Art, Music, Pop Culture

Growing up (in 2002) and Peter’s bouncy giant zygote

No Comments

Summer 2002 at a mutual friend’s wedding, saw an ex-girlfriend I hadn’t spoken with in ten years. My main response? Shame. See, I had come to realize I had been a major drip, clingy, and utterly failed to see that a cross-continental relationship between two young people who could not afford to travel cross-continent (and my drippy behavior had already begun in-person) was a not-so-good idea. She saw that early on, I didn’t and kept on dripping long afterward.

BUT a Peter Gabriel concert tour was taking place that winter. After 17 years of Gabriel fandom, I had never seen him in concert. It had been 10 years since his last album. And it was coming to Seattle where my friend lived. I took two buddies along. She hosted and toured the three of us through fun corners of the city. It was fun. She was stalwart about being a tour guide to three goons. My mind kept going whoosh between past and present and I somehow managed to insert sentences in between urges to apologize for drippiness.

All that made me VERY ready for the Peter Gabriel concert. He’s one of the few artists I tuck in deep. My favorite song on his album up was Growing Up (which had the deepest groove) and I was delighted how over the course of the show the staging by Robert Lepage (who also works with Cirque du Soleil) had a huge overhanging egg. Then the egg covering fell away to reveal a round moon image projected from within. Then the moon’s covering fell away to reveal a giant transparent egg cell that lowered slowly onto Peter Gabriel as he inserted himself within it as the opening bars of “Growing Up” began. And then he moved around the stage in the zygote, and bopped up and down to the song.

The birth of my second child was pending in about four months. The song is about birth and engaging the world (like how we first learn to identify one point in space, then two, then three… I kept thinking about how my daughter would be coming into the world, ready to bop about (which came true). The female vocalist on the stage is Melanie Gabriel, Peter’s daughter, and her making way for her daddy’s strolling zygote was even more amusing.

It was a hazardous drive back, heavy rain and wind, VERY tired, the laughs back in the car exhausted after the first hour or so. But we made it alive, and after our early morning return a few hours later I joined one of my friends to watch The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on opening day. A memorable, intense 24 hours.

Not quite ten years after THAT day, was listening to this album and this memory/anecdote came back. Most everything everyone says about Time is true, escpecially the word “funny”.

Below is a screen grab of a Google ad that came up while viewing the video above. Funny indeed, though I’d flip the genders in this case. Glad Google is pandering to the me from 20 years ago.

Art, Reading

The Trial of Ulysses

No Comments

Watched this 50 minute (they make ’em that long?) YouTube video that I thought would be about U.S. Appeals Court Judge John M. Woolsey’s decision to finally allow Ulysses into the United States. It wasn’t about that. It’s a survey of Joyce’s time in Trieste. I liked it for that, too.

Interesting to see some of the living experts on Joyce whose names I’ve read in the past. They’re not how I ever pictured them, but they LOOK as they should look. Then I realized I’d never made any effort to picture them anyway. Some peculiar people, not a surprise. We Joyceans ARE a precious lot. Nice to see footage of elderly Sylvia Beach rocking the same haircut she had in her 20s!

Activity, Art

Burnside Bridge balloon man

1 Comment

Walking yesterday the sight of a balloon art installation tethered to a stairway off the Burnside Bridge caught my eye. Caught about 4-5 peoples’ eyes. Snapped some photos. Within an hour the balloon man was gone. Was the artist/perpetrator among the people snapping photos, taking photos of people taking photos? Didn’t much care. If so, give them their moment. This was interesting.

Art, Music

Everybody’s got a sad song, but…

No Comments

So, are there people on the planet for whom a Hootie and the Blowfish song triggers a reminiscent sadness? The song comes on and the person’s instinct is to retreat and walk (or sit) and think big thoughts and piece the important things together? Gotta be “Yes”, right?

Art, Poetry

Three stanzas from ‘Under Ben Bulben’ by Yeats

2 Comments

“Under Ben Bulben” doesn’t quite work. Yeats tried to make it a culminating poem, even writing his eventual epitaph in the closing lines. I cracked it open tonight and rediscovered these three stanzas:

II
Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-digger’s toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.

III
You that Mitchel’s prayer have heard,
“Send war in our time, O Lord!”
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.
 
VI
Under bare Ben Bulben’s head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago; a church stands near,
By the road an ancient Cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase,
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

Art, Opera

I Cio-Cio-Choose ‘Madama Butterfly’

No Comments

Second opera in two months. Saw the Portland Opera’s production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly this afternoon. Fun to go to a classy event in daylight, and still have daylight outside when it’s done. The day still felt open, heart full of amusement and music!

I don’t speak Italian, and am by no means classy, but I really liked the show. There are musical discernments I am far from being sensitive to, but Opera is sure-as-heck less daunting than I once thought. Plots are simple, and take forever to develop. But rapid plots are not opera’s appeal. It’s empathy and sensory experience.

Listening to live music can be superior to decades-old recordings. You’re welcome for this free wisdom.The score to Madama Butterfly was less familiar than Carmen which I saw in late December. But while I’ve listened to Butterfly several times with good speakers and headphones, I was struck by how the music that comes across as cramped on a recording opens up with live orchestration. One thing to KNOW that, as most everyone who cares about music does, but another thing to EXPERIENCE that.

Voices were strong. The male lead character, B.F. Pinkerton, is a jerk who doesn’t stick around. We’re not supposed to like him, but I kept hoping he would break into Nelly Furtado’s “I’m Like a Bird” to at least TRY to win us over.

As it was, when it was time for curtain call, the long-suffering Cio-Cio San (nicknamed Madama Butterfly) had just taken her own life before our eyes. When the performer who played Pinkerton, the man who led to Cio-Cio San’s despair, took the stage a crescendo of applause was supported by an undercurrent of playful booing. Very funny. Singer smiled. Must be part of the role.

The production was more accomplished than the Eugene Opera’s Carmen (though I liked that show, too, and like Carmen more than Butterfly). At the Eugene Opera I did not see a single illuminated cell phone screen as the lights came down. In Portland, bright rectangles were all over the place. So, point to Eugene for being classier!

Art, Pop Culture

Dissecting ‘Doctor Zhivago’

No Comments

Doctor Zhivago is not a great film. Though I’ve seen it a dozen times, it may not even make my list of top 20 favorites.

Cupcake, cheesecake.Director David Lean’s film before Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, is my favorite movie (don’t tell Singin’ in the Rain, m’kay?) and watching Zhivago (same composer, a lead, director, screenwriter) always gets me contrasting art that works (Lawrence) to art that falls flat (Zhivago). I’ll probably never write my thoughts out about Lawrence, there’s not enough internet space for all the slop that would pour out, but it’s interesting that Lawrence has no speaking roles for women, and the only time women are heard are ululations of women sending their men off to battle. It IS an army movie in the Middle East and I don’t recall T.E. Lawrence mentioning women in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Oh, shit. Right. Zhivago. See? It’s easy to get rolling about Lawrence. Staunching that gusher and getting back on topic…

Producer Carlo Ponti wanted Sophia Loren to play Lara. Lean thought her too tall. Julie Christie was hired instead. And I can’t make up my mind about Geraldine Chaplin as Zhivago’s wife and cousin. In many shots she seems alert and intelligent, others like a ninny. And her appearance changes from gaspingly cute to weird-looking.

Christie was already a notable actor and beauty, Chaplin would become a prominent actor and had already been a teen model. Like any good devotee, I demand consistency from objects of worship. Fluctuating levels of beauty and presence are confusing.

Lean decided to make the character of Yuri Zhivago an observer, to Sharif’s initial frustration. He was to take it all in, hardly emoting, but he and the audience would know Zhivago would express himself through poetry. Don’t worry, Lean assured Sharif, despite the beautiful spectacles and actors emoting all around him, at the end of the movie they will think most about Sharif as Zhivago.

“[The novel] Doctor Zhivago is a sorry thing, clumsy, trite and melodramatic, with stock situations, voluptuous lawyers, unbelieveable girls, romantic robbers and trite coincidences.” – Vladmimir Nabokov

Would it shock you to know that Doctor Zhivago is not a documentary? Turns out the scenes in the ice palace home were not done in a ice palace that just happened to be there. The ice effects were done with beeswax coating the set, the drippings flash-hardened by being sprayed with ice water.

Speaking (okay typing, you stickler!) of fake cold, and fake heat. Something about the movie remains unconvincing. The actors don’t quite click. I may have started to put my finger on it.

It has to do with too much emphasis on the look of things. How the shot is lit, in focus, holding a pose as if for a movie still. In the throes of passion, or deep feeling, the leads don’t comport themselves the way people do. Too many shots of the gorgeous Julie Christie as Lara being lit achingly right:

And, with Sharif’s Yuri Zhivago relegated to being an observer, the movie is a parade of sustained white glints of light in his moist eyes. It’s not subtle. It’s distracting. A simulcra of a highly attuned human and artist shown so deliberately he seems a falsely-moved mannequin. Take this still which is the shot right after the one of Christie above:

Feeling the passion? Neither are they, but they are optimally lit, and Sharif’s sleeve is smoothed out just so.Omar Sharif is a great actor. Julie Christie is a great actor. It’s a fault of the direction and cinematography. Has David Lean done a convincing love scene? It’s a mood killer, and irreparably harms a grand melodrama like Zhivago. Any-hoo, having pinned that down I’m going to sleep knowing the world is a better place having helped us all get more precise about a supreme piece of middling entertainment.

Activity, Art, Music, Pop Culture, Reading

‘Neath Neil Sedaka

No Comments

During a morning walk, a turn of brain had me switch from the audiobook for A Dance with Dragons (why, Roy Dotrice, must you lose track of your character voices from book to book?) to the two songs on my iPod by Neil Sedaka.

I know he’s recorded a lot more songs in his long career. I recall an odd love duet with his daughter. What trips me out about “Calendar Girl” and “Breaking Up is Hard to Do” is the forced cherubism. “Though sad inside, I shall for the sake of commerce and Tin Pan Alley heave a superhuman effort into PROJECTING MIRTH THOUGH ITS FORCE MAY REND TIME/SPACE ASUNDER!”

Let’s focus on his shout out to “December” in “Calendar Girl”. He uses the word “‘neath”. He could have used “beneath” and it would have still flowed. But no, he formally sat at a table, wrote the word “‘neath” on the music sheet and thought “How winningly informal and crafty. I shall keep it.”

He gives out a “Whoo!” at the start of the bridge (at 1:26 in the clip below) that is hilarious. “Holy Christmas on a cracker, I got so much groove I don’t know what to do but whoop in exultation!”

Drafting this on my phone, its AutoCorrect suggested “Meat” for “Neil”, “Defamation” for “Sedaka”, “Shop” for “Whoo”. Good summary, phone! Somewhere out there my smartphone has a funnier, more concise blog than mine.