a musical box

Musical box

slow light
draping
the spiked cylinder
the gears’ teeth
the spinning vane
the torquing key and vertiginous spring
from whence this once
and once again
springs Lohengrin
or Brahms perhaps
some music anyway
some old and toothsome sound
come round
again and still again
unlocking still
and yet again
the unlocked stillness
teething sweetly
teasing out the inner ear

[jocular cochlear jiggery pokery]

tricking and trickling
out from the
tight grained
tight wound
spring loaded
shine varnished
mite box of musings

or muses
what use is
a box without

soul love
and slow light

 


indifference, like shells

Blue

O rare and clarifying day, 

    good day:

Your raiment of the moment washed in blue

Illumes a softened, sadder rumination

Among despairing men

Who watched each hair go grey.

 

Whichever course they plot they face the sun

In unimpeding drifted winter air

Lashes, squinting eyelids: unavailing

Against that ageless burst

Frigid, Promethean.

 

Out many miles from shore a sudden shower

A sodden shudder weeping on the sea

Mere meters wide

    a drenching isolation

A pure vertical rain

Repeating every hour

 

This shined and shattered shaft of splint’ring light

That draught of water from a cloudless sky

Alludes to sullen shoulders wracked with sobbing

A smudged and doubtful map

Disperses lines of flight

 

O rare and clarifying day,

    good day:

Your raiment of the moment washed in blue

Aloft a soft'ning shy manifestation

Engrained with faded care

Dispensing with dismay.

 

 

© 2017 George M. Wallace; all rights reserved.


The Mouse Man Cometh
[The Perfect American - Long Beach Opera]

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"Walt Disney", as a name, has never gone away, although it was 50 years this past December 15 since Walter Elias Disney the man expired. It is likely difficult for anyone much younger than 60 to understand what a constant and continuing presence Disney the man had in U.S.life and culture straight up to the moment of his death. Philip Glass's twenty-fifth opera, The Perfect American, which on Sunday received its belated U.S. premiere via Long Beach Opera, explores and (as it were) reanimates the man in the most appropriate way: by spinning him through a mirror-fragmented jumble of stories.

Adapted, by librettist Rudy Wurlitzer, from a novel by Peter Stephan Jungk (Der König von Amerika), The Perfect American takes place during the final months of Disney's life, imagining him hospitalized and lighting out for the territory of dreams and occasional nightmares, recalling versions of his past, confronting his history, his strengths and weaknesses, what he was and became and might be in the future. Citizen Kane-like, it freights its protagonist's earliest years - here, Disney's childhood in Marceline, Missouri, in the company of his indispensable brother, Roy - ceiling-high with significance and meaning.

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Dramatically, it works more often than not, producing a nuanced and faceted Portrait of the Artist as a Messy and Perhaps Unknowable Human Being. Reports from the world premiere in Madrid in 2013 focused in on the critiques, particularly the conclusion of Act 1 in which Disney voices an array of [sadly standard for their day] racist views, and is set upon by his own Audioanimatronic simulacrum of Abraham Lincoln. The racist attitudes are there, certainly, as are Disney's willingness to battle union labor and to bare knuckle it against anyone who stood in the way of his sometimes self-important creative vision. But if these flaws are not forgiven - and they are not - they play off against what their human carrier accomplished: not a business empire built on shabby real estate deals or moving other people's money around, but an empire built on finding, feeding and fulfilling the dreams of others. Disney is seen here (though the comparison is never made overtly) as a figure akin to Wagner, whose creative work is not ultimately poisoned by his sometimes deplorable personal qualities. 

At Long Beach, director Kevin Newbury and his design team have confined the entirety of the literal action to Walt's hospital room and the theater of the patient's mind. When Walt casts back on his fondness for trains, hospital beds become trains. When he faces a vision of an owl that he killed in a panic as a child - the only time, he insists, that he ever killed anything - it appears as a child patient's stuffed toy and as a costume constructed from medical paraphernalia. Silhouettes of Marceline, Missouri, and of a classic Disney castle are constructed of bottles, clipboards, and the like, a surgical lamp casting their shadows on suspended bedsheets.

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Philip Glass is easily and unreasonably stereotyped as nothing but a peddler of arpeggios, based on his earliest work. There was more to him then, and there is much more to him now. Glass has developed a genuine "late style" that incorporates all those swirly arpeggios and repetitions in company with a restrained  but potent approach to melody (melody!) and an array of punctuation tricks in the percussion section. It is a richly whipped brew, riding long and dextrous rhythmic lines. It is also, perhaps surprisingly, a solid ground over which to sing, allowing the audience to actually hear and decipher the words and the singers to deliver them with dramatic point. The chorus, out of keeping with the usual Glass approach, is positively folksy: they sing "happy birthday," they quack and hoot, and they sing comforting bromides about dreams coming true much as the choruses do in the classic Disney pastorals.

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Disney's Lincoln automaton, resident at Disneyland for over 50 years, was originally created for the 1964 New York World's Fair, where it was the centerpiece of the pavilion of the State of Illinois. (The best thing in the Disney studio's otherwise misfiring Tomorrowland was its loving recreation of elements of the Fair.) Disney and his "Imagineers" provided animatronic creations to a total of four pavilions in 1964: Lincoln for Illinois, the "Carousel of Progress" for General Electric, dinosaurs and cavemen for Ford and, most inescapably, "It's a Small World" for Pepsi. Pepsi's Moppets of the World make no appearance in The Perfect American, but Walt compares himself favorably to Henry Ford and Thomas Edison and Lincoln, as noted, looms large.

References to elements of Philip Glass's own past work are everywhere as well. Walt's love of trains, in particular, readily triggers memories of the trains in Einstein on the Beach; his yen to build things suggests Akhnaten; the collective, often mechanical effort on the part of animators, and the push against it, echo the tension between natural and mechanized worlds in Koyaanisqatsi; an owl appears prominently in Glass's portion of Robert Wilson's the CIVIL warS, as does Lincoln,whose concern for equality and racial justice Glass returns to in the recently revised Appomattox (which one can hope will find its way to southern California someday soon). The Perfect American seems at times as interesting a survey of the composer's creative history as it is a survey of Disney's.

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The character of Walt Disney is on stage from start to penultimate scene (and after that, receives in this production a charmingly homespun apotheosis, waving us goodnight in a manner recognizable to anyone who grew up on The Wonderful World of Color). Justin Ryan as Walt hits all the necessary notes, musically and dramatically, only occasionally veering toward overselling the part. He is persuasive as a driven and powerful man who would rather return, if he could, to a simpler world of his boyhood. As stalwart brother Roy, Zeffan Quinn Hollis is duly stalwart; at Sunday's premiere, he doubled up as the duly righteous voice of robo-Lincoln. Suzan Hanson as Lillian Disney brought to the part some of the grounded dignity she previously displayed as Marilyn Klinghoffer, particularly in the late scene when Walt's death from lung cancer is revealed as inevitable. Jamie Chamberlin, previously one of LBO's twin Marilyn Monroes, charmed as the fictitious Walt's personal nurse Hazel George, whom he addresses as "Snow White".*

Being as it is not the Big Opera Company in town, Long Beach Opera is only able to mount two performances of The Perfect American. The remaining date is Saturday, March 18, and tickets are certainly to be had. (These performances are in the cavernous Terrace Theater, so the number of potentially available seats is not small.) Let your conscience be your guide. It is whispering that you should go.

~~~

Photos by Keith Ian Polakoff, used by kind permission of Long Beach Opera.

*Correction: The original version of this post referred to Hazel George as a fiction. Assorted fact checkers, including the singer, have pointed out that Hazel George was very real and that she was a remarkable, if hidden, figure in Disney's creative life.


A Figure of Speech


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1

The figure standing always on the beach

Even when there is no sand

Even when there is no sea

Even then there always is the beach

An even sheen of water without water

An even shine of sand    without sand

The line and the limit    always there the line and limit

The shifting line   the long withdrawing sigh    the boring advancing roar

This far no further no no no   no further no  no further

Futile     unavailing   still and all

And always still   so still   the figure stands

 

2

The figure standing always on the beach

Does not disturb a grain of the never present sand

Does not divert or shift a wave adventuring out of the never present sea

Does not assert a space on the ever present beach

No grain is moving nothing ever moves

No wave is breaking nothing ever breaks

The shift and the sheer  always suggested the shift and sheer

This slicing light   the spark and the kindling   the dim implicit flame

More light is need need needed   kneading light

Futile    unavailing   still and all

And always still  so still   the figure stands

3

The figure standing always on the beach

Informed by light takes nothing from the sand

Refined by shadow cares not for the shimmer of the sea

Above the beach the sky   the sky is a desert sky

Above the sky the clouds   the clouds are jungle clouds

Above the clouds the light     the light like words made light

A plane like paper     spread like parchment     clothing the limit

Sprinkling glints      brazen Klimtische gold    a span of flattened wrinkles

One sees these things by hearing them   by picturing pictures of words

Futile     unavailing   still and all

And always still   so still   the figure stands

 

And an absent unseen seer evocates

The figure standing always on the beach

 

~~~
[Photo (which is unconnected to the poem) by the blogger.]

© 2017 George M. Wallace; all rights reserved.


Burred

Burred

 [she says]

 

Hollow my bones

Inject them with air

Marrow once out, atmosphere fill me

With latticework socketed pockets of sky

Laced amid faceted boxes of calcium

 

Each wall translucent

Veined and accented

                                        paper thin agate

Skylight beneath an encircling sheath

 

Calcified, drift-white

                                        bored out

                                        burred clean

hollowed out zones

                                        Emptied and filled

Essence ineffable rudely infused

A plenum a vacuum awash with a way

 

Envelope

Bonded to tendon to muscle to flesh and to

Skin under

Feathers and pinions

 

Clockwork and talons

Engaged or imagined

[she postulates rising]

                                        Rising is purpose

[she execrates falling]

                                        Falling is not possible

Each move beneath

directs itself up

to a still

             farther starting point

poised to plunge higher

 

~~~

 

[she says]

 

The earth and air were not made to be neighbors

Cast athwart one to the other smashed hastily

 

Lean into potent uncertain futurity

Push off on high on invisible potency

Riverine flow

Crystalline luxe

Cerulean   

                Void 

~~~

 

I spread I flap and I flail almost floating

A gasp then the chirping         

                                       songs and screams

A fall

aflutter

                                       fleet and fleeing

Fascinated plummeting   

                                       alive and leaving….     

 

                                                Casting off

                                                Casting off

That caged and perching life

That human beastly scuttle

For this

 

                                        fleet and fleeing

                                        alive and leaving

                                        arc and contour

 

I will fly and I will rise

                                        until the darts strike home


[more she says not]

 

~~~
[Photo (unconnected to the poem) by the blogger.]

© 2017 George M. Wallace; all rights reserved.


The Watcher Watched

Spotted a spy who spotted a bird
Who spotted the bird-spotting spy

The spotted bird espied a spot
Where the spy could not see the bird he sought
The spy could not spot where the bird was not

In a birdless and unburdened sky

 

 

© 2016 George M. Wallace; all rights reserved.


Listening Listfully 2016

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This blog is a sad thing these days, a walking shadow of its once sprightly self, a faded jaded mandarin, little trafficked, neglected by its proprietor. Over the length of 2016, I find that I have more unfinished drafts than actual posts. And yet, one—at the least, this one—might hold out hope that it may bestir itself again in time.

One tradition to which I yet cling is this: "Listening Listfully", my catalogue of the album/EP-length recordings released in the past twelvemonth that most particularly tickled my fancy. This year, they number 50, but the List is like baseball: it could in theory go on without end. These are personal favorites, as always, rather than "bests"—although I maintain that everything here is here because it is genuinely among the best things of the past year, and not simply because I have enjoyed it. There are inevitably many recordings of quality omitted, simply because I have yet to listen to them.

Last year, I held out until New Year's Eve. For 2016, I am electing to post on the Eve of Christmas Eve, with the intention to follow on on Boxing Day with a 50-plus entry, properly threaded Tweetstorm on this fool's Twitter timeline. If I get truly ambitious, I will update this post to embed those tweets, and possibly to add further commentary. [Update 26 Dec 2016: The Tweetstorm broke as threatened and is now embedded at the end of this post.] In a break from recent practice, I have lumped everything into a single list, eschewing arbitrary genre boundaries. It is all just plain good music to these foolish ears.

I have incorporated opportunities to stream most of the Top 25 choices on the list. I am sufficiently old fashioned that I still prefer to buy and own music, rather than simply streaming it. I also prefer that as large a portion as possible of what I pay for music should make it into the hands of that music's makers. In consequence I find myself more than ever making use of Bandcamp, which advances both of those preferences more than passing well. Bandcamp-linked recordings on this list are purchasable there; for others, I have provided Amazon links.

Flawed, entirely subjective, and internally contradictory as always, here begins the eleventh annual edition of The List: 

 1.    Julius Eastman - Femenine

 

2.    Darcy James Argue's Secret Society - Real Enemies

 

3.    David Thomas Broughton - Crippling Lack

 

4.    David Bowie - Blackstar

 

5.    Psychic Temple - III

 

 6.    The Gloaming - 2

 

7.    Battle Trance - Blade of Love

 

8.    AHNONI - Hopelessness

 

9.    Shearwater - Shearwater Plays Lodger

 

10.    Morgan Guerin - The Saga

 

11.    Gabriel Kahane - The Fiction Issue

 

12.    The Lazy Lies - The Lazy Lies

 

13.    David T. Little - Dog Days

[I wrote about Dog Days here in 2015.]

 

14.    Qasim Naqvi - Chronology

 

15.   SheLoom - The Baron of the Fjord

 

16.    Howe Gelb - Future Standards

 

17.    Psychic Temple - Plays Music for Airports

 

18.    Nathaniel Bellows - The Old Illusions

 

19.    Niechęć - Niechęć

 

20.    William Brittelle - Dream Has No Sacrifice

 

21.    EH46 - Metropole des Anges

[First appearing in August, nearly all evidence of this exemplary ambient drone raga musing on southern California themes mysteriously "made itself air into which it vanished" from the online world earlier this month. Included here in the hope it may someday return among us.]

 

22.    Finnegan Shanahan, Contemporaneous - The Two Halves

 

23.    Daniel Lanois - Goodbye to Language

 

24.    Nico Muhly, Nadia Sirota - Keep In Touch

 

25.    Vanishing Twin - Choose Your Own Adventure

 

26.    Gabriel Kahane & the Knights - Crane Palimpsest

 

27.    R. Andrew Lee - Adrian Knight: Obsessions

 

28.    The Rolling Stones - Blue & Lonesome

 

29.    Sabina Meck - Love is Here

 

30.    La Femme d'Argent - La Femme d'Argent

 

31.    Roomful of Teeth, inter alia - The Colorado: Music from the Motion Picture

 

32.    Jherek Bischoff - Cistern

 

33.    Bill Nelson - New Northern Dream

 

34.    Andy Shauf - The Party

 

35.    The Living Earth Show - Dance Music

 

36.    Eleanore Oppenheim - Home

 

37.    Jeremy Flower - The Real Me

 

38.    Still Corners - Dead Blue

 

39.    C Duncan - The Midnight Sun

 

40.    Timo Andres & Gabriel Kahane - Dream Job

 

41.    Bonjour - Bonjour

 

42.    Nico Muhly & Valgeir Sigurðsson - Scent Opera

 

43.    The Industry, wildUp - The Edge of Forever

[I wrote about The Edge of Forever previously, here.]

 

44.    Michael Mizrahi - Currents

 

45.    Chris Kallmyer, inter alia - Rhyolite

 

46.    Rational Discourse - Live at the Mothlight

 

47.    Los Angeles Opera - Corigliano: The Ghosts of Versailles

[I wrote about this production in 2015, here.]

 

48.    Magik*Magik - Magik*Magik

 

49.    Steve Jansen - Tender Extinction

 

50.    Field Music - Commontime

 

~~~

On paper, this list rolls on beyond 50. Many of those Honorable but Unmentioned recordings can be found in my Bandcamp collection, here.]

~~~

The Boxing Day Tweetstorm [clicking on the embedded initial tweet below should lead to Twitter and the complete 51-entry collection]:


Tempted by the Fruit of an Author
[Four Larks: The Temptation of St. Anthony]

Foray dans les forêts de symboles

 O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.

— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Infinite space in a nutshell is a cogent metaphor for what the creative performative collective Four Larks offers in The Temptation of St. Anthony, scheduled to run through October 2 at [a secret location revealed to ticket holders] in downtown Los Angeles. The Temptation is as all-consuming in its concerns, and as vivid and innovative in its theatrical gestures, as Einstein on the Beach, but compresses it all into a mere 75 minutes, with a dozen performers, a set and properties scavenged and cobbled together from heaven knows where, and in a space that would not fill an Einsteinian caboose. It is a mighty microcosmos.

The intense compaction of The Temptation of St. Anthony is perhaps a tribute to its origins in Gustave Flaubert's novella. Flaubert spent nearly half his life writing the book, each successive version etched and edited to remove everything he determined to be inessential. His first draft ran well over 500 pages. Some two-thirds of that disappeared in the second draft, and so on until the page count of the final version barely topped 100. It is nearly devoid of external plot, but tells of St. Anthony of Egypt (c. 251-356) who, after many years of living the life of a holy hermit in the desert (atop a cliff, where "an aged and twisted palm tree leans over the abyss") is beset one night by doubt-driven visions designed to draw him from his holy path: the Seven Deadly Sins appear, and a series of rulers (Nebuchadnezzar, the Queen of Sheba), heretics, mages, scientists, pagan gods and philosophers descend upon him. At daybreak, he emerges tested and recommitted to his faith, resuming his pious life. The incident was long a favorite of painters, as it provided an opportunity to depict lewdness and grotesquerie under the guise of spiritual teaching. Flaubert's depiction is far more austere and inward looking. (For lewdness and grotesquerie in Flaubert, the reader is advised to consider his epic depiction of same in Salammbô.)

A magic number

Four Larks describes itself as an artist operated collective, founded and guided by Artistic Director Mat Diafos Sweeney (also the adaptor/writer/composer of The Temptation, with lyrics by Jesse Rasmussen) and Creative Producer (and principal Temptation designer) Sebastian Peters-Lazaro. "Junkyard opera" is the portmanteau description for the Larks' body of work. The Temptation is described as "a euphotic rite of music, dance and visual theatre." It is less an opera or play than it is a pageant or, most accurately perhaps, a contemporary masque. Instead of in a palace or chateau, however, The Temptation plays out inside a seemingly shuttered one time wholesale floral facility a few blocks from the Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles.

As a courtly masque might include elaborate constructions depicting the provinces of gods or a nymphean retreat, Four Larks has devised a mystic cave environment of its own, filling its chosen space far, wide, high, and low, with books, abandoned and outmoded communications devices, artistic detritus, faux ruins, and a myriad of uncategorizable objects of all sorts, all colored a desert-blasted off white. On arrival, members of the audience can explore the eccentric desolation, perhaps with a refreshment in hand. At performance time, they are ushered into the comparably be-cluttered performance room. At the front of the floor level stage area, The Hermit (Max Baumgarten) is already present. His thick and sand dappled Bible beside him, he is focused intently on a battered manual typewriter, hard at work on what proves to be the text of The Temptation of St. Anthony.

Mementoes

In form, Flaubert's Temptation resembles a drama more than it does any traditional 19th Century novel. Considered as a play, The Temptation can be tied to the symbolic and nocturnal experimentalism of Strindberg's A Dream Play or Ibsen's Peer Gynt (which Four Larks took on during a period its founders spent in Melbourne, Australia). As a working premise, the conflation of the writer, the work he is writing, and the events within the work he is writing handily throws open the door to the free flowing, ambiguous shape shifting free for all that ensues.

The Temptation begins with an authorial voiceover, speaking the introductory description of the hermit and his hermitage as it is typed, but the creator is soon absorbed by the creation as the visions and manifestations come thick and fast. For much of its later stretches, The Temptation's chief speaker is not The Hermit but the dreamt version of his one time follower Hilarion (Caitlin Conlin), whose evening attire and sprightly wickedness of manner may recall the Master of Ceremonies from Cabaret. Figures historical and symbolic emerge and disappear with the rapidity of shuffled cards. Ideas and arguments fly about at breakneck speed. The Hermit is caromed about in a mazy concatenation of movement, music, light, speech, sound and surprise, emerging (as perhaps he had not expected) back at the place he began, his typewriter the still point in an uncertainly resettled world. He is left, as is his audience, to reflect upon—or more likely simply to muse and to marvel over—whatever it was that has just happened to him. As one does, when what has happened is something of a wonderment. The Temptation of St. Anthony is a wonderment like no other in recent memory, and not to be missed or resisted.

The revels now are ended

~~~

The Temptation of St. Anthony is currently scheduled through October 2, 2016. Capacity is modest and some performances are sold out. Such tickets as may be had may be sought here.

The blogger attended the September 8 performance of The Temptation of St. Anthony as a paying customer.

Photos above (l'espace) by the blogger. Photos below (les artistes) by Michael Amica, used by kind permission of Four Larks.

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