Do Not Go Gentle?
I bought a magnifying glass today. I'm not a stamp collector, nor am I dressing up as Sherlock Holmes for Halloween. I bought it to read. Certain things. Despite my very good vision check last month, I still find myself straining and squinting at some fine print. Dear Penguin Classics, I know David Copperfield is a long book, but do you have to squeeze that sparkling prose into a 6.5 point font!
The magnifier joins my menagerie of medications, supplements, ointments, braces, support socks, and brain boosters that help me get through the days with reasonable vim, vigor and dignity. At age 64, I think I’ll pass on Dylan Thomas’s urging to "…not go gentle into that good night.” If Diclofenac Sodium Topical Gel, 1% (NSAID) gently keeps my arthritis in check, I’m all in.
In my younger days, you might say I was old before my time. At least I acted that way. I discovered jazz music in high school, and while I didn’t doff a beret or start smoking French cigarettes, I wore my artsy pretensions on my sleeve. At my sports-crazy university, I opted out of wearing green on football Saturdays, preferring to wander the quiet campus and perhaps find an empty practice room and plink around on a piano for an hour. College concerts? Naaah. Who wants to see this Bruce Springsteen guy at the height of his E-Street powers? Not my 20-year-old self. My idea of a music event was banging around on a piano at the campus coffee house “Open Stage,” trying to channel the spirit of Keith Jarrett.
Now that my age is real and bodily, I try to keep my 20-year-old self at bay. I well remember a time when roads not taken kept me awake at night, when failures—major and minor—weighed heavy in my soul. Perhaps the increasingly fraught and perilous world has shrunk my horizon. Perhaps this is the standard operating procedure for someone in the middle of his seventh decade.
These days, various skeletons and gravestones in my well decorated neighborhood do their darnedest to put me in mind of mortality. It’s all kid’s stuff, of course, another all-American transformation of timeless ritual into a chance to sell stuff. But the symbols are still potent and they stick in my craw, as they should. On my best days, I simply shake them off, perhaps going home to sample my own trick-or-treat stash: calcium citrate, Losartan, turmeric, Crestor, fish oil, etc.
Happy Halloween!
Still Here
Clyfford Still was an iconoclast and notoriously persnickety about showing his work. When Buffalo’s Albright Art Gallery (which eventually became part of today’s AKG Museum) offered him the first retrospective exhibit of his career, he asked for complete control over the design and installation. They granted it. And the good vibe between artist and museum led to Still’s donation of 31 paintings to the museum in 1964.
Today, that collection is one of the largest collections of Still’s work, so it’s appropriate that part of the inaugural show in the AKG’s spectacular new wing, which opened in June.
Considered an early and “second-tier” abstract expressionist, his work nonetheless has a powerful, visceral charge. Some say his paintings reflect his rural, ranching roots in Nebraska and Alberta, Canada. Still denied this, saying his art had no worldly reference, instead claiming deep existential aspirations. He called his paintings “life and death merging in a fearful union.”
“I want the spectator to be on his own,” he wrote, “and if he finds in them an imagery unkind or unpleasant, or evil, let him look to the state of his own soul.” I’m guessing he didn’t get invited to too many dinner parties.
Some highlights of the exhibit below. Click on the square to get a full-size image with caption.
R.I.P. Carla Bley
Carla Bley
Composer-arranger Carla Bley died of brain cancer earlier this month. A fixture of the jazz avant-garde for five decades, her music was nonetheless very accessible and a lot of fun. She composed an opera of sorts, Escalator Over the Hill, and wrote for her own large ensembles, as well as The Liberation Jazz Orchestra led by bassist Charlie Haden. She also often played in trios and duets with her longtime life-partner, bassist Steve Swallow.
Her work ranged from the tender to the raucous, but all her arrangements were musically inventive. Here, for example, is her version of The Christmas Song from her album of holiday music. She loved putting her stamp on familiar tunes, and her several medleys of patriotic American songs are among my favorites. From her big band recording, Looking for America, here’s one of them: “The National Anthem: OG Can UC?/ Flags/ Whose Broad Stripes?/ Anthem/ Keep It Spangled.”
Hyperlocal MKE
Maria Gillespie
Hyperlocal MKE is a music and dance improvisation series started in 2014 by choreographer Maria Gillespie (UW-Milwaukee) and composer Tim Russell (UW-Madison). Sitting down in the space before Hyperlocal #28 at the UWM’s Kenilworth Square East Gallery, you might have a good idea of what to expect. The program includes a roster of 15 artists--six musicians, one visual artist, and eight dancers. There is a stage of sorts: an open gallery carpeted with two large oriental rugs, spots for musicians on three of the corners, a back wall and large column covered in white paper. But since Hyperlocal creates completely improvised events, expectations are bound to be thwarted.
Paul Westfahl
The piece starts in silence, with artists one-by-one taking their place around the space. The dancers array themselves somewhat symmetrically on the carpets. Violinist Allen Russell plays a three-note motif that repeats as the space comes to life. The dancers begin to move--small, delicate gestures at first. Then the space and the soundscape become more active. As artist Kimberly Burnett starts to draw light, organic lines on the back wall, the dancers become more animated, eventually creating duets and trios that move to center stage. Dan Schuchart and Cuauhtli Ramirez Castro create a duet that owes much to acrobatic, physical hip hop. As they move, one of the carpets slips, creating a sliver of concrete floor between them. Other dancers attempt to push the rugs back together, but Margaret Sunghe Paek has a different idea: crawling between the rugs, she “plows" them apart as she moves like Moses parting the Red Sea. Later, Daniel Burkholder pulls the rugs apart and begins to roll and fold them, moving them like abstract sculptures to other parts of the stage.
Eventually, the paper around the column becomes a percussion instrument, dancers tearing at it rhythmically. Paul Westfahl incorporates the torn paper into his percussion arsenal, laying strips over cymbals and marimba keys to get a snare-like buzz.
The piece evolves like this for around 45 minutes—fresh ideas introduced, woven into patterns, discarded as new ideas emerge. Sitting around the performance space, you’re attentive to the changing connections between the performers—sometimes unfolding slowly and gently, and sometimes zinging electrically around the space. Eventually, the dancers make their way to the carpets and sit themselves quietly in front of Burnett’s finished drawing. Sound and movement subside into stillness and silence.
Candide
Susie Robinson goes for the high E-flat in Skylight’s Candide.
Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, now onstage at Milwaukee’s Skylight Music Theatre, has been through the ringer over the years. Based on the 1759 book by the French satirist Voltaire about a young man’s futile search for meaning and goodness in life, it ran for only two months when it opened on Broadway in 1956. Director Harold Prince brought it in 1973, but Lillian Hellman refused to collaborate with him, so Prince had a new book written by Hugh Wheeler, the first of many different versions of the musical, involving—to various degrees—a who’s who of theater and letters: John Caird, Stephen Sondheim, Dorothy Parker and Richard Wilbur.
It’s a musically daunting show, performed these days by opera companies as well as theater groups, and the Skylight does it proud. Imaginative large-scale puppetry by director/designer James Ortiz and a cast that deftly handles Bernstein’s demanding solo and choral parts. Skylight regular Susie Robinson has her way with the famously difficult aria, “Glitter and be Gay,” and Music Director Jeffrey Saver leads a 10-musician ensemble that captures the colors and vigor of Bernstein’s score.
Most important, the cast of great singers clearly articulates every syllable of Richard Wilbur’s devilishly witty lyrics. A legendary American poet who is known for his translations of Moliere, Racine, and Voltaire, Wilbur has a way with rhyming couplets. Here’s an excerpt from the song, “Life is Absolute Perfection,” sung in the Skylight production by Doug Clemons:
Life is absolute perfection,
As is true of my complexion.
Every time I look and see me,
I'm reminded life is dreamy.
Although I do get tired
Being endlessly admired,
People will go on about me -
How could they go on without me?
(If the talk at times is vicious,
That's the price you pay when you're delicious.)
Life is pleasant, life is simple-
Oh my God, is that a pimple?
No, it's just the odd reflection -
Life and I are still perfection!
I am everything I need!
Life is happiness indeed!
For those in the Milwaukee area, Candide continues at the Skylight through October 29th.
Have a good week.