MEDITERRANEAN

 

“Do you notice anything different here from what you’re used to at home?” Bill asks. 

 

We’re in line for tickets to see John Wick, Chapter 2…which turned out to be just as much fun as the first one and even better on a huge screen with pumped up sound and the comfy seats that the Arclight in Hollywood features. But I digress...

“Yeah,” I reply, “this line is glacial.” 

That was it alright. The line although short was poking along. It was my introduction to the pace of LA. I’m telling ya, things go slowly here. Movie lines, supermarket lines, get in any line and expect to wait a while, a long while, before you get to the front. 

That's when I began to notice more examples of an absence of urgency. 

There are two major residential construction projects underway in our immediate neighborhood. I pass them just about every day. I’m a guy who knows a thing or two about construction and these projects are construction at a snail’s pace. 

On a beautiful day in LA, Sandi Amtraks up from Rancho Magnifico. After a leisurely lunch we walk to the Geffen Contemporary where a guard opens a door to tell us it’s closed until April while they mount a new exhibit.

“But the website says the new exhibit opens today,” we protest.

“They really should change that,” says the guard. “The MOCA on Grand is open”

We set out for there.

“We’re partially closed while we mount new exhibits,” we’re told. “Only the permanent collection is on view. We’ll compensate you with a voucher for a free admission when the new exhibits open in April.” Late in the game, this, so we opt in although we’ll be long gone before the vouchers are any use to us. We give two vouchers to Alvaro, two to Sandi. We head inside.

The permanent collection is small but mighty, a room fulla Rothkos, lotsa Pop and a fine Pollock. We’ve just enough time to toss it. Then it’s time for Sandi to catch her train home.

And that’s it. Or should be. But heading back to Silver Lake it occurred to me that it’s all part of a piece. Once again we’d encountered that Los Angeles dearth of determination to get things done quickly.

You know who is in a hurry here? Nobody. Why, I wondered. I suspect it’s climate related. Look up SoCal climate and you’ll find it described as Mediterranean, typified by relatively mild winters, warm summers and lotsa sunshine. The old adage, “Make hay while the sun shines,” doesn’t really apply here. When there’s one nice day after another, there’s really no need to hurry to get things done.

Not that I’m complaining exactly. It’s just that I’ve had to gear down my expectations. That's proven to be easier than I would have thought. It’s not a matter of patience, one of the few virtues I try to practice. Instead, it’s more of fitting in and going along with the slow, slow flow. Hustle and hassle? Forget it, Jack, it’s Mediterranean.

CODA

Mediterranean is not about traffic. For all the years I’ve been coming here I’ve defended LA traffic as heavy at times but bareable because it rolls along. However, during this visit and my last one a year or so ago, I’ve been forced to rethink this, mostly while stuck in interminable bumper to bumper, stop and go, mostly stop, traffic. Clearly, traffic’s gotten worse. I suspect it's got something to do with LA’s quite low for a large city density. It's the  source of so much of the city's charm. But it also means putting everybody out on the road for everything. More and more.

Way back in this blog at the conclusion of a driving in LA piece, I copied in a poem by Bill. This visit I learned he’s written a second stanza:

 

                 

    Getting There

                            by William Tutton

 

Cars

cars  cars

cars cars, cars

cars cars cars cars

cars cars cars cars cars

cars cars cars cars cars cars

cars cars cars cars cars cars cars

plus a bus

Winter in LA 2017 Pt II

Jessica Lang Dance, Ahmanson Theater, February 17 

We weren’t familiar with Jessica Lang Dance. But the company’s appearance at a major downtown venue, The Ahmanson Theater at the Music Center encouraged us to attend. So glad we did. We discovered Lang’s innovative choreography performed by an exceptionally strong company in a theater perfect for dance.

Tesseracts of Time, the opening piece, a collaboration with architect Steve Holl performed in four parts to music by contemporary composers won is over immediately.  The opening dance to music by Pulitzer Prize winning minimalist David Lang, really just a series of clicks and tones, quickly established Lang’s gift to find the movement in the music. Buffalonians are familiar very familiar with Morton Feldman’s deliberately arrhythmic compositions. It was a daring choice to choreograph the second part to his music, a challenge met by employing video to create an otherwise physically impossible dance where onscreen performers appear and disappear among unfolding geometric patterns.

We’ve seen ever greater use of video in dance. Much of White, A Dance on Film is video on a full stage sized screen. This allows seeing dance larger than life, to see the dancer’s movements in ways never possible otherwise- close up or sped up or in slow motion.

All of the dancers in this company are exceptional. Two in particular stand out. Kana Kimura is slight and extraordinarily lithe. Milan Misko is the biggest dude I’ve ever seen in a dance company. His strength combined with her elasticity allows Lang to create astonishing duets.

This is a young company, just five years old. Choreographer and Artistic Director Jessica Lang is in her forties. As her creativity continues to evolve and her company continues to prosper, world class status is certain.

 

 

 

“Salome” by Richard Strauss, LA Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. March 2

 

 Our first disappointing LA Opera production, mostly for lack thereof. Instead of the stagecraft we’ve come to expect we got a marginally employed lackluster set. I blame director David Paul for the poorly posed presentation and for soprano Patricia Racette’s portrayal of Salome as more of a petulant princess than a sensuous seductress. Characters addressing each other stood at opposite sides of the stage facing the audience and declaimed. Only Allan Glassman as Herod showed any real acting chops.

(Racette redeems her performance with her long, powerful, erotic and perverse song to the served to her on silver head of the prophet, Jochanaan) 

The evening was saved by the glorious music of Richard Strauss. I mean, how often does one close one’s eyes during the dance of the seven veils so as to concentrate on the music.

 

 

 

Jane Monheit, Catalina Jazz Club. March 3.
It took a coupla numbers, probably until her first ballad, before I tumbled in. From then on it was a total groove hearing this superb singer live. What pipes!
What an extraordinary sense of style! She’s truly in the great tradition of chick jazz singers.

 

 Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, March 8

 

Last big ticket this tour. A big deal: six performances over five days in the largest venue in LA. Because pretty near everyone who knows me has heard my Alvin Ailey story at least once, I’m pledged not to repeat it. The gist of it is I know what to expect from this venerable dance company – challenging choreography performed by some of the best dancers in the world. All those expectations were met and exceeded. Again.

They performed four pieces:

·       R-Evolution, Dream- My personal favorite. In the company’s tradition: street dance and balletic dance and a least a coupla breath taking moments, all of it steeped in African-American culture. Choreographed by company veteran Hope Boykin and inspired, she writes, by the speeches and sermons of Martin Luther King. I’d advise anyone who might be put off by the politics to just watch the dancers.

 

·       Untitled America – hard core choreography, intense, much of it performed to thrums and clicks or spoken word. The piece asks a lot of the dancers; they excel. Inventive and compelling and crucial to the advancement of the art.

·       Ella – the only dance on the program choreographed by Artistic Director Robert Battle. Two chicks dance out the one and only Ella scatting. Great fun

·       Revelations by the late Alvin Alley. I’m sorry but this signature piece seems dated to me now. What once was ground breaking choreography seems light and uncomplicated in view of all that came before it this evening. And there is that touch of watermelon. Still, the LA audiences loved it. Cheering wildly at every turn. No really, I’ve never encountered that in a dance audience before

Winter in LA 2017

 

Picasso and Rivera LACMA February 1

 

Our second only in LA experience (the first involved driving forty-five minutes on busy Freeways to catch a flic…one that will likely never play anywhere near Kenmore…but I digress.) We took in the pricey but all together worthwhile Picasso and Rivera: Conversations Across Time at LACMA. Who knew they knew each other? Not I. We learned that both had been admitted to their country’s academies at an early age, both showed similar novel approaches to the classicism in which they were instructed. (I’d seen Picasso juvenilia before; Rivera’s, seen in this show, are remarkably similar.) We learned that Rivera moved to Paris in the early 20th century and fell in with Picasso, Braque and Gris where he took up cubism. Picasso and Rivera cubist paintings, hung by each other are remarkably similar. Each, of course, went their separate ways and are best known for the work they did subsequently. Rivera is best known for his murals and since they can’t be put on display here, the elaborate cartoons that went into the murals’ creation sufficiently substitute.

This is one of the best curated shows we’ve seen. That includes a very large screen video that lovingly pans over details of Picasso’s Guernica and Rivera’s mural at the City College of San Francisco then finishes with each successively full screen.

 

 

   

“The Abduction from the Seraglio” by Mozart

 LA Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, February 8

Rivera is best known for his murals and since they can’t be put on display here, the elaborate cartoons that went into the murals creation sufficiently substitute.
This is one of the best curated shows we’ve seen. That includes a very large screen video that lovingly pans over details of Picasso’s Guernica and Rivera’s mural at the City College of San Francisco then finishes with each successively full screen

We’ve come to expect superior staging from this company and we weren’t disappointed. The opera is transposed to the 1920’s. The set, the interior of a lavish railcar on the Orient Express, can slide side to side revealing attendant cars. Scenery rolls by outside. The costumes, lighting, the direction, all of what is stagecraft was world class. The performers were all technically terrific if not exceptional. Best in the cast: Basso Profundo Morris Robinson as Osmin (right) and Soprano So Young Park as Blonde (far left). Canny opera goers Shelley, Jennifer, Erik and I, were, if not blown away, left pleased that we’d been there.


Los Angeles Philharmonic, Walt Disney Hall, February 10.

 

We’re back in the magnificent Disney Hall. It’s a chance to hear new music in one of the world’s great music venues. Composer Thomas Adès is at the podium. He opens with Sibelius, “The Bard”, light but lovely harp dominated, followed by Saint-Saëns lively “Danse Macabre”. Then it’s the US premier of his own “Lieux Retrouvés” re-orchestrated from a piano-cello duo into a full on four movement cello concerto. Collaborator Steven Isserlis plays cello with abandon. Potent stuff and in its third movement, moments of incandescent beauty.

 At intermission we explore the ever so many contrasting parts of this striking Frank Geary structure. We discover that the reason the section in which our seats are located is called the garden level is its doors open to a charming garden. It’s a cool rainy night so we don’t linger but mark where, when next we’re back here, we’ll head with our intermission flutes of champagne.

 The second half of the program is given over to Adès’s “Totentanz”. This is the West Coast premiere of Adès’s 2013 composition. The original soloists, mezzo Christianne Stotijn and baritone Simon Keenlyside, are here. Set to an anonymous 15th Century text, Keenlyside intones death calling out the highest to the lowest to his lethal dance while Stotijn replies as each faces his or her fate. It’s at times powerful, a knight meets death in a barrage of percussion, at times breathtakingly beautiful, a young maiden’s lament in duet with death soars to Wagnerian heights. This is a unique and powerful composition, a strong candidate to rank with the best new music of the new century.

 

 Steven Isserlis plays cello. Potent stuff and in its third movement, moments of incandescent beauty.
At intermission we explore the ever so many contrasting parts of this striking Frank Geary structure. We discover that the reason the section in which our seats are located is called the garden level is its doors open to a charming garden. It’s a cool rainy night so we don’t linger but mark where, when next we’re back here, we’ll head with our intermission flutes of champagne.
The second half of the program is given over to Adès’s “Totentanz”. This is the West Coast premiere of Adès’s 2013 composition. The original soloists, mezzo Christianne Stotijn and baritone Simon Keenlyside, are here. Set to an anonymous 15th Century text, Keenlyside intones death calling out the highest to the lowest to his lethal dance while Stotijn replies as each faces his or her fate. It’s at times powerful, a knight meets death in a barrage of percussion, at times breathtakingly beautiful, a young maiden’s lament in duet with death is Wagnerian. This is a unique and powerful composition, a strong candidate to rank with the best new music of the new century. Steven Isserlis plays cello. Potent stuff and in its third movement, moments of incandescent beauty.
At intermission we explore the ever so many contrasting parts of this striking Frank Geary structure. We discover that the reason the section in which our seats are located is called the garden level is its doors open to a charming garden. It’s a cool rainy night so we don’t linger but mark where, when next we’re back here, we’ll head with our intermission flutes of champagne.
The second half of the program is given over to Adès’s “Totentanz”. This is the West Coast premiere of Adès’s 2013 composition. The original soloists, mezzo Christianne Stotijn and baritone Simon Keenlyside, are here. Set to an anonymous 15th Century text, Keenlyside intones death calling out the highest to the lowest to his lethal dance while Stotijn replies as each faces his or her fate. It’s at times powerful, a knight meets death in a barrage of percussion, at times breathtakingly beautiful, a young maiden’s lament in duet with death is Wagnerian. This is a unique and powerful composition, a strong candidate to rank with the best new music of the new century.

Back to LA, Pt. 2

It’s hardly possible to consider Los Angeles, indeed pretty much all of that huge hunk of territory known as Southern California, without confronting traffic. LA is, after all, the city that grew from a pleasant place under the warm California sun to a megalopolis after the introduction of the automobile. It must have seemed so simple back then: put anything any place. It won’t matter because all you have to do to get there is climb in your car and drive off. Fair enough, but as the city sprawled in the post war years, despite the broad streets that wound through it for astonishingly long distances, getting about by auto became more and more difficult. The ingenious solution was freeways. Limited access multi-lane highways weaving through the city to move traffic along swiftly.

And as has been known forever, make something easier, more convenient and folks will flock to it. Soon enough the freeways jammed up. The solution: more of the same. Now flyovers fly over ten lane with an additional four commuter lanes roads. And of course, that’s where all the drivers head.

SoCal freeways are never not busy, not day, not night, not in the still hours before dawn. The speed limit may be sixty-five but don’t expect to drive that speed for long. Cruise control is useless. Drive, just drive. Speed up, slow down, change lanes, and stay alert. Watch out for those motorcycles that ride the white lines between the lanes.

Throw that many drivers zipping around as fast as they can go and inevitably accidents will occur. Lots of accidents. The first thing to do when heading out on the freeways is to tune the car radio to the news station: traffic and weather together every ten minutes. And accident updates because there’s always accidents somewhere on the system. The traffic reports may, if there are any, suggest alternate routes. Take the advice and you find yourself driving the “surface” streets along with everyone else who has harkened to the same advice plus the locals who are there anyway. Stop at traffic signals and deal with unfamiliar traffic patterns. Better yet, just stay on the freeway and crawl along bumper to bumper. It may seem eternal but nothing ever is.

So I found myself on the most notorious of all, I-5, headed south from LA to visit my friend Jim in San Marcos. Five lanes abreast we’re moving slower than the tides. The news radio clues me into to the neigh apocalyptic reason, a car on fire further on down the road. Looks as though this particular jam is gonna last a long time.

And I reflect. A few weeks back Dale and I were among the dozen or so who turned out to hear singer songwriter Ray Bonneville at the Sportsmens. Ray talks up the audience between numbers and always has something amusing and thought-provoking to say. This night he reflected, “People complain about the airlines. But they fly me at three hundred miles per hour and get where I want to go in hours rather than days.” So it is. We’re all out here jammed up, creeping along because we can be. It’s no great fun but it’s better than it might be.

LA Pt 2: Drive

 Of course the sun is shining.

Of course flowers bloom everywhere

We’re in LA 

Ask any Angelino for driving directions and he or she will tell you what freeways to take.

No really. We were driving out Sunset Boulevard headed for Century City when I was overcome by severe “are we there yet” anxiety. At a light we pulled up next to a police car. I rolled down the window and asked for assistance. I expected one of two possible answers. “Keep going.” or “You’ve gone too far.”  But no, the officer started off on what freeways I should have taken and which ones I might head for now. “What if I keep going this way?” He allowed as how I could do that but his look told me he thought was loco.

But I prefer driving Los Angeles overland, or as Angelinos would have it, driving on “surface streets.”  It’s the ever changing scene that takes me that way. One moment you’re driving past funky junky strip malls and the next you amidst gleaming steel and glass high rises. From a low end neighborhood you quickly pass into a high end one. There are residential streets here that look for all the world like tree lined streets in New England at mid-summer.

This is, I’ve noted before, a post-Fordian city, a city built concurrently with the era of the automobile. It stretches, if you count the scant water surface, over five hundred square miles divided into over eighty districts and neighborhoods. (Buffalo by the same measure covers a titch over fifty square miles.) Within and wherein that vast space, all of it accessible by car from the earliest days of the twentieth century, this city growed randomly. It made little difference where anything or anyone was. Hop in your car and drive there. By the forties congestion ruled; construction of the freeways commenced. And if you build a system to rapidly move cars, the drivers will all head there and rapidity become a memory.  While all those drivers are jammed up out there, I cruise the generally broad streets.

Jennifer was flying in from San Francisco. I plotted an overland route to pick her up in Burbank at Bob Hope Airport. Garminella is along on this trip; I’d shipped her out here in advance. I hadn’t as yet had a chance to utilize her so I saw this ride as the opportunity. We set out together. She was intent on getting me onto a freeway. Ignoring her set off flurries of “Recalculating”.

{Garmenilla speaks: It was nice to be out of the box after two years on a shelf in the closet. It was nice to be up on the dash doing what I was meant to do once again with Jack, with whom I’ve had a long and er, complex relationship, behind the wheel. And he totally ignored me! My job is to quickly and efficiently get us to our destination. And in LA that means getting out on the freeways. He never took a single turn I directed him to. Knucklehead! }

There are times when freeway driving is just unavoidable. We set out for Long Beach to take a whale watching three hour cruise. (We watched the hell outta one whale.) It’s a haul from here to there. Only taking freeways made any sense. While Bill drove Alvaro navigated. That meant that while one was behind the wheel the other wielded a smart phone apped to continuously update traffic.

Summing up: A poem by Bill:

                Getting There

                        by William Tutton

 

Cars

cars  cars

cars cars, cars

cars cars cars cars

cars cars cars cars cars

cars cars cars cars cars cars

cars cars cars cars cars cars cars

including ours.

 

             

 

LA Pt. 1: Lights

Of course the sun is shining.

Of course flowers bloom everywhere.

We’re in LA.

We’re invited to Molly and Heather’s house to view the sunset from their patio. The house is about half way up the side of a hill above Silver Lake, the actual lake (Soon to be drained we’re told. Wouldn’t that be awful.) not the neighborhood although it’s in the neighborhood which extends to include our apartment which isn’t near the lake at all. Got that?

It’s a lovely home built in the California cottage style in 1927. The first homeowners here worked at the Disney studios. They could take the stairs that climb the hillside down to the trolley line that delivered them to the studio doors.

Bill and Alvaro are with us. Mark Weinstein stops by. Glasses are filled and refiled. Molly proposes a toast, “To Kenmore.” Indeed five seventh of us are from there, none regretting not being anywhere near there now.

Reaching the patio involves climbing a coupla short flights of stairs up from the backyard. The patio is built into the hillside above the house. No, really, the patio is higher than the roof of the house. The view is fabulous, down the valley, west over Hollywood, down and out over the LA basin.

The sun does its firey ball dropping below the horizon thing. Colors emerge in the southwestern sunset style. It’s all so beautiful. As the colors fade away, Venus emerges, brighter than the lights of the helicopters, two or three of which seem always to be airborne over Los Angeles.

Lights go on all around us. I’m in mind of those iconic pictures of LA at night, the foothills all around the basin set alight by houselights from the homes that cling, often precariously, to the hillsides. We are, it occurs to me, one of those lights.