The Importance of Making Porn

Wow, I really thought I’d be able to post at least once a week even during the schoolyear. I guess I was deceiving myself. It’s been a busy few weeks between teaching, research, the class I’m taking, a conference in Boston, and cat-sitting and dog-sitting for different friends. Nevertheless, I did see a movie.

 

Zack and Miri Make a Porno invites comparison with a whole genre of recent British (or German filmed for some reason in Britain) “comedies” about unemployment and body image, of which Full Monty is the most famous. Calendar Girls and Irina Palm have a similar premise, except they deal with older women. In each, the hero (or group of heroes) are forced for financial reasons to confront their inhibitions about their body and enter the stripping/calendar/professional handjob giver industry. So Zack and Miri, who decide to try amateur porn to deal with their utilities bill.

This is about where the similarities end. This American version has none of the subtle irony of its European models, and none of the substance either. It is more of a parody of the porn industry than a critique of the issues about identity and appearance which the porn industry raises. And who needs a parody of the porn industry, when the porn industry is essentially already a parody of itself?

It turns out the the inhibitions which Zack and Miri are having are not about their own bodies, but each other’s. Of course, they’re in love, and been in love all along, even though they’ve been living together essentially as brother and sister for 10 years (because of course it’s impossible for men and women to have a relationship other than a sexual one, right?). And so since it was a non issue in the first place, the porn is never completed: there is no final moment of triumph as in Monty/Girls/Irina.

And how does the financial problem get resolved? As usual, in American films, by magic. The friend to whom Zack owes money wins a disability suit and suddenly becomes a philanthropist. No more money problems. But money doesns’t matter anyway, since Zack and Miri have ach other.

Considering the financial climate we’re in, perhaps it’s either time to become more realistic, or really test our belief in philanthropy.

Good Old Oldenburg

One of the podcasts I listen to regularly is the BBC Newspod. Obviously, like every other news forum, they’ve recently been dominated by the financial crisis. On yesterday’s podcast, as a way of covering the crisis in “Europe’s largest economy” (Germany), one of their representatives visited the medieval town of Oldenburg in Lower Saxony. The angle was appealing: this pictaresque, cobble-stoned, quaint little provincial town which survived (I am paraphrasing fairly closely, I think) plague, the 30 years war, the Napoleonic war, the 2nd world war, is now at the verge of collapse because of a global financial crisis.

As sensational as the idea might sound, Oldenburg is neither unique nor special. By “surviving” the journalist seems to be suggesting that the city has remained unchanged since the 12th century, when it seems to have been founded, but of course that is just a romantic fallacy. Oldenburg might look very traditional and “untouched”, but it’s not a particular old city for European centers – not even for Germany: Trier, Koelln, Augsburg, are all almost a thousand years older. How odd that it was chosen for its appearance, for a podcast! Even more importantly, however, Oldenburg has been no more immune to change than other cities of its kind. One might even say that it has changed more rapidly, if more belatedly, in the last 100 years, than larger European cities. Witness its population explosion, much more rapid than London or Berlin’s:

Demographic evolution of Oldenburg between 1910 and 2007

1910	1919	1930	1940	1950	1960	1970	1980	1989	1995	2000	2004	2007
30,242	32,540	55,485	80,605	122,809	122,337	131,545	136,764	140,785	151,382	154,832	158,394	161,034

One of the really indicative facts brought up in the podcast is that part of the “imminent collapse” of Oldenburg has been brought on by the fact that the church (yes, the church!) had invested in Lehman Brothers. I mean, how much more of a part of the global financial system can this quaint little fairy-tale of a town get? So, as alarming as the perile of this bastion of traditional values might be, I fail to see how this should be surprising anybody.

All-American Woman!

The line between satire and politics has been so blurred in the last two months, that I’m no longer able to refrain from political commentary. This is just too good. I am assuming this is for-real, though at times it’s hard to tell: “She dresses a moose and ad-dresses a nation!?” Dear God, who came up with that? Of course when the All-American Woman can be easily mistaken for Tina Fey’s parody of herself, is it surprising that the fan tributes also pass for satire?

The Palin genre has been exploding on YouTube: videos of her actual interviews, rallies, etc, videos of professional impersonators, amateur impersonators, tributes, parodies, fact checking amateurs, fact checking professionals… you could spend hours just browing through it. I think I just did. Some of it is intelligent, some of it is naively enthusiastic, and some of it is offensive and sexist. But most of it is ridiculous. Just like this campaign.

Meat never tasted so good

I stopped eating meat a couple of months ago, not because I have any problem with killing animals, but because I have problems with the way industrialized meat production treats animals while they’re still alive. I like meat in moderation – I expect I will be getting my annual craving for pepper steak soon – but this hasn’t really changed my diet that much. I still eat seafood, eggs, and dairy, so basically the only thing that I stopped eating regularly is chicken.

Last Sunday, I discovered a new reason to be vegetarian: Vegetarian’s Paradise 2. Normally I don’t find meat substitutes (tofu turkey, soy tuna, etc) very interesting, or even necessary. But this place doesn’t merely replace meat: it improves on it. Their fusion/eclectic menu (smoked turkey with corn bread, stuffed zuchini, dim sum, paella, mango -yummy!- chicken, etc) will definetely keep my coming back: it goes on for six pages. Going with friends and sharing dishes is probably the best idea – you could also just stuff yourself with appetizers: make sure you try the collard green rolls, among others.

Prices: more than reasonable for Greenwich village. Unfortunately this place has already been  “discovered” – we had to wait for a while on the steps of the apartment building next door. It might be worth making a reservation.

I’d love to get some suggestions from other vegetarian New Yorkers: what are your favorite restaurants? Looking forward to trying a lot of new places!

Bringing sexy back to opera (II)

Wow. Who would have thought opera in the 21st century would be making theatre look bland and puritanical? (Well, New York/Broadway theatre, anyway). There is on major difference, however, between Don Giovanni at the Royal in London, and Salome at the Metropolitan. In London, it was the whole production, that heightened the eroticism and the sensuality of Mozart’s original. In New York, it is Karita Mattila, the Finnish soprano in the title role, that reminds us why the opera (and the play it’s based on) was censored in the first place.

The highlight of the afternoon (well I saw a matine!) is, as it should be, Salome’s dance – a 10 minute sequence for which a professional dancer often substitutes for the singer. (Strauss seems to have actually built this in quite well, as Salome makes her only exit from the stage right before the dance – persumably to change into her seven veils). Mattila’s understated yet provocative posing is a perfect match for Strauss’s minimalism: Mattila isn’t really a dancer, any more than she’s a sixteen year old princess, but it doesn’t really matter. She “moves” well. And she moves a lot in this production, even while singing: there is a great image toward the end, after she has taken her bloody prize, when Salome lies on her back on the apron, with her head hanging over the orchestra. And she’s still singing to the severed head on the plate. I guess Mattila is more an acrobat than a dancer.

The rest of the production is grandiose in the typical Metropolitan fashion: busy, lots of pretty pictures. Santo Loquasto sets Herode’s palace at the edge of the desert, making an interesting contrast, but the desert looks so domesticated and Disneyfied that this might as well be a beach resort. The same goes for the “angels of death” which appear on the sand dunes when Salome reveals her demand for the prophet’s head. There has been a vague attempt to somehow relate the production with current events in the Middle East, but it was both unnecessary and superficial. Mattila is really all this production needed. Thank God Strauss made sure she was on stage for pretty much the whole 90 minutes.

Cold War Chic

This one is admitted a bit late – it’s now been over a week since I was at the Victoria & Albert in London – but since the exhibition “Cold War Modern” is on till January, you have plenty of time to get there. And get there you must. As a historian, I tend to avoid art museums altogether, or at least favor carefully contextualized exhibitions. That’s probably why I also tend to visit only for special exhibitions, and avoid the haphazardly arranged permanent collections. This was the perfect time for me to go the V&A.

The exhibition is really a study of how design was used as part of the rhetorical conflict between the Great Powers during the Cold War: architecture, furniture design, fashion, all in the service of ideology. Propaganda posters, of course, figure prominently. One of the most fascinating exhibits is the parallel projection on two large screens of footage taken in East and West Berlin, showing the “model community” reconstruction undertaken on both sides of the Iron Curtain – I’ve included the Eastern half of this in my recommended Berlin boulevard tour. This is really one propaganda project (architecture) within another (film/television). This example is also typical of how well the exhibition balances its coverage between East and West.

In general, it is the similarity between East and West that strikes one the most. This is particularly striking in a section showing models of the many TV towers which were built in the period. I suppose that is what the title suggests: East or West, there was only one type of modernism. I guess the equivalent in the theatre is the (in one case doctrinal) domination of realism on the stage on both the American and the Russian stage.

It was also interesting to see a museum attempt to do something slightly different with its audio guides. Most audio guides today are actually Mp3 players, with many more capabilities than merely producing sound. Rarely are those possibilities explored, however. At this exhibition there are some attempts to provide supplemental images to enrich the visitor’s experience/understanding: you can, for example, see a photograph of Stalin on your screen when you are standing in front of his caricature. As the audio guide has a touch screen, some exhibits are reproduced on the screen so you can find out more about different elements of a poster/mural/tapestry by “touching” them. Finally, the guide can be costumized to some extend, as many exhibitis have supplemental entries providing more information on a subject related to the work or the artist. Hopefully we’ll be seeing more of this and done in a more confident way – though perhaps the V&A should first invest in providing audio guides in languages other than English: most museums in continental Europe usually do at least four languages. Surely London has enough visitors to justify the exepense.

No time for singing

Someone somewhere decided that 19th century novels make good musicals. Since I moved to New York – which isn’t that long ago – we had a Frankenstein (plus a young one), a Dracula, a Woman in White, and of course there was a Jane Eyre not long before that. Why not? It worked for Les Miz… At least that’s what these producers must be thinking. But watching these shows actually makes me wonder why Les Miz worked so well in the first place…

What the composers of Les Miz did so well, is discover the moments in the novel that could be turned into songs, and then only include those moments in the musical. It’s not just that the show has no spoken dialogue: it hardly has any sung dialogue, either. If it was an opera, it would be all arias and no recitative – just the way I would like my operas actually, but I’m a lowbrow. Unfortunately Jill Santoriello, who tried to follow in the steps of Lionel Bart who also wrote music, lyrics, and book for his Charles Dickens’ adaptation, has failed to do the same for A Tale of Two Cities.

The main problem seems to be that there is just too much happening: there really isn’t any time left for songs, if Dickens’ complex plot is to be reduced to two and a half hours. Why wasn’t that a problem in Les Miz? I am not quite sure: Hugo’s novel is longer and certainly not any simpler. But perhaps the action is. The plot really only moves in one direction: Valjean is on the run. Then he is on the run again. And again. Two CIties is a story of intrigue, hidden identities, plot reversals, you get the idea. The characters don’t have any time to stop and break into song! Some of Santoriello’s “songs” don’t really last more than a minute.

In addition Santoriello’s music is a) repetitive (in itself) and b) a repetition of all the cliches commited by all the musicals I mentioned above. The only song that stands out is a “masque” telling the story of the execution of the French monarchs, and that’s probably because of Warren Carlyle’s direction/choreograhy. It is also Carlyle’s most inventive moment – the rest of the show looks as banal and repetitive as it sounds.

The failure of a musical is often blamed on the book. In this case, at least we know who to blame.

Bringing sexy back (to opera)

Apart from seeing a lot of old friends, the highlight of my visit to London was without question Don Giovanni at the Royal Opera at Covent Garden. I have seen Don Giovanni so many times now (and in so many media – see here) that I almost didn’t go – I was also a bit uncertain as to whether I could get a ticket at a price I could afford, since the show was technically sold out. I showed up only an hour before the (12 o’clock matine) performance, however, and I was able to get a standing room ticket for only 11 pounds – less than I would have paid to see a film at a Leicester Square cinema, apparently. You know a performance is good when you don’t feel tired after standing for three and a half hours.

The soloists and the orchestra were magnificent, but that’s not what made this production unforgettable. (I am not enough of an opera connoseur to distinguish between a great singer and an excellent singer, unfortunately. I’m also not a hundred percent sure which of the many alternating Giovannis I was watching). It is the combination of Francesca Zambello’s direction and the late Maria Bjoernson’s designs that sets the stage on fire – literally, during the dazzling finale. This made sense when I was reminded that Bjoernson is largely responsible for the spectacle behind the most spectacular (and most operatic) of West End spectaculars, The Phantom of the Opea. (Ironically, Phantom already pays tribute to Don Giovanni in the “Don Juan Triumphant” sequence). Bjoernson died in 2002, the year this production premiered.

Mozart’s opera doesn’t necessarily contain a large amount of spectacle: it is only in the fifteen minutes that all hell breaks loose, literally. Zambello and Bjoernson (with Paul Pyant’s lighting), however, have made the magic last through the whole four acts. There is a sense of heightened sexuality, an eroticism which surrounds every aspect of the production, which is normally absent from productions that involve powdered wigs and ruffled shirts. Somehow, while making their Giovanni seem even more brutish and villainous than in more decorous productions, they still make him inexplicably attractive. It is only in the last act, when he physically humiliates Donna Elvira, that this Giovanni entirely looses the audience’s sympathy. But by then, his fate is already sealed, so that the apocalyptic finale feels both exciting and cathartic.

The entire production is well acted, which is even more suprising when the quality of the singing is so high. The physical demand on the singer/actors is high: both Leporello and Giovanni have a lot of climbing to do, and William Hobbs’ fight sequences are exhilerating. As the Met continues to remind us on its publicity, “great opera is great theatre”, after all. Even sparse and underacted productions of Mozart’s “perfect opera” can be breathtaking, but this production does justice to both the opera and the theatre.

Credit Crunch

No, I am not going to attempt to join the masses of amateur financial analysts and commentators that have been popping up all over the web (ok except maybe to remind everybody that they need to read Samir Amin’s book Obscolescent Capitalism). This blog post is actually about the current production of Strindberg’s Creditors at the Donmar Warehouse in London, which fortunately has nothing to do with investment banking. Credit is only a metaphor in Strindberg’s play, though the current economic crisis makes the reference all the more poignant.

I normally do not write summaries here, because I like to deceive myself into believing that everybody enjoys reading plays in their free time, but this one was too obscure even for me – besides Strindberg wrote too much for anybody without completion compulsion to get through. So, briefly, the play deals with a love triangle (as so many plays do): jealous abandoned husband, jealous new husband, and a wife who is alternatingly enchanting and cruel. It consists of three fairly extensive dialogues – in David Greig’s adaptation it runs just under 90 minutes, which is really the ideal length for a drama if you ask me. But of course you didn’t ask me.

In the first scene, the first husband offers to help the second husband deal with his anxiety over his wife’s flirtations. Husband #1 has some interestingly “scientific” theories that are really a good illustration with all the issues I have with the scientific positivism of what was called the “progessive” era. He can essentially rationalize any fact he is confronted with. There is a moment I really liked when he is using a photograph of the wife as evidence of her licentiousness: it’s as if Strindberg had already predicted the theory of the “male gaze” – of course when Foucault first described the “gaze” he was referring to Victorian clinical observers, but the connection to photography as the perfect method for absent observation was always there. The suggestion that viewing the photograph was an act of sharing the wife with the invisible photographer was a great mindgame. Of course theatrically the use of an effigy in this way is an old trick - Hamlet uses it on his mother during the “closet scene”.

In the second scene, wife arrives and meets new husband who attempts to confront here – meanwhile it has been agreed that former husband will spie on them, and then the two husbands will trade places. Perhaps another instance of “scientific” observation. The scene essentially proves the manipulative character of the wife, though there is a suggestion that new husband enjoyes being manipulated. Strindberg is also referring to the Pygmalion myth, though in a much less direct and more metaphysical way than Shaw. Going by the definitions I once heard in one of Martin Puchner’s classes, I’d say Strindberg is using the myth as a symbol, whereas Shaw uses it as an allegory. Both husbands claim credit for “creating” the woman, for turning her into who she is, so the control she seems to have over them becomes even more incidious. Of course, to stress the allusion, husband #2 is a sculptor, engaged in making a nude portrait of his wife.

At the end of the brutal confrontation between the two exes, the man reveals the spying husband on his way out to the shocked wife – but it is the spie who has had the biggest shock. The already week Adolph now looks like he has gone through a stroke: speechless, he collapses on the floor where he is cradled by his wife, as the first husband exits making a detached comment on the unexpected sincerity of the woman’s emotion.

Ok now that I ruined the ending for everyone, I need to explain that it is performances, not the surprise ending, that makes this play truly devastating. It’s hard to pick a favorite with this cast: Tom Burke is sympathetic and pathetic at the same time as the new husband, Owen Teale is both menacing and (believe-it-or-not) whimsical, and Anna Chancellor plays a vulnerable enachantress, somehow managing to overcome what some might see as a misogynistic portrayal by Strindberg. Alan Rickman’s (love-him) direction is subtle: no unnecessary fireworks, but Donmar (and largely most British) productions always seem to have an almost classical restrain that distinguishes them both from ultra-flashy Berlin directing and kitchen-sink-tv-psycho-drama New York emoting. I was surprised that some plays in London seem to omit the name of the director entirely from the poster. That would definetely not fly in Berlin, where directors receive the same credit as playwrights, or on Broadway, where directors actually “own” the rights to new shows as co-creators. I wish we would get to see Donmar productions in New York as often as we see the National (I enjoyed the Seagull, just didn’t get a chance to write about) or the Old Vic. Is anybody at BAM listening?

There’s a few more things I want to see while here, but the season seems to be just taking off – much like in NY. Kenneth Branagh in Ivanov is at the top of my list – musically everything seems to have come from Broadway, sadly. I wish the Savoy was doing some good old-fashioned G&S. But until that happens I guess it’s more depressing turn of the century symbolo-naturalism for me. At least it’s something we don’t get much of in NY.

“Stark Sands”

The Classic Stage Company, as I’ve mentioned before, usually offers us star-driven productions of classical drama, with a mediocre supporting cast: it’s where Broadway character players come to be leading men, primarily by playing Shakespeare’s great titutal heroes: the Richards (II and III), Lear, Hamlet. The idea of offering classically trained actors a venue where they can perform in a role more challenging than that of a cheated (or cheating) husband in some domestic melodrama is respectacble, but the fact that the productions are invariably compromised by the amateurism which frames the (usually male) principle is unfortunate, in a city with so many out-of-work theatre professionals. In the current production of the The Tempest, Mandy Patinkin (playing Prospero but sounding more like the titular weather disturbance) is framed by some of CSC’s trusted artistic associates, who are always servicable, and what seems to be NYU’s latest cohort of MFA graduates, who sound like they’ve never heard of Shakespeare, or poetry. (I hereby acknowledge my distaste for all kinds of MFA programs).

It is Patinkin himself, however, who seems most uncomfortable with Elizabethan verse – and The Tempestis perhaps the most lyrical of Shakespeare’s plays. At times, Patinkinrushes through a soliloquy giving the impression that he is not aware of what he is actually saying: the optimism with which he announces that “every third thought shall be my grave” was almost cruel. Patinkin looks almost biblical in the role of the wizarding duke, and he seems to be enjoying the aura of divinity. In the moment when he repels the drunk rebells who threaten his sovereignity, he sounds like a cross between Ethel Merman and the Burning Bush: I wasn’t sure he was speaking English. The height of absurdity is reached during the nuptual masque that Prospero prepares for his daughter, when Patinking (who should be serving as director and stage manager) joins in the singing with his characteristically affected voice. (There is another amusing moment during the masque when, more appropriately, Prospero asks one of the actors to tone it down: the great ham being threatened by the upstart).

Given the great failure in the leading role, it doesn’t really matter what either the experienced stalwarts or the timid novices are up to. The clowns are satisfactory, the conspirators are passable, the romantic ingenues are sentimentally obnoxious, and Nyambi Nyambi as Caliban gives a performance that is halfassed enough that it fails to be either racist or a commentary on racism. The choice of casting a black actor in that role (and casting other actors of color as the inhabitants of the island) is obvious enough that it’s almost de rigoeurnow: his Carribean accent is what makes the character seem like a caricature. The tattoos of the islanders (which seem to recall Maori warriors while also being phantastical enough to be appropriate for these creatures of the imagination) also fail to go far enough: Angel Desai who plays Ariel in a diaper is particularly rediculous. (Oana Botez-Ban is credited for the diapers). They seem like token references rather than aspects of the characters.

No performance stands out, but it’s hard to stand out when the tempest called Patinkin is bellowing iambic pentameters in your ears. Brian Kulick’s stylized production (whatever stylized has come to mean nowadays) also fails to rise beyond the satisfactory level – the opening tempest sequence is promising enough, but there is not much enchantment or wonder in the rest of the two and a half hours. Perhaps I’ ve been too spoiled by three months of German theatre: if this production was down at the Schaubuehne, the unfortunate actors would have been suspended from the ceiling trying to balance on the large moving flat which in Jian Jung’s minimal design represents the ocean. As directed here, this moment fails to communicate a sense of danger: perhaps  because this is already a passage into a realm of magic, rather than a true danger. The magic, however, never turns up.

(The cryptic title of this blog post refers to the name of the actor playing Ferdinand, with appropriate sentimental naivete. It was his name, however, that seemed to be most relevant to this sandy production: see picture).