmogrified, but never explained. Mallinson actually picks up the objects which are the models for her work on morning walks in the wilds of the S.F. Valley, but nothing here, or there, is as it seems. These are paintings that are intricate, complex and luxurious, which invite long and languorous gazing. They also contain within them stories of an uneasily shifting reality, an ever-dying natural world, and primal acts of violence and regeneration embedded in the act of seeing.

We have walked through the woods in fall and winter, gathered the broken parts of trees, the detritus of the wild park land, its carcasses and hollow husks, empty seed pods and broken-off branches whose xylem and phloem have withered and collapsed; and these objects, released from reproductive function, seem startlingly familiar. It is nature’s uncanny familiarity that feels somehow more primal than the studied affection nature lovers know–although it is very likely this uncanny familiarity gives rise to nature love. We have listened to the whining and scraping of tree trunks pressed together by the wind, a plaintiff sensuality that is a strange echo of something that is ours. In Mallinson’s latest works, those acts are evoked and stirred into a witchery of weird and compelling iconography that resonates as both primitive fetish and art history–taken not in its academic, referential sense, but as a psycho-cultural cauldron which emanates images that haunt and re-manifest through the medium of the sentient artist.

Mallinson stirs up a primal scene of terror as we gaze into a tumble down pile of leaves and branches: the decay that is only form, and transient at that, re-formed into an horrific new manifestation. Her “Nature Mort” paintings have been likened to memento mori, and though I tend to see the fact that the chosen objects are decaying as decidedly secondary to primary act of seeing/gathering/compositing, “Severed Limbs” seems the most quotational of memento mori form.

This brings us to my personal favorite, as I confess a partiality to typography, eastern philosophy, and words: a painting entitled “You”, which displays the word “me” in its multifarious forms. From a great distance it is a pretty floral field picture, but on second thought and closer examination, a koan-like contemplation opens up, a wry portrait of the Self as a crisp, fragile and illusory thing, suitable for composting.

The questions Mallinson asks in her new body of work are not interrogatory–in demand of answers–but they are probes into the nature of forms as seen/unseen. In her gathering and recompositing, in this fetishistic anthropomorphous that calls to mind a certain sorcery she exercises the craftiness of the consummate artist. The “Nature Morte” series shows us how the dream fabric of our reality is inhabited by invisible beings engaged in acts that we have committed countless times, leads us into a forest of signs, and leaves us there to wonder.

Please click on the image to enlarge.

Couple, Oil on Paper, 95×52 1/2 inches, 2008

Olympia Decayed, Oil on Paper, 52 1/2×90 inches, 2008

Severed Limbs, Oil on Paper, 52 1/2×60 1/2 inches, 2009

You, Oil on Paper, 40 1/2×52 1/2 inches, 2008

Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary Valentino: The Last Emperor has recently been released on DVD and as a pre-cursor to the Spring Collections it is fitting to take a look at this extraordinary show that was the culmination of a stunning 50 year career. Contributing Times Quotidian writer Rita Valencia was fortunate to attend the show in Rome at the Museo dell’Ara Pacis in 2007. Below is a first hand look at Valentino a Roma 45 Years of Style.

For further reading entertainment here is the Style.com Q&A with Matt Tyrnauer upon the Valentino: The Last Emperor initial release in March 2009.

© Rita Valencia

At the National Gallery of Art, April 2009
By Rita Valencia

There is the airborne escape mechanism which is the airplane, or the effective instrument of destruction which is the war plane. Anselm Kiefer’s The Angel of History is a poetic antithesis of both forms, fabricated of lead, its wings laden with books of beaten lead sheets. The lack of utility makes it not only about art, but a sublime object with which to contemplate the idea of the plane, one of the great icons of the war years of the 20th century. Like all icons its pragmatic uselessness makes it sacred in an areligious way. Its payload of leaden manuscripts piled on the wings, pages stuffed with dried poppies, the better to fuel an auto-da-fé, is a righteous Dada juxtaposition. The nose cone of the plane is round, phallic, wrinkled and sagging. The plane’s contours inveigh against aerodynamism. They are angular, not sleek; crumpled and corrugated, edges torn and drooping, tailfin battered. This is an earthbound, organic form, a sad cousin to its perky commercial brethren.

The color is ashen gray, as in the ashes of burned buildings and bodies, alluding to the apocalypse of a society, or an individual; the darkest, most destructive chaos that preceeds a new year’s renewal. (see Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane, Ch 2) Mr. K’s airplane speaks to what is left of the idea of the technological wonder once it has acted upon the world, borne its heavy payload, wrecked its havoc, and fallen to the ground again in shades of ash, the apogee of a once hysterically optimistic trajectory.

There is something left, some fuel for a fire. The end of this “angel’s” flight is the beginning of the thought of no flight, the bittersweet memory of flight, the tragedy of war, the failure of war: a stark history. Poppies–emblematic plant of forgetfulness–are dried and stuffed into the leaden books. The manuscripts burned to the color of ash, are the journals and the records of that history. There is a mystical dimension here as well, for People of the Book–whose extermination and whose mystical heritage (in the Kabbalah) is of deep concern to this artist. Who do they become, what do they become, once the Book has been incinerated, the stuff of ash? The Word is obliterated, one cannot know what has been wiped from memory, one can only contemplate the spectacle of its result.

The painting, partner to the plane, says Zim Zum, as in the sound of roaring engines reproduced by a happy child at play. Actually, there was no official onomatopoeic reference according to the art historians at the National Gallery. Ahem. ZimZum is a term from the Kabbalah which refers to the contraction, as in the drawing in of breath, of the Divine, which must contract Itself to produce the place for the creation. Here we have a suitable landing strip for the plane on display, a cosmic field of utter desolation and contraction. Of course, a painting/poem must inhabit an entirely other world, inaccessible to the literality of this sculpture/plane…the juxtaposition of painting and sculpture is wryly comical. The sky is leaden (and also made of lead–Kiefer is arch-practitioner of German humor) but as reflected in the large pool on the field, it is gray and white and smooth like glass. These are winter fields that surround waters, and though yes the perspective is like a landing strip, it would in fact be a horrific place to land any plane other than the Angel of History. The one point perspective of this landscape alludes to a metaphysical ultimatum which is handed all of us at birth. Ash and ice have covered this field in perpetual winter, but the rows of crop stubble suggest a latent fertility. The Divine contraction, the icey harrowed ground, are necessary for regeneration. Look twice and you could be far above, perhaps carried by an Angel of History, so far in the sky that you are seeing a planet whose ocean is bounded by lands that have gone from green to ash and ice. Look again and you may see at the single perspective point (a place that does not really exist) the face of the Divine one, a powerful organizing principle, sucking the ice-shocked fallen feathers of an angel into its tiny white maw. 

La Didone
The Wooster Group
Redcat Theater, Los Angeles, June 6 through June 21
by  Rita Valencia

Open on a post industrial-style stage and a lush, restless soundscape of way-distorted noise levels with smooth pulsing undercurrents of Baroque chamber opera. The sensual meets cold steel, curvy bods are clad in nicely shaped silver bodysuits. The overall effect has some charms, but like most things that charm, there is a vacuous center. In the case of “La Didone”, a 1641 Baroque opera by Francesco Cavalli, you might argue that the voiding of content began in a palliated retelling of the Dido/Aeneas romance when adapted for Carnival by librettist Giovanni Francesco Busenello. In that opera, the tragic fate of Dido, the beautiful spurned suicide queen, was altered, so that Dido doesn’t kill herself after Aeneas has seduced and abandoned her. Instead she is brought back from the brink by horny King Iarbas –why let a good hot, propertied, babe go to waste when she can be eminently re-cycled? …the raunchy pragmatism of the times had its demands. Changing the end may have been an inane idea, pandering to the tastes of its audience, but not nearly half as ill concieved as marrying the whole opera to a sampling of 20th century space age kitsch: Planet of the Vampires, Terrore nello spazio, 1965 film by Mario Bava. with some additional material from Queen of Outer Space by Edward Bernds.

The Wooster Group and their brilliant impresario, Elizabeth LeCompte, by their own admission, were not eager to take on this project. “On a whim” they accepted the commission, from the Belgian KunstenFESTIVALdesArts, only after being “pestered” and because the budget was ample to hire real musicians. LeCompte’s interest in the nascent musicality of theater voicing was given some wind –“I always direct opera”. And so the group began by playing the movie and singing the opera side by side, then continuing to work and to stage and refine, until the piece took form. Check out this edifying set of interviews with LeCompte, Chinn and others from the group .

Hear an excerpt from this interview with LeCompte, Shepard and Chinn conducted by Claudia La Rocco

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The methodology of the Wooster Group, a long rehearsal process where a performance organically develops through inhabiting the premise, is always a large part of what the work is about. “Possession, being possessed by genre, the opera story getting taken over by the spirit of the movie…became a useful metaphor for the combining of the forms” said veteran Wooster member Scott Shepard. Evidently the pairing of this particular film to this opera was at the suggestion of film buff Dennis Dermody, a true lover and scholar of B Movies. LeCompte had originally been attracted to the notion of pairing the opera with a spaghetti Western, because the dubbing as a form of mask bore an interesting similarity to the use of voice as mask in the form of opera. It was odd to hear her say this, as I’d commented to my husband on the way home from the performance that La Didone would have worked better had it been juxtaposed (assuming you accept juxtaposition as a strategy at all) with a Spaghetti Western. In the genre of the Spaghetti western–in addition to the dubbing which lends a curious artificiality, there is the latent tragedy of the existential lonely drifter which gives a pungence to any romance. In “Terrore…” there is none of that, only the flat stylization of that Trekkie kind of film which the Bava represents: basically a cold war drama dealing with notions of paranoid xenophobia. Opera plus movie, tangentially related by the ideas of long lonely voyages, shipwreck and the alien invasion of love or something, is a playful and anomalous juxtaposition that never really gels into poetry. Absent of a sense of darkness, which always lurks behind the successful art that engages kitsch–you end up with, well, pleasant confusion. You cannot ignore or elide the implications of the signs you throw.

Musically there’s plenty to enjoy with Hai-Ting Chinn’s powerfully expressive contralto and Bruce Odland’s inspired scoring…Chinn’s performance inhabited another world, along with the brilliant rising star turn of hunky hot Andrew Nolen. His falsetto was thrilling, even more so when he dropped it to reveal his native bass/baritone–this guy you expect to be a tenor, or a fashion model or eye candy on a daytime soap–not the charismatic presence he in fact was. Back in the day, (17th century) singing falsetto was a code for virility, sort of like sissy singing in the vernacular of soul music (think The Stylistics). Worked for me, at least with Nolen doing it, though of course it drew giggles from the audience, as the meaning has been long since supplanted (19th century) by comedy. He and Chinn paired with the truly inventive work of Music Director Odland are worth the price of admission. Kate Valk turned in a mesmerizing performance as the cool space woman Sanya, agingly beautiful and Viva-esque. Jennifer Griesbach’s choreography was disciplined and smart.

The current cutting edge theater vernacular–for those projects which have been supported by a substantial amount of institutional funding–ensures that there will be at least a modest amount of video gadgetry and image manipulation, so there is nothing in the Wooster Group production which is groundbreaking. The set design was just okay–leaning to the space age rather than the baroque. I’ve seen real transformations of the space at Redcat and this staging was weirdly claustrophobic and cluttered.

Overall, I suspect this is opera for an art audience who think that opera is hokey and square, so that to blend it with a 60’s kitsch B-film would appear to be cool, cutting edge and clever marketing, but…why?

Open with a picture perfect postcard, a body of water and a stand of trees, portrait of tranquility. The unruffled surface of the lake mirrors a small house centered on it, as if floating. It is a natural sanctuary, a view to which we return repeatedly throughout the film, with growing poignancy, and from discreet and meaningful distances. The image of this sacred place as it appears in the opening scene of ‘Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…Spring’ is like a logomark in its graphic simplicity. It fairly shouts Zen Buddhism, the sort of iconic image we as Westerners wish to carry in our hearts as an adornment to our wretchedly privileged lives full all manner of triviality, excess, fraudulence and fear. (In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition ours is appropriately called the Degenerate Age.) Perhaps we have a small garden sanctuary with a fountain or bird feeder (mind the cat!) that reminds us in some small way of a place like this. Perhaps we have bought a Buddha statue to sit there…they are sold at many garden shops, a generally pathetic homage to the “real thing” that exists somewhere heartbreakingly far off. Perhaps we squeeze out a meditation practice in a manner which suits us and fits our busy schedule. Of course we are kidding ourselves, and when no one is around to assure us we are “all right” we know we are not. Where has our Zen gone? Writer/director Kim Ki-duk lures us in to this sweet hideaway, this appealing and stately landscape, only to rip away the mask and reveal the hidden nature of Zen: the scarred up face of samsara, the real ugliness of it, animals tortured to death, small boys crying in terror and despair at their lot, fucking scenes like something out of a Hieronymous Bosch painting, a wild-eyed murderer, savage beatings, and the ghost of an ex-lover frozen in ice. There is a reason why people need enlightenment, and this elegant film is the blunt answer.

It is a dream, a film more reminiscent of Bergman than most of Kim’s work. And in its resemblance to Bergman there is a certain ponderous quality to its heavily symbolic poetics. Zen is a container for a theme that Kim visits again and again in his other films: the innate wildness of human Being. Is the film an illustration of philosophical principles? Is it a fairy tale? A morality play? Kim Ki-duk is not a filmmaker who is enslaved by the logic of plot, but he returns to the theme of human violence as an outpouring of confusion upon a framework of sacred, not rational, order. I’m thinking of an image that takes on heightened importance in ‘Spring…Spring’: the doorway. Inside the Zen hut, the doorway to the boy’s sleeping mat is a frame with a door mounted on it. It is only a formality, not an actual form: there is no wall to support it. Outside, at the shore of the lake upon which the house sits, there is another portal through which all must pass. It too is freestanding, with nothing to block the way on either side. Both doorways are formal, sacred portals. In the profane world, such portals are “useless” and “irrational”. Yet at the moment our young protagonist crosses out of his room, NOT through that portal, in his lusty haste to escape the protection of his Master, to be with his lover, he has broken a wall which will never be repaired.

I can’t help but think of Bunuel in a place like this little Zen hut on the picturesque lake. What would Bunuel have done with this material? Certainly he would have chuckled at the picture of the shrewd old master, watching calmly as small animals are tortured at the hands of a naughty boy, the better to set the child up for a brutal lesson in compassion. The great difference between the function of Bunuel as an artist in a Christian culture, and Kim Ki-duk in a Buddhist culture, is that Zen allows the artist no escape, for it encompasses all escape in its embrace of emptiness, where as Christianity is built on an institutional foundation which aligned itself with empire–and form (literally, the “rock” of the Church)–so early on, that the artist has always been an outsider to it: its modern culmination in the Other-priest archetype, perfected by Dostoevsky; or the heretical artist Bunuel, for whom the church is the terrible fraudulent father who raised us to despise all patrimony. But the traction to be gained by the theoretical position of outsider and provocateur becomes a slippery place as applied to the dharma that underlies ‘Spring…Spring’. Once you start along the path, the stones you may throw just keep falling and never hit anything, except maybe your own head. And this is the ultimate joke that Kim Ki-duk tells in his stately, languid and fearsome film.

Synopsis: A Zen sanctuary hut which is at the center of a pristine mountain lake is home to a small boy and his guardian, a Zen master. The boy is cute and innocent, the master sage and powerful. It is lush Spring. We watch the boy picking herbs in the wilds around the lake, and he seems to be a good, obedient child, on the whole. But one day while playing he indulges in the wicked mischeif of tying stones to the bodies of a fish, a frog and a snake. This act of childish sadism is carried out as the Master looks on, unseen by the boy. In the night, as the boy lies sleeping, the Master ties a large stone around the child. Morning comes and the boy complains about the stone to his Master, who gently confronts him about the animal torture. He then orders the boy to go and free all the animals–telling him once they are all freed, he will untie the stone, but that if any of the animals has died, the stone will be in his heart for the rest of his life. Unsurprisingly, two of the three animals have died…the snake having suffered a particularly bloody and horrible death. The final note of the Spring chapter of this film is the weeping of the little boy whose childhood has come to a bleak end.

Summer brings a young woman into the scene seeking a cure for a cough and persistent melancholia. The boy, now a youth, is gripped with lust for her. The Master sees through this affair to its ultimate consequence, murder; but of course the youth can hear none of it, and when the girl must leave, the youth follows after her, stealing a statue of Buddha, presumably so that he can pawn it for starter cash in his new, profane, life.

Fall proves the Master’s dark prophecy and the youth returns, now a grizzled man, mad with anger, still weilding the bloodstained knife with which he ’s murdered the young woman who had become his wife. Under the stern tutelage of the Master he is beaten mercilessly, and performs an act of penance by carving out a sutra on the deck of the little lake house with the knife that was his murder weapon. [I always assumed this was the Heart Sutra]. After he finishes the carving, the young man is taken away by two of the kindest, most compassionate police detectives you will find in film…and I can’t help but detect a note of wry sarcasm here. As Fall ends, the old Zen master performs an act of ritual suicide.

Winter comes, and with it a mature man returns from completing his prison sentence to the lake house–which is now locked up in ice. The man is committed to a program of intensive purification. In the ice he discovers the Master’s funeral pyre and he digs out the relics from the ashes of his master (probably teeth, but traditional Buddhists believe them to be pearls that are formed in the body of an enlightened being). He carves an ice sculpture of a Buddha and places the relics inside its third eye. The ghost of a woman visits him, her face covered by a blue scarf. She carries with her a baby. In the night she leaves, falls under the ice and appears to drown, but this is only a manner of showing that the wandering ghost of his murdered wife has been satisfied by delivering their child to its rightful guardian….Spring shows us the same child as a lifetime ago, this time tormenting a turtle, with heedless joy.

I am married to filmmaker Kirby Dick. The Washington Post identified me as a Mexican actress because that is the information available on IMdB, and it has never been corrected. I am not her, I’m a writer and a Sr. Art Director/Creative Director at an advertising firm in L.A.

As a person who never felt “American” even though I was born here, I see, and admire a certain ethical and moral advancement, uniquely American, based on a deeply held belief in rationalism. Because I share neither this belief in rationalism nor the ethical advancement it engenders, I have always been amused by my husband’s selection of subject matter for his documentaries, and have always noticed that he was drawn to ethical/moral/sexual scenarios which raised many questions and inflamed both inter-personal and public controversy. There was the fearless invasion of privacy (and partnering with my ex-husband) in PRIVATE PRACTICES (1986), the equally cheeky elbowing in on a relationship between a dominatrix and her sub in SICK (1997), and the dragging into the light of the evils of a religion to which he was an utter outsider in TWIST OF FAITH (2004). Kirby’s work is always a kind of invasion, which would be arrogant if it were not grounded in the rational-ethical. I always cringe when my husband asks if I’m ready to hear what he’s thinking about going after next…which is a good thing.

At the beginning of this project, OUTRAGE, the first people to question its premise were sitting around the dinner table: my son and Kirby’s mother. Our son felt the subject matter was the equivalent of ratting people out. No moral relativism here, this was, to his 17-year old sensibilities, wrong. People can admit wrongdoing when they choose. That is an absolute right. You have no right to tell on them EVER. Of course, I raised both my children to nevertattle! Kirby’s mother, another anti-tattler, felt that it was wrong to shine the light on very personal secrets. I was on the fence, but I had a queasy feeling about the whole thing. Closeted public officials represented a morass of bad karma: already they are dishonest on so many levels, already they have blood on their hands for supporting government policies that harm or kill citizens, always with compromised reasons for doing so. The closet was certainly not the worst of it when it came to official disingenuousness. Wading right into this karmic sinkhole was going to bring conflict and damage. This was only the beginning of months of debate and discussion between Kirby, his crew and friends and about the whole issue of outing people who were in the closet and in public life. Who was fair game? Who was off limits? Once again the issue of hypocrisy became the standard. Hypocrisy is, after all, the ultimate crime against the rational-ethical, because it adds inconsistency to simple dishonesty. Was the film to be about outing people? Was the film to be about the closet?

The greatest challenge in making the film was in no way, however, the moral argumentation that framed it; it was that Kirby is by training and sensibility a verite filmmaker. Therefore, he needs to stories to follow, people engaged in activities, experiencing drama, living out conflicts. His initial concept, to both follow activists who were engaged in outing as well as to oversee his own investigations into a rather long list of government officials, was a gamble, based on a delicate structure of hypotheticals. By the law of averages, at least one prominent-enough person should show up at a bar with a same sex partner, or one of the guys in an escort service would talk on camera, or a former aide would agree to go on record.

One by one the hypotheticals crumbled. None of the “outers” ever outed anyone. The all-night stakeouts outside a certain Senator’s home netted one mysterious male guest who spent the night…but it was impossible to prove that they had had sex. Another investigation was supposed to turn up decades-old documents to prove a sex crime, but the search done by an professional expert in historical investigation, also a deeply interested party in the case of the particular official under investigation, concluded that the documents were “missing”. A subject who claimed to have an incriminating photograph strung the crew along for several months until it became apparent that he was lying. A rumor, which seemed to be substantiated by eight people turned out to have one source, who was unreliable. The most ambitious, nerviest and cleverest of Kirby’s interns had exhaustively searched the gay bar scene, dated D.C. escorts, discovered the secret showers in the basement of the Capital building–but nobody would go on record to talk about any of it. One hoped-for breakthrough after another went down ingloriously, until all that was left of the plan for this film was utter disappointment and a shattered budget.

It became grimly clear that there was no verite to be had, and possibly no veracity, from which to make a film. A deadly “essay” film was all that was left, something that would die after one bleak week at a festival somewhere, excluded by the blogosphere because there were no juicy new outings, ignored by the gay press and abandoned by funders and distributors. Into the wreckage walked Doug Blush, who had edited ‘Wordplay’ and ‘I.O.U.S.A.’.  Doug’s style was, as Kirby put it, more painterly and more intuitive than his previous, much beloved and respected editor, Matt Clarke. The energy began to build again, and the editing team regrouped and reworked. Crafting a story from interview footage and title cards, a new film began to emerge, and the subject matter slowly crystallized from being a failing attempt at sensationalism to a careful and balanced analysis of the closet and its psychological, political and social effects–a very different film than would have been made if all the hypotheticals had fallen into place. This was both ironic and fortuitous.

There had been a hope that OUTRAGE would open before the 2008 election. It was now December 2009. The election deadline had passed, but Obama had won, and the body politic was no longer so desperately angry. A new and impossible deadline for a cut was set for mid-January, to submit to Tribeca. Charlie Crist (Governor of Florida) was the slightly disappointing “star” as the outed politician-on-the-rise. To some bloggers this was not particularly news, but to the great majority of people interested in this film, it was. The evidence of his hypocrisy was plentiful but again, lovers of powerful men do not tend to want to rat them out. Crist, a deeply boring man, deserves as much if not more opprobrium for using possibly the emptiest, stupidest rhetoric since Ronald Reagan, as he does for being a closeted homosexual. [Of course in the day of brouhaha over his announcement that he would run for Senate, not one of the mainstream news outlets said anything about the flourishing stories of his secret life with male sex partners, or his opportunistic marriage.] Other great moments emerged in the film: Jim McGreevey’s tears, and his beautiful ex-wife’s heart-wrenching testimony; Dan Gurley’s transformation; Michelangelo Signorile’s story of how the media deliberately ignores this issue time and again. Check out the story about NPR censoring a review by Nathan Lee (http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/archives/2009/05/npr_censors_its.php) and listen to Terry Gross get EXTREMELY uptight in her interview. Kirby realized that she had not watched the film after being baffled by her off-putting manner. (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103832005) Indeed, in her interview in The Advocate, she admits to only being “briefed”. The blind eye of mainstream media might just blink, if enough people persist in supporting what this film is trying to do, which is to say that the Closet is a deeply destructive place to live and work, for those who take up residence there, and for the rest of us who accept the fear and loathing that supports it.

Terry Gross’ Advocate interview: http://www.advocate.com/print_article_ektid84096.asp

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.

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.

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.

 

LUTHER  

Other names:

Luther, THE dog
“BGM” (Big Giant Monster)
Lothar the Magnificent
Fartmeister
Pooch de la booch, de la hootch, de la cootch
Cur
Big Bezungenungen

You loved being petted on the stomach and butt,
going for walks in Griffith Park, and riding in the car.

You loved men, especially Kirby and Joey, and almost
all workingmen.

Your walks around the block resembled stations of the cross,
with you pausing to savor and seeming to pray
at a discreet and unvarying selection
of gates, posts, trees and stairwells.
Occasionally you would find a fig leaf–a favorite forage–or fresh tender spring grass.

Your ferocious yet sad appearance brought smiles
to many strangers, and you loved their compliments
and attention, tossing your head, bouncing and snorting
in a terrifying way..

You had a special skill in triangulation.
When people visited us at home, you would manage to find
the exact central point between them, and lie down there.

Thunder, gunfire, and the Fourth of July were terrifying to you.

You never learned to properly greet visitors.

Your job was to guard us,
although the mission was never tested–
I guess you did your job.

Your face always made me smile.

Rita 

 

My mom and I picked him up from John Steppling’s house and took him home with us. He was tiny and soft, like a cat. In the midst of my cooing and oohing and awing on the car ride home he promptly crapped in my lap. That first night my parents went out and Joey and I were left to care for him. I put him in the bathtub with some newspaper and towels and tried to sleep but he started crying so I brought a sleeping bag down there and slept with him. That was the last night he cried.

He grew relatively quickly, but never quite lost his puppy-ness, meaning he wasn’t the most well-behaved dog. He didn’t play fetch, he was more into tug-of-war, and he wouldn’t hesitate to snarl and bite if you were winning (or if you seemed like you had any intention of winning). This was something I learned to appreciate about Luther: he never really was domesticated. He taught me to respect animals as animals and not to treat them like small children or stuffed toys.

In teen-angsty moments sometimes I’d stare into his eyes, convinced that he could read what I was thinking. This may just be some stupid projection, but there was some sort of tired intelligence behind those expressive eyes of his, and sitting with him or going on walks around the neighborhood did help me to feel better.

Throughout college he’d greet me with excitement every time I came home. People can fake excitement, but there’s nothing quite like having an animal get excited to have you home after months away. On one of my last days of my last LA visit we took him out to Point Dume, my favorite beach. We walked over the Point, where I’d never actually been, and the sky was so clear we could see up and down the coast. We hiked down to the tide pools and let him off the leash where he excitedly ran between my mother, father, and I, almost herding us. When we all walked back up the stairs toward the car he wouldn’t move until he saw that we were all there, walking with him.

Lena

Luther, an American Bulldog was born around March 1998 and died Saturday, March 14, 2009 

Let The Right One In [Låt den rätte komma in]

It is the cold deep winter of northern Sweden. Snow falls upon the well-kept, charmless suburb of Blackeberg.  An old man is covering the windows of his apartment with a patchwork of corrugated cardboard, some of it with chunks of advertising left on. Inside, he readies a set of very used equipment for a grisly mission, to provide fresh human blood for the young vampire who is his “daughter”.  In the same building lives a young boy and his mother. The child is 12-year-old Oskar, (Kåre Hedebrant) a gentle, introverted, and highly intelligent boy, with flaxen hair and an angelic face. At school, he is the perfect mark for a group of bullies who taunt and humiliate him. Later, in the courtyard of his apartment, he acts out his anger by viciously stabbing a tree. Here he meets Eli, (Lina Leandersson) a strange young girl who is his neighbor, and their love story begins.

According to medieval legends, the north is the land where witches and all manner of evil spirits originate. The cold North is first character of this tale, from a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, which owes much to the spirit of Hans Christian Andersen at his most chillingly tender. There is something reminiscent of Andersen’s The Snow Queen in the seductive and gentle aspect of evil, which nestles close to the beautiful innocence of first love in the midst of a world where the ice is a metaphor for a soul not quite dead but in frozen suspension. Filmmaker Tomas Alfredson is attuned to the mesmerizing filmic power of snow and ice; of glass, of water and of the dark. (Production of the film was moved to Luleå in the north of Sweden to capture the snowier winter there.) Stylistically, the film inspires all the usual clichés such as tour de force, etc. The quotidian qualities of murder and violence are treated with a disciplined and sensitive eye, trained in tableau and composition by the likes of Dreyer; and a sensibility steeped in the textual symbolism of Bergman. The steamy warmth of indoor swimming is contrasted with the frozen ice of a snowy river. The ice and snow literally blanket and encrust horrific crimes. The glass, cousin symbol to ice (see the film excerpt) functions as separation and reflection; it is a symbol which deeply resonates, given a vampire’s relation to glass as a purveyor and reflector of light. Glass can be the vampire’s worst enemy, but ice and snow, treacherous to humans, are to the vampire harmless allies.

The unrelenting menace of cold and ice is the first to be dispelled by the magical Eli, a 12-year-old vampire who wanders around at night in a light tee shirt and does not shiver.  Hers is an extraordinary isolation, interrupted only by brief violent interludes wherein she attacks this or that robust victim to feed on their blood; but to the innocent Oskar she is a kindred soul, an outsider who represents, in her seeming independence, the sort of empowered being that Oskar wishes to be. She quietly amazes the lonely boy, who begins his subtle transformation to manhood soon after they meet. He aspires to physical strength, dreams of retribution against his enemies, and at her instigation, he bashes one of his tormenters in the head, sending the boy to the hospital (and setting up the final ghastly scene). Gradually the two children come to trust and love one another, even as the macabre violence of Eli’s feeding regimen proliferates. The man who is supposedly “her father”–although she has been twelve for “a very long time”, maybe forever–dies a spectacularly horrific yet voluntary death once it becomes clear he can no longer be of help in sustaining Eli’s life. This turn of events makes it necessary for Eli to leave town, and briefly, it seems that Oskar may have outgrown her. As it turns out, she makes a brief but fortuitous return, the two go off together, and we the audience are happy for them, even as we are horrified.

This is a quiet film that uses understatement in a sophisticated and drole manner. There are murders, and blood, but the focus stays calmly upon emerging love between Oskar and Eli. Is it innocent and “beautiful” or demented and cruelly exclusive?  Does this love engender a kind of deeply poetic justice or a perverse revel in retribution? The powers of this fairytale are given great psychological breathing space by allowing silence and space and eschewing the American tendency to edit for shock and gasp. As a play of the unconscious, this story can be read as dream, where Eli is an imagined figure of the charming weakling Oskar, reflecting his desire to wreck havoc and revenge on the cruel and powerful boys who torture him. Like every good horror movie, there is a deeply disturbing aspect to the blood curdling satisfaction that is Oskar’s as the film closes, for he has come out on top only to lose his soul. Thus, the deeply moral rigor that gives all fairytales their power, demonstrates to us the innocent charm and alluring mask of love, while intimating of this gentle love’s unquenchable thirst for blood.