Mauckingbird’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’
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Shakespeare meets Lady Gaga
JIM RUTTERAt its recent annual membership meeting, the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia reconfirmed its commitment to achieving the goals set by “Engage 2020,” an ambitious program of the Philadelphia Cultural Alliance that seeks to double the region’s arts participation by the year 2020. This benchmark presents no small task for Theatre Alliance members, who already enjoy an annual audience of 450,000. Doubling that number in the next ten years— especially if the Alliance also wants to fulfill its goal of shedding theater’s “elitist image”— would presumably require attracting a large number of young people with minimal prior exposure to theater.
If anyone at the Theatre Alliance wants to see how to attract young people, they should head over to Temple and see Mauckingbird’s impressive, gender-bending staging of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This imaginative, highly theatrical production offers a spectacle that the Facebook generation can sink its teeth right into, notwithstanding the limitations of Mauckingbird’s scatterbrained approach to the text.
If nothing else, director Peter Reynolds understands a young audience. Mauckingbird’s summer residency at Temple— where Reynolds also teaches— enabled him to populate his cast with young, attractive and energetic students or alumni. He and co-director Lynne Innerst chose a schoolyard setting, and they incorporate computer-generated multimedia without intruding upon the drama (a feat that directors rarely achieve). The production also pokes fun at text messaging while believably showing how it can work as a communication device in a character’s performance.
Cross-gender casting
Reynolds also chose a smart play for bending gender and blending homosexual romance into Shakespeare’s traditionally hetero world. From the outset, Midsummer reflects the foolishness of love across generations (“Lord what fools these mortals be!”), plays with the capriciousness of sexual attraction and notes something that young people experience daily: “The course of true love never did run smooth.”
The level of engagement with Shakespeare’s play also benefits from the re-casting of Lysander as a woman (Emily Letts) and of Helena as a man (Patrick Joyce). Moreso than their elders, young people daily encounter— and mostly tolerate— homosexuality amongst their peers. A schoolteacher friend of mine in North Carolina says a week doesn’t pass without her seeing (and separating, as per school policy) girls making out in hallways. Across college campuses, students have adopted (mostly) affectionate terms for widespread collegiate sexual experimentation (for example “BUG,” as in “bisexual until graduation”).
More than anything else where young people are concerned, Mauckingbird’s clipped 90-minute production justifiably subordinates Shakespeare’s verbiage to the spectacle onstage. The fairies rock Oberon to sleep with Samantha Bellomo’s slick choreography; Lauren Perigard’s costumes range from the prep school students’ crested blazers and plaid skirts to the fairies’ black vinyl, zippers, mesh shirts and goggles; and the Mechanicals present their play-within-a-play as a wild knockoff of Lady Gaga videos.
All the action takes place inside Dan Soule and S. Cory Palmer’s vivid but minimal set design of luminescent dappled forests. Dom Chacon’s emotive lighting fuses with Chris Colucci’s microphone echoes and electronica beats to generate the feel of an ecstasy-fueled rave.
A 90-minute party
I would have partied there for far longer than 90-minutes if this production had let me. In its more raucous moments— mostly provided by Perigard’s audacious costumes (outrageous costumes of tinseled barbwire and shaggy red body suits) and the squealing, brash performance of Danielle Pinnock as Nick Bottom— I erupted with laughter.
Unfortunately, the removal of huge chunks of text disjointed the play’s three subplots from their usual coherency. Why does Puck so willingly engage in his antics on Oberon’s behalf? Why do the Mechanicals put on a play in the first place? In this production, we don’t know. Like a music video, the fast-paced direction sweeps past every incoherent intersection of each plot line.
Moreover, Mauckingbird’s “gay prism” approach loses credibility in its boarding school setting: I no more expected these kids to want to get married than I believe that a father at such a “school of the future” could then threaten his daughter with death if she doesn’t comply. Only the stellar bickering and longing performed by Joyce, Thompson, Erin Mulgrew (as Hermia) and Letts overcame my disbelief.
In this production, spectacle covers the script’s logical flaws. Whether such a formula can consistently attract audiences to theaters is another matter.
Lady Gaga’s previous incarnation
Spectacle-driven singers like Lady Gaga, David Bowie, and Prince enjoy immense success because they build their visual outlandishness upon a tower of talent. As a result, you don’t see second-rate imitations, because neither the music industry nor the fans will tolerate them.
However, if you watch old clips of Lady Gaga back when she called herself Stefani Germanotta, you can understand that without her dazzling costumes and the visual spectacle of her shows, this talented singer-songwriter wouldn’t have risen above the crowd of similarly talented singer-songwriters. By the same token, a more-straightforward production of Midsummer would have vanished into the ho-hum background of the four other stagings of that show in Philadelphia this season (with yet another to follow next year).
This approach may work well for young people— at least once. For those directors tempted to imitate Reynolds, the key question must be: Would you use this approach for Shaw or Ibsen?
September Letters: Why piano students cry…
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Why piano students cry
Re “Why piano students cry,” by Dan Coren—
Actually, Dan, while I’ve never played a perfect concert, I have had moments when I really felt like God was playing through me, which makes all the struggle worthwhile. But you and Barbara Rottenberg are right: There’s something about approaching pieces as sublime as the ones you mention that makes me want to do them justice, and when the fact I’m a mere human stands in the way, it’s very frustrating.
The good news is, I doubt there will ever be a machine that can truly express the way a human pianist can, so our tears and frustration along the way (if we don’t curse and quit), are important if great music is to have a chance to live. And even if one’s audience is a reluctant cat (or just your walls), if you can “nail it” at home, that means you can nail it. Nobody can take that away from you!
Maria Thompson Corley
Lancaster, Pa.
August 30, 2010
Editor’s note: The writer is a concert pianist.
The imam, the mosque and Ground Zero
Re “The imam, the mosque and Ground Zero”—
There’s a zing in Robert Zaller’s agnosticism. Three centuries after Voltaire and his followers forced the Catholic Church to temper its semi-civilized Monism, we’re going to assent by our silence to monstrosities like Islam’s stoning an adulteress to death, with a men-only execution squad?
As a dues-paying MultiCulti, I think we should take away the citizenship of all those assenting to Sharia Law. Send them back to Mecca, where they can play God to each other.
There ought to be a minimum price for living in an egalitarian democracy: Don’t do unto others what you wouldn’t have done to yourself.
Patrick D. Hazard
Weimar, Germany
August 30, 2010
Since Robert Zaller is a card-carrying member of the ACLU, I will forgive him if he thinks there is a separation of church and state clause in the Bill of Rights. That phrase does not exist in the U.S, Constitution.
Our first amendment gives us the right to freely practice our faiths without interference from disapproving minds like Zaller. Which means if the Imam wishes to preach that all Jews and Christians are devils, he’s welcome to his belief. This does not give him the right to build a mosque wherever he pleases.
His choice of a non-Moslem neighborhood in the shadows of the fallen towers seems to me, in the language of one of those Mets fans, “shoving it” to New Yorkers. No clause in the Constitution gives one the right to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater.
Jackie Atkins
Northern Liberties/ Philadelphia
August 30, 2010
Jewish artists
Re “Why so many Jewish artists?”, by Joan Myerson Shrager—
Back in my misspent youth, I read an essay by a Fordham University conservative philosopher who attributed Jewish omni-excellence to a thousand years of Catholic celibacy. Get it? YOUgenics: While the clergy was busy wasting its semen, every bright young rabbinical student had first choice at the wealthiest and most fertile maidens in his flock.
I thank Ms. Shrager for informing me that my favorite 20th-Century painter, Sonia Delauney, was Jewish. I knew she had changed her name when she fled Odessa for a rich uncle in St. Petersburg, but religion wasn’t at the top of her “Must Do” list.
Patrick D. Hazard
Weimar, Germany
August 31, 2010
Joan Myerson Shrager replies: I hope readers understand that I was moved by sense of curiosity about all this rather than a pompous claim that their having Jewish blood made them great. I am curious about how, why or if Jewishness influenced them.
‘Ellis Island Ghosts’ at Michener Art Museum
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Our ancestors, the immigrants
JANE BIBERMAN“It is the dark side of the island. A place where the huddled masses yearning to be free remained huddled, remained yearning, many permanently, just inches short of the promise land.”
So writes New York photographer Stephen Wilkes about the hospital complex that comprises the south side of Ellis Island. From 1998 to 2003, Wilkes returned repeatedly to photograph the decaying rooms, isolation wards and corridors where nearly 1.2 million people stayed after failing the initial medical assessment. Some 100,000 of them were denied entry into the U.S.
“In the shadow of Ellis Island’s Great Hall,” says Wilkes, “forgotten by history and woefully ill-equipped for its battle with nature, I came upon the ruins of a great hospital: contagious disease wards and isolation rooms for the people whose spirits carried them across oceans but whose bodies failed them a stone’s throw from paradise.”
In 2006, W.W. Norton published Ellis Island: Ghosts of Freedom, a handsome volume of 74 of Wilkes’s images, upon which the Michener Museum’s current show is based.
Lady Liberty in a mirror
The large crisp ilfochrome pictures (prints made from slides) were taken with natural light and without what Wilkes calls “the artifice of the photographic craft,” so that he could document the “living spirit of the place.” Each is accompanied by a caption written by Wilkes.
One of the most powerful pictures, Tuberculosis Ward. Statue of Liberty, depicts a dirty sink and our symbol of freedom, reflected in a small mirror. For a woman who stayed in that room, Wilkes surmises, “that reflection would be the closest she would ever come to freedom.” This photograph, as all the work, reflects the melancholy of Atget.
I returned three times to see the show and noticed that visitors move slowly and thoughtfully through the gallery, as if mesmerized by the scenes of rooms that our ancestors may have passed through. In many of them, doors and windows are the subject. Do they lead out to freedom? Or do the encroaching weeds and vines forever block their way?
In one photograph, a lone dusty shoe remains on a table. What became of its owner?
Hine’s companion exhibit
Perhaps that owner can be found in the companion exhibit tucked away in its own space. When the Michener’s chief curator, Brian Peterson, decided to mount a show of Wilkes’s photographs, he got the inspired idea of pairing them with the iconic black-and-white images of Lewis Hine (1874-1940), who produced a body of work that has become synonymous with the immigrant experience in America.
“My idea was to show two sides of the story,” Peterson explains. “While Wilkes engages in the act of honoring the memory of the place through attentiveness to decay, Hine portrays human beings full of vitality with a particular agenda.”
Some critics view Hine’s photographs as overly sentimental, but Peterson stresses that Hine was hired to humanize the immigrants: “The point is that Hine was not documenting dispassionately, but showing the humanity of these people who were just as human as those immigrants who got off at Plymouth Rock.”
This exhibit contains 15 exquisite portraits, all on loan from the George Eastman House in Rochester. Today, when anti-immigrant feelings run high in America, these two photographers of different generations remind us not only of our collective past, but of the need to show compassion to the strangers to our shores.
‘Saturday Night Fever,’ revisited
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Should you be dancin’?
Saturday Night Fever, revisited
Saturday Night Fever, the 1977 disco film that made a star of John Travolta, suffers from numerous flaws: The plotting is obvious and the characters are caricatures. Even the dancing— the film’s alleged raison d’être—isn’t very good.
Nevertheless, Saturday Night Fever retains its interest after more than 30 years for its power as a coming of age story and for its evocation of a specific time: that brief moment of sexual freedom, post-Pill and pre-AIDS. Its characters’ efforts to find themselves ring true to those of us born to that particular slice of the Baby Boom.
Ostensibly, Saturday Night Fever was based not on fiction but on journalism— specifically, a 1976 New York Magazine article, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” describing the nightlife of working-class kids in Brooklyn. Though most hip observers thought disco’s moment had already passed by then, the Australian producer Robert Stigwood bought the rights to the article and proceeded to make a film whose subject embraced much more than disco. Not until 1996 was it revealed that the original article’s author, Nik Cohn, had fabricated the whole story. Here was one film, ironically, that may have been more true to real life than its original journalistic source.
The story concerns Tony Manero (John Travolta), a good Catholic boy who lives with his parents in Brooklyn and works in a hardware store. Where he really lives, though, is at the disco, where Tony and his pals drink, get high, pick up girls, and dance— ah, dance. One of his regular partners is Annette (Donna Pescow), with whom Tony executes precise but joyless maneuvers.
One night, though, Tony sees a girl who is literally dancing circles around her partner. Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney) is another Brooklyn kid, but one who’s attempting to escape her blue-collar roots by way of an office job in Manhattan. Tony convinces the skeptical Stephanie to be his partner in an upcoming dance contest.
Madonna vs. whore
Tony, a product of his culture and his time, lacks a mental model for females beyond the extremes of Madonna or whore. Annette, who pines for Tony, struggles to embody either of those archetypes in order to win him, but she is elbowed aside by Tony’s fascination with the slightly older, apparently sophisticated Stephanie.
The film’s secondary characters also struggle to resolve the conflicts between the strictures of family, church and neighborhood on the one hand and their own desires and needs on the other. Tony’s brother, Father Frank, decides to quit the priesthood. Bobby C., one of Tony’s sidekicks, seeks advice from one person after another as to what to do about his pregnant girlfriend. (None of them can suggest anything but marriage.)
The various elements all climax in a single evening, during which (a) Tony and his friends attack a Puerto Rican gang in retaliation for an earlier attack on one of their own, (b) Tony and Stephanie score an undeserved win over a Puerto Rican couple at the dance contest, (c) Tony unsuccessfully tries to rape Stephanie, (d) Tony’s friends successfully gang-rape Annette, with Tony present but not participating, and (e) Bobby C., whose romantic travails had been played as a running joke until this moment, falls/throws himself off the bridge that had been used as symbolic leitmotif.
From Serpico to Rocky
The movie was first released with an R rating, reflecting its numerous dark plot elements and raunchy language (including, according to director John Badham, the first direct mention of a blow job in a feature film). To attract a larger audience, it was re-edited and re-released in 1978 with a PG rating—the version most of us saw at the time. (The current DVD has the R version.)
The mid-’70s was the period during which Martin Scorsese was getting his feet under him (Mean Streets in 1973; Taxi Driver in 1976). Scorsese was just one of several filmmakers making urban dramas with Italian-American protagonists: there was also Sidney Lumet’s Serpico in 1973 and Dog Day Afternoon in 1975, as well as John Avildsen’s Rocky, set on the equally mean streets of Philadelphia in 1976.
The gritty feeling of these dramas imbued Badham’s approach to Saturday Night Fever. The racism and sexism of its characters is utterly unselfconscious, and the casual approach to drug use and sexual encounters evokes that period when hippie hedonism hadn’t yet morphed into yuppie striving.
Claustrophobia
The movie’s visual style was also true to the urban dramas of the time. It was filmed on the streets, late at night and very early in the morning to avoid throngs of Travolta fans. (At this point he was still mostly the teen heartthrob from the TV sitcom, “Welcome Back, Kotter.”) The Steadicam was new technology then. Its use enabled filming in real-life settings. The hardware store where Tony works and the stairway down to the dance studio where he practices with Stephanie are presented with a claustrophobic immediacy.
The urban dramas are only half of the film-history context of Saturday Night Fever. Its other innovation concerned its use of music.
Plenty of musicals had been set in New York before: On the Town (1949) and its bleak successor, It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), plus, of course, the magnificent West Side Story (1961). These are the musicals that people who hate musicals hate. In all of them, the singing and dancing occur as breaks from the overall narrative.
Between drama and musical
But there’s a whole separate tradition of movie musicals in which the performances are integrated into the narrative, as something that the characters actually do. However, musicals of this sort traditionally involved characters who are performers, from Busby Berkeley’s show biz musicals (such as 42nd Street and Footlight Parade, both 1933) to Bob Fosse’s classics, Cabaret (1972) and All That Jazz (1979)— the latter, of course, also set in New York.
Saturday Night Fever takes off from this latter tradition of integrated musicals. All the dancing is done by characters who dance. Most of the music is framed as recordings in the dance venues (disco, studio) where the non-singing characters do their dancing. Not all of it, though: The exception— the Bee Gees songs written for the movie— is precisely where the film straddles the line between urban drama and musical.
Words vs. music
The movie opens with Tony strutting down the street in time to the BeeGees’ anthemic Stayin’ Alive: “You can tell by the way I use my walk/ I’m a woman’s man; no time to talk./ Music loud and women warm,/ I’ve been kicked around since I was born.” The song perfectly encapsulates both Tony’s character and, with its quintessential “four on the floor” disco beat, the milieu in which Tony comes (and stays) alive. A few minutes later, we hear Night Fever in counterpoint to Tony’s Saturday night primping.
Both of these songs are played over scenes in which Tony is alone: they are part of the music that shapes Tony’s not particularly complex interior life. The music thus serves to comment on Tony’s character, and functions somewhat more ironically than one might expect from the songs themselves.
Other Bee Gees songs are played in the disco. Tony does his floor-clearing solo to You Should Be Dancing, which includes a telling bit of byplay. The scene opens with Tony dancing with some random girl; when the song starts, he mutters something and walks away from her. Everyone quickly leaves the floor, except for this girl, who stands at the edge but remains on the dance floor, watching expressionlessly as Tony struts and preens. Alone among the crowd, she’s not nodding or clapping or grooving along; she simply stands and watches, giving lie to the lyrics (“My woman gives me power,/ Goes right down to my blood”).
Prelude to rape
In the dance contest, Tony and Stephanie dance to a fourth Bee Gees song, More Than a Woman, ending with a long romantic twirl during which they lose themselves in the moment and forget the careful choreography they’d prepared. Tony then struts off the floor, Stephanie trailing behind him, as the song fades out. Again, Badham uses the song with a certain amount of irony: A few minutes later Tony is trying to rape Stephanie, proving that she isn’t, actually, more than a woman to him.
The final Bee Gees track is, again, used to show us Tony’s inner thoughts, now more tumultuous. He spends the night after the contest riding back and forth alone on the subway, trying to sort out everything that’s happened. The song is the gentle disco ballad (sic), How Deep Is Your Love. In the morning he finds his way to Stephanie’s new Manhattan apartment, begs for (and receives) her forgiveness, and the movie ends with them pledging friendship, if not love.
In the late ‘70s you couldn’t escape the music from Saturday Night Fever. The soundtrack album sold 40 million copies, and its songs (only a third of them by the Bee Gees) were everywhere: on the radio, at parties, in bars and, of course, in discos. The album thus took on a life and a cultural resonance that ignored the film’s subtler usage of the music. As a repeat viewing of the film today will attest, that was itself a far darker experience than the buoyant dance beat might suggest.
Julia Roberts and ‘Eat, Pray, Love’
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Julia Roberts confronts mature womanhood
MARGE MURRAYI just flew back from Ubud, on the resort island of Bali in Indonesia, where most of the Bali portion of Eat Pray Love was shot. So of course I had to see the movie as soon as we returned to Philadelphia.
In the memoir/travel book of the same name, the author, Elizabeth Gilbert, rejected the urban rat race and left her husband, her rebound lover and her life in Manhattan, hoping to find peace and serenity through travel to India, Italy and Bali. But for all the breathtaking vistas of the countries Gilbert visited, I left the movie more enthralled by the transformation of Julia Roberts than the story line, or the happy ending (in the arms of Javier Bardem) or the film’s unrealistic postcard-perfect portrait of Bali. (Not many people live in the gorgeous teakwood, open-air cabin that Roberts inhabited in Ubud.)
Indonesia is, after all, a Third World country. Eighty percent of its economy is tourism-based, and much of that industry was decimated by bombings in 2002 and again in 2005. It suffers from poor health care, high infant mortality, limited rights for women and no transportation infrastructure to speak of.
The road from the airport in Denpasar to Ubud, for example, doesn’t take kindly to the sort of bicycle that pedals in the film. In real life, Roberts would have been squashed between trucks, cars, cabs and motorbikes that make three lanes of traffic out of a one-and-a-half-lane byway. Nor would she have sauntered the back roads of Bali, cycling between verdant (albeit muddy) rice paddies.
Up from Pretty Woman
Roberts, on the other hand, was worth the price of admission. This glamourpuss who once routinely played bimbo roles (in films like Pretty Woman) or Wonder Woman (in Erin Brockovich, for which she won the Academy Award for best actress) has evolved at age 42 into an entirely different actress: older, wiser and unabashedly heavier too.
Her luminosity now reflects a maturity that wasn’t evident in her earlier films. Roberts smiles that gorgeous smile in Eat Pray Love, too, but not quite as widely or as frequently as in her earlier films. She doesn’t use her body in place of acting any more either. And by God, she thinks! You can almost see the wheels turning in her head scene by scene.
She’s not only subtler and more reflective. She’s also larger, and her clothes didn’t come out of Vogue, either. Roberts wasn’t exactly dowdy in Eat Pray Love— she was more like a real woman. In many ways, it was a fairly courageous choice of script for a star long touted as a gorgeous icon of pulchritude.
But if you’ve watched Roberts over the years— not so much her films as her utterances and acceptance speeches— you already know that she’s not just another pretty face.
From Bette Davis to Lindsay Lohan
Still, I couldn’t help thinking: What is in store for such an actress? In the past, Hollywood seemed to offer abundant real mature woman roles for real actresses like Lauren Bacall, Laraine Day, Ida Lupino, Myrna Loy, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. The scripts were written for adults, not capricious, empty-headed girl-children like Miley Cyrus and Lindsay Lohan.
Eat Pray Love isn’t a great movie. It isn’t even a good movie. It won’t resonate 15 years from now, if indeed it’s even remembered 15 years from now. But it is, for me at least, a harbinger movie. I want to see what Roberts will make of herself from this point on.
She seems to have taken to motherhood and spousehood, and that contentment plays out in her acting and her choice of roles. But Hollywood has no place for real women these days.
Roberts seems finished with a lot of things: shallow living and girly films. How she traverses this borderland between what audiences want and creating a body of work that stands the test of time, I’m not sure.
Here’s hoping Eat Pray Love was merely a first step on a path toward a more robust version of cinematic womanhood, a path leading away from stardom toward real professionalism. (I understand Roberts will collaborate with director Ryan Murphy in a forthcoming film about another woman of a certain age adjusting to real issues, this time because she lost her job.)
Will Julia Roberts go the way of Botox, face-lifts and detrimental dieting? Or will the new Julia celebrate becoming a full-bodied woman playing full-bodied roles? We mature women can dream too, can’t we?
Ethnic humor: Tips for Dr. Laura
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It’s OK for you but not for me:
Three rhetorical tips for Dr. Laura
“Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is ‘nigger, nigger, nigger’,” Dr. Laura Schlessinger observed on the August 10 program that provoked her departure from the airwaves. “I don’t get it. If anybody without enough melanin says it, it’s a horrible thing. But when black people say it, it’s affectionate. It’s very confusing.”
When Dr. Laura said, “I don’t get it,” she was being facetious. Her role as a talk show self-help advisor is not to listen to her callers but to lecture them. “I don’t get it” was her rhetorical way of insisting that she does get it— that she perceives a double standard that permits black people to use expressions that are verboten for whites.
But Dr. Laura was right in the literal sense: She really doesn’t get it. As someone who has practiced journalism, humor writing and speechwriting for a living, let me attempt to set her straight about the rules of rhetoric, which also happen to be the rules of common sense.
The rabbi, or the minister?
Rule Number One: When you deprecate yourself or your group, it’s amusing and endearing. When you deprecate other people or groups, it’s mean and malicious. If you want to have fun, point your gibes in your own direction, not someone else’s.
I once wrote a speech for a corporate executive who proposed to tell a joke about a rabbi. This particular joke would have worked just as well using any other clergyman as its butt, regardless of religion. So I persuaded the executive to joke instead about a Methodist minister— and to preface the joke by telling his audience that his own father was a Methodist minister (which he was).
The joke was well received. Had I told it, I would have used the rabbi.
Except….
Real Polish jokes
Rule Number Two: It’s OK for underdogs to make fun of overdogs. Humor, after all, is one of the few tools the poor and the meek possess to make it through their otherwise gloomy days.
So, yes, it’s OK for the poor to tell jokes about the rich and powerful but not vice versa. It’s similarly OK for blacks to make jokes about whites, for women to make jokes about men, and for gays to make jokes about straights, but not the other way around.
This isn’t a matter of political correctness; it’s a matter of plain good sense. Among other things, this rule explains why Jon Stewart, who needles the pompous, is funny, while Rush Limbaugh, who tweaks welfare recipients, is not.
The “Polack jokes” that swept America in the late ‘60s failed precisely because they ridiculed the ignorant poor. My antidote for this mean-spirited exercise was to collect real Polish jokes told by real Poles in Poland— jokes that were invariably directed not at people who neglect to wash their underwear but at Poland’s Soviet and Communist oppressors.
Oppressed anti-Semites
Granted, reasonable people often differ as to who is the underdog in a given situation. Corporate executives making millions sincerely believe themselves the persecuted victims of greedy unions and power-hungry government bureaucrats. Jews and anti-Semites alike perceive themselves as oppressed by the other. Ditto for conservatives and liberals. Many white middle-class Americans sincerely believe themselves oppressed by blacks and the poor. (See, for example, publisher Herb Lipson’s “Off the Cuff” column almost any month in Philadelphia Magazine.) Indeed, I am one of only 23 people in the entire world who don’t believe themselves the victim of some malign persecution.
But still— most of us can smell nastiness when we hear it. Which brings me to….
‘General Betray-Us’
Rule Number Three: Don’t criticize or ridicule people for things they can’t control. Such characteristics include someone’s name, age, nationality, race, family background, relatives and physical appearance. If you violate this rule, you’ll merely engender sympathy for your target while reflecting poorly on yourself.
Case in point: In 2007 the anti-war liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org published a full-page ad in the New York Times that labeled General David H. Petraeus “General Betray-Us” because the general was allegedly “cooking the books for the White House.” Whatever valid point the MoveOn folks might have made was undermined by their bad-mannered attack on the general’s name. (Indeed, MoveOn subsequently erased all such references from its website.)
Surname abuse abounds on the left and right alike, as witness Rush Limbaugh’s recent attack on “Imam Hussein Obama.” Obama didn’t choose his politically problematic name, and he deserves some credit for hanging on to it— unlike, say Ralph Lauren, who was born Ralph Lipschitz. (When your surname is Rottenberg, you’re especially sensitive about this issue.)
Another case in point: The former Philadelphia Daily News columnist Pete Dexter once dismissed a young critic of Mayor Frank Rizzo with this put-down: “Noel Weyrich is 21 years old and in love with his mind.” Years later, Dexter’s 2007 anthology, Paper Trails, joked about his wife’s “tiny titties.” Ask yourself: Do these cheap shots endear you to Dexter or to his targets?
My publisher’s lesson
I learned this lesson from one of the wisest people I’ve ever met: my first boss, Hugh Ronald, the late publisher of the daily Commercial-Review in Portland, Ind. When that paper’s editor resigned to take another job in 1966, I was second in command in the newsroom. But I was only 23 and less than two years out of college.
In the normal course of affairs, Hugh would have searched elsewhere for a new editor. Instead he took the extraordinary gamble of promoting me to the editor’s chair, making me for a while the youngest daily newspaper editor in the country.
“You know,” Hugh told me on the night he offered me the editorship, “a lot of people in town are going to criticize me for doing this. They’re going to say you’re too young for this job— and they’re right.” Then he chuckled and added, “But that’s not your fault.”
It’s a rule I’ve tried to live by ever since: Don’t criticize people for things that aren’t their fault.
So should Dr. Laura be silenced and/or removed from the airwaves? I wouldn’t. She may be wrong, but she expresses views that are widely held; and by raising them in public she offers those who differ (like me) the opportunity to respond. If she really gets canned because of this incident, I invite her to take her provocations to Broad Street Review— assuming, of course, that she can tell me something I don’t already know.
Why so many Jewish artists?
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Why so many Jewish artists?
The Holocaust connection
I was raised in a non-observant Jewish home in a family with strong ethnic (but not religious) ties to Judaism. Consequently, in some ways I distanced myself from things particularly Jewish.
Of course I knew about the Jewish imprint on American musical culture. I knew about Irving Berlin, Al Jolson and Eddie Fisher. I grew up hearing Gershwin and the Andrews Sisters’ Bei Mir Bist du Shein. My grandfather, an accomplished singer, always sang Yiddish and folk songs by Jewish composers.
But the notion of a “Jewish artistic imprint” comparable to the Jewish musical imprint never occurred to me, even though I’ve worked as an artist all my adult life.
The ‘graven images’ myth
Then about five years ago I began volunteering my artistic services to my neighborhood synagogue, Congregation Keneseth Israel of Elkins Park, which has a strong museum collection as well as a history of featuring art and artists in exhibitions. My computer skills and artistic training led to work with on a continuing series of illustrated lectures about “Judaism and Art” by the congregation’s senior rabbi, Lance J. Sussman, who is also a visiting history professor at Princeton.
From Sussman I learned that although it was customary— even traditional— to assume that Jewish culture lacked much in the ay of visual art because religious restrictions against “graven images,” this wasn’t really so. In fact, Sussman contended, Jewish art dates back to the Israelites.
After Googling simple phrases like “Jewish artists” and “Jews in art” as part of my research for our project, I soon discovered that, without my having realized it, many of the great 20th-Century artists I had studied happened to be Jewish.
My favorites
My favorites, for example, include giants like Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Jacob Landau, Louise Nevelson, Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Jonathon Borofsky, Sonia Delauney, Jim Dine, Helen Frankenthaler, Audrey Flack, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Sol Lewitt, Amadeo Modigliani, Jules Olitski and Jules Pascin, George Segal, Ben Shahn, Nancy Spero, Raphael Soyer and Lee Krasner.
Then there are the great photographers like Man Ray (whose work I always loved for its extraordinary innovation), Alfred Stieglitz and of course Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Alfred Eisenstadt and the great Robert Frank. Almost all of my favorites, it turned out, were Jews or at least had one Jewish parent who was. For that matter, a great number of Philadelphia artists I have known and worked with turn out to be Jewish as well.
Of course, Jews hold no monopoly among history’s greatest artists, as countless examples from Michelangelo to Rembrandt to Picasso to Jackson Pollock can attest. Nonetheless, for the past half-century Jews have dominated most lists of the Top 50 contemporary artists.
Why so many Jews in the visual arts? And why now? Is it just a coincidence? Or is there something about that Jewish genetic imprint that has produced such a plethora of brilliant artists?
War’s ripple effect
I can’t answer my own question, except to speculate that the ripple effect of being either much maligned or overly scrutinized and tragically singled out in the 20th Century has somehow produced a psyche that looks inward for self-expression and for an outlet for hidden fears— a combination of self-adulation mixed with pain, accompanied by the salve or burden of over-achievement. Add it all together and you might end up with that slightly twisted, slightly loosely screwed up inner core that characterizes many an artist.
For a more scholarly historic perspective, you’ll have to attend “Art and The Holocaust,” Dr. Sussman’s latest exploration of art and Judaism. For myself I will simply add that my own work on this three-part mini-series has left me profoundly touched by the creativity and depth of my fellow Jewish artists before, during and after one of the most devastating periods in human history.&diams
To read a response, click here.
August Letters: Gay marriage….
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Gay marriage
“The ‘right’ to gay marriage,” by Dan Rottenberg (Editor’s Notebook) presupposes that parents in heterosexual marriages are all wonderful role models. But June and Ward Cleaver are pure fiction. I think parenting of all kinds needs society’s support. A gay couple can have many friends of the opposite sex, gay and straight, who offer the kind of contrasting views of life that you refer to.
Social conservatives cannot count on my support because, simply put, they are intolerant of gays only for their religious fundamentalist reasons, somehow making the status of being gay a “poor choice” when in fact those of us who are gay or who have gay relatives and friends know this is the height of ignorance.
I am afraid, Dan, that your attempt at a reasonable discourse on this topic falls flat when you examine the groups, such as the Mormon church, that have fought so hard to present this issue as one with moral and historic justification. These are the “Bible says” folks who find all sorts of justification for their biases.
There are no reasonable points of view when we deny the civil rights of certain segments of our society.
Joan Myerson Shrager
Elkins Park, Pa.
August 18, 2010
The article makes a number of excellent points, but overlooks the issue of who should decide how marriage is defined. I would be happy if our elected officials were to pass legislation to expand the definition of marriage beyond its historical definition. There are strong moral and public policy arguments for this, and public opinion is moving in this direction.
But should a judge, who is not elected, take this issue away from voters and make this an issue of constitutional rights?
Legislating social policy from the bench can have profound consequences at the ballot box for decades to come, as traditional voters who are outraged by the decision become politically active. Roe v. Wade was a major factor in the resurgence of the Republican Party.
Stanley Kull
Wynnewood, Pa.
August 19, 2010
Your defense of the “right to gay marriage” depends in large part on the assertion that gay men are thereby signing up “to a lifetime non-fornication program.”
But that is not accurate. From what I read, monogamy, as expected in marriage, is not part of the conditions of male gay marriage.
Bourne Ruthrauff
Center City/ Philadelphia
August 19, 2010
As a math know-nothing, I must give you the benefit of my doubts about a zillion exposures to sexual infection in 20 years. But the rise of “hooking” as one-nighter sex for our most educated young people seems more dangerous.
The only thing more dangerous is Catholic virginism, the sad fate that befell my first wife and me. No experience is as bad as too much uncritical experience. And the U.S. boom in porn suggests that our future is more threatened by too much unloving sex.
I fear surging Christian fundamentalism will prevent our schools from tutoring the next generation into the sane relations your essay powerfully supports.
Patrick D. Hazard
Weimar, Germany
August 18, 2010
Dan Rottenberg makes a very good argument for life-long monogamy. However, it begs the question about marriage, the validity of which is never quite defined anywhere in his article.
What is marriage? There really is no definitive agreement.
I learned from my late father (a clinical sociologist) the following definition, which he used in teaching his class on Marriage and the Family: A usual, normal marriage is one in which a man and a woman exchange verbal and behavioral commitment to each other, who meet the requirements of their culture, and who share sexual relations with one another.
The question then to be discussed is why marriage must be defined as only between a man and a woman. My father understood his definition to embody what is universally characteristic of marriage in both recorded human history and myriad cultural settings. If this is so, then a life-long monogamous relationship between a same-sex couple must be called something other than marriage.
"Social conservatives” will still object to the homosexual aspect of such a relationship, but, as the article points out, it would be more beneficial to society than the promiscuity that seems to reign at present.
Craig R. Tavani
Phoenixville, Pa.
August 19, 2010
Editor’s comment: We haven’t reached the end of history. Definitions of marriage have evolved over thousands of years and will no doubt continue to do so.
Steven Slater’s footsteps
Re “What hath Steven Slater wrought?” by Dan Rottenberg (Editor‘s Notebook)—
You forgot to mention that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs said the heck with laptops and cell phones and decided to read a few good books (hard copies).
Joseph Glantz
Levittown, Pa.
August 25, 2010
Dan, let “Sooner or Slater” be our battle cry. If our lower orders suddenly and together sat on their abused duffs, the Casino Capital gang might understand who’s holding up whom. And how did I ever miss that it was a foulmouthed ms. who discombobulated our Slater?
Patrick D. Hazard
Weimar, Germany
August 26, 2010
Editor’s comment: Like Steven Slater himself, you guys are going to give “service” a bad name.
Saving the Olympia
Re “Why the U.S.S. Olympia matters,” by Andrew Mangravite—
Interesting— America in 1898 as China today. The question is whether or not the general public cares about that sort of notion— or even history in a general sense— any more.
Rick Soisson
East Falls/ Philadelphia
August 19, 2010
Andrew Mangravite replies: They probably don’t. That’s why we keep making the same mistakes over and over at an ever-escalating cost. Santayana, anyone?
Farewell to the ’50s
I laughed out loud when I read “Farewell to the ‘50s,” by Perry Block. The only things he forgot were S & H green/trading stamps.
Sadly, I’m that way now about the’60s. I meet kids who can’t name all four Beatles and I get sick. I went to see my son play at a big rock festival and no one was smoking pot.
And hippie is now a dirty word— I’m still trying to figure that one out, but I think 20-somethings who are still fairly liberal and use the word hippie as if their mouths are filled with bile are totally misinterpreting what hippies really were and tried to do. To kids today, hippies are simply unwashed moochers.
Oh God, I hate getting old. But it beats the alternative.
Robin Slick
Fairmount/ Philadelphia
August 17, 2010
As it turns out, Annette Funicello was also the bridge between the Mouseketeers and
Mary Poppins. See my blog in Creative Loafing.
Perry Tannenbaum
Tega Cay, S.C.
August 18, 2010
Perry Bock replies: The bridge from Mouseketeers to Mary Poppins? Maybe. For me, she was more the bridge from Mouseketeers to supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!
Professional soccer
Re ”The case for professional soccer,” by Tom Purdom—
As a die-hard Philadelphia Union fan, any article that raises awareness of the team and Major League Soccer is spectacular. That said, I must disagree with your assessment that soccer will necessarily be a niche sport with a niche market in the U.S.
The fact that we now have some 16,000-plus people heading out to Chester, Pa. to take in a local team— our local team— playing the sport that we love indicates, to me, a shift in the sport’s popularity and acceptance.
If Major League Soccer can continue to expand into would-be successful markets like Seattle, Philadelphia and (what looks to be very successful) Vancouver, I firmly believe that we’re talking about contention with at least two of the four “major” sports in this country— hockey and basketball, both of which are seeing dwindling attendance and lack of profitability.
The U.S. Men’s National Team got some of the sport’s best ratings in this country in the 2010 World Cup. The “designated player” rule allows clubs to bring in big international names. ESPN, arguably the most accurate barometer of American sports, continues to add to its soccer coverage. I think the recipe is ripe for the explosion of soccer onto the American sports scene.
Kevin Sullivan
Center City/ Philadelphia
August 17, 2010
Renoir and the Barnes
Re Judith Stein’s review of “Late Renoir"—
Thank you for taking the Art Museum’s show and expanding its reference to other familiar Renoirs at the Barnes and elsewhere.
A review of high visual clarity and thought!
Diane Burko
Center City/Philadelphia
August 10, 2010
Editor’s note: The writer is an artist.
It costs $25 a head to see “Late Renoir” at the Art Museum, when not too long ago more than 170 Renoirs and the rest of the Barnes Foundation collection could be seen for $5. It’s a sign of what is to come once the Barnes pieces are ripped out of the Merion gallery and parked down the
street at a virtual Art Museum adjunct.
Those who claim to be “liberating” the Barnes collection (many with Art Museum connections) will be doing so only for those who can afford such outrageous fees. If the Barnes Foundation charged $25 a head in Merion, there would never have been the excuse of flagging income that
the court accepted in allowing the trustees to move the collection.
I recall distinctly Barnes President Bernie Watson’s testimony dismissing the idea of raising the $5 admission fee as a way to balance the Barnes’s (hyper-inflated) budget. Not long after the collection’s move was court-approved, the trustees did just that, doubled the fee. And not long after they increased it by another third.
As for Judith Stein’s piece, it’s the kind of gushing nonsense that Barnes sought to overcome with objective observation and analysis. It’s pretty clear that this kind of critical thinking has no place in the new Barnes regime or anywhere else in a city Barnes once pegged as an ignorant backwater.
Nick Tinari
Jenkintown, Pa.
August 11, 2010
Bravo, Judith. Your article matches the power of Renoir’s art, and is the first time that I’ve had an inkling that his canvases were anything but an old man’s revolting obsession with pink.
As I read your response, I had a historical vision of the emergence of women’s consciousness during Renoir’s time: getting the vote (!); going to work during World War II; the Pill that followed shortly thereafter; and then access to higher education that began in earnest in the 1960s. All these social leaps forward followed Renoir’s sensual, intuitive explosions of paint, almost as if his models’ souls passed through him as they struggled their way off of his canvases toward freedom and life.
Good for you to nail it down in such sensual terms. No doubt that he would have appreciated your skills, too.
Margaret Chew Barringer
Penn Valley, Pa.
August 16, 2010
Black classical audiences
Re “Black audiences and classical music,” by Maria Corley—
I completed a number of videos with classical music. I’m likely one of few African-Americans who actually filmed a YouTube video of a white woman playing a violin (Bach In Bryant’s Tunnel). The color of her skin (or mine) shouldn’t matter: Classical music has worldwide appeal. Nevertheless, it’s not easy to find an audience for my work or even much response to it.
Curtis W. Jackson
Bay Shore, N.Y.
August 19, 2010
Editor’s note: The writer posts his work on a YouTube channel titled “cjinspector.”
Wolves of Fairmount Park
Can you please pass along to Bob Ingram my thanks for his very kind and thoughtful review of my book, Wolves of Fairmount Park?
It’s especially nice to get such excellent attention in my hometown.
Dennis Tafoya
Bucks County, Pa.
August 20, 2010
A coach’s tone of voice
John Erlich’s remembrance of basketball coach John Wooden mentions Columbia coach Lou Rossini’s tone of “genuine surprise” upon discovering that Erlich, his player, had received a C in a chemistry course. Coach Rossini, my father, always referred to all of his players as “family.” I do remember when he would on occasion question my grades. His “tone of voice”, however, was a notch above “genuinely surprised.”
Thank you for the memory.
Ron Rossini
Deptford, N.J.
August 23, 2010
Minor league baseball
Re “The charm of minor league baseball,” by John L. Erlich—
Take me out the minor league ball game any day! The view is better, the atmosphere is fun and, best of all, the prices are right, especially for a
family day outing.
Jennifer Baldino Bonett
South Philadelphia
August 11, 2010
All About Eve, reconsidered
Re “The trouble with All About Eve,” by Dan Rottenberg (Editor’s Notebook)—
As many times as I’ve watched this film, one of my favorites, I never considered the fact that Eve can act.
Thanks for the perceptive analysis. I guess in every field, there is always someone waiting in the wings to take center stage. On the other hand, Margo Channing’s downfall can be seen as a direct result of her character.
Jane Biberman
Doylestown, Pa.
August 12, 2010
Antidote for cheating
Re: “An antidote for cheating,” by Maria Thompson Corley—
A wonderfully engaging and convincing piece! Unfortunately, in some cases (in pop music, for instance) the many shortcomings of people who haven’t practiced their craft enough are covered up by sound technology— even in performance.
Also, audiences are not always discerning; lots of technically lousy music gets an audience. But at the level of the family and the school, practicing a craft certainly teaches perseverance and humility, and performing offers nowhere to hide. Thanks for the piece!
Janet Benton
West Mount Airy/ Philadelphia
August 4, 2010
Maria Corley replies: I admit, I wasn’t thinking about pop music, much as I enjoy it. In any case my idea was that students perform for their classmates, not the public. Performing for the kids you see every day is probably asking for a lot more, pressure-wise, than performing for “the public.”
Janet Benton replies: Ah, yes— performing in front of peers certainly offers one nowhere to hide!
Ralph Lauren remakes Jefferson
Re “Ralph Lauren’s Monticello makeover”—
I couldn’t agree more with Caroline Millett: People visit Monticello to learn about Jefferson, not Ralph Lauren.
By the way, how much did Ralph Lauren pay/donate for the opportunity to do the makeover?
Bill Abrams
Encenitas, Calif.
July 31, 2010
Just as critics of global warming confuse weather with climate, Ralph Lauren’s Monticello makeover confuses decoration with design. Thomas Jefferson’s designs are timeless; Lauren’s decor is topical. Please keep him away from the University of Virginia.
Brenda Godwin
Andover, N.H.
August 3, 2010
I am a Virginian. This is unbelievable. What if they turned the oval office into a square? I guess it boils down to money talks. Is Lauren desecrating any other national treasures?
Louise Mohardt
Lancaster, Va.
August 5, 2010
It’s very sad to see that one of America’s historic sites has been commercialized. I went to Monticello as a child and have wanted to return as an adult. Thank you for writing such an insightful article.
Karen Zepeda
Miami, Fla.
August 11, 2010
This seems a very silly thing to do to Jefferson’s home, yet Jefferson’s image never quite takes into account that he was a slave owner all of his life, even after many others had freed “their” slaves.
History is a funny thing, sometimes a matter of what you choose to emphasize. Is Ralph Lauren redoing historic interiors that different than Chuck Connelly painting fashion photos?
Tom Brady
East Oak Lane/ Philadelphia
August 21, 2010
Editor’s note: The writer is an artist who has been represented by Caroline Millett, as has the painter Chuck Connelly.
Editor’s note: To read a follow-up by Caroline Millett, click here.
Reading Woody Allen aloud
Re “My words, echoed by Woody Allen,” by Dan Rottenberg (Editor’s Notebook)—
Congrats on your psychic connection with Woody Allen. I must mention, however, that you weren’t the only critic to conclude that some stories are better read silently than heard aloud or acted out. In my City Paper review of An Evening Without Woody Allen, I wrote, “Allen’s short works are better enjoyed on the page ... some brilliant lines were meant to be savored on the page, some moments meant to be read again and again.”
I don’t mean to diminish your insight; since I achieved the same realization, I must be in your league, and Woody’s. Thanks for the rare moment of vindication.
Mark Cofta
Ridley Park, Pa.
August 4, 2010
That’s why some people write plays and others write like the rest of us.
To wit: “Carlyle notwithstanding, this coincidence supports the opposite view: that great ideas often occur simultaneously to many people in isolation. But the ideas perish unless a community connects such people, reinforcing their beliefs and emboldening them to convert their thoughts into actions. (Behind the Jewish requirement of a ten-person minyan for prayer lies the insight that a community of worshippers is greater than the
sum of its parts worshipping alone.) Some communities perform this function better than others. And you thought Broad Street Review had no great overarching purpose!”
Try saying this out loud!
Reed Stevens
Campbell, Calif.
August 4, 2010
Shakespeare and anti-Semitism
I very much enjoyed Rathe Miller’s article on the true
New York outdoor theater adventure (“Jews 1, Shakespeare 0” ). But methinks thou doth protest too little.
"The play’s the thing,” no? Even if there is license granted to the artist to re-investigate the underlying themes in The Merchant of Venice, why send the bones of it to the closet and support the skin and flesh with an unwieldy frame, and not give a justifiable send-up of this new interpretation’s rhyme and reason?
Did you ever get any explanation other than “My ending’s better”?
Erich DeHaven
Glenside, Pa.
August 2, 2010
I have no trouble with your conclusion, but I do find the headline (“Jews 1, Shakespeare 0”) in poor taste. Consciously or not, it implies that Jews form a cabal. And an anti-cultural one at that. It just seems unfriendly.
David Millstone
Philadelphia
August 8, 2010
Miles Davis remembered
Re “My evening with Miles Davis,” by Bob Ingram—
In the mid-’60s when I was attempting to be a jazz trumpet player, I went up to Miles between sets at the Aqua Lounge (or was it Pep’s?) and asked if I could play his horn. I was 16, knew nothing about Miles other than his music and was an idiot. He stared at me, snorted, turned and walked away. Later, a guy in his group told me I was “lucky.”
By the by, Bob, I’m shocked— shocked! — to discover you once used drugs.
Rathe Miller
University City/ Philadelphia
August 3, 2010
Bob Ingram replies: I’m shocked that you’re shocked.
La Cage Aux Folles on Broadway
Re Jane Biberman’s review of La Cage Aux Folles—
Jane, you’re not alone. La Cage ranked at the bottom of musicals I just saw. See my comment in Creative Loafing.
Perry Tannenbaum
Tega Cay, S.C.
August 5, 2010
Mum Puppettheatre remembered
Re “R.I.P., Mum Puppettheatre,” by Bob Cronin (Oct. 12, 2008)—
I served as the Mum’s house manager in 2007 for its production of A Christmas Carol. I had so much fun there and learned so much about theater from the great Robert Smythe himself. He was really a great mentor.
I’ll miss the Mum, but I’ve taken what I learned and applied it when I started my own theater organization, RebelYard Theatre Collective. I only hope we can embody some of those wonderful skills and values I learned from the Mum and Robert.
Rest in Peace, Mum!
Corey A. Stephens
Founder, Artistic Director at
RebelYard Theatre Collective, Inc.
West Philadelphia
August 7, 2010
Edgard Varèse festival
Re “A sudden thirst for Varèse,” by Dan Coren—
It’s great to see that you’re big enough to “eat your words” about Varèse’s Ameriques. It was, indeed, an amazing evening, one full of 20 and 30-somethings, all revved up and cheering. But I think you’re wrong about Varèse lacking melodies. Listen again.
And if you were looking for another such miraculous and unlikely evening, you need not go back to Bernstein and Beethoven’s Ninth. Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic pulled off an even more unlikely triumph just a few weeks earlier, with Ligeti’s Grande Macabre, which also was a “can’t get a ticket” event— over three nights, not just a single performance.
There’s life in the old gal (modern Classical music) yet. And frankly, fur-lined teacups look a lot more appealing to me than sharks in tanks of formaldehyde.
Andrew Rudin
Allentown, N.J.
July 28, 2010
Medieval mania
Re “Pennsic’s medieval make-believe,” by Kristen Eaton—
Yes, the fun does spill out over the rest of the year. I live out in Oregon and haven’t been to Pennsic. But there’s an event within driving distance nearly every weekend, and local meetings and classes every week. Heck, I ran a sewing class last Saturday, in my home.
Pennsic is probably the most visible thing that we medievalists do, but it is not anywhere near all of the Society for Creative Anachronism experience. Because that experience is all year-’round.
Laura Minnick.
(AKA Liutgard of Luxeuil)
Portland, Ore.
August 3, 2010
Schubert vs. Beethoven
Re Dan Coren’s “Schubert vs. Beethoven” (April 5, 2008)—
I find it hard to believe that someone would actually try to make the case that Schubert might have eclipsed Beethoven if he had lived as long. Most composers don’t produce their best works until they are well into their 30s and 40s, so Schubert, like Mendelssohn, are exceptions. Big deal. Schubert probably would have written crap like Mendelssohn did as he grew older.
Beethoven’s early work is uneven at times because he was meant to transform the musical world, not just merely be another “great” composer, and the styles he inherited fit him like an ill-tailored suit.
Even if Schubert had managed to come close to Beethoven’s middle period quality, he never would have reached the heights of the late works. No other composer has.
Chris Cano
Los Angeles, Calif.
July 30, 2010
Dan Coren replies: I never tried to make the case that Schubert would have eclipsed Beethoven, nor do I believe that to be the case. My point was that Beethoven, at age 31, had nothing in his resumé to compare with, for example, Schubert’s C Major Quintet or Schwanengesang. We can’t know what would have happened had Schubert lived another 20 or 30 years; in fact, that’s really the point of my article.
Baseball’s armchair warrior
Re “George Steinbrenner in peace and war,” by Dan Rottenberg (Editor’s Notebook)—
Loved it!
Erika Roth
New York
August 2, 2010
Met’s high-definition Carmen
Re Steve Cohen’s review of the Metropolitan Opera’s high-definition theatrical version of Carmen (Jan. 22)—
This was a five-star production! Elina Garanca was breathtaking. The movie was even better than a live performance at the Met. During the non-singing orchestration, the camera focused on the musicians playing the particular instrument, such as the flute, oboe, bassoon or violin, adding to the overall enjoyment.
Sanford Gage
Los Angeles, Calif.
July 29, 2010
‘Late Renoir’ at the Art Museum (4th review)
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Updating Renoir:
Young Woman With Laptop, anybody?
Each of us reacts to art exhibits in different ways. For this member of the Casual Art Viewer’s Society, the Art Museum’s “Late Renoir” show provoked a quirky, highly personal musing: What would a 21st-Century version of Renoir’s portraits look like?
Most of the paintings in the Art Museum exhibit portray members of Renoir’s domestic household engaging in commonplace activities like reading or playing musical instruments. One of the exhibit’s largest sculptures depicts a woman doing the wash.
Lesser artists might have turned Renoir’s subjects into the kind of thing connoisseurs dismiss as “mere illustration.” Renoir produced something far more weighty. He created paintings that intensify our sense of the poetry inherent in life’s most mundane aspects.
As the Art Museum’s commentary points out, many of Renoir’s paintings are everyday versions of classical subjects, such as Venus in her bath. We see the world through the eyes of an artist whose sensitive response to color, texture and personality reminds us that our day-to-day existence is just as aesthetic and enchanting as the doings of gods and heroes.
So what would a contemporary Renoir paint? Young Woman with Laptop? Boy with Video Game? Woman with Kindle? Man with Blackberry?
Is that an e-reader?
A sarcastic critic of the modern cultural scene could toss out those possibilities. But they’re actually reasonable equivalents of the subjects Renoir actually chose.
Most of his portraits depict women from moderately prosperous families engaging in activities— like embroidering or playing the piano— that filled the same position in their day that more technological pursuits fill in ours. In Renoir’s portrait of a woman reading, the book lying on the table is painted so vaguely that it could just as well be an e-reader.
Renoir’s portraits may seem picturesque to contemporary viewers, but their real strength is the way he evokes the profundity of commonplace scenes. His subjects are dressed more colorfully than our T-shirted contemporaries, but they probably looked just as ordinary, in their day, as the young women who sit peering into their laptops in the Barnes and Noble café on Rittenhouse Square.
A back yard comes alive
I’m not a gallery habitué, so I don’t know if any contemporary painters are creating the kind of portraits I’m visualizing. Some contemporary landscape painters seem to be doing something similar.
One of our local Philadelphia stars, Larry Francis, uses his mastery of light to permeate ordinary sights with the sharpness of experience. He can turn a Philadelphia back yard, with washing hanging on the line, into an image that makes you feel intensely aware that you’re alive. (See, for example, his Second Street.) But I can’t think of any painters currently doing the same thing with portraits.
Any artist who painted uniquely contemporary subjects would have to breast a number of headwinds. One of the strongest would be the widespread perception of an inherent conflict between technology and art— a bias that has dogged our attitudes toward art ever since the first steam engines spread their smoke over the countryside.
An answer from Eakins
The best answer to that can be found at the Art Museum’s Perelman annex, which I visited after I took in the Renoir exhibit. The major attractions at the Perelman are two Thomas Eakins paintings that combine astute portraits with a scientific and technical setting— The Gross Clinic and The Agnew Clinic.
Renoir painted women engaged in commonplace domestic activities. Eakins painted men engaged in humanity’s epic struggle against death and disease. A young woman studying biochemistry on a laptop might have appealed to both of them.
Of course, it helps if you can paint as well as Eakins and Renoir. But the artist who applied that kind of talent to contemporary subjects might be surprised by the response.♦
To read another review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.
To read another review by Andrew Mangravite, click here.
To read another review by Judith Stein, click here.
The imam, the mosque and Ground Zero
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The delusions of monotheists, or:
The imam, the mosque and Ground Zero
By now, it is clear that all right-thinking people regard Park51, the plan to build an Islamic study center two blocks from the site of the 9/11 attacks, as an exercise in the freedom of worship that is nobody’s business but the worshippers themselves. President Obama and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have said so. So have The New York Times, The Nation, and the president of the ACLU, to whom I’ve just sent my annual dues.
It seems, though, that the issue has caught me on the left side of my brain, because I don’t find Park51 a happy idea; indeed, I find it rebarbative.
This is only partly because of my personal distaste for houses of worship in general, particularly those of a monotheistic persuasion. The idea that a branch of primates on a minor planet circling a mediocre sun on the rim of a mid-sized galaxy should be the special object of attention of a Universal Creator strikes me as absurd.
It was not always so, in the prehistory of the race before Copernicus and Darwin, but it is so now. I wouldn’t regard it as preferable that a church or a synagogue arise near Ground Zero instead of a mosque— sorry, study center, although worship will take place in it— just as I’m not relieved to know that Barack Obama is a born-again Christian rather than a covert Muslim.
Hallowed soil?
Of course, property owners have the right to use their space for any lawful purpose, including absurd ones. That’s not the issue. It’s legal for Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his followers to worship where they please and in whatever structure that local zoning regulations permit them to erect.
The question is whether it’s appropriate. No, not all Muslims are fanatics; they’re merely, like their fellow monotheists, deluded. But 9/11 did occur. Ground Zero is not, as some would have it, hallowed soil—the god that was worshipped there was Mammon— but it’s not just any piece of real estate either. Like Gettysburg or Pearl Harbor, it’s a site of national trauma.
It is also, through a combination of greed, incompetence and confusion, still a place of devastation, both the cause and the symbol of our deeply conflicted and tragically misguided response to the attack unleashed against us. It’s true that not all Muslims are responsible for that attack, although some of us will recall Palestinians dancing in the streets on hearing the news of it. But the attackers were all Muslim, and it’s idle to pretend that this fact can simply be set aside less than nine years later in the cause of interfaith conviviality.
Prayer in the Pentagon
It has been pointed out that Muslims worship in the Pentagon, which was also struck on 9/11. I’m not sure why anyone is praying in the Pentagon, or to whom— Ares, perhaps?— but apparently it’s done in an interfaith chapel open to all.
The Park51 study center, by contrast, is designed for the use of one faith alone, and it’s no modest structure like the little Greek Orthodox church of St. Nicholas that was destroyed on 9/11 but a 13-, or by some accounts a 15-storey behemoth that will dominate its neighborhood and therefore a part of Ground Zero itself.
You have to be utterly tone-deaf to the temper of this country and to the pain it still feels not to understand why this project is perceived by many as an act of triumphalism. It’s not cynical or reactionary to feel so. It’s simply human.
The wrong messenger
Apparently, Imam Rauf is tone-deaf. Right after 9/11, he gave an interview in which he said that, while the attack was a terrible thing, Americans needed to appreciate the extent to which they had brought it on themselves. This was a perfectly valid observation, for 9/11 was indeed blowback from a half-century of American mischief in the Middle East.
But the Imam was precisely the wrong person to deliver this home truth, and he chose precisely the wrong moment to do so. We don’t attend funeral services to speak ill of the dead, and we don’t lecture the victims of an atrocity on their responsibility for it, particularly while wearing the garb of their attackers.
Now, it seems, the Imam is touring the Middle East on the American taxpayer’s dime to proclaim the virtues of “moderate” Islam, whatever that may be. I can think of lots better uses for my money. And speaking of the constitution— anybody ever hear of the separation of church and state?&diams
To read responses, click here.
Editor’s Digest
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Recent articles of interest
“Dictating a Masterpiece”: Before the computer, novelists like Henry James and Dostoevsky dictated new works—mostly to female transcribers. Now writers rely on voice recognition software to dictate their books. In the process, they’ve lost the advantages of instant human feedback.
(Amy Rowland, The Smart Set, Summer 2010.)
“No More Cathedrals of Culture”: A new generation of museum directors is actively undoing the idea of museums as “cathedrals of culture.” The new goal of “making art essential to everyone” has converted buildings into town squares, incorporated technology to facilitate access to works, and forced curators and artists to engage audiences via social media and interactive exhibits.
(Judith Dobrzynski, Wall Street Journal, August 24, 2010.)
“Art: What is art’s place in the picture?”: Many museums around the country have built additions in recent years, but few of them house paintings or sculpture. Instead, these new wings generate revenue by hosting concerts, weddings and even yoga classes. As more museums take on the function of community centers, Edward Sozanski wonders how this trend will affect the goal of enlightening and educating patrons.
(Edward Sozanski, Philadelphia Inquirer, August 15, 2010.)
“New writers take the Internet route to reaching readers”: Literary editors used to sift through piles of manuscripts and query letters to find the next great novel. Now publishing houses like Harper Collins have created social networking websites to tackle this chore by combining market research with contests similar to “American Idol.” Prospective authors upload a new work, then community members read it (for free) and vote each month on their favorites, some of whom get book deals.
(Chuck Furlong, Seattle Times, August 15, 2010.)
“Message to our cultural organizations: Don’t forget the folks on the train”: Arts organizations that focus exclusively on donors and low-income beneficiaries of grants risk losing the educated, moderately affluent class in the middle. A century ago this approach alienated culture-starved “ordinary folk,” who’ve regarded the arts as elitist ever since. The solution, argues Chris Jones, requires dialing down the pricey premium experience and learning the lessons of openness and familiarity seen in successful popular panderers such as NASCAR and “America’s Top Chef.”
(Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune, August 13, 2010.)
“For Ballet, Plots Thicken, or Just Stick?”: Alastair Macaulay surveys the current offerings of narrative ballet to question how and if the genre can continue to craft stories that transcend the contemporary antagonism between pure movement and emotive expression. Balanchine argued, “Put a man and a woman onstage, and you already have a story,” but for Macaulay, ballet’s inherent sexism— women dance on point as men partner them— limits its ability to say anything meaningful about modern gender relations.
(Alastair Macaulay, New York Times, August 4, 2010.)
“Judging a Girl by Her Cover”: Amazon now sells more e-books than hardcover, which is good news for trees, bad news for romantics. The title of a book read in public used to signify something about the reader, generating conversations that blossomed into friendships or more. But you can’t tell an e-book by its Kindle. As one result, technology designed to encourage humanity winds up diminishing it.
(Mark Oppenheimer, Slate, July 30, 2010.)
“Theater Talkback: Preaching to the Choir on ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’?”: When Marc Wolf started working on a play about gays’ right to serve in the military, he struggled with how to transcend the gay-equality views held by his targeted audience. But when he encountered only apathy or anti-military bias from gay rights organizations, he emerged as a lone voice defending enlisted gays against bias and persecution.
(Marc Wolf, New York Times, July 29, 2010.)
“The Death of the Phone Call”: As text-messaging and social networking communication (on Facebook, Twitter, etc.) has risen, phone calls have grown shorter and more infrequent. Because of its high emotional cost and intrusiveness, “voice-calling,” at least in its current form, deserves to go the way of the telegraph, argues Clive Thompson.
(Clive Thompson, Wired, July 28, 2010).
“In Defense of Amazon”: Despite Amazon’s bullying business tactics and its attempts to monopolize e-book titles and authors for its Kindle-reader, Ruth Franklin finds reason to praise America’s largest bookseller. The company, she argues, offers a wealth of books— more than 2 million titles— to anyone with an Internet connection, and it has forced book publishers to adopt leaner practices, including dropping unprofitable advances for authors, to decrease the price of books for everyone.
(Ruth Franklin, The New Republic, July 28, 2010.)
“Solving the 800-year mystery of Pisa’s Leaning Tower”: For centuries, the impossible southward tilt of the Leaning Tower of Pisa has defied the attempts of structural engineers, soil geologists, and politicians to set it straight. In 1990, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti closed the site and commissioned a ten-year study that cost nearly $40 million. The result: The tower has been fully stabilized and its lean finally checked.
(Alastair Smart, The Daily Telegraph, July 28, 2010.)
“Classical Music’s New Golden Age.” U.S. orchestras have lost money, audiences, and appeal. But according to Heather MacDonald, Classical music is more accessible now than at any point in history. The advent of recording technology and Internet proliferation provides multiple performances of works once familiar only to musicologists. A growth in conservatory-level music programs as well as an explosion of orchestras and smaller groups provide unprecedented opportunities and employment for musicians. And the rediscovery of older works has supplanted the need to create “new” music for public consumption.
(Heather MacDonald, City Journal, Summer 2010.)
“Reconstructing Ballet’s Past.” So many choreographers have tampered with Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake that no one would recognize the original 1877 ballet. Ismene Brown’s two-part article details the history of revisions that led to the three most commonly performed versions, and includes an interview with Mikhailovsky Ballet’s chief ballet master Misha Messerer about his current attempts to recreate a Swan Lake that connects historically to its first staging. Part II discusses the difficulties faced by historians and choreographers attempting to uncover the exact meaning of Petipa’s notations for The Sleeping Beauty and Coppélia.
(Ismene Brown, The Arts Desk, July 14, 2010 and July 22, 2010.)
“Publishers rage against Wylie’s e-book deal with Amazon.” As consumers attempt to weigh the pros and cons of reading paperbound or electronic books, a top literary agent, the Wylie Agency, signed a groundbreaking deal with Amazon.com. Wylie, which holds the rights to more than 700 authors— including the estates of Borges, Updike and Bellow— decided to cut publishing houses out of the loop by delivering works like Lolita direct to Kindle. This move calls into question the ownership of digital rights and also threatens to give Amazon a monopoly over smaller e-book sellers.
(Alison Flood and Ed Pilkington, The Guardian, July 23, 2010.)
“Exporting Broadway.” Theater producers used to test-run new plays and musicals in Philadelphia or New Haven before opening them in Broadway houses. After the recent European and Asian successes of Tarzan and The Lion King, theater conglomerates have started using New York as the tryout town for tomorrow’s international blockbuster. And why not? Despite its problems of adaptation and translatability, The Lion King’s overseas stagings grossed triple the Broadway revenues, and rewrites turned the Broadway flop Tarzan into a hit in Denmark and Germany.
(Ellen Gamerman, Wall Street Journal, July 23, 2010.)
“Theaters Playing to Plumper Audiences.” Along with airplanes and movie houses, performing arts venues are now confronting the problem of America’s ever-expanding waistline. A recent study by Theatre Projects Consultants looked at 1,200 theaters across America and found that the average standard width of seats grew from 21 to 22 inches in the past 20 years, “primarily due” to the nation’s increase in obesity (over the past century, seat widths rose from an average width of 19 inches).
(Erica Orden, Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2010.)
“You pushed the button and out came hundreds and thousands of sonatas”: If you heard a piece of music composed by a computer program, would you be able to tell the difference? Music professor and composer David Cope has spent the last 30 years writing— and then training— software that “borrows and steals” the signature stylings and phrasing of composers from Palestrina to Rachmaninoff. A slew of albums and more than 11,000 computer-generated pieces later, he responds to the complaints of his machine’s “soulless” music: The real question, Cope says, “isn’t if computers possess a soul, but if we possess one.”
(Tim Adams, The Observer, July 11, 2010.)
“Philly jazz festival a state-funded extravagance”: Thanks to funding secured by State Representative Dwight Evans, this year’s annual West Oak Lane Jazz Festival received $1 million in state support. To get that money, the Ogontz Avenue Revitalization Corp. claimed that 600,000 patrons attended last year and that it expected a half million people at this year’s festival (more than attended the original Woodstock Festival in 1969). As arts organizations like the Mummers struggle to attract any state funds, the Philadelphia Inquirer questions the veracity of the Jazz Festival’s attendance records.
(Christopher K. Hepp, Philadelphia Inquirer, July 4, 2010.)
“Call him ‘YNS,’ the talk of the musical world”: The Philadelphia Orchestra signed 35-year-old Yannick Nézet-Séguin as its new conductor for a five-year contract. If you’re unfamiliar with this young Canadian, a recent spate of articles in the Inquirer can bring you up to speed. Peter Dobrin’s “New leader for Philadelphia Orchestra” provides a short biography and details how Nézet-Séguin will fit into the Orchestra’s mission. In “A good moment for high spirits,” David Patrick Stearns places the new maestro in the historical and artistic context of 20th-Century conductors. (Philadelphia Inquirer, June 13 and 15, 2010.)
”America’s Musical Ambassadors”: The U.S. State Department ramped up its cultural diplomacy efforts in 2006 by reviving the Cold War-era Jazz Ambassadors program. This initiative, now titled “Rhythm Road,” has provided funding and arranged concerts overseas for more than 100 musicians in blues, gospel, blue grass and hip hop. As Corinna Da Fonseca-Wollheim reports, so far the program has reaped positive results in its attempts to transcend politics and religion to build bridges to other cultures. (Corinna Da Fonseca-Wollheim, Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2010.)
“Underscoring Richard Wagner’s influence on film music”: The film score composer Max Steiner— think Gone with the Wind— once quipped, “If Wagner had lived in this century, he would have been the No. 1 film composer.” As Jon Burlingame points out, Steiner’s not too far off the mark. Burlingame interviewed musicologists and music historians to illustrate how film music from Steiner to John Williams and Howard Shore (Lord of the Rings trilogy) depends on the inventive techniques of musical storytelling that Wagner laced through his operas.
(John Burlingame, Los Angeles Times, June 17, 2010.)
“The ENO show’s not over until the understudy’s understudy can’t sing”: Should a performing arts company offer its patrons a refund if the advertised “star actor” drops out? According to the general practice among opera and theater houses, the answer is “no.” These groups argue that actors, singers and dancers often fall ill or get hurt, and that ticket-holders have paid to see a show, not their favorite TV or movie actor. But as Alice Jones points out, when multiple understudies substitute, it begs a reevaluation of the refund question. (Alice Jones, The Independent, June 15, 2010.)
“The Dangerous Beauty of Cellulose Nitrate Film”: In his recent Avatar, James Cameron’s inventive new filmmaking techniques created lush, artificial environments that expanded the possibilities of 3-D movies. But according to the BBC’s Will Gompertz, the most vivid film recordings were all shot in the first half of the 20th Century on cellulose nitrate, a highly flammable, now banned medium. Gompertz details the history of cellulose nitrate, what steps archivists take to preserve existing reels and the qualities that let it produce such visual richness. (Will Gompertz, BBC News, June 10, 2010.)
“Live screening ‘good for theater‘ ”: In a single broadcast to 300 cinemas, London’s National Theatre doubled the number of patrons who saw the entire run of its 2009 production of Jean Racine’s Phèdre. A follow-up study found that the screening brought in audiences that don’t reflect the traditional educational and economic spectrum of most theatergoers. But the most surprising result of the report? Those who saw it on screen were actually more emotionally engaged than those watching the live performance. (Tim Masters, BBC News, June 3, 2010.)
“The Vatican Loves a Good Story”: In Katharine Drexel and John Neumann, Philadelphia can claim two of America’s eight Catholic saints. According to Slate.com’s James Verini, Pope Benedict is on a canonizing spree that outpaces the record set by his predecessor John Paul II. But any nominee needs to meet three conditions: money, a medical miracle and a compelling narrative. (James Verini, Slate, June 3, 2010.)
“Everyone Else Outsources, So Why Can’t The Arts?”: From the Art Museum to the Orchestra, Philadelphia’s larger arts organizations face budgetary shortfalls. Similar-sized organizations in Columbus, Ohio that experienced financial woes solved their problems by outsourcing PR, marketing, ticketing and a host of services to a third-party vendor. In the process, the Columbus Symphony shaved $750,000 from its bottom line. But will such money-saving strategies risk alienating the arts-going community? (Elizabeth Blair, NPR, May 23, 2010.)
“To Get Those Summer Tickets in New York, Strategize”: While most of Philadelphia’s performing arts organizations go dark each summer, venues in New York— from Free Shakespeare and Opera in Central Park to the Lincoln Center Festival— get under way. For the Philadelphians who buy almost 1 million tickets to New York events each year, knowing where to grab these rare tickets can determine whether you’ll see Al Pacino as Shylock for free or have to shell out a pound of flesh for a Broadway revival. The New York Times details the strategies that can help you beat the crowds and save money. (Felicia R. Lee, New York Times, May 28, 2010.)
“Susan Hess’s upbeat end to 30-year run on Sansom”: After 30 years of showcasing up-and-coming choreography, Susan Hess Modern Dance Studios is leaving its home on the third floor of the Adrienne Theatre. The building’s owners recently decided to convert the former open floor performance space into a venue more suitable for black box theater works. But dance aficionados shouldn’t worry; the Inquirer’s Merilyn Jackson reports that Hess will reopen across town in the Performance Garage Space owned by Jeanne Ruddy Dance. (Merilyn Jackson, Philadelphia Inquirer, May 25, 2010.)
“No Museum Left Behind.” Now even political conservatives are furious about the Barnes Foundation’s forthcoming move from Merion to Center City. The relocation, concludes Lance Esplund in a lengthy piece, “is fueled by ignorance and avarice, not altruism.” (Lance Esplund, The Weekly Standard, May 31, 2010.)
“At NEA, a daring idea to help artists rises again”: Has time healed the culture war wounds? Rocco Landesman, new chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, recently floated the idea of restoring the individual grants for artists that Congress de-funded in 1996. The Denver Post’s John Wenzel weighs the pros and cons of this controversial funding and its timeliness during a recession and tumultuous political season. (John Wenzel, Denver Post, May 23, 2010.)
“Philadelphia’s latest generation of emerging composers”: Curtis faculty member Jennifer Higdon won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for music composition. According to Inquirer music critic David Patrick Stearns, her success continues the city’s tradition as a laboratory for developing new work. His article sketches some of 20th-Century Philadelphians’ contributions to classical music and then details four composers (including Higdon) who continue to produce vital works. (David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Inquirer, May 2, 2010.)
“Can gay actors play straight roles?”: Newsweek’s openly gay writer Ramin Setoodeh argues that audiences can accept straight actors in homosexual parts but not the reverse. To prove his point, he cites recent examples of gay men and women in film, TV and theater who give insincere and scarcely believable portrayals as heterosexuals. Is it a fault of the actor not overcoming his persona or the failure of viewers to see past his background? (Ramin Setoodeh, Newsweek, April 26, 2010.)
“Mere fact, mere fiction”: Is there a wrong way to make good art? David Hare, perhaps Britain’s most famous living playwright, examines the recent genre of verbatim drama, which takes a journalistic approach to its subject by dramatizing real incidents with actual dialogue. Critics object that these plays (and films) lack historical perspective, enduring value, necessity of truth— all of which Hare looks to dismiss by restoring the distinction between art and journalism. (David Hare, The Guardian, April 17, 2010.)
“How do you measure theater success,” or success in the any of the arts? Critical acclaim, ticket sales or awards don’t determine a production’s impact, according to numbers crunchers at London’s New Economics Foundation. Instead, a study they implemented with three of Britain’s largest and most influential theater organizations argues that artistic success hinges on an audience’s quantifiable emotional response to what’s on stage. (Alistair Smith, The Guardian, April 9, 2010.)
“Christopher Wheeldon leaves dance company he created.” Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon resigned as artistic director of Morphoses just three years after founding the company, citing the lack of artistic resources, specifically the inability to maintain a large enough troupe of steady dancers for the company’s touring productions. Philadelphians know Wheeldon for his Carnival of the Animals (2008) and his 2004 updating of Swan Lake, a work he created specifically for the company, which they’ll reprise again in 2011. (Daniel J. Wakin and Alastair Macaulay, New York Times, Feb. 22, 2010.)
“Losing the hearts of its listeners.” The Philadelphia Orchestra has a $3.3 million deficit, average houses of only 63%, and audiences who feel abandoned by a once beloved ensemble. In a recent pair of articles, the Inquirer’s Peter Dobrin discusses the artistic and economic sources of their financial difficulties, and what steps new CEO Allison B. Vulgamore is taking to ward off a potential bankruptcy and win back its clients. (Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 21 and 27, 2010)
Were Stokowski and Toscanini overrated? Old Philadelphia orchestra devotees may argue over which conductor they loved more— Leopold Stokowski, who invented the Orchestra’s fabled “Philadelphia Sound,” or its frequent guest conductor Arturo Toscanini, who made several World War II-era recordings with the Orchestra. But in a recent blog article, composer John Adams turns a critical eye on both maestros. Adams labels Toscanini’s interpretations “frequently bewildering and puzzling”; of Stokowski, he says, “Anyone following his career will be driven mad trying to cull the pearls from the swill.” (See “Glamourpuss,” by John Adams, Earbox.com, March 14, 2010.)
“A Wild, Wild West of Their Own.” Philadelphia actress (and Temple MFA graduate) Krista Apple chronicles the aesthetic trends that catapulted Philadelphia’s experimental Pig Iron theater troupe to national recognition and highlights the group’s likely future directions, including its plans to open a Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training in Philadelphia in 2011. (Krista Apple, American Theatre Magazine, February, 2010.)
Playwright’s Nurturing is the Focus of a Study: If Eugene O’Neill wrote it today, would Long Day’s Journey Into Night ever see a production? Or would uncaring corporate-minded producers and artistic directors whittle away its significance in workshops? According to the authors of Outrageous Fortune—the Theatre Development Fund’s recently released six-year study about how plays get written and produced in America— O’Neill would today face hostility from theaters, producers and audiences, and would likely have given up long before he put his pen to the page. (Patrick Healy, New York Times, Feb. 13, 2010.)
“New gay theater has more love than politics.” A new breed of plays and musicals this season is presenting gay characters in love stories, replacing the topical; and political messages of 1980s and ‘90s shows like The Normal Heart and Angels in America with more personal appeals for social progress, reports Patrick Healy in The New York Times (Feb. 23, 2010). That begs a point raised by Dan Rottenberg in BSR in 2006: “The essence of drama is conflict— and there’s ample conflict in the endless dance between the sexes but relatively little conflict in the seduction of one gay man by another.” (See “The trouble with gay theater.”). (Dan Rottenberg.)
The music of Olympic figure skating isn’t what it could be. Figure skating music must include a number of varying tempos that match the athlete’s choreography— graceful passages for artistic ice dancing, exhilarating crescendos to highlight a leap, and slower portions where a skater can catch her breath. But for audiophiles, it often sounds like a grating, disjointed mix. The Washington Post’s Anne Midgette examines the current trends Olympian’s and their coaches employ to balance the demands of skating artistry and musical purity. (Feb. 14, 2010).
What hath Steven Slater wrought?
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A role model for our time:
What hath Steven Slater wrought?
News item: After 20 years as a flight attendant, Steven Slater became a folk hero to millions of service workers this month when he found a uniquely dramatic way to quit his job. As his arriving JetBlue flight from Pittsburgh was taxiing to its gate at Kennedy Airport in New York, Slater turned on the intercom, cursed the passengers, grabbed two beers from the galley and then exited the plane by deploying the emergency chute.
“That’s it, I’m done,” were the last words the passengers heard from Slater before he slid down the chute to the tarmac, ran to his car and drove off into the sunset (or at least his apartment in Queens).
The trouble apparently started when an impatient passenger jumped up to grab her luggage before the seatbelt sign was turned off, then reportedly ignored Slater when he told her to sit down. When Slater again told the passenger to sit down, he was hit in the head with her falling bag. When he asked her to apologize, she responded with a foul refusal, according to reports.
“I’ve been thinking of doing that for years,” Slater told the New York Times afterward.
Are you as inspired as I am by Slater’s response? Let’s consider the possibilities…
MONTCLAIR, N.J.— Eleanor McSwaggle, a veteran nurse at the Pleasant Acres senior intensive care center, became a folk heroine to millions of health care workers when she quit her job in spectacular fashion, cursing her patients over the public-address system and switching off their resuscitators before driving off in the facility’s mini-van.
“I’ve been shat on for the last time!” McSwaggle reportedly shouted. “From now on you can clean up your own feces!”
McSwaggle apparently cracked after a demented 103-year-old patient asked her the same question 26 times in a row, then called her a “stinking doodyhead” when she failed to reply on the 27th time.
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.— Dr. Otto Schwenk, a respected psychiatrist, became an instant folk hero to millions of therapists when he interrupted a group session by dumping his goldfish bowl on one of his clients, grabbing his golf clubs and vanishing.
“Who gives a shit about your problems?” Dr. Schwenk reportedly told the group before flying off in his private helicopter. “What about my problems? Goodbye and good luck!”
PHILADELPHIA— Richard Sprague, wily lion of Philadelphia’s criminal defense bar, became a folk hero to millions of courtroom litigators worldwide when he dramatically quit his practice by challenging the prosecuting attorney to “step outside in the hallway where we can settle this like real men.”
When Judge Angel Santiago warned Sprague that he could be held in contempt, the 85-year-old litigator replied, “You can take your subpoena duces tecum and stick it where the sun don’t shine! I’m outta here!”
BEAUMONT, Texas— Mother Katharine Drexel became an instant folk hero to millions of teachers when she dramatically quit her job after more than 50 years spent building a nationwide network of schools to educate poor blacks and native Americans.
The boiling point apparently came when Mother Katharine’s mischievous seventh-grade students showered her with spitballs after she turned her back on them to write on the blackboard.
“I gave up a fortune to teach turkeys like you?” the former Philadelphia banking heiress shouted. “Fuhgeddaboutit!” Then, announcing, “Class dismissed, for the rest of your worthless lives!” she drove off in the school bus, leaving the children to walk home.
“I’ve been thinking about doing that for years,” Mother Katharine told the New York Times later that week.
VATICAN CITY— Pope Benedict XVI, under increasing pressure over the Church’s priestly sex abuse scandal, became an instant folk hero to religious leaders when he dramatically quit his job by mooning more than 1 million supplicants gathered in St. Peter’s Square.
“So you want my blessing?” the pontiff shrieked at the astonished crowd from his balcony. “All right, you asked for it: You can all go straight to hell!” Then he doffed his priestly vestments, slid down a drainpipe and vanished into the crowd.
JUNEAU, Alaska— Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential candidate who electrified her party’s campaign in 2008, resigned as Alaska’s governor in a dramatic decision that has fuelled speculation she is positioning herself to run for president.
In an at times rambling speech, Palin compared herself to battle-wounded American soldiers in Kosovo and said only dead fish go with the flow. Palin also repeated a quote she attributed to General Douglas MacArthur: “We are not retreating, we are advancing in another direction.”
On second thought, scratch that last item. Who on earth would believe it?
Dr. Laura and the ‘n’ word
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The ‘n’ word and other casual racial slights:
What Dr. Laura doesn’t know about me
A black woman recently called the talk-radio self-help counselor Dr. Laura Schlessinger to complain that her white husband remained silent when his friends and family made racist remarks in her presence. Dr. Laura replied that the caller was too sensitive, since black people call each other “nigger” all the time.
“Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is nigger, nigger, nigger,” Dr. Laura observed. (For a full transcript of her remarks, click here.)
That discourse provoked a public outburst that led to Dr. Laura’s decision to quit radio so that she can exercise “her First Amendment rights” without fear of sponsor boycotts. (Apparently, she doesn’t understand that the First Amendment protects her from government censorship, not public ire.)
This incident got me thinking about my own experiences with the “n” word. I grew up in one of the few black families in a little town in Alberta, Canada, in the 1970s. It was a time and place where black people were very scarce and political correctness was in short supply, so the “n” word was something my black friends and I heard on far too many occasions, at least in elementary school.
But by high school our white classmates had grown accustomed to us, or they’d been humbled by the fact that our handful of black kids surpassed most of them academically, or enough white kids got beaten up by one of us for uttering racial slurs. Whatever the reason, after a while I rarely heard the term.
What does ‘nigger’ mean?
Now I’ve reached the point where my intellect can see such outbursts not as oppressive toward me but as a reflection on the speaker’s weak-mindedness. But emotionally it remains difficult to dismiss being dismissed.
It’s true, as Dr. Laura says, that some black people use the “n” word as a term of endearment (for this purpose, the spelling and pronunciation changes to “nigga"). But the derisive intent of the epithet can’t be ignored when “nigger” is used as an insult. After all, what does the word really mean? To me, it suggests that my accomplishments and strength of character are rendered inherently irrelevant as long as I’m black.
The suspicious sales clerk
This feeling can be conveyed overtly or by implication, such as when cabbies refuse to stop for even the most elegantly dressed black customers. In Europe, my friends and I were tailed around a store while the white members of our tour group were ignored. I’ll never forget the sales clerk in an expensive store who assumed I couldn’t buy something I’d just tried on. (Actually, I could, and did.)
Dr. Laura’s suggestion that her caller was oversensitive was ridiculous even if the word “nigger” hadn’t been used. Would a husband allow his friends to make fat jokes in the presence of his overweight wife? What does it say about people who deride others for characteristics beyond their control— not only one’s race but one’s physical appearance, name, gender, age, nationality or family background? What emotional wounds are generated by a society that routinely accepts such slights?
The performer took my pen
A few weeks ago, I arrived a few minutes early for a concert by the virtuoso organist Cameron Carpenter to find the performer shaking hands with audience members. I saw that he was signing autographs, so I got out my pen. Carpenter signed my program and continued to work the crowd, still holding my pen. Why, I wondered, had he returned another man’s pen with a grandiose gesture just moments before, but not mine? Was it because I was the only black woman in the crowd? How would Carpenter have reacted had it turned out (as was certainly possible) that he and I were the only Juilliard graduates in that group? Rightly or wrongly, I found myself thinking: He probably disregarded me because I’m a black woman with an Afro who he assumes is musically illiterate. I felt like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
By the end of Carpenter’s superb performance I had almost adjusted to my pen’s disappearance when he emerged, post-recital, to sign CDs. I took the opportunity to ask the identity of a theme he’d chosen to improvise on. As he explained that it was a “forgotten melody that sounds like a lot of things,” he pulled out my pen (a very distinctive combination of hot pink and black).
“I’m glad you like my pen,” I couldn’t resist saying.
He looked surprised. “Oh, is this yours? Then you must have it back.”
“Oh, no. Please keep it as a memento,” I insisted, turning away.
Why blacks voted for Obama
Am I oversensitive? No doubt. I wish the many race-based injuries I’ve experienced— deliberate and inadvertent— hadn’t left such lasting scars.
Still, as I listened to Dr. Laura telling her caller, “Without giving much thought, a lot of blacks voted for Obama simply ‘cause he was half-black,” I couldn’t help thinking: What does Dr. Laura really know about me?
I’ve worked very hard to value myself based on what I know about me, not the reactions of others. Still, it remains very difficult to be unaffected by the casual disrespect shown toward me and/or my race over the years. You’d think that Dr. Laura, who is Jewish, would relate to that.
Dennis Tafoya’s ‘Wolves of Fairmount Park’
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Crime and redemption, Philadelphia-style
BOB INGRAMPhiladelphian Dennis Tafoya’s second crime novel, The Wolves of Fairmount Park, is a twisting journey into the gray, gritty urban demimonde of dope– in this case, heroin– and the criminals and addicts who keep it darkly swirling, as well as the cops who stick their collective fingers in the weak, trembling dike of the pursuit and apprehension of the endless flow of purveyors of urban narcotics.
This is a classic whodunit set in the grim glades of Philadelphia’s drug subculture— a constantly evolving and always thriving economy where success ultimately comes out of the barrel of a gun, and the ladder to the top is slick with blood and shaky with subterfuge.
Nothing is what it seems, and this is the key to The Wolves of Fairmount Park. Everybody is being played by somebody and the landscape is a constantly shifting kaleidoscope, a heroin haze for the addicts and the dealers and their rent-a-killers and thugs who stumble through it. The cops are a business risk, plain and simple, and their best efforts amount to the proverbial teaspoon bailing out the sea of dope that’s engulfing America. They may be smart and knowledgeable in the ways of the street, but they’re so vastly outnumbered, outgunned and outflanked as to be little more than ineffectual scorekeepers.
Two dead white boys
Two middle-class teenagers– clean-living white boys– are shot in front of a dope house on Roxborough Avenue on a Thursday night in June. One dies and the other, a Philadelphia police officer’s son, lies in a coma. What were they doing there? Who shot them and– most of all– why?
The answers are sought by two diametrically opposed characters: Danny Ramirez, a young star detective in the Violent Crimes unit, whose rapid rise resulted from his taking down a high-level dope dealer; and Orlando Kevin Donovan, a dreamy junkie and the half-brother of the cop, Brendan Donovan, whose comatose son had been shot at the Roxborough Avenue dope house, a few blocks from the apartment Orlando shared with Zoe, a renegade Main Line girl who had followed him into the shadow world of addiction.
Mother’s tragic hold
Orlando, a Temple dropout, occupies the spiritual center of The Wolves of Fairmount Park. Indeed, the novel’s title is taken from this passage, which demonstrates Tafoya’s prose at its hypnotic, poetic best in describing Orlando’s drunken, wraithlike mother, long vanished, and her tragic hold on him:
“Dogs began to bark then, first one, close by, then others, blocks away, and he remembered his mother telling him when he heard the dogs at night it was the wolves, the wolves in the park that had never been caught and never would. She’d lean over his bed, her breath sweet with wine, swaying drunk and her eyes on fire, and afterwards he would lie awake for hours and listen for them, see them moving in a line down the trails in the dark woods, silver and black under the moon and their teeth snapping, bone white.”
Suburban preppies
Ramirez’s hunt is from the outside of the dope world, while Orlando’s amateur efforts burrow from the inside, deep into the murky entrails of what is simply known on the streets as “the life.” Ironically, his quest for answers also takes him to the foreign shores of suburbia, both at the home of one of the shot kids and to the exclusive prep school they both attended. The set piece at the school demonstrates Tafoya’s pitch-perfect ear for the patois of jaded teenagers, and throughout Wolves he captures perfectly the language of the mutts on the street and the cops who chase them. He has listened in the streets.
Tafoya walks many a shaky mile in Orlando’s dope fiend shoes with a sure hand that brings to mind Nelson Algren’s The Man With the Golden Arm, William Burroughs’s Junkie or Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries.
No chapters
There are no chapters in The Wolves of Fairmount Park. Triple spaces between certain paragraphs are the only lines of demarcation, as if Tafoya is typographically communicating that there are no chapters in the lives of his characters— only short breaks as they slide toward the vortex of oblivion that awaits them.
Yet this book is ultimately about redemption. The separate quests of Orlando and Danny Ramirez finally coincide at a dank warehouse on American Street where Asa Carmody, the small, red-haired dope lord who set the events of Wolves in motion, is holed up with his spoils of money and drugs. Shot and dying, Asa’s last words are, “You win, you win.”
Orlando finds his redemption in seeing his quest to its bloody end, and as the book ends he is in rehab. There is no redemption, even in death, for Asa Carmody, the keeper of the ignorant flame of evil that spreads through the veins of society with each shot of dope. Asa runs now with the wolves.♦
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The ‘right’ to gay marriage, reconsidered
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Sex, society and gay marriage:
A few points Judge Walker overlooked
A federal judge in California recently ruled that gay people have the same right to get married as straight people. Laws that prohibit gay marriage, said Judge Vaughn Walker, are unconstitutional, irrational and unjust.
It’s the right decision for the wrong reasons, I would argue.
These days we hear plenty of talk about the “right” to get married, as if marriage is a temporary private contract between two consenting adults, to be terminated by mutual agreement if it no longer works. When Al and Tipper Gore split up this past spring, for example, the family researcher Stephanie Coontz observed, “It should be reassuring to know that if your marriage does become deeply unsatisfying, you have other ways to live the rest of your life.”
But if that’s all there is to marriage, the state would have no interest in promoting or regulating it. On the contrary, I submit, marriage is a lifelong commitment that two spouses make not only to each other but also to their community. And that’s very heavy stuff.
That is why, for centuries, Christian weddings were traditionally preceded several days in advance by the “reading of the banns”— a public announcement to enable anyone to raise canonical or civil objections to a marriage. It is why, at the very moment before pronouncing a marriage, ministers traditionally turn to the congregation to demand, “If any person can show just cause why they may not be joined together, let them speak now or forever hold their peace.”
A rabbi’s fury
It also explains why my step-grandmother generated such fury in the 1930s by running off and eloping with her first husband. When the newlyweds sheepishly returned to New York and asked a family friend— Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan— to sanctify their marriage by conducting a ceremony of his own, he read them the riot act.
“Don’t you know that marriage is a commitment you make to the Jewish people?” thundered the founder of the Reconstructionist branch of Judaism.
And surely you recall the 18th-Century wedding in Stanley Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon, in which the Anglican Reverend Runt spells out “the causes for which matrimony was ordained”:
“First, it was ordained for the procreation of children to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of His holy name. Secondly, it was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication.”
Note the absence of a single word about rights or love or personal satisfaction.
Times have changed, for sure. But for judges and legislators, I submit, the relevant question remains: not who has the right to get married, but what is society’s interest in the institution of marriage— gay or straight.
Order out of chaos
I can think of several state interests. Marriage provides an effective, voluntary, non-coercive means of imposing social order out of chaos. It’s probably the best vehicle for raising children. In an age when health care costs are shared communally, it’s an important outlet for healthy sex and consequently a tool for reducing sexually transmitted diseases. It probably helps stabilize real estate values, too.
For all these reasons and doubtless many others, society has a vested interest in encouraging adults— gay or straight— to enter long-term committed relationships.
Sex by the numbers
You needn’t be a devout Anglican like the Reverend Runt to perceive the danger that fornication poses to a society; simple mathematical aptitude will suffice.
Do the math: Even if each of us waited until age 18 to have sex for the first time, and even if thereafter we had sex just once a year with a single new partner, within 20 years that single annual sex act would expose each of us to the sexual histories of more than a million partners. Conversely, if each of us had sex every day of the year with the same exclusive partner, we’d be exposed only to one person’s sexual history, even after 50 years of constant sex.
Forget about going to heaven; this is a prosaic matter of enjoying sexual fulfillment without endangering your health or unloading your medical bills on the rest of society.
So now gay men and women are clamoring to sign up for what amounts to a lifetime non-fornication program— and social conservatives want to stop them? Are they out of their minds?
The case for straight marriage
Heterosexual marriage in particular offers probably the best arrangement for humanity’s most important function: the reproduction of the species. It provides an environment in which two drastically different but mutually dependent human types— men and women— can coexist together. Ingeniously, the marriage commitment restrains the natural male impulse toward promiscuity while simultaneously restraining the natural female impulse to mate with the highest-status male available.
Other things being equal, I suggest, a heterosexual household is a better place to raise kids— not because straights are inherently better parents than gays, but because men and women really are different, and kids benefit from their contrasting perspectives.
So, yes, social conservatives are right when they argue that lifelong heterosexual monogamy is a uniquely valuable institution that deserves society’s distinctive recognition and support. If they could demonstrate that gay marriage undermines straight marriage, they could count me among their supporters.
But of course they’ve failed to demonstrate any such thing. That was precisely Judge Walker’s point in his ruling this month.
Biblical fears
Back in the good old days of high infant mortality rates when the Bible was written, every sperm and uterus— even gay sperm and uteri— was needed to assure the replenishment of the species. So society had rational reasons for discouraging homosexuality. But today, when humanity’s great threat is not population loss but overpopulation, there’s no reason to prohibit gay marriage and plenty of reason to encourage it.
Society’s essential needs do change. And, yes, society does have a vested interest in the happiness of its members. Happy citizens make a healthier society, as enlightened rulers since Queen Elizabeth I have recognized. If marriage nowadays enhances individual happiness, so much the better.
But from the state’s perspective, marriage is above all a valuable civic service— like paying taxes, joining the army, walking a Town Watch beat, working in a homeless shelter or serving in the Peace Corps. Who would want to discourage citizens from pursuing any of these activities, regardless of their sexual orientation?♦
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