Or Mephistopheles is such a mouthful in Wapping.
I
Those nice people at AIR sent me en e card announcing the opening of their own room in Second Life. I’ve never played Second Life, but I understand it to be a virtual environment you roam around in, going into various rooms, interacting with people or objects if and as you wish. Well last night at Punchdrunk's performance of Faust I played it for real. In Wapping, of all places.
II
They say that the reason that the internet is addictive is because you have these periods of low activity (searching, downloading etc) followed by pulses of excitement as you find something interesting: it is this pulsing of excitement that triggers the parts of your brain associated with pleasure; these pulsing triggers is what makes it so addictive.
In Faust you find yourself alone in the dark, pushing open heavy fire doors not knowing whether you are to discover a black corridor, maybe lit by votive candles or statutes of the Virgin Mary, or a complex of rooms, recently occupied as you can tell from the exotic perfume in the air, the sheets on the bed messy, a record left playing. Behind a blood red curtain you may find a scene unfolding, bodies intertwining. The acrid scent of mothballs. Typewriters freshly fallen silent. Little pulses of discovery, pulses of excitement. Is this why I immediately want to go back? Why I log on at midnight. It finishes on Friday. All tickets sold.
III
Hell of course is other people. Although there is some amusement in watching other people’s strategies. Some stick limpet-like to a particular actor, like their daemon in Pullman’s terminology. Some actors have long strings of people shadowing them, echoing their movements; the actors choreograph their shadows with their movements.
We all wear grotesque white carnival masks. There is something about the mask, not just the way it affects what you see, limiting your peripheral vision, an effect exaggerated in the dark, but it also releases inhibitions, creates anonymity.
Some people stand right in the faces of the actors, almost goading them. Other search through drawers and cupboards, open books, investigate like private eyes or voyeurs.
There is a sense that the boundaries here are not as they would be in the real world or the world of the theatre. In a corridor one of us, the audience, is grabbed by one of them, the actors, or are they the agents of the devil, and pushed behind a clanking metal barrier, a hand tightens on their throat, their face is pushed against a wire fence.
I am alone in a room whilst a woman writhes on top of a man. He falls asleep. Drugged? She searches for his wallet. It is empty. She opens a drawer. She looks for something. A piece of paper. She puts the paper in the wallet with a kiss.
IV
The central image of Faust occurs in a tight corridor, actors lined up, crushed against the audience. Mephistopheles holds a bundle of flyers, which he rips up into small pieces, and sprinkles over us. The pieces are too small to discern what was written on them.
This is a play with a fractured narrative. You walk around the building, piecing together your own narrative, randomly, or according to whatever system you may choose to employ.
But this is a game. Playtime.
Any narrative there might have been has been torn up and scattered. The actors speak in whispers. Pieces of paper are passed around, notes scribbled, but in the dark they cannot be read. The text remains elusive. She puts a piece of paper in the wallets with a kiss.
V
Some people have described this as an installation, which in part it is. Misty forests of fir trees. Room stuffed with books and dolls. Is that wet straw on the floor over there? A scarecrow marks the path. I find myself alone in a maze of racks of filing cabinets, mostly empty, but there is a section filled with bundles of papers, indecipherable in the dark. I am inside a horror film looking out.
It also makes me think of Gilbert and George transforming themselves into living sculptures. This is three dimensional performance compared to the usual two dimensions of stage performance (or should that be four compared to three). You walk around the actors and the action.
A woman stands behind the counter of a diner chewing gum. I am in a three dimensional Edward Hopper painting. Another woman stands in the corner of her room muttering “I hate him I hate him” softly, over and over again. She whispers in the ear of the person next to me “you’ll come back for me wont you?” Whilst she whispers she is sticking a pin into a voodoo doll, pulling it out, sticking it in.
David Lynch described INLAND EMPIRE as being about a “woman in trouble”. This Faust, set in the 1950s, features a number of men and women, all of whom seem to be in some sort of trouble.
Scenes unfold in bars to heavy rock’n’roll soundtracks. Actors move either too slowly or too quickly. I am inside a David Lynch movie, walking around the set.
Mephistopheles serving behind a bar turning water into wine and whisky and vodka. Magic.
But more than anything else, this is a piece of dance. Choreographed across five floors, how the actors keep time and interweave is remarkable. Many of the actors have achieved a kind of aura around them, or maybe they are in an elevated meditative state. To stay in role, despite the swirling pressing tide of audience swishing around them. And the best scenes are dance pieces, the agents of the devil seemingly transporting themselves into demons or imps or sprites, running along and around the walls, swinging up into the rafters, sticking themselves vertically to walls. You can believe a man or a woman can fly. You can believe that a man or a woman may not be a man or woman at all. You can feel as though you are being granted a glimpse through the gates of hell.
VI
It has occurred to me that the point about my reviews is that, unlike say a professional critic, I am not trying to review the art itself, but rather my reaction to the art. Thus if a girl in the orchestra causes me to have a pleasant dream, that too must be recorded, as it is a direct reaction to the art.
They are, if you prefer, subjective reviews, rather than objective reviews.
And it strikes me that Faust is designed to be a subjective performance rather than an objective performance.
But then every person’s experience of art will always and necessarily be very different to anyone else’s, because it is filtered through that individual’s brain.
In a theatre, you sit there and let the art come to you. But here, you go to the art. And yet for me the best strategy was to wander randomly, which felt to me like letting the art come to me, just in a different way.
VII
At the start of the production we were given a flyer which we were told would help us piece things together as we looked back on the evening. It summarised a plot, in seven parts or scenes. Initially I was disappointed and confused. There were characters I couldn’t recall meeting, and the events described bore little resemblance to that which I had put together in my own mind. But then I realised that this was in some ways as much of a red herring as anything else, and best regarded as a summary of the elements of Goethe’s Faust which had inspired the performance, because the performance, being in the form of mime and dance and physical theatre and installation and atmosphere and audience, would and should remain forever elusive, imprinted illegibly on a piece of paper in a room too dark to read in.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Yabbok and Roll
Harold Bloom, the great New York literary and cultural theorist, is perhaps most famous for his theory that each generation of artists reject the values and systems of the previous generation (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Bloom). Like all such theories, it sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t, but has some truth in it.
However the theory is of some interest in the context of the current generation of so-called “New Jews”. Personally I hate labels as much as the next man (although I see that today the next man is sporting a black T shirt with "D&G" emblazoned in white) but the term "New Jew" is I suppose useful in identifying the current cultural phenomonenon of Jewish people openly flauting symbols of their Jewishness (see also http://jewschool.com/THE_NEW_JEW.pdf).
The New Jews are something of a contradictory bunch, for there are at least two distinct and very different groups operating under the New Jew banner (or should that be chuppah?): (1) the secular anti or post Zionists, for example groups such as Jewdas (if an anarchic collective can be said to be anything at all) and (2) newly confident religious and Zionist yoof, eg Matisyahu and his fans (see http://www.myspace.com/matisyahu). In between are a whole range of motley variations evidenced by eg the Hebrew Hammer film (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hebrew_Hammer) and the Bar Mitzvah Disco book (http://www.barmitzvahdisco.com/).
What is interesting is how these groups are often appropriating the same set of images – swaying black hatters, shofars, naff bar mitzvahs, "Moses is my Homeboy" and other slogan T shirts, the old East End, Klezmer etc. For example AISH (religious, zionist), Jewdas (see above) and Limmud (yeah everyone is welcome) all make a great deal of havdalah, the ceremony marking the end of the sabbath, extrapolating from the religious element of lighting a candle a more general activity of setting fire to things (leading to such peculiar behaviour as singing round bonfires, as Jewdas did a while back, very retro-zionist if you don't mind me saying, even of it was on bRightOn beach).
To the previous generation, outward visible signs of Jewish identity often provoke(d) mixed feelings - embarrassment, and fear being the two most common. The complexities of these emotions are beautifully set out in Philip Roth’s early short story, Eli, the Fanatic, written in 1959, in which a secular community is traumatised by the arrival of a black hatter in town.
Roth’s mature work, along with other great Jewish artists such as Arthur Miller, Steven Spielberg, Harold Pinter, could be said to represent the generation that this is now being rejected, in that their art, whilst clearly informed by the artist’s Jewish identity, avoids specifically engaging with Jewish themes or images. The generation coming through now hark back to the generation before that generation, a generation more directly connected to the old country – Isaac Bashevis Singer for example- there is a yearning to reimagine the world of dybbuks and golems.
However there is a problem with a lot of the New Jew-ish art, which is that after one has gotten over the amusement factor of the images, where and what is the content? A lot of it is just surface visuals, pop videos for an imaginary mash up that will inevitably feature some whining Klezmer along the way.
All of which brings me nicely round to “Yabbok” a new multimedia play performed at the LJCC last night, directed and I suspect largely created by Elliott Tucker, a film maker and painter often to be found to the side of the stage creating something or other at Jewdas’s events.
The highest compliment I can pay Yabbok is to review it according to the same standards as any of the other plays or events I have been to, even though this was not a professional production as such.
The play was largely based on a Nathan Englander short story about Charles, a New York WASP who in a moment of revelation in the back of a cab realises he is Jewish and goes on to swap his shrink for a new age Rabbi and to try and reconcile his new status with his very much still not Jewish wife. The story in many ways is symptomatic of, maybe even a metaphor for, the New Jew-ish aesthetic.
In Yabbok, the Englander story was fused with Genesis 32.25 et sec where Jacob wrestles with an unknown man, or more likely some sort of demon, who refuses to tell Jacob his name, and whom Jacob will only release once he has blessed him. There were also some scenes set in a mystical shop selling religious artefacts including a mask which seemed to link the other two stories.
Staged in an empty black space with a large screen at the back, the play moved between live action and Tucker’s specially and well made videos, some of which included the cast. The videos were frenetic torrents of images, including those referred to earlier, black hatters, bar mitzvahs et al, with an eerie, whirling electronic soundtrack. I suspect that Elliott Tucker knows his Lynch and was going for the kind of mind altering effects Lynch achieves by the combination of blurring images and psycho-acoustic soundscape.
The acting was not quite so impressive, often a little stilted and awkward, and being reduced to bare dialogue left the text a little flat.
Charles was played by Penny Pollak, although I am not sure whether this was because she was the best available actor, or because it was hoped that this would introduce an extra level of nuance to the play. Either way she did well, and, given that it was a difficult role to play, this was no mean feat. The onstage relationship with his/her wife, which is central to the Englander story, didn’t ring true for me, but nonetheless it was a memorably intense performance. Whether by accident or design, or a consequence of my own demented state of mind, the image of Penny / Charles in yarmulke and tzitzit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzitzit) is one that that has burned itself into my brain in a surprisingly erotic fashion.
I also thought the Rabbi character was well played (although I see the chap playing him is leaving to become a rabbi!) and liked the rather odd shop keeper’s odd assistant.
The video projections, technically impressive though they were, you have to say, well what was the content? Were they anything more than just a series of over-familiar images of Jewish life? But on stage some new visual ideas emerged. I particularly liked the section where the Rabbi helps Charles to put on tefillin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tefillin), which involved binding him/her up in a long black length of fabric wrapped around his/her body, followed by Charles stepping into a giant black tefillin box. Humorous and ambiguous, this was probably the moment which came closest to capturing the mood of the Englander story. For me this went to the heart of the challenge facing New Jew-ish artists today, which is how to find something fresh and original to bring to those old familiar images.
On the whole, Yabbok was a curate's (or should that be Rabbi's ?) egg; a brave attempt to do something experimental and forward-looking, visually impressive and in its own way surprisingly powerful.
It's on again on Wednesday and I would urge my two and a half readers to get down the LJCC to support the production.
However the theory is of some interest in the context of the current generation of so-called “New Jews”. Personally I hate labels as much as the next man (although I see that today the next man is sporting a black T shirt with "D&G" emblazoned in white) but the term "New Jew" is I suppose useful in identifying the current cultural phenomonenon of Jewish people openly flauting symbols of their Jewishness (see also http://jewschool.com/THE_NEW_JEW.pdf).
The New Jews are something of a contradictory bunch, for there are at least two distinct and very different groups operating under the New Jew banner (or should that be chuppah?): (1) the secular anti or post Zionists, for example groups such as Jewdas (if an anarchic collective can be said to be anything at all) and (2) newly confident religious and Zionist yoof, eg Matisyahu and his fans (see http://www.myspace.com/matisyahu). In between are a whole range of motley variations evidenced by eg the Hebrew Hammer film (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hebrew_Hammer) and the Bar Mitzvah Disco book (http://www.barmitzvahdisco.com/).
What is interesting is how these groups are often appropriating the same set of images – swaying black hatters, shofars, naff bar mitzvahs, "Moses is my Homeboy" and other slogan T shirts, the old East End, Klezmer etc. For example AISH (religious, zionist), Jewdas (see above) and Limmud (yeah everyone is welcome) all make a great deal of havdalah, the ceremony marking the end of the sabbath, extrapolating from the religious element of lighting a candle a more general activity of setting fire to things (leading to such peculiar behaviour as singing round bonfires, as Jewdas did a while back, very retro-zionist if you don't mind me saying, even of it was on bRightOn beach).
To the previous generation, outward visible signs of Jewish identity often provoke(d) mixed feelings - embarrassment, and fear being the two most common. The complexities of these emotions are beautifully set out in Philip Roth’s early short story, Eli, the Fanatic, written in 1959, in which a secular community is traumatised by the arrival of a black hatter in town.
Roth’s mature work, along with other great Jewish artists such as Arthur Miller, Steven Spielberg, Harold Pinter, could be said to represent the generation that this is now being rejected, in that their art, whilst clearly informed by the artist’s Jewish identity, avoids specifically engaging with Jewish themes or images. The generation coming through now hark back to the generation before that generation, a generation more directly connected to the old country – Isaac Bashevis Singer for example- there is a yearning to reimagine the world of dybbuks and golems.
However there is a problem with a lot of the New Jew-ish art, which is that after one has gotten over the amusement factor of the images, where and what is the content? A lot of it is just surface visuals, pop videos for an imaginary mash up that will inevitably feature some whining Klezmer along the way.
All of which brings me nicely round to “Yabbok” a new multimedia play performed at the LJCC last night, directed and I suspect largely created by Elliott Tucker, a film maker and painter often to be found to the side of the stage creating something or other at Jewdas’s events.
The highest compliment I can pay Yabbok is to review it according to the same standards as any of the other plays or events I have been to, even though this was not a professional production as such.
The play was largely based on a Nathan Englander short story about Charles, a New York WASP who in a moment of revelation in the back of a cab realises he is Jewish and goes on to swap his shrink for a new age Rabbi and to try and reconcile his new status with his very much still not Jewish wife. The story in many ways is symptomatic of, maybe even a metaphor for, the New Jew-ish aesthetic.
In Yabbok, the Englander story was fused with Genesis 32.25 et sec where Jacob wrestles with an unknown man, or more likely some sort of demon, who refuses to tell Jacob his name, and whom Jacob will only release once he has blessed him. There were also some scenes set in a mystical shop selling religious artefacts including a mask which seemed to link the other two stories.
Staged in an empty black space with a large screen at the back, the play moved between live action and Tucker’s specially and well made videos, some of which included the cast. The videos were frenetic torrents of images, including those referred to earlier, black hatters, bar mitzvahs et al, with an eerie, whirling electronic soundtrack. I suspect that Elliott Tucker knows his Lynch and was going for the kind of mind altering effects Lynch achieves by the combination of blurring images and psycho-acoustic soundscape.
The acting was not quite so impressive, often a little stilted and awkward, and being reduced to bare dialogue left the text a little flat.
Charles was played by Penny Pollak, although I am not sure whether this was because she was the best available actor, or because it was hoped that this would introduce an extra level of nuance to the play. Either way she did well, and, given that it was a difficult role to play, this was no mean feat. The onstage relationship with his/her wife, which is central to the Englander story, didn’t ring true for me, but nonetheless it was a memorably intense performance. Whether by accident or design, or a consequence of my own demented state of mind, the image of Penny / Charles in yarmulke and tzitzit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzitzit) is one that that has burned itself into my brain in a surprisingly erotic fashion.
I also thought the Rabbi character was well played (although I see the chap playing him is leaving to become a rabbi!) and liked the rather odd shop keeper’s odd assistant.
The video projections, technically impressive though they were, you have to say, well what was the content? Were they anything more than just a series of over-familiar images of Jewish life? But on stage some new visual ideas emerged. I particularly liked the section where the Rabbi helps Charles to put on tefillin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tefillin), which involved binding him/her up in a long black length of fabric wrapped around his/her body, followed by Charles stepping into a giant black tefillin box. Humorous and ambiguous, this was probably the moment which came closest to capturing the mood of the Englander story. For me this went to the heart of the challenge facing New Jew-ish artists today, which is how to find something fresh and original to bring to those old familiar images.
On the whole, Yabbok was a curate's (or should that be Rabbi's ?) egg; a brave attempt to do something experimental and forward-looking, visually impressive and in its own way surprisingly powerful.
It's on again on Wednesday and I would urge my two and a half readers to get down the LJCC to support the production.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Sore Bottom / Funny Bottom
Or a tale of two bottoms.
Saturday, and a theatrical double bill.
Doo Cot’s Fold Your Own at the Arts Depot, Finchley, followed by A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Roundhouse. The former cost £8 and the latter £37.50. But which would have the more energy, freshness and vitality? Which would tell us more about our culture and Eastern culture and the interrelationship between the two? Which would be more spectacular? Which more satisfying? Which more fun?
Well you will have guessed that Doo Cot (http://www.doo-cot.com/) won hands down.
On entering the studio we were dressed in kimonos (replete with obi sash) and hotel slippers and ushered through what I took to be a simulacrum of a Shinto Torii gate (yeah all right it was a door) and ushered onto the stage, and in particular onto a round floor cushion. The central conceit of the piece was that we were actors in a Japanese film, although this was really an excuse for a series of set pieces of theatre / film / puppetry / play. We made origami spirit birds. We sang “My Way” in Japanese. We did aerobics. We laughed. A lot. Around us swirled swordplay, anime, puppets, robotics, yakuza, green tea, Godzilla, flower arranging, evil robots, a faceless man, a water feature. At the end we were shown bits of the film, culminating rather worryingly in a repeated loop of us doing the aerobics. On screen I looked like a very nervous Stephen Berkoff in my black kimono but no-one seemed to mind. To get a flavour have a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI1UKmh7-hA&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Edoo%2Dcot%2Ecom%2Fprojectb%2Fexercise%2Ehtml.
My only complaint was that I starting to get a very sore bottom from sitting on the cushion for so long.
If Doo Cot was Tiswas, A Midsummer Night’s Dream was Swap Shop, except that the snotty woman at the booking office wasn’t very keen at all in taking my spare ticket after The Devil Wears Prada fell ill in the morning of the show. “No returns” she said, waving me away with a hand gesture that would make even my post tai chi calm blood boil. My mood wasn’t improved when I saw that I was rewarded for being one of the first to buy tickets, and in the most expensive section, with a seat at the side rather than in front of the stage. Did it matter? Whether it did or didn’t, it did, because I spent quite a lot of time thinking about whether it did, if you know what I mean!
Listen, it wasn’t by a long chalk a bad production. It’s just that after the fun of Doo Cot, and the spectacular and brilliant Platonov, it suffered by comparison. The play was performed in something like 8 languages, so you would have a burst of Hindi then “the course of true love never did run smooth” then a burst of Sanskrit. Shakespeare has many great attributes, but the greatest of them is the beauty of the language, and this was lost. The English parts felt like a compressed text so that those of the audience who, unlike me, hadn’t bothered to read the play before they came, could keep up, but like those dreadful ITV Jane Austen adaptations which convert her work into bodice-ripping romances, you are missing the best bits. And when they did speak English, a lot of it was incomprehensible, a combination of the actor’s accents and the poor acoustics (I could see mikes right in front of me but lord knows where the speakers were).
Except for Bottom. Without doubt one of the finest Bottoms I have ever seen. A big Bottom I grant you, a loud Bottom certainly, but an expressive Bottom, and most importantly, a funny Bottom.
And visually it was stunning. The colour co-ordinated clothes were great. The big set piece stunts were fab – fairies bursting through a paperclad bamboo frame or spinning up and down on ropes and swathes of fabric, Puck spinning a rubbery web around the arguing lovers in the forest, a martial arts style fight between the sets of fairies.
But I couldn’t help feeling that it felt a little bit too much like it was grafted on. It felt too obvious an attempt to fuse Shakespeare with Crouching Tiger and Cirque de Soleil, and just a little bit worthy in its lets all speak our own language so no-one can fully understand the text kind of way.
Good but not great.
And as I lay in bed thinking about the dusty red sand of the enchanted fairy forest, my mind went back to the controlled mayhem of Fold Your Own, and it was Godzilla not Puck who sang me to sleep.
Yours truly,
Robin Goodfellow
Saturday, and a theatrical double bill.
Doo Cot’s Fold Your Own at the Arts Depot, Finchley, followed by A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Roundhouse. The former cost £8 and the latter £37.50. But which would have the more energy, freshness and vitality? Which would tell us more about our culture and Eastern culture and the interrelationship between the two? Which would be more spectacular? Which more satisfying? Which more fun?
Well you will have guessed that Doo Cot (http://www.doo-cot.com/) won hands down.
On entering the studio we were dressed in kimonos (replete with obi sash) and hotel slippers and ushered through what I took to be a simulacrum of a Shinto Torii gate (yeah all right it was a door) and ushered onto the stage, and in particular onto a round floor cushion. The central conceit of the piece was that we were actors in a Japanese film, although this was really an excuse for a series of set pieces of theatre / film / puppetry / play. We made origami spirit birds. We sang “My Way” in Japanese. We did aerobics. We laughed. A lot. Around us swirled swordplay, anime, puppets, robotics, yakuza, green tea, Godzilla, flower arranging, evil robots, a faceless man, a water feature. At the end we were shown bits of the film, culminating rather worryingly in a repeated loop of us doing the aerobics. On screen I looked like a very nervous Stephen Berkoff in my black kimono but no-one seemed to mind. To get a flavour have a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI1UKmh7-hA&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Edoo%2Dcot%2Ecom%2Fprojectb%2Fexercise%2Ehtml.
My only complaint was that I starting to get a very sore bottom from sitting on the cushion for so long.
If Doo Cot was Tiswas, A Midsummer Night’s Dream was Swap Shop, except that the snotty woman at the booking office wasn’t very keen at all in taking my spare ticket after The Devil Wears Prada fell ill in the morning of the show. “No returns” she said, waving me away with a hand gesture that would make even my post tai chi calm blood boil. My mood wasn’t improved when I saw that I was rewarded for being one of the first to buy tickets, and in the most expensive section, with a seat at the side rather than in front of the stage. Did it matter? Whether it did or didn’t, it did, because I spent quite a lot of time thinking about whether it did, if you know what I mean!
Listen, it wasn’t by a long chalk a bad production. It’s just that after the fun of Doo Cot, and the spectacular and brilliant Platonov, it suffered by comparison. The play was performed in something like 8 languages, so you would have a burst of Hindi then “the course of true love never did run smooth” then a burst of Sanskrit. Shakespeare has many great attributes, but the greatest of them is the beauty of the language, and this was lost. The English parts felt like a compressed text so that those of the audience who, unlike me, hadn’t bothered to read the play before they came, could keep up, but like those dreadful ITV Jane Austen adaptations which convert her work into bodice-ripping romances, you are missing the best bits. And when they did speak English, a lot of it was incomprehensible, a combination of the actor’s accents and the poor acoustics (I could see mikes right in front of me but lord knows where the speakers were).
Except for Bottom. Without doubt one of the finest Bottoms I have ever seen. A big Bottom I grant you, a loud Bottom certainly, but an expressive Bottom, and most importantly, a funny Bottom.
And visually it was stunning. The colour co-ordinated clothes were great. The big set piece stunts were fab – fairies bursting through a paperclad bamboo frame or spinning up and down on ropes and swathes of fabric, Puck spinning a rubbery web around the arguing lovers in the forest, a martial arts style fight between the sets of fairies.
But I couldn’t help feeling that it felt a little bit too much like it was grafted on. It felt too obvious an attempt to fuse Shakespeare with Crouching Tiger and Cirque de Soleil, and just a little bit worthy in its lets all speak our own language so no-one can fully understand the text kind of way.
Good but not great.
And as I lay in bed thinking about the dusty red sand of the enchanted fairy forest, my mind went back to the controlled mayhem of Fold Your Own, and it was Godzilla not Puck who sang me to sleep.
Yours truly,
Robin Goodfellow
INLAND EMPIRE
David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE follows Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive in exploring extreme psychological states, where an individual’s identity fractures and morphs.
Lost Highway was described as a “psychogenic fugue” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugue_state) although I prefer to think of it as moebius strip ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip ) – one twist then another and you are at the point where you began.
In Mulholland Drive the moebius strip was cut down the middle (which produces two interlinked moebius strips).
Well in INLAND EMPIRE the moebius strip is divided and divided and divided again, resulting in a series of linked fragments, looping around one another. Or a psychogenic symphony if you prefer.
It is tempting to view everything Lynch does post Twin Peaks as a puzzle which the viewer is challenged to solve; indeed it is hard not to, given the way that the brain works, always trying to piece together unrelated parcels of information, especially visual information (which is how people end up seeing the face of the Virgin Mary in the bark of a tree). But the films are not designed as mysteries and so any solution is unsatisfactory, is less than the sum of the parts. The films set up a series of resonances, some strong, some faint, which reverberate in the viewer’s mind. Lynch now works with digital video rather than celluloid, and whilst this has meant the loss of some of the beauty of his cinematography, he has gained a degree of freedom which he makes the most of in the 3 hours of INLAND EMPIRE.
Although he will not discuss the meaning of his films, Lynch has been unusually forthcoming of late about his interest in and practice of Transcendental Meditation, and this gives us some clues about HOW to watch the film. In particular I have extracted two principles.
First of all is the idea that “everything is in everything.” Put in terms of the creative process, because all of his ideas come from the same place (Lynch’s unconscious), there is a connection between them, however difficult it might be to detect. This could be a recipe for randomness or gratuitous or wilful weirdness, but I felt he pulled it off for the most part. Words, sounds, images resonate and connect across different segments of the film, even by as simple a device as the physical placing of people or objects in a room being mirrored by other people or objects in another room.
Second is the mental discipline of meditation. As elements in the film resonate, the viewer’s mind goes wandering off to try and understand what is meant by the connection that it senses. But this is to waste mental energy, because the meaning is elusive. Instead you have to let it go, and return to the state of concentrated viewing.
It was also interesting to me that Lynch goes further down the road of metacinema ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta ) than he has gone before, even than in Mulholand Drive – in INLAND EMPIRE not only do we have a character who is an actress blurring her role with (one version of) reality but she twice walks in on and views herself, once on set, the second time in a cinema. One part of me likes to think Lynch has seen The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pervert) and is laying little traps for Mr Žižek and his theories of "the gaze".
I do detect a playful side to the film. Although I say it is not a puzzle to be solved, Lynch plants a number of elements which appear to be code, particularly letters and numbers. There also seem to be coded references to many of his other films, such as a painting of a pair of robins which references Blue Velvet and a man sawing a log in the closing titles which made me think of the log lady in Twin Peaks. Whether these are recurring motifs which mean something to Lynch or traps to entice the puzzle hunter we will probably never know.
So is it any good?
Yeah, of course it is, but in truth one for Lynchofiles and cinema buffs only. It wouldn’t make a good date movie (although I would instantly propose to any girl who thought it did) and if your idea of a good time is a huge tub of the noisiest popcorn available with a bag of Doritos for dessert and a two litre carton of extra sugar non branded cola and your favourite film is Norbit well – oh what am I saying, if that is you, you wont be capable of reading this anyway.
Lost Highway was described as a “psychogenic fugue” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugue_state) although I prefer to think of it as moebius strip ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip ) – one twist then another and you are at the point where you began.
In Mulholland Drive the moebius strip was cut down the middle (which produces two interlinked moebius strips).
Well in INLAND EMPIRE the moebius strip is divided and divided and divided again, resulting in a series of linked fragments, looping around one another. Or a psychogenic symphony if you prefer.
It is tempting to view everything Lynch does post Twin Peaks as a puzzle which the viewer is challenged to solve; indeed it is hard not to, given the way that the brain works, always trying to piece together unrelated parcels of information, especially visual information (which is how people end up seeing the face of the Virgin Mary in the bark of a tree). But the films are not designed as mysteries and so any solution is unsatisfactory, is less than the sum of the parts. The films set up a series of resonances, some strong, some faint, which reverberate in the viewer’s mind. Lynch now works with digital video rather than celluloid, and whilst this has meant the loss of some of the beauty of his cinematography, he has gained a degree of freedom which he makes the most of in the 3 hours of INLAND EMPIRE.
Although he will not discuss the meaning of his films, Lynch has been unusually forthcoming of late about his interest in and practice of Transcendental Meditation, and this gives us some clues about HOW to watch the film. In particular I have extracted two principles.
First of all is the idea that “everything is in everything.” Put in terms of the creative process, because all of his ideas come from the same place (Lynch’s unconscious), there is a connection between them, however difficult it might be to detect. This could be a recipe for randomness or gratuitous or wilful weirdness, but I felt he pulled it off for the most part. Words, sounds, images resonate and connect across different segments of the film, even by as simple a device as the physical placing of people or objects in a room being mirrored by other people or objects in another room.
Second is the mental discipline of meditation. As elements in the film resonate, the viewer’s mind goes wandering off to try and understand what is meant by the connection that it senses. But this is to waste mental energy, because the meaning is elusive. Instead you have to let it go, and return to the state of concentrated viewing.
It was also interesting to me that Lynch goes further down the road of metacinema ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta ) than he has gone before, even than in Mulholand Drive – in INLAND EMPIRE not only do we have a character who is an actress blurring her role with (one version of) reality but she twice walks in on and views herself, once on set, the second time in a cinema. One part of me likes to think Lynch has seen The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pervert) and is laying little traps for Mr Žižek and his theories of "the gaze".
I do detect a playful side to the film. Although I say it is not a puzzle to be solved, Lynch plants a number of elements which appear to be code, particularly letters and numbers. There also seem to be coded references to many of his other films, such as a painting of a pair of robins which references Blue Velvet and a man sawing a log in the closing titles which made me think of the log lady in Twin Peaks. Whether these are recurring motifs which mean something to Lynch or traps to entice the puzzle hunter we will probably never know.
So is it any good?
Yeah, of course it is, but in truth one for Lynchofiles and cinema buffs only. It wouldn’t make a good date movie (although I would instantly propose to any girl who thought it did) and if your idea of a good time is a huge tub of the noisiest popcorn available with a bag of Doritos for dessert and a two litre carton of extra sugar non branded cola and your favourite film is Norbit well – oh what am I saying, if that is you, you wont be capable of reading this anyway.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
The History Boys
And so, at last, to the History Boys, and an inordinately expensive West End matinee in the company of elderly, mostly American, tourists, the kind who wear jackets and ties to go to the theatre. And what a magnificent theatre Wyndham’s is. The theatre was opened in 1899 and to this day retains décor in the Louis XVI style (so my programme tells me), a turquoise, cream and gold colour scheme, and a circular ceiling in the style of Francois Boucher (yeah still typing out the programme). Very grand.
And it is a very enjoyable experience. The play is well written and acted - funny, sad, clever and never boring.
But it is, the more I think about it (and I am nothing if not someone who thinks about it), a very peculiar play (but then Alan Bennett is a very peculiar person). It is not immediately clear when the play is set – the musical interludes suggest the 1980s, the political and cultural references which frame the play suggest the present, but there is also a feel of the 1950s. In truth it is set, both in time and place, in Alan-Bennettsville, in a school where a boy can admit to a crush on another pupil without being bullied and abused into a suicidal state, where kids don’t bring guns and knives and skunk contaminated with shards of glass to school, where a teacher can fondle his pupils and show no shame and still be considered a hero who’s behaviour is morally equivalent to the headmaster trying to fumble with his secretary. Most of the character’s speech patterns are like Bennett’s; slow, careful, clever, and slightly fey, with a touch of whimsy. And he gets away with some stupendous swearing (including the expression “cuntstruck”, marvellous) and a lot of sexual content.
I am not saying Alan-Bennettsville is a bad to place to be – in many ways it is as good a place to be as any you could wish for – but is remarkable how little comment has been made of these aspects of the play.
In summation: enjoyable, worth seeing, and a little peculiar.
And it is a very enjoyable experience. The play is well written and acted - funny, sad, clever and never boring.
But it is, the more I think about it (and I am nothing if not someone who thinks about it), a very peculiar play (but then Alan Bennett is a very peculiar person). It is not immediately clear when the play is set – the musical interludes suggest the 1980s, the political and cultural references which frame the play suggest the present, but there is also a feel of the 1950s. In truth it is set, both in time and place, in Alan-Bennettsville, in a school where a boy can admit to a crush on another pupil without being bullied and abused into a suicidal state, where kids don’t bring guns and knives and skunk contaminated with shards of glass to school, where a teacher can fondle his pupils and show no shame and still be considered a hero who’s behaviour is morally equivalent to the headmaster trying to fumble with his secretary. Most of the character’s speech patterns are like Bennett’s; slow, careful, clever, and slightly fey, with a touch of whimsy. And he gets away with some stupendous swearing (including the expression “cuntstruck”, marvellous) and a lot of sexual content.
I am not saying Alan-Bennettsville is a bad to place to be – in many ways it is as good a place to be as any you could wish for – but is remarkable how little comment has been made of these aspects of the play.
In summation: enjoyable, worth seeing, and a little peculiar.
Mixing It Up
Mixing It is dead, long live Mixing It.
Yes indeed, good news. Resurrection.
Those lovely people at London's "Art Radio Station" Resonance 104.4 fm have taken on the best programme on radio - Mixing It of course - after the BBC's ludicrous decision to axe it in their Trinny and Susannah (as opposed to Susanna and the Magic Orchestra) esque makeover of Radio 3 into some smooth classic-lite sugary pile of shite.
Wednesday nights at 11 pm and renamed "Wheres the skill in that?"
Or streamed at http://www.resonancefm.com/
Check Resonance out anyway - you really never can tell what on earth they might be broacasting at any particular moment.
Yes indeed, good news. Resurrection.
Those lovely people at London's "Art Radio Station" Resonance 104.4 fm have taken on the best programme on radio - Mixing It of course - after the BBC's ludicrous decision to axe it in their Trinny and Susannah (as opposed to Susanna and the Magic Orchestra) esque makeover of Radio 3 into some smooth classic-lite sugary pile of shite.
Wednesday nights at 11 pm and renamed "Wheres the skill in that?"
Or streamed at http://www.resonancefm.com/
Check Resonance out anyway - you really never can tell what on earth they might be broacasting at any particular moment.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Do The Bus Stop
At the risk of sounding like The Latte Days (who is tireless in her pursuit of the idiocy of Barnet Council), Barnet have just put a new bus stop in to serve the Finchley Love Palace, and whilst in my dreams I would be receiving coachloads of nubile Japanese tourists coming for a tour around the gardens, the stop is presently only used by the erratic numbers 82 and 460.
However the stop is long enough to cater for about 4 buses in length.
And guess what? They don't even use it - they don't pull in for fear of not being able to pull out again (something I can associate with), so they just stop in the middle of the road. Doh.
However the stop is long enough to cater for about 4 buses in length.
And guess what? They don't even use it - they don't pull in for fear of not being able to pull out again (something I can associate with), so they just stop in the middle of the road. Doh.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Platonov
There was a moment at the very end of Platonov at the Barbican when the talking was over and I suddenly felt released from 3 ¼ hours of concentration on the actors (performing in Russian), whilst at the same time reading the surtitles which were placed very high in the theatre, and trying to take in all the other things happening on stage: the lights dimmed and then glowed; the dead Platonov lay floating in the onstage river; up above, other characters were sat around a dining table, frozen in time; the light had a golden quality to it; rain poured down onto the set. At that moment it dawned on me, and everyone else in the theatre I suspect, what an incredible event we had just witnessed. I didn’t realise it earlier simply because I had been so absorbed in it all.
An old lady behind me described it as total theatre. I think in particular she was comparing the Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg to Johan Cruyff’s 1970s Dutch team for whom the phrase “total football” was coined. The point of total football was that any player could perform in any position, so defenders would attack and attackers defend. Here similarly the actors swam and jumped, played music and sang, shifted furniture and laid tables for dinner.
The set was magnificent and multi-layered, including the river, a beach, and three levels of house. This allowed there always to be something going on in the background, with characters drifting in and out of scenes, which made sense given Chekov’s complicated multi-layered text.
But what most impressed me was that strange power of osmosis that can exist where things are communicated without being spoken. In particular was a sense of claustrophobia and “stuckism” and ennui. These characters are bored, stuck in their provincial estate, with nothing but gossip and seduction to keep them entertained – in such a backwater a brilliant man like Platonov once was can quickly stagnate into a boorish drunk without anyone noticing. Platonov himself, like his hero Hamlet, is cursed with knowledge of his own inevitable tragedy. All he can do is warn the various women infatuated with him of the inevitable consequence of pursuing him, and admit that he will not be strong enough to resist them if they insist. They cannot resist of course.
Platonov was an early, sprawling, and very long work by Chekov, and whilst there were times in the second half when the production threatened to lose control and shape, it managed to cling onto coherence, gathering momentum in its closing scenes until that final wordless image.
In a word, marvellous.
An old lady behind me described it as total theatre. I think in particular she was comparing the Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg to Johan Cruyff’s 1970s Dutch team for whom the phrase “total football” was coined. The point of total football was that any player could perform in any position, so defenders would attack and attackers defend. Here similarly the actors swam and jumped, played music and sang, shifted furniture and laid tables for dinner.
The set was magnificent and multi-layered, including the river, a beach, and three levels of house. This allowed there always to be something going on in the background, with characters drifting in and out of scenes, which made sense given Chekov’s complicated multi-layered text.
But what most impressed me was that strange power of osmosis that can exist where things are communicated without being spoken. In particular was a sense of claustrophobia and “stuckism” and ennui. These characters are bored, stuck in their provincial estate, with nothing but gossip and seduction to keep them entertained – in such a backwater a brilliant man like Platonov once was can quickly stagnate into a boorish drunk without anyone noticing. Platonov himself, like his hero Hamlet, is cursed with knowledge of his own inevitable tragedy. All he can do is warn the various women infatuated with him of the inevitable consequence of pursuing him, and admit that he will not be strong enough to resist them if they insist. They cannot resist of course.
Platonov was an early, sprawling, and very long work by Chekov, and whilst there were times in the second half when the production threatened to lose control and shape, it managed to cling onto coherence, gathering momentum in its closing scenes until that final wordless image.
In a word, marvellous.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
AIR - The Forum - 16/3/07
Sometimes you know words can't describe. It was lovely. Here are some photos instead.
Optronica - Semiconductor/Atlas/Fennesz
So how do you listen to music? Do you concentrate on every note, perhaps following the score as someone at the Mahler gig was doing? Or just let it wash over you, and enjoy the way your mind wanders?
I spent a large part of my visit to Optronica, London’s leading festival dedicated to the fusion of music and visuals, or something like that, contemplating this question. The visual part of the mix was somewhere between the kind of vj (as opposed to dj) experience you get in clubs, and digital art, and was mixed or generated live, so a similar question to that posed above arises – how do you watch it, in the absence of narrative, plot, characters and conventional aesthetics?
I went to a double header at IMAX.
First up were Semiconductor showing two pieces. In the first the visuals were generated by the soundtrack, which was kind of tinkly abstract electronica. The visuals were a bit frantic, mostly lines or polygons, and, large on the IMAX screen, all the frenetic flickering was somewhat nausea inducing. I could see one of the artist’s laptop monitor and it looked much better on that than on the big screen. The best parts resembled a digital walk through of some weird architect’s world where physical objects seemed to grow and mutate organically and a little sinisterly.
The second piece, Brilliant Noise, was much more interesting, and originated from Semiconductor’s period as artists in residence at NASA. The visuals were I think taken from film of activity on the sun’s surface. It started off looking like the northern lights in reverse, but became more abstract and affecting, cosmic and sinewy and Blakean. Again the soundtrack was abstract electronica, I think they said generated by the brightness of the images.
The second half was a collaboration between Charles Atlas (him again – see my review of Anthony and the Johnson’s Turning last year) on visuals and Christian Fennesz on laptop and guitar. Fennesz is one of a number of electronic music makers heavily influenced by those heroes of the noisey shoegazing fraternity, My Bloody Valentine, so there were lots of droney loud guitar noise-soups, although I preferred his quieter ambient moments. Atlas cut up bits of old films with some sparingly used and pretty special effects in much the way a laptop musican would, layering loops on top of each other with variations and variable synching. The result was hypnotic and yes did seem to send my mind racing in a way similar to a pure musical experience, and I found I had to abandon concentrating on specific images and just let the general feeling of them wash over me. Particularly effective was the repeated image of a flame being applied to handcuffed hands which writhe as they try to escape. I also enjoyed a segment where the left side of a face kept blurring which had me wondering if something was going wrong with my neurological system. I would even go so far as to describe some of it as being Lynchian, that peculiar hybrid of the weird and the curiously, emotionally, affecting, and there’s no higher praise in my book
In conclusion, the musical aspects were a little disappointing – nothing new or original there. The visuals were interesting, but at the time left me wondering whether they were as ephemeral as the visuals in a club, or as unsatisfying as the video art that’s all the rage these days. But to my surprise, both the sunspot piece by Semiconductor and Atlas’s work have stayed with me, so I have to allow that indeed there was something interesting and meaningful going on.
I spent a large part of my visit to Optronica, London’s leading festival dedicated to the fusion of music and visuals, or something like that, contemplating this question. The visual part of the mix was somewhere between the kind of vj (as opposed to dj) experience you get in clubs, and digital art, and was mixed or generated live, so a similar question to that posed above arises – how do you watch it, in the absence of narrative, plot, characters and conventional aesthetics?
I went to a double header at IMAX.
First up were Semiconductor showing two pieces. In the first the visuals were generated by the soundtrack, which was kind of tinkly abstract electronica. The visuals were a bit frantic, mostly lines or polygons, and, large on the IMAX screen, all the frenetic flickering was somewhat nausea inducing. I could see one of the artist’s laptop monitor and it looked much better on that than on the big screen. The best parts resembled a digital walk through of some weird architect’s world where physical objects seemed to grow and mutate organically and a little sinisterly.
The second piece, Brilliant Noise, was much more interesting, and originated from Semiconductor’s period as artists in residence at NASA. The visuals were I think taken from film of activity on the sun’s surface. It started off looking like the northern lights in reverse, but became more abstract and affecting, cosmic and sinewy and Blakean. Again the soundtrack was abstract electronica, I think they said generated by the brightness of the images.
The second half was a collaboration between Charles Atlas (him again – see my review of Anthony and the Johnson’s Turning last year) on visuals and Christian Fennesz on laptop and guitar. Fennesz is one of a number of electronic music makers heavily influenced by those heroes of the noisey shoegazing fraternity, My Bloody Valentine, so there were lots of droney loud guitar noise-soups, although I preferred his quieter ambient moments. Atlas cut up bits of old films with some sparingly used and pretty special effects in much the way a laptop musican would, layering loops on top of each other with variations and variable synching. The result was hypnotic and yes did seem to send my mind racing in a way similar to a pure musical experience, and I found I had to abandon concentrating on specific images and just let the general feeling of them wash over me. Particularly effective was the repeated image of a flame being applied to handcuffed hands which writhe as they try to escape. I also enjoyed a segment where the left side of a face kept blurring which had me wondering if something was going wrong with my neurological system. I would even go so far as to describe some of it as being Lynchian, that peculiar hybrid of the weird and the curiously, emotionally, affecting, and there’s no higher praise in my book
In conclusion, the musical aspects were a little disappointing – nothing new or original there. The visuals were interesting, but at the time left me wondering whether they were as ephemeral as the visuals in a club, or as unsatisfying as the video art that’s all the rage these days. But to my surprise, both the sunspot piece by Semiconductor and Atlas’s work have stayed with me, so I have to allow that indeed there was something interesting and meaningful going on.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
weird bird
anyone know what that bird is that seems to be everywhere at the moment making a noise like a ruler being twanged on the side of a desk?
Monday, March 12, 2007
Mahler 2
At the very core of String Theory is the idea that the universe, when divided into the smallest indivisible unit of stuff, is made of one dimensional vibrating strings. This theory is exciting to new age types because, well it’s the vibes man.
It’s an attractive theory to me because it might go some way to explaining why music has the ability to so utterly transform us. It’s not just the melody, although that can make us cry or transport us instantly to where we were ten or so years ago, as we sat in a little Crêperie up a mountain in France hearing Air’s “Kelly Watch the Stars” for the first time. It’s not just the rhythm, although that can, with a grunt from the Godfather and a riff from the funky drummer hitting it on the one, make us dance like crazed animals. It’s not just the lyrics, which, in a tune like the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back”, can make you declare undying love for an ex-girlfriend in the middle of an office party on a boat on the Thames with no possible escape from the humiliation.
No, there is more going on. It’s the frequencies.
“Can we change these frequencies?
Can we trade them in for dreams?
Can we stay asleep for them?
And Lucifer, if we say please, can we keep them?”
sang Thee More Shallows in their post-rock classic “Walk of Shame” and yes indeed, although for another day, we know that popular music is the devil’s music, stemming as it does from the moment Robert Johnson stood at the Crossroads and sold his soul in return for immortality. But all that tells us is that the vibes can be used as a force for good or a force for evil (although the devil has all the best tunes).
In some of last years more experimental gigs, particularly Ryoji Ikeda at the Barbican, you could feel the vibrations of different low end frequencies scanning your body, the bass mashing up your legs, stomach, and chest. Similarly some of the weird noises in the Photophonic Experiment you felt as much as heard.
And some music has the ability to make you feel like your head is being washed and massaged – in this category I would include Mystical Sun. His cd “Primordial Atmospheres” boasts of using “brain entraining binaural beats” to “induce and enhance the body’s autonomic responses to primordial sounds”. You are advised to listen through headphones as some of the tracks are designed to co-ordinate and balance the left and right hemispheres of your brain. If you think that sounds daft, consider that it has long been suggested that listening to Mozart’s works for two pianos will improve children’s intelligence; the suggestion is that something in the interweaving patterns stimulates the brain.
All of which is a round about way of explaining how it came to pass that, in my efforts to open up the channels in my brain, I found myself saying to Big Ol that I was thinking of exploring classical music. “Try Mahler’s Second” said Big Ol. That was Tuesday last week. And with remarkable serendipity, I went on the net and found the LSO were performing Mahler 2 (as they call it) last night and that there was one seat left in the whole of the Barbican Hall, in a good position, and it quickly had my name on it.
It must be 8 years since my last classical gig, a solo recital on the fortepiano (as opposed to the pianoforte) by a Russian lady with very small hands who my colleague Lady M. of K. had helped secure a UK passport for. Lady M was now trying to secure a nice Jewish husband for her client. I was to be that man. I took my brother along for moral support and it was a good job I did because I could not keep my eyes open during the concert at the Wigmore Hall. Only his constant nudging saved me from humiliation. Well I didn’t fancy her (small hands you see, no good) so that was that.
Back at the Barbican, I allowed myself a coffee (from a big metal flask behind the bar, no milk – The Latte Days would not have been impressed) and, a little nervous, settled into my seat. My goodness there were a lot of people on stage. 200 odd at least.
They say Mahler was Jewish but I have my doubts because 100 or so were singers who just sat there until ten minutes before the end – you’d never have got away with that at Farnham & Co – “do you really need 100, can’t you make do with 50, and give them something to do, you can’t just have them sitting around doing nothing, I’m certainly not going to pay them for just sitting there…And all those violins, ach!)
The first movement or act (whatever you call it) went quite well – I got myself into a good mental zone. Then there was a little break and an outpouring of suppressed coughing from the audience, accompanied by some childish sniggering at the silliness of the coughing. And I made a fatal error. I popped a Halls Soother in my mouth. I thought there would be a longer pause, but no, they were off, and into a very quiet section. I could hear the sweet rattling against my teeth – I should say that there was an effect not unlike meditation, whereby every sound around you becomes amplified. Every time I swallowed, the glandular squeezing sound seemed to echo around me, and to make it worse my saliva ducts went into frenzied overdrive. The lady next to me seemed to be staring hard at me from the very corner of her eye (or maybe it was my imagination). Time slowed. The sweet would not dissolve. Oh if only Big Ol were here, I moaned (silently), he would not have let me make such a schoolboy error. The second act finished and I crunched the Soother away with relish and relief.
From there on things seemed to go very quickly indeed. There were some lovely bits, some loud bits, another ghostly experience when the orchestra fell silent, but the conductor carried on and music wafted in from outside (at first I thought it was pre-recorded, but I saw in the programme notes there were a bunch of people listed as being “outside the hall" – strangely enough I saw the other side of this the night before - waiting to go into the Mira Calix gig – as the fella was toasting my mozzarella and tomato panini in the hall of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, some musicians gathered by the entrance to the theatre, played a burst of some marching music, then buggered off).
Things got very dramatic, the chorus rose, then a bit later they sang too. A couple of women in nice frocks did some singing too. Then everyone played and sang together – it was loud, dramatic and very nice. Suddenly it was Austin Rover, game over. Everyone looked very happy. There was a lot of clapping. And I was home by 10.
Well, I enjoyed it. Maybe I was a little uncomfortable, as in out of my comfort zone, which is always a good thing. I know my mind was racing for a lot of the time with quite profound thoughts, but as soon as it was over I couldn’t remember any of them. The time passed very quickly too, which must be a good sign. I would definitely do it again.
There was a lady in the orchestra who looked a bit like a pretty Asian girl who was at Farnham & Co. In the night, I had a very pleasant dream about that girl, culminating in her enveloping me in her surprisingly warm and soft breasts (like freshly baked rolls they were).
And waking up this morning, I do feel as though my brain has had quite a good work out.
Must have been the vibes.
It’s an attractive theory to me because it might go some way to explaining why music has the ability to so utterly transform us. It’s not just the melody, although that can make us cry or transport us instantly to where we were ten or so years ago, as we sat in a little Crêperie up a mountain in France hearing Air’s “Kelly Watch the Stars” for the first time. It’s not just the rhythm, although that can, with a grunt from the Godfather and a riff from the funky drummer hitting it on the one, make us dance like crazed animals. It’s not just the lyrics, which, in a tune like the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back”, can make you declare undying love for an ex-girlfriend in the middle of an office party on a boat on the Thames with no possible escape from the humiliation.
No, there is more going on. It’s the frequencies.
“Can we change these frequencies?
Can we trade them in for dreams?
Can we stay asleep for them?
And Lucifer, if we say please, can we keep them?”
sang Thee More Shallows in their post-rock classic “Walk of Shame” and yes indeed, although for another day, we know that popular music is the devil’s music, stemming as it does from the moment Robert Johnson stood at the Crossroads and sold his soul in return for immortality. But all that tells us is that the vibes can be used as a force for good or a force for evil (although the devil has all the best tunes).
In some of last years more experimental gigs, particularly Ryoji Ikeda at the Barbican, you could feel the vibrations of different low end frequencies scanning your body, the bass mashing up your legs, stomach, and chest. Similarly some of the weird noises in the Photophonic Experiment you felt as much as heard.
And some music has the ability to make you feel like your head is being washed and massaged – in this category I would include Mystical Sun. His cd “Primordial Atmospheres” boasts of using “brain entraining binaural beats” to “induce and enhance the body’s autonomic responses to primordial sounds”. You are advised to listen through headphones as some of the tracks are designed to co-ordinate and balance the left and right hemispheres of your brain. If you think that sounds daft, consider that it has long been suggested that listening to Mozart’s works for two pianos will improve children’s intelligence; the suggestion is that something in the interweaving patterns stimulates the brain.
All of which is a round about way of explaining how it came to pass that, in my efforts to open up the channels in my brain, I found myself saying to Big Ol that I was thinking of exploring classical music. “Try Mahler’s Second” said Big Ol. That was Tuesday last week. And with remarkable serendipity, I went on the net and found the LSO were performing Mahler 2 (as they call it) last night and that there was one seat left in the whole of the Barbican Hall, in a good position, and it quickly had my name on it.
It must be 8 years since my last classical gig, a solo recital on the fortepiano (as opposed to the pianoforte) by a Russian lady with very small hands who my colleague Lady M. of K. had helped secure a UK passport for. Lady M was now trying to secure a nice Jewish husband for her client. I was to be that man. I took my brother along for moral support and it was a good job I did because I could not keep my eyes open during the concert at the Wigmore Hall. Only his constant nudging saved me from humiliation. Well I didn’t fancy her (small hands you see, no good) so that was that.
Back at the Barbican, I allowed myself a coffee (from a big metal flask behind the bar, no milk – The Latte Days would not have been impressed) and, a little nervous, settled into my seat. My goodness there were a lot of people on stage. 200 odd at least.
They say Mahler was Jewish but I have my doubts because 100 or so were singers who just sat there until ten minutes before the end – you’d never have got away with that at Farnham & Co – “do you really need 100, can’t you make do with 50, and give them something to do, you can’t just have them sitting around doing nothing, I’m certainly not going to pay them for just sitting there…And all those violins, ach!)
The first movement or act (whatever you call it) went quite well – I got myself into a good mental zone. Then there was a little break and an outpouring of suppressed coughing from the audience, accompanied by some childish sniggering at the silliness of the coughing. And I made a fatal error. I popped a Halls Soother in my mouth. I thought there would be a longer pause, but no, they were off, and into a very quiet section. I could hear the sweet rattling against my teeth – I should say that there was an effect not unlike meditation, whereby every sound around you becomes amplified. Every time I swallowed, the glandular squeezing sound seemed to echo around me, and to make it worse my saliva ducts went into frenzied overdrive. The lady next to me seemed to be staring hard at me from the very corner of her eye (or maybe it was my imagination). Time slowed. The sweet would not dissolve. Oh if only Big Ol were here, I moaned (silently), he would not have let me make such a schoolboy error. The second act finished and I crunched the Soother away with relish and relief.
From there on things seemed to go very quickly indeed. There were some lovely bits, some loud bits, another ghostly experience when the orchestra fell silent, but the conductor carried on and music wafted in from outside (at first I thought it was pre-recorded, but I saw in the programme notes there were a bunch of people listed as being “outside the hall" – strangely enough I saw the other side of this the night before - waiting to go into the Mira Calix gig – as the fella was toasting my mozzarella and tomato panini in the hall of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, some musicians gathered by the entrance to the theatre, played a burst of some marching music, then buggered off).
Things got very dramatic, the chorus rose, then a bit later they sang too. A couple of women in nice frocks did some singing too. Then everyone played and sang together – it was loud, dramatic and very nice. Suddenly it was Austin Rover, game over. Everyone looked very happy. There was a lot of clapping. And I was home by 10.
Well, I enjoyed it. Maybe I was a little uncomfortable, as in out of my comfort zone, which is always a good thing. I know my mind was racing for a lot of the time with quite profound thoughts, but as soon as it was over I couldn’t remember any of them. The time passed very quickly too, which must be a good sign. I would definitely do it again.
There was a lady in the orchestra who looked a bit like a pretty Asian girl who was at Farnham & Co. In the night, I had a very pleasant dream about that girl, culminating in her enveloping me in her surprisingly warm and soft breasts (like freshly baked rolls they were).
And waking up this morning, I do feel as though my brain has had quite a good work out.
Must have been the vibes.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Mira Calix / the Man of Mode
On stage, against a black curtain, stand two musicians, each wearing a black suit and black t shirt. The only light comes from a small bulb set into the music stands in front of them. One holds a violin, the other a cello.
They have been playing a repeated riff for some time. Only now do I realise that their hands have ceased to move, although the sounds of their instruments fill the room.
Further along the stage is a table draped in a black cloth. On the table is a box with a dozen or more wires poking out. Next to the box is a silver laptop. The only light comes from a small lamp in the corner of the table and from the half bitten apple logo on the laptop.
Sitting behind the table, mostly hidden from view, Mira Calix is weaving a ghostly magic as compelling as any Victorian table turner. Instead of ectoplasm, her materials are electricity and sound – electroplasm.
I am in the Purcell Room at the South Bank. Next door, in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment are recreating a long lost opera. In here, I feel that I am listening to the Orchestra of the Age of Disenlightenment, a new variant classical music for our time of confusion and disarray. It is a thick sound, like quicksand, a sound you sink into. But sinking in, you find a strange sense of calm, of space to think in.
Some of the audience, expecting beats and bleeps, walk out. They are young and our society has lost the ability to sit and listen, the pleasure of losing oneself in music. Their thumbs ache to get back to texting and gaming. I am only just relearning the art of stillness, and this proves the perfect gig at the perfect moment.
Earlier we were entertained by Gong Gong, an arty French electro outfit who also used chamber instruments in their act, to more punk-funk effect. Members of the group busied themselves hanging pieces of cardboard or balloons around the set onto which frantic images were projected. It was impossible to dislike them although I won’t be rushing out to buy their music.
Earlier still, earlier even than the couple of hours spent in a very weird pub opposite Waterloo, a kind of Swiss ski-ing chalet, an alpine wooden box, squeezed into a railway arch, where I watched the United game, I was at the National to see The Man of Mode.
The best thing about it was the production, meaning the design and thinking behind the thing. It was set in a very contemporary London of Sunday supplement interior designs, Selfridges, mobiles and laptops, hoodies and free running. Very flashy and stylish. One of the subplots, concerning an arranged marriage, was played by Asian actors cos like you get arranged marriages in some Asian families (they could have gone Charedi but I don’t think the black hats and coats would have fitted the colour scheme very well). Ok, so, I enjoyed the cleverness of how they made the text fit the setting, or was it vice versa.
I had two main problems though. First was the very poor vocal projection of the actors, particularly Tom Hardy in the lead role of Dorimant, and I was in the front stalls – I hate to think what it was like for the people at the back. I couldn’t help feeling he was picked for his physique (he spent large parts of the show with his shirt off) than for his acting. The second problem was that I just did not find the acting sparky enough – Restoration sex comedies hang entirely on the idea of the deliciousness of the seduction game. Of the three women pursued by Dorimant, only Harriet, played by Amber Agar, had a sense of sparkle and energy about her. Again Tom Hardy’s flat Dorimant was part of the problem – the character is frequently described as a “wit” as opposed to a “fop” but you got no sense of this from his performance, nor was there any sizzle between him and the ladies he was trying to seduce, with the exception of one moment when he found his head between the legs of Mrs Loveit. Aside from that moment, you were hard pressed to believe that Mrs Loveit loved it at all.
I wondered whether this was intentional – that in giving the play a modern setting, Nicholas Hytner's direction had gone a step further and attempted to capture the casualness of modern crass sexual behaviour, driven by mass media and boredom booze pills and throw(n)away morality, but I am not convinced. In any event that would be where the comparison between the Restoration period and now would end. For there was nothing casual about the sex in Restoration times – it was a very serious pursuit, a science and an art. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so down on the play if I could have heard half of what the actors were saying! Then again, maybe all the surface flashiness masking the emptiness lying beneath really was a production for our times?
They have been playing a repeated riff for some time. Only now do I realise that their hands have ceased to move, although the sounds of their instruments fill the room.
Further along the stage is a table draped in a black cloth. On the table is a box with a dozen or more wires poking out. Next to the box is a silver laptop. The only light comes from a small lamp in the corner of the table and from the half bitten apple logo on the laptop.
Sitting behind the table, mostly hidden from view, Mira Calix is weaving a ghostly magic as compelling as any Victorian table turner. Instead of ectoplasm, her materials are electricity and sound – electroplasm.
I am in the Purcell Room at the South Bank. Next door, in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment are recreating a long lost opera. In here, I feel that I am listening to the Orchestra of the Age of Disenlightenment, a new variant classical music for our time of confusion and disarray. It is a thick sound, like quicksand, a sound you sink into. But sinking in, you find a strange sense of calm, of space to think in.
Some of the audience, expecting beats and bleeps, walk out. They are young and our society has lost the ability to sit and listen, the pleasure of losing oneself in music. Their thumbs ache to get back to texting and gaming. I am only just relearning the art of stillness, and this proves the perfect gig at the perfect moment.
Earlier we were entertained by Gong Gong, an arty French electro outfit who also used chamber instruments in their act, to more punk-funk effect. Members of the group busied themselves hanging pieces of cardboard or balloons around the set onto which frantic images were projected. It was impossible to dislike them although I won’t be rushing out to buy their music.
Earlier still, earlier even than the couple of hours spent in a very weird pub opposite Waterloo, a kind of Swiss ski-ing chalet, an alpine wooden box, squeezed into a railway arch, where I watched the United game, I was at the National to see The Man of Mode.
The best thing about it was the production, meaning the design and thinking behind the thing. It was set in a very contemporary London of Sunday supplement interior designs, Selfridges, mobiles and laptops, hoodies and free running. Very flashy and stylish. One of the subplots, concerning an arranged marriage, was played by Asian actors cos like you get arranged marriages in some Asian families (they could have gone Charedi but I don’t think the black hats and coats would have fitted the colour scheme very well). Ok, so, I enjoyed the cleverness of how they made the text fit the setting, or was it vice versa.
I had two main problems though. First was the very poor vocal projection of the actors, particularly Tom Hardy in the lead role of Dorimant, and I was in the front stalls – I hate to think what it was like for the people at the back. I couldn’t help feeling he was picked for his physique (he spent large parts of the show with his shirt off) than for his acting. The second problem was that I just did not find the acting sparky enough – Restoration sex comedies hang entirely on the idea of the deliciousness of the seduction game. Of the three women pursued by Dorimant, only Harriet, played by Amber Agar, had a sense of sparkle and energy about her. Again Tom Hardy’s flat Dorimant was part of the problem – the character is frequently described as a “wit” as opposed to a “fop” but you got no sense of this from his performance, nor was there any sizzle between him and the ladies he was trying to seduce, with the exception of one moment when he found his head between the legs of Mrs Loveit. Aside from that moment, you were hard pressed to believe that Mrs Loveit loved it at all.
I wondered whether this was intentional – that in giving the play a modern setting, Nicholas Hytner's direction had gone a step further and attempted to capture the casualness of modern crass sexual behaviour, driven by mass media and boredom booze pills and throw(n)away morality, but I am not convinced. In any event that would be where the comparison between the Restoration period and now would end. For there was nothing casual about the sex in Restoration times – it was a very serious pursuit, a science and an art. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so down on the play if I could have heard half of what the actors were saying! Then again, maybe all the surface flashiness masking the emptiness lying beneath really was a production for our times?
Friday, March 09, 2007
The Seagull
“Was that Ibsen or Chekov?” said the very smartly turned out old boy in front of me as we shuffled out of the Royal Court theatre. I know the feeling. After two Ibsens, time for the first in a series of three Chekovs, the next two in Russian with English surtitles, so this was a good warm up.
One of the Sunday Telegraph’s critics (not Charles Spencer, who seems to find everything wonderful) is part of something called CRAP (I kid you not) – the Campaign for Real Acting Performances or something like that, though it could as easily have been Critics Really Are Planks. What CRAP object to are “movie stars” taking a turn on the West End stage thereby displacing the “better” traditional thesps. They appear to have taken a particularly dim view of Daniel Radcliffe waving his quidditch about on stage.
This was one of those kinds of performance that CRAP object to, with a cast including Mackenzie Crook, Kristin Scott Thomas and, erm, Art Malik.
Just to prove what a load of crap CRAP is, this was a wonderful production. There wasn’t any sense of “isn’t that the bloke off…” although I would admit to a little frission down below when the lovely KST made her entrance.
It was acted in a very naturalistic, downbeat style which is much talked about but little seen. For me it is a style that works much better that the declamatory, shouty “I am an Actaaaw” style still prevalent.
The Royal Court was instantly one of my favourite theatre spaces – small with an old fashioned feeling in the auditorium, comfy light brown leather seats, a rather nice looking bar and restaurant area. I felt very much at home with the over 60s who made up the majority of the weekday matinee crowd.
All in all good fun, and the best thing KST’s done since “Under the Bitter Cherry Moon.”
One of the Sunday Telegraph’s critics (not Charles Spencer, who seems to find everything wonderful) is part of something called CRAP (I kid you not) – the Campaign for Real Acting Performances or something like that, though it could as easily have been Critics Really Are Planks. What CRAP object to are “movie stars” taking a turn on the West End stage thereby displacing the “better” traditional thesps. They appear to have taken a particularly dim view of Daniel Radcliffe waving his quidditch about on stage.
This was one of those kinds of performance that CRAP object to, with a cast including Mackenzie Crook, Kristin Scott Thomas and, erm, Art Malik.
Just to prove what a load of crap CRAP is, this was a wonderful production. There wasn’t any sense of “isn’t that the bloke off…” although I would admit to a little frission down below when the lovely KST made her entrance.
It was acted in a very naturalistic, downbeat style which is much talked about but little seen. For me it is a style that works much better that the declamatory, shouty “I am an Actaaaw” style still prevalent.
The Royal Court was instantly one of my favourite theatre spaces – small with an old fashioned feeling in the auditorium, comfy light brown leather seats, a rather nice looking bar and restaurant area. I felt very much at home with the over 60s who made up the majority of the weekday matinee crowd.
All in all good fun, and the best thing KST’s done since “Under the Bitter Cherry Moon.”
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
The Illusionist / Peer Gynt
I spent so much time at JBW (see below) that when Monday came round I had that peculiar feeling you have when you get back home after a couple of weeks on holiday; you are back in the routine but everything seems just a little bit different, fresher perhaps.
This would seem to have been the perfect mood to encounter The Illusionist. It stars Edward Norton who, like his brother Graham, is an odd looking chap, if only marginally less camp. He plays somebody called Abramovitch, who changes his name to Eisenheim to escape persecution by Arsene Wenger and his goon(er)s who don’t like him trying to shtup some posh bird called Sophie. Or something like that. He is haunted by his inability to disappear out of trouble and hence becomes a magician and medium. He is also haunted by the apparition of a terrible goatee beard and a Melvyn Bragg like bouffant hairdo. He is not the only one. “I imagined you with shorter hair and no beard” says Sophie when they are reunited years later; arguably the funniest line in cinematic history since “I want an extreme close-up on the kugel”.
It’s a bit dull and plodding and even I, who never can, could see the big twist coming a mile off. The time out reviewer tried to persuade me of a “Usual Suspects” like double twist (like the twist might only be a twist in the mind of the narrator, and can we really trust him) but I don’t buy that.
It’s shot in nice sepia tones and the magic performances, in a creaky old theatre not unlike the creaky old theatre I saw “Under the Lintel” in with my creaky old friends, are atmospheric, as is the depiction of turn of fin de siècle Vienna. Despite the name business, the film shies away from any suggestion that the aristos are motivated in their hatred of Abramovitch by anti-Semitism, or even mentioning that he might be Jewish, instead employing a semiological approach whereby Abramovitch and his “peasant” cohorts are signified by their wearing Pinter hats. Also Norton can’t seem to decide if he is going for a Viennese or Golders Green accent.
Talking of weird accents (nice and smooth transition if I say so myself) the evening found me at the Barbican for the National Theatre of Iceland’s production based on (rather than of) Peer Gynt. I took the precaution of reading the play beforehand, not knowing what language it would be in (they performed In English as it happened). I was glad I did, because I found the diction of the cast to be poor. OK English isn’t their first language but it was all a bit shouty.
Having said that, in the first half it didn’t matter at all, as the visual poetry of the production carried me along. Set in a lunatic asylum of dirty white walls and old fashioned hospital beds, the characters and actors were able to weave in and out of consciousness as though conjured by Peer Gynt’s, or Ibsen’s, or my imagination.
The second half was heavily edited from the text and as a result seemed to lose its centre; ironic in a play that’s all about whether the central character has been true to himself. The humour and energy of the first half seemed to dissipate and I found myself losing interest in Peer’s existential struggle. Then there was the crass reference to the Iraq war thrown in for good measure. And finally the production downplayed any sense that Peer finds redemption in the love of the long suffering Solveig, preferring a bleaker ending.
So a game of two halves, a powerful and memorable production but one which seemed to go astray somewhere after the interval.
This would seem to have been the perfect mood to encounter The Illusionist. It stars Edward Norton who, like his brother Graham, is an odd looking chap, if only marginally less camp. He plays somebody called Abramovitch, who changes his name to Eisenheim to escape persecution by Arsene Wenger and his goon(er)s who don’t like him trying to shtup some posh bird called Sophie. Or something like that. He is haunted by his inability to disappear out of trouble and hence becomes a magician and medium. He is also haunted by the apparition of a terrible goatee beard and a Melvyn Bragg like bouffant hairdo. He is not the only one. “I imagined you with shorter hair and no beard” says Sophie when they are reunited years later; arguably the funniest line in cinematic history since “I want an extreme close-up on the kugel”.
It’s a bit dull and plodding and even I, who never can, could see the big twist coming a mile off. The time out reviewer tried to persuade me of a “Usual Suspects” like double twist (like the twist might only be a twist in the mind of the narrator, and can we really trust him) but I don’t buy that.
It’s shot in nice sepia tones and the magic performances, in a creaky old theatre not unlike the creaky old theatre I saw “Under the Lintel” in with my creaky old friends, are atmospheric, as is the depiction of turn of fin de siècle Vienna. Despite the name business, the film shies away from any suggestion that the aristos are motivated in their hatred of Abramovitch by anti-Semitism, or even mentioning that he might be Jewish, instead employing a semiological approach whereby Abramovitch and his “peasant” cohorts are signified by their wearing Pinter hats. Also Norton can’t seem to decide if he is going for a Viennese or Golders Green accent.
Talking of weird accents (nice and smooth transition if I say so myself) the evening found me at the Barbican for the National Theatre of Iceland’s production based on (rather than of) Peer Gynt. I took the precaution of reading the play beforehand, not knowing what language it would be in (they performed In English as it happened). I was glad I did, because I found the diction of the cast to be poor. OK English isn’t their first language but it was all a bit shouty.
Having said that, in the first half it didn’t matter at all, as the visual poetry of the production carried me along. Set in a lunatic asylum of dirty white walls and old fashioned hospital beds, the characters and actors were able to weave in and out of consciousness as though conjured by Peer Gynt’s, or Ibsen’s, or my imagination.
The second half was heavily edited from the text and as a result seemed to lose its centre; ironic in a play that’s all about whether the central character has been true to himself. The humour and energy of the first half seemed to dissipate and I found myself losing interest in Peer’s existential struggle. Then there was the crass reference to the Iraq war thrown in for good measure. And finally the production downplayed any sense that Peer finds redemption in the love of the long suffering Solveig, preferring a bleaker ending.
So a game of two halves, a powerful and memorable production but one which seemed to go astray somewhere after the interval.
TWTJBWTW
So that was the Jewish Book Week that was.
Here’s a list of things I never thought I would hear spoken there.
“My brother was the first soldier to be thrown out of the IDF for practising paganism.”
“I’m a great fan of perversions – I’ve tried to engage in as many of them as I can.”
“Have you read the New Testament? It’s a beautiful thing. It’s all there in Isaiah you know. Would you like a leaflet?”
“I gather Kristeva and Butler are out, Lacan is in.”
Highlights for me were Etgar Keret for his warmth and ability to reduce great stories to a very macro human level, and Joann Sfar for his energy and enthusiasm.
I also enjoyed Edgardo Cozarinsky and Gabriel Josipovici who both spoke very interestingly about their creative struggles and techniques.
Duds of the week were Jonny Geller / “Sol Bernstein” for the least funny discussion of Jewish comedy since the children of Israel started worshipping the Golden Calf, and Judith Butler for managing to speak for half an hour deconstructing the idea that Israel was acting in self-defence during the Lebanon war last year, whilst not once mentioning Hizbollah.
Here’s a list of things I never thought I would hear spoken there.
“My brother was the first soldier to be thrown out of the IDF for practising paganism.”
“I’m a great fan of perversions – I’ve tried to engage in as many of them as I can.”
“Have you read the New Testament? It’s a beautiful thing. It’s all there in Isaiah you know. Would you like a leaflet?”
“I gather Kristeva and Butler are out, Lacan is in.”
Highlights for me were Etgar Keret for his warmth and ability to reduce great stories to a very macro human level, and Joann Sfar for his energy and enthusiasm.
I also enjoyed Edgardo Cozarinsky and Gabriel Josipovici who both spoke very interestingly about their creative struggles and techniques.
Duds of the week were Jonny Geller / “Sol Bernstein” for the least funny discussion of Jewish comedy since the children of Israel started worshipping the Golden Calf, and Judith Butler for managing to speak for half an hour deconstructing the idea that Israel was acting in self-defence during the Lebanon war last year, whilst not once mentioning Hizbollah.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
