Blindingly obvious

I'm really interested in issues of transportation, and my position is fairly simple: Governments all over the world need to push public transportation, especially trains. Banking on cars is a losing proposition. Not only is there the obvious problem of oil, but even if someone invents engines fueled by other means (electricity, ethanol, fumes from Republicans' brains), we will have to deal with 1) how to actually pump out these new sources of energy and 2) the enormous gridlock that will come out of millions of additional vehicles on the roads.

Reading "Running on Fumes," Elizabeth Kolbert's review of two new books about the automobile industry and a potential "car of the future," I was struck by the fact that she never brought up public transportation. Actually, it kinda blows me away. Of all people, the ecologically minded Kolbert should at least mention the fact that the car cannot possibly be considered the be-all and end-all when it comes to going from point A to point B; the very terms of the discourse are impossibly narrow in America. When I read about new super-cheap cars, it makes me tremble. Our short-sighted elected officials should focus on figuring out how to efficiently replace cars whenever possible, not on how to make them cheaper. Kolbert says that "There are nine personal vehicles per thousand eligible drivers in China and eleven for every thousand Indians, compared with 1,148 for every thousand Americans." Okay, so China and India will have cheap cars, but perhaps their governments should look into bullet trains as well? (It goes without saying that the U.S. should look into them too; it just won't happen with the current administration.)

Leaving issues of pollution aside, I've been living in New York for 17 years and in that time I've witnessed the metastasizing of auto traffic in the city. Unless you drive at 3am, it's a given you'll get stuck, no matter where you are or where you go. It's blindingly obvious that physical space isn't infinitely expandable: Where, pray tell, are all these extra cars going to go?

Conveying electricity

Pylon's show at Mercury Lounge tonight is sold out so you have two options if you don't have a ticket: go anyway see if you can somehow get in, or try to catch the band at the Music Hall of Williamsburg (né Northsix) tomorrow. I previewed the gigs in TONY so this is a just an extra reminder.

According to my logs, I've seen the Athens quartet only once, at Maxwells on May 14, 1989. I was convinced I'd seen these guys more but it's unlikely. I did listen to my crappy bootleg recording of that show a lot, though. They pretty much hibernated throughout the 90s and two thirds of the 00s, so this is a rare chance to catch this fine, fine American band.

Pylon's debut, 1980's Gyrate, has just been reissued by DFA so here are two tracks from its follow-up, 1983's Chomp (the one that came in a die-cut sleeve).

Pylon "M-Train" (a live favorite, where the crowd bellows "whoo-hoo!")
Pylon "Yo-Yo" (methinks some people listened to ESG)

What the other half buys

The new stats are out: last year, 65% of the people who bought Broadway tickets were tourists. This percentage has been on a steady rise over the past few years, and I'm not sure how far it can go: 90%? 99%, with the remaining holdovers the local critics who show up on press nights? Speaking of critics, these numbers seem to make them increasingly irrelevant: alas, I don't think Ben Brantley or TONY's own crack team (David Cote, Adam Feldman and Helen Shaw) are morning-commute reads in Des Moines, Tokyo or Paris.

I was a Broadway-going tourist myself once, so I have mixed feelings about it all. I think I saw Cats on a visit in 1986 or 87, and I sure was happy there was a show I could enjoy with my shaky English. Visiting New York and going to a musical go hand in hand. There are more and more tourists in New York, so naturally there are more and more tickets sold to tourists. But does it mean New Yorkers don't go to Broadway anymore? I can't say I blame them, with the prices and shows on offer. Does it mean the locals go to more Off or Off-Off shows to satiate their theater cravings? Questions, questions…

Stop Stoppard!

I can't say that Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia thrilled me but I made it through all nine hours, and even enjoyed parts here and there. His Rock ’n’ Roll, on the other hand, is an utter wash. Its combination of smug and irremediable blandness actually made me angry.

Stoppard charts the parallel lives of an established British communist (Brian Cox, blowhardy) and a Czech diffident dissident (Rufus Sewell, transparent). As usual he throws heady intellectual material into a blender but nothing of substance emerges. It's just not enough to have your characters spout impassioned speeches about ideas: You need to turn them into drama. As it is, watching the play is like watching old ideas congeal into an unappetizing slop—chicken soup for the complacent.

Trevor Nunn's direction does not help in the least—it's a bland tapioca pudding not unlike his King Lear at BAM. Apparently Stoppard's stage directions include "smash cuts" between scenes, i.e. rapid transitions. Nunn handles them by projecting basic information about whatever song is being played on a large screen. This has the opposite result of what I assume Stoppard intended and only breaks the flow, such as it is; it's hard for any scene to get jump-started after that.

And rarely has a show's title been so woefully misleading: There's no pulse on this stage, let alone a beat, let alone any sense of antiestablishment rage. Quite the opposite: Rock ’n’ Roll only flatters the so-called-intellectual establishment and caters to its aesthetic prejudices. It ends with the Rolling Stones, but not the Rolling Stones of 1969—the Rolling Stones of 1990. This is a statement in and of itself.

For another take on this turgid piece of synapse masturbation, please check out this piece in Encore, a British online theater magazine I'm adding to my blog roll posthaste. (Thanks to David Cote for the tip.)

Finally, need I point out that judging by the photo above, Prague's Museum of Communism is next to a casino?

Where credits are due

My recent post about Jan Johansson prompted a further email exchange with the friend who'd sent me the CD. This involved an in-depth analysis of the translation issues raised by Johansson's theme song to Pippi Långstrump (Pippi Longstocking), as heard here.

This, in turn, prompted some thoughts about classic French theme songs and credit sequences from TV series. There's a long tradition of slapping French lyrics onto imported themes, or to write new songs altogether. Haïm Saban's French theme to Starsky & Hutchhttp://youtu.be/AjLqtioEpm8, for instance, was really cheesy but oddly memorable.

Here are some other favorites, a few harking back to the glory days of the ORTF—French public television and radio, modeled on the BBC by De Gaulle, and for many, many years the only game in town.

• Les Globe-trotters This ingenious three-season series in which a couple of buddies go on a round-the-world trip started in 1966, with a theme by Paul Bonneau.

• La séquence du spectateur A weekly ritual for me, this show presented a ten-minute excerpt (not a trailer: an uncut excerpt) from various movies.

• The puzzle train The word “interlude” refers to something that fills time. They’d run this short—where you had to put together a sentence based on the illustrations on the train—whenever they were running ahead of schedule and had a few minutes to kill.

• La vie des animaux This animal show was resurrected several times but the old credit sequence is the best.

• Les chevaliers du ciel This series about fighter pilots, which started in 1967, was turned into a movie a couple of years ago. Cool beginning credits here, but most people in France remember the end-credit version sung by none other than Johnny Halliday. Music by the great François de Roubaix, whom I wrote about a little while ago.

And now a couple of more recent theme songs. Visually the credits aren't really inspiring but the music still had an impact: I have no idea who did the French version of Santa Barbara but it embodies the 80s for me. As for the French them to Prison Break, it's by the Marseille rapper Faf Larage. The song was a best-selling single in France in 2006.

What's in a name

My piece about trends in French first names for the New York Times' Week in Review is up.

"Elisabeth," by the way, peaked in the mid-60s and is considered old-fashioned now. Meilleursprenoms.com says it's widespread (in France), but not really given out anymore: in 2004, it was ranked 357th among first names; since 1940 it's 47th overall.

Alas, my namesake saint is a boring one: Saint Elisabeth was a Hungarian princess (1207–1231) who became a Franciscan nun after her husband's death. No crazy stigmata, no particularly nutty catholic endeavors: She just went out and looked after the poor.

The Scottish opera

Taking a break from the Britney Spears album, I dropped by the Met yesterday to catch Verdi's Macbeth. It was a fitting choice for Halloween, even if the tensest moment came from watching Maria Ghouleghina…sorry, Guleghina roll down the raked stage in a nightgown, raising the fear that her ample bosom might pop out. Adrian Noble's production was a little short on the spooky stuff—okay, so maybe he didn't want to stoop to cheap thrills—but also on the overall drama. The ginormous columns that delimited the set moved more than the leads: I was surprised to see so much of the "park and bark" approach that the Met's Peter Gelb mocked in his recent New Yorker profile, especially from a guy known from his theater work.

Speaking of that article: The thing I found most telling is that at no point did Gelb suggest any particular love for the art form. No mention of favorite performers or operas. No quirky memories of hearing an obscure singer in a weird setting. Nothing that remotely involved actually enjoying opera. Most of Gelb's talk was of brokering deals, flying all over the world to wine and dine potential stars; he only seemed to come alive when describing his visit to Zeffirelli's estate.

This business-minded approach may have little impact on the Met's artistic future—there are certainly plenty of encouraging signs when it comes to the hiring of interesting directors. It just felt a little sad to me.

Ghost story

Wow: the new Britney Spears album is pretty good. I might actually go as far as saying that it's good, period. Each song is a self-contained nugget of inventivity, and almost each one has a sonic hook that makes me pay attention, like the bass vroom on "Piece of Me," which sounds like a Robyn song (no wonder: Robyn actually contributes backing—and perhaps more—vocals), or the intro to "Heaven on Earth," which is total Moroder.

Kelefa Sanneh's review in the NY Times strongly implies that Britney has pulled a Milli Vanilli and doesn't even sing on some tracks. Clues include the fact that she's always done all her own backing vox and she doesn't this time, and that each track has a "vocal production" credit. Indeed, the album sports some of the most processed vocals I've ever heard. Not that I mind, it's just an observation.

As my esteemed colleague Mike Wolf pointed out, following this line of inquiry to its logical conclusion, why do we even need Britney anymore? Why not just a triannual report from a selection of studio wizards? Seen like that, Blackout is a triumph of engineering, a missile directed straight at the heart of decades of rock & roll purity. Ka-BOOM!

And really, is it that much different from art superstars like Jeff Koons employing armies of assistants to do the actual work, or from jet-setting chefs like Alain Ducasse who don't often cook in the restaurants bearing their names? You might argue that at least Koons comes up with a sketch and Ducasse with a dish, whereas it's debatable whether Britney, despite a pair of songwriting cocredits, had much creative input on Blackout. But in a way she certainly helped define the template that's being implemented on the album, so sure, her artistic fingerprint is definitely there.

In all these cases it's the brand that matters most: You don't go eat at Ducasse's to feel the master's personal touch in a sauce. There, the sous-chef is good enough, just like Swedish producers Bloodshy & Avant, who are all over Blackout, are certainly good enough left to their own devices—and possibly even better without Britney. After all had she been involved in the album she might have requested saccharine ballads (there are none), insisted on different arrangements (the current ones are brilliant) or made some other bird-brained choice—it's not like the past three years have inspired a lot of confidence in her decision-making abilities.

So Ms. Spears was not as involved in her own album as she might have been? It's not a scandal, it's a relief!

Mighty Joe Eszterhas

I'd not seen Flashdance since it first came out, but watching it on DVD this weekend was revelatory: It really is the yang to Showgirls' yin, both of them hatched by one of my favorite Hollywood animals—screenwriter Joe Eszterhas.

The similarities between the two movies—which should be shown on double bills—are stunning:

• Both are about young dancers (Jennifer Beals' Alex and Elizabeth Berkley's Nomi) who are unschooled but have a raw, explosive talent that doubles up as an expression of exuberant sexuality.

• The two women are prone to fits of petulant rage that seem to come out of nowhere (Nomi's classic fast-food freakout is just one of many such instances in Showgirls, while a pissed-off Alex gets out of a car in the middle of a tunnel).

• Each woman has a best friend who turns out be unlucky in love or career (Sunny Johnson in Flashdance, Gina Ravera in Showgirls), only to be helped/comforted by the lead.

• Each woman is desperately trying to integrate her idea of the establishment: the Pittsburgh Conservatory of Dance and Repertory for Alex, the Goddess show at the Stardust for Nomi.

• Both Alex and Nomi develop affairs with older men (Michael Nouri in Flashdance, Kyle McLachlan in Showgirls) who secretly give them breaks in their careers.

• Both have the support of much older women who represent exactly where they do not want to end up (a forgotten Follies/ballet dancer in Flashdance; bawdy comedian Henrietta Bazoom in Showgirls).

Eszterhas is also a lot more clever about class than most of his peers: This issue ties the movies together, and both offer telling scenes where the women betray their backgrounds in "uppity" environments—Nomi famously pronounces Versace so it rhymes with "face" while Alex pigs out on lobster in a fancy restaurant. Taken as a whole, Flashdance and Showgirls make up a study of art and ambition as thorough and uncompromising as any of the more "respectable" films Hollywood has cranked out over the years. For better or for worse, these movies embody their respective decades and are iconic signifiers of the threat of upwardly mobile "trashy" women against aging, stuck-in-their-ways establishments. Switch the gender, and you have the Joe Eszterhas story.

How to navigate through the stars

Within a 24-hour period this weekend I saw on stage Cate Blanchett, Peter Sarsgaard, Natalie Portman, Elaine Stritch, Ellen Burstyn, Anita Ekberg, Kevin Kline and Jennifer Garner. The latter two play the leads in Cyrano de Bergerac on Broadway. I'll get back to that one, though I'll let you ponder the fact, dear readers, that Garner's character, Roxane, is described as "bookish" in the text. Jennifer Garner bookish: three words I never thought I'd ever see in the same sentence.

As for all the others, they were in Francesco Vezzoli's one-night-only happening at the Guggenheim on Saturday night, part of Performa07. You could describe it as a star-studded reading of Pirandello's 1917 play Right You Are (If You Say You Are), but it was both more and less than that. Less, because as a reading, it plain sucked; more because as a concept, it was inspired.

I tagged along with Time Out New York's dynamic duo, dance editor Gia Kourlas and theater writer Adam Feldman; I felt decidedly gray next to their sartorial flair—she in some deconstructed, Westwood-like kite frock, he in his now-trademark swest (a sweater and a vest). After a late start, which caused tempers to amusingly flare on the enormous line, we finally made it inside the Gugg, only to realize the only spots left were rather high up on the ramp; the VIPs, of course, were on the floor, where mikes and lecterns were positioned facing inwards on a round platform. On one side, Anita Ekberg (!) sat on a couch made to look like oversize lips. We peered down to the action, feeling frustration mount (by then it was way past 11pm)—and it got worse as soon as the actors began speaking, as we realized with dismay that the sound was so shittily amplified that it echoed into sheer unintelligibility. Within five minutes, we decided to bail on one of the hottest tickets of the season.

But as we started walking away from the museum, a publicist caught up with us and explained that we'd be better in the theater, "and that's where Cate Blanchett is too." As it turned out, the proceedings upstairs were videotaped and projected in the Gugg's basement theater—and those upstairs had no way of knowing this was happening downstairs. La Blanchett indeed was there, sitting with her back to the audience in some leathery Galliano get-up and a black veil, a vision of ghostly goth chic.

The split-screen action in the basement offered unsparing video closeups of the actors on the main floor, some of them waffling between awkward and downright clueless (most notably Natalie Portman in mustachioed male drag by Prada and Abigail "Little Miss Sunshine" Breslin). Unsurprisingly, the ones who were best at actually acting out their lines were the old pros: Dianne Wiest, Ellen Burstyn, David Strathairn. But it was clear that the feed was the event's real point: not live but on video, and with a focus not on acting (this was not theater) but on sheer presence. This could not have been done with stage actors, it worked only with movie stars. And with someone from the category above star: that of icon—Ekberg, looking bored on her lips, drinking a glass of wine, observed and pitied by a cannibalistic, self-satisfied crowd who would not be caught with a copy of Star yet attended only because there were names in the cast.

Another good moment: when one of the screens suddenly switched to a shot of some of the VIPs, unaware they were being filmed. A beefy man in a suit looked as bored as Ekberg, fidgeting, looking at his shoes.

It all culminated at the very end when Blanchett finally got up from her subterranean perch, walked right by us like a b&w hologram on the runway of the damned, went all the way to the top of the museum then majestically proceeded down the ramp, filmed and photographed by paparazzi-like handlers, to join the other actors and deliver her handful of lines. Ta-da!

Soundtrack for the post-Vezzoli come-down: Róisín Murphy "Movie Star" (from Overpowered, 2007).

Fall has arrived

We've had a rather nice Indian summer here in New York, but the past few days have been gray and on the mournful side, and I can't say I find this displeasing, especially since my current soundtrack of choice is Jan Johansson's fittingly melancholy Jazz på Svenska.

I'd never heard of Johansson until a nice elf in Stockholm sent me the CD following an email exchange in which I'd mentioned my love for Benny Andersson's folk album, 1987's Klinga Mina Klockor. Turns out that in the ’60s Johansson recorded LPs in which he gave the jazz treatment to folk tunes from Sweden (Jazz på Svenska), Russia (Jazz på Ryska) and Hungary (Jazz på Ungerska). Johansson was—and, I gather, still is, despite his death in 1968 at age 37—considered one of Sweden's top jazz musicians. But he also had genuine mass appeal: He wrote the theme for Pippi Långstrump, better known here as Pippi Longstocking, and Jazz på Svenska has sold a total of 250,000 albums in Sweden—not bad considering there's only 9 million people in the entire country.

(Note to jazzheads: My colleague K. Leander Williams pointed out some similarities between Jazz på Svenska and John Lewis's Modern Jazz Quartet, particularly the Django and Fontessa albums. More stuff to check out.)

Jan Johansson "Visa från Utanmyra" and "Polska från Medelpad" (from Jazz på Svenska)

And of course I can't resist posting songs by Benny Andersson. Note that "Efter Regnet" was covered (as "After the Rain") by Anne-Sofie von Otter. And while I'm at it, let's go for maximum geek-out with excerpts from Benny and Björn's Kristina från Duvemåla, a musical based on Vilhelm Moberg's cycle The Emigrants, which tells the tale of Swedes leaving their country for the wilds of Minnesota in the 19th century. I've been waiting for it to come to the US for a good decade, but even I have to admit it's not the easiest sell here, as it is light years away from Mamma Mia and even Chess. Of course I had to get the cast album when it came out, despite the fact that it's a three-CD set in Swedish (except for a couple of tracks, one of which I'm posting) and with no translation.

Benny Andersson "Inledningsvisa" and "Efter Regnet" (from Klinga Mina Klockor)

Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus "A Sunday in Battery Park" and "Missfall" (from Kristina från Duvemåla)

So much to do

A couple of short ones in this week's Time Out New York. It would have been fun to review Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read without reading it; alas, a little thing called journalistic ethics got in the way. I know, I know: How old-fashioned, how old media of me. Didn't care much for the book, but it did provide a timely reminder that I should read Balzac's Lost Illusions, if only as a sort of bookend to Sentimental Education.

Also, a plug for the little Finnish monster band that could—yes, Lordi. I am not ashamed.

Finally, do check out the roundup preview of Performa07, the mammoth performance-art biennial that's starting on Saturday with Francesco Vezzoli's one-time-only staging of Pirandello at the Gugg. There's tons of really promising events, and most of them are under $25 and even free.

Andiamo!

A belated note on the matinee of Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci I caught a few days ago at City Opera. It's brought on by both the fun I had and as a reaction to the self-congratulatory chest-thumping coming from across the plaza, which is starting to get on my nerves: Fine, we get it, the Met has big, luscious stars, and many of them have nicely proportioned chests, and many of them have shiny, lustrous manes. And then there's the women… But the new productions aren't half as cutting-edge as they think they are (Il Trittico = Zeffirelli in Broadway clothing) and the musical-chair policy of slotting big names as last-minute replacements could backfire severely when some of them start overworking their voices.

The Cav/Pag bill, on the other hand, embodied what City Opera has been doing well for years. (We'll see what the incoming administrator has in mind.) It's not chic to be seen there, it's not super-hyped, but it's pretty damn entertaining. The Cav/Pag singers were mostly fine and the staging was nimble and inventive—more of an achievement than you'd think, considering those pieces are almost part of the national subconscious after having been used and overused in TV and movies, and excerpted on a gazillion tenor recordings. We have to thanks director Stephen Lawless for that. I'd loved his Semele set in the days of JFK's Camelot last year, and Cav/Pag, borrowing from Italian postwar neorealist aesthetics, is another thumbs-up.

Lawless likes conceptual interpretations but he doesn't go as far as some of those kooky Germans (who are always used as strawmen when it comes to decrying going-too-far stagings, but never mind). Lawless works with the music, not against it. He doesn't force his ideas on the opera, but provides a framework that allows the piece to acquire new resonance, visually filling in the blanks without straining. For instance in Cavalleria he alludes to Alfio being in cahoots with the mafia, which adds a nice little frisson to the drama. I did watch with trepidation when Elizabeth Caballero as Nedda (in Pagliacci) climbed on top of her pink trailer in order to sing an aria, then gingerly made her way back down—talk about frisson! Had she missed a step, it would have been a lot more dramatic than Natalie Dessay's trip-and-tumble at opening night of Lucia di Lammermoor.

Standing in the way of control

New Yorkers still have time to catch Pierre Rigal and Aurélien Bory's érection, which is at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, on W. 37th St, until Saturday evening; it lasts 45 minutes, costs only $20 and is general admission, so there's no excuse.

I was lured by Bory's name: I loved his work on Cie. 111's Plan B a few years ago. That mix of dance, athletics and circus (presented at the New Victory) was tied together by a perpetual jostling of the viewers' visual perception. That overall theme is present as well in érection, which Bory directed and designed, and which Rigal choreographed and performs.

It was off to a slow start—Rigal alone on stage, within a square delimited by light. Okay, I can't deny that the first 15-20 minutes are on the uneventful side, as the crouched Rigal tries to stand up but cannot quite do it. He moves around, gets imprisoned within ever-evolving areas defined, again, solely by light. But gradually a purely visual kind of bliss emerges. As I watched Rigal attempt to "evolve" from a supine position to an erect one, my mind kept coming back to how this could be read as a poetic answer to creationists.

My colleague Gia Kourlas gleefully rained on my parade by telling me that a strobe-light effect I enjoyed (it's timed so that Rigal looks suspended in mid-air as he bounces up and down) was a rip-off of something David Parsons did a few years ago. Oh well…I still loved it, and it made me wish NYC theater and opera directors went to see more dance, which seems to be light-years ahead in its use of lighting and projections. Peter Gelb (who comes across as unbelievably smug in a recent New Yorker profile) should go out more; he'd realize the stuff he's so proud of is 20 years behind. (Granted, an improvement on the previous regime, which was 40 years behind.)

By the very end, Rigal is lit so that he looks like a 3-D hologram of himself. He was a few feet from me and yet I hesitated to trust my eyes; in the back of my mind was the feeling that I was being tricked, that the performer had rushed offstage and been replaced by something out of Tron.

There's nothing like being bamboozled live, in a small space, by mere lighting—it's a very different experience from being tricked by million-dollar CGI in a movie. One engages all your senses and makes you question reality itself; the other you just kinda look at.

The 24-second post

Check out Time Out New York's website for my report on last night's 24 Hr. Plays at the American Airlines Theatre. And I forgot to mention it, but I'd never seen so many people text during a show. Lame! Still, Bubbles and Omar in one night…I was happy.

Flaubert's parrot

I guess that'd be me, 'cause I just finished reading his novel Sentimental Education and can't resist quoting a couple of passages. (I read the book in French but am borrowing from the Penguin Classics translation—who has time to translate Flaubert for fun?)

The scene takes place at a party, with guests whipping themselves up in a frenzy of fun. Suddenly, Flaubert opens up to an abyss with suggestive economy:

"The Sphinx was drinking brandy, shouting at the top of her voice, and throwing herself around like a madwoman. Suddenly her cheeks puffed out, and, unable to hold back a mouthful of blood, she put her napkin to her lips, then threw it under the table.
Frédéric had noticed.
'It's nothing!'
And when he urged her to go home and take care of herself, she answered slowly:
'Oh, what's the use? It it wasn't this, it would be something else. Life isn't much fun.'
He shivered, in the grip of a glacial melancholy, as if he had just caught sight of whole worlds of misery and despair, a charcoal stove beside a trestle-bed, corpses in the morgue, in their leather wrappings, cold water from the tap running through their hair."

And here's a description of the blah-blah during the at-home day of a wealthy woman:

"The luxury of the setting underlined the triviality of the conversation; although the subject-matter was not as stupid as the manner of its delivery, which was aimless, lifeless, and inconsequential. Here were men with experience of the world—a former minister, the curé of a large parish, two or three high government officials—yet they confined themselves to the most threadbare commonplaces. Some looked like tired old dowagers, some like crafty horse-dealers; and old men displayed wives who might have been their granddaughters."

Plus ça change…

Phantom of the Nightwish

Yesterday evening, the Dilettante, her friend Tristan and a special representative from Night After Night trekked to Nokia, the serendipitously named—and located: half a block from the theater presenting Phantom of the Opera!—venue hosting Finnish band Nightwish.

The charms of Nightwish had eluded me for years. I just couldn't get into to the mix of power metal and operatic vocals. This all changed when the band unceremoniously kicked out singer Tarja Turunen, replaced her with a Swede with a pop background named Anette Olzon, and released the album Dark Passion Play. One listen and I was hooked. Actually I should specify: One listen to the first track, the 14-minute-long "The Poet and the Pendulum," and I was hooked. So many things I love are crammed into it: Abba and Metallica, Jim Steinman and Lord of the Rings, blastbeats and a ginormous orchestra. Also a singalong chorus, a Celtic gig interlude and a children's choir, because why not? ("Because why not?" is my favorite rationale for art.)

Nightwish "The Poet and the Pendulum" (from Dark Passion Play, 2007)

I'm sure Night After Night will comment on the musical side of the show so I'll just expand a bit on some side aspects. I can't remember, for instance, the last time I saw men sing along so lustily at a gig; I suppose the power riffage and brute drumming allow them to distance themselves from the fact that they're singing along to very pop choruses. Still, it was impressive to watch all those dudes mouthing long stretches of verbose lyrics.

Another surprising thing was the band's amiable stage presence. Mastermind Tuomas Holopainen played the part of tortured artiste to the hilt behind his keyboards, but the rest looked very happy to be there, particularly guitarist Emppu Vuorinen. It was actually a bit jarring at times, considering the lyrical content ("I cannot die, I, a whore for the cold world," etc.). I'll quote Tristan's suggestions for Anette:
- Avoid smiling. We realize that given your genetic and ancestral makeup this may be impossible. In that case, perhaps a black veil could be considered, maybe one decorated with silver spiderwebs.
- Do not wave happily at audience members. Try instead to look malevolent and resigned.
- Please avoid making any gesture whose meaning is “I encourage you to applaud!” Instead, gestures in the category of prayer, anguish or ritual sacrifice could be substituted. We can provide helpful examples for you to emulate. You can also fold your arms Pharaoh-style.

You can tell Tristan regularly goes to the Met.

Say uh-oh!

No, this isn't the new home of Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po: It's the design for the new Prague National Library, and boy are the Czechs angry! The project, designed by Jan Kaplicky, was selected by a jury headed by Zaha Hadid, reigning queen of jet-setting starchitects. It's hard to tell from the CGI model, but apparently the nine-story-high library will be topped by an eye-like design, as if the building was looking over the city.

I don't mind the design actually—especially living in New York, where we're assaulted by an avalanche of cookie-cutter "luxury condos" and where zero money goes to public buildings. But I'm a bit baffled as to why it's dumped in a middle of a field, when Prague is many things but not a field. According to Le Monde the library is slated to be built on a hill near downtown. Wouldn't it be better to see the building in its urban context? I don't mean to restrict an architect's imagination, but it's hard not to sense deliberate obfuscation there.

Through a glass pinkly

The vagaries of the calendar mean that I recently saw two plays set in the gay and lesbian past: the new Beebo Brinker Chronicles, based on Ann Bannon's 50s pulp novels, and a revival of Terrence McNally's 1975 bathhouse-set farce The Ritz.

First, let's point out that the lesbian-themed production is Off-Off, in a tiny theater with general admission, very basic sets and a cast of six. The gay-themed show is at the refurbished Studio 54 with Broadway-level ticket prices, an opulent multilevel set and a cast of 23; the rights for the songs they use alone must have been half the Beebo budget.

An interesting parallel between the shows is brought on by the difficulty to handle the pull between two conflicting directions. A big element in The Ritz is the appeal of a performer so bad, she's—maybe not good, but compulsively watchable; Rosie Perez plays her and she does work her butt off, but she lacks that ineffable spark that'd make her magnetic (plus her diction is so muddled that she's often hard to understand). The Beebo creative team, meanwhile, had to make a decision about going for camp or for earnest drama. The tension between the two actually makes for interesting theater because you can almost physically feel the effort of the creative team as it tried to inject humor while not falling into irony and distance. There, the actors, especially the stunning Marin Ireland and David Greenspan, walk that fine line with essential grace.

Finally, the issue of sexuality is very present in both shows. The Ritz, alas, feels completely neutered. Joe Mantello's direction is, er, flaccid—not good when the action relies on slammed doors, chases and mistaken identities, and not good when the background is a place dedicated to 24/7 sex. This bathhouse isn't a place where men go to have sex with each other: It looks and feels like a gym—though I'm sure there's worse happening in the steam room of the Chelsea branch of New York Sports Club than in Mantello's baths—and the gaze is narcissistically turned toward the self rather than toward others. Beebo feels more about desire than raw sexuality, which I enjoyed because it's a tricky thing to represent onstage. Once again, the cast pulls it off beautifully, and watching it in action more than made up in the oft-confused chronological structure of the show.

Achtung baby

My piece about German band Tokio Hotel is up at Slate. Haven't heard of them? Then you're not checking out this post from a computer in Europe, or you're not a Hot Topic shopper. Read on…

Special thanks to Andréa and JM for the TH tip!

Smell the glove

Actually, it wasn't only the glove you could smell at Bowery Ballroom: it was the entire main space. As I got in, two men were busy spritzing down the room from the balcony. This, you see, is because the "Sunday Party™ Lifestyle Concert" was "scented" with "an appropriately sexy amber-champagne" perfume. (No wonder the Sheila said "I thought you smelled boozy" when I got home—and the Dilettante is a confirmed teetotaler.)

We were told in a program distributed at the door that "guests will be able to see, hear, touch, taste, and even smell each and every part of the event's message, presenting a full-sensory immersion in glamour!" I'm not sure what the message was: it all just felt like any other party for fashiony types—everybody seemed to know everybody and there was a lot of excited air-kissing. But it was okay because the crowd shed any kind of blasé attitude and got down for the evening's main attraction.

Being completely un–au courant when it comes to lifestyle, I'd thought that the full-sensory immersion in glamour would be delivered solely by the music acts: Justin Bond and the magnificent Escort. I raved about Escort's PS1 show a few months ago, and this one was even better, largely because the sound was up to the Bowery's usual high standard. It took the group about a song and a half to gel (the equivalent of them clearing their throat) but then they were an unstoppable dance machine. The originals are so good that they more than stand up next to the covers of Geraldine Hunt's "Can't Fake the Feeling" and Gino Soccio's "Dancer." I'm stunned that they don't have a bigger buzz in town—they're only the best live band NYC has to offer right now.

I'm getting totally over the Pixie Harlots, who surrounded Justin Bond in a leggy cloud on the first couple of numbers; the troupe of lascivious dancers (and I use the term loosely) is fun the first time, but its range is so limited that the act grows dull with repeat viewings.

Bond himself was in fine form—nobody around offers between-song banter like "Bring on the rapture so we can get these Christians the fuck out of the way and we can have a good time." He also went on at some length about the welcome arrival of a "neo-pagan aristocracy." Not sure what it is, but count me in.

Loon against the moon

For the past several weeks I've been irrationally excited every time I saw Natalie Dessay's haggard mug on one of the Met ads plastered on bus shelters all over town—it may have something to do with misplaced French pride, which also got a boost from last week's rugby triumph. I was particularly excited to see the froggy star in Donizetti's over-the-top Lucia di Lammermoor, even if opera blogs were carrying alarming rumors about the cluelessness of director Mary Zimmerman (whose popular Metamorphoses I missed a few years back).

Alas, the evening was okay but not exciting. Supposedly Zimmerman researched the local flavor in Scotland, where the action takes place. Watching the results, I sometimes thought, The director went to Scotland and all I got is this lousy crag. Dessay did her best and proved you can act up a storm and still come across as restrained, and she sounded fine (but not great) to my untrained ears. My biggest beef is with the theatrical elements themselves, which felt weirdly tentative. The Met's current Madama Butterfly and Magic Flute productions are warhorses that will survive almost any cast; this Lucia lives or dies by whoever plays the title role—if she isn't up to snuff, it will all sink.

I actually preferred the Met's previous Lucia, which I saw a couple of years ago with Elizabeth Futral. To me it captured the opera's grand nuttiness, especially since Futral (not the most precise singer but a grand emoter) teetered very close to camp, in a Jennifer Jones kinda way. It was insanity in grand Technicolor. Zimmerman's Lucia, on the other hand, is insanity in muted beige. Wow, what a non-thrill!

One of my favorite writers around, Vilaine Fille (aka Marion Lignana Rosenberg, a contributor to TONY and other fine publications), eviscerated the production here. She sets her phaser to TOTAL DESTROY and…well, it's a sight to behold.

Across the plaza the same night, a friend—let's call him Tristan—was catching Cavalleria Rusticana/I Pagliacci at City Opera. He was unlucky enough to run into that dreaded subset of the NYC audience: the Boor.

"The two wealthy looking people behind me were amazingly drunk," Tristan reported in a postmortem email the following day. "Coming in late, spilling m&ms all over the floor, talking, falling asleep and snoring, and then mumbling incoherently during the entire last 5 minutes. As the woman staggered over her aislemates just as the applause started, I couldn't resist the urge to stand up, turn around, and tell my slowly moving captive audience what I thought about her. 'Go home and sleep it off! Next time drink at home!' I don't think she even understood what I was saying. I actually regret not physically knocking her over. Is that bad?"

I often fantasize about confronting the Boor; Tristan did it.

Who's laughing now?

The only news that matters today: France beat New Zealand in the rugby world cup. Yes!!!!! After a typically slow start in the tornament, Les Bleus are picking up irrepressible steam. We're playing England—another surprise winner (over Australia) today—in the next round and I'm confident we will overcome.

Oh, there's a rugby world cup going on? No wonder you don't know about it if you rely on American outlets for your sports news: None of them talks about the event. I suppose the provincial shenanigans of baseball or, even worse, college basketball are satisfying when you live blissfully sheltered from international competition.

Anyway, back to today's momentous win. One of the Kiwis' famous weapons in rugby is the haka, a Maori dance involving stomping and shouting that the national team performs right before a game starts. (A variant introduced a couple of years ago controversially included a throat-slitting movement.) Usually the opposing team looks on from a safe distance, but today the French got very very close to the All-Blacks, and even wore special red, white and blue shirts. A great moment captured here.

Notice the hirsute French player looking half-psychotic? That bearded mountain has become quite the star in France, and his name is Sébastien "the caveman" Chabal. There's quite a few tributes on YouTube and DailyMotion but my favorite is "Chabal Bazooka," a pastiche of a pastiche since it's based on a song by parodic band Fatal Bazooka (which I actually posted a few months ago).

Wish you were here

There's a lot of talk about old New York—as in, 1980s New York—these days, what with the unstoppable mushrooming of "luxury condos" and $2,500/month studios, the family-friendly Times Square, and brokers making multimillion bonuses (not salaries: bonuses).

Learning about the death of Dean Johnson was sad in many ways. He was a tireless advocate of out gays playing rock via his bands Dean and the Weenies then the Velvet Mafia, and his Rock & Roll Fag Bar and HomoCorps nights—this at a time when gay men were assumed to like only show tunes and disco. I can't say his own music ever did much for me, but I love that he represented a certain idea of queerness whose ideals were reflected in the aggro aesthetics of Bimbox zine rather than in getting same-sex vows published in the New York Times. For a look back at Johnson's days in New York, check out his brief diary.

And speaking of HomoCorps, Tom Jennings, coeditor of the historically significant zine Homocore, has painstakingly scanned and posted classic issues here.

Ink on your fingers

Two short pieces in the new Time Out New York.

First is a review of the latest Irène Némirovsky book to be published in the U.S. I'm a huge fan of Suite Française, but this one is…meh.

Then we have a paean to the new Caligula DVD. My fascination with this movie isn't new, but even I was stunned to see it come out as a three-disc set! Space constraints prevented me to mention some of the great stuff on offer, like Malcolm McDowell outing Florinda Bolkan in his commentary (her girlfriend introduced him to Gore Vidal, author of the original script), or the featurettes on John Steiner (Longinus) and Penthouse Pet of the Century Lori Wagner (an extra). Steiner had gained modest fame after appearing in Peter Brook's Marat/Sade, so what did he do with it? He moved to Italy where he made 120 movies ranging from B to Z grade in about 20 years. If names like Lucio Fulci, Antonio Margheriti and Ruggero Deodato mean anything to you, you've seen Steiner—who now says he hated Caligula and everybody involved with it. Wagner's story is more bittersweet. She had to fight to get decent screen time, and on that set it meant not being shy. "Tinto [Brass] needed somebody to urinate on this dead guy and I wanted my own spot in the movie…" At least she made out with some costumes, which she still owns.

But my absolute favorite extra is Helen Mirren's commentary. Dame Helen is acerbic, smart, funny—and considering her character appears only after a full hour, she's great at setting the scene while not on screen. Describing her first encounter with Maria Schneider (originally slated to play the key part of Caligula's sister, Drusilla), for instance, she recalls that "Maria was more terrifying than the whole of Caligula put together in many ways." She's frank about signing on for the money (it bought her first house) but has no regrets as the overall insanity made for a memorable experience. It's also fun to hear her cringe during the killing-machine sequence: She still can't bear to watch it and has to be told when it's over so she can resume watching.

Insterstellar overdrive

Space rock has never really been my cup of lysergic tea; it certainly has something to do with my abstaining from mind-altering substances (unless you count chocolate, but somehow I don't think you do), but also with the genre's hippie connotations. Too much noodling, too much babbling.

But I kept reading intriguing tidbits about a newish Brit outfit called Litmus that's said to play super-heavy space rock—so heavy, in fact, that the band's second and latest album, Planetfall, came out on Rise Above, the label run by Cathedral's Lee Dorrian and the home to Dilettante sludgy/doomy faves like Grand Magus, Witchcraft, Orange Goblin and Electric Wizard. Plus Litmus was being championed by Julian Cope, who has a pretty good ear for these things.

Well, Planetfall really is all that. It's heavy. It's fast. It's dense. Sure, like much of the Rise Above roster it's also unabashedly retro, and the mellotron whizzes are a bit conventional, but oh my god does it rock! It's got to be the headbanging-with-your-eyes-closed album of the year.

And in a super-rare occurrence, since I tend to believe 180 seconds is the ideal length for a song, my favorite tracks here are two of the longest ones: "Far Beyond," clocking in at eight minutes, and "Under the Sign," which goes on for 15 over-the-top minutes and just never lets up even as it piles on busy-busy-busy bass runs, atomic drum fills and endless guitar soloing—things start at full speed and just stay there.

Litmus "Under the Sign"
Litmus "Far Beyond"

Duking it out, sports-style

The Regular is a tiny place that makes the best espresso in Park Slope, where the competition is stiff. Another reason to go there is that they always have a few issues of the New York Review of Books on hand. Today, however, there also was a copy of the latest Columbia Journalism Review on the counter, so I read that while having coffee. (I'm the first to complain about Park Slope, but at the end of the day living in a neighborhood where you get these mags at the local coffee place ain't too bad.)

The most interesting thing in that CJR is a long article by Steve Wasserman, who used to be editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, about the state of book reviewing. He makes several interesting points, but one of them really caught my attention. He explains that when he got the job at the LA Times, he was inspired by the paper's sports section, and the way it covers the local teams thoroughly, in great arcane detail and with unflagging passion.

Yes! I often say that there's no reason we can't write and talk about culture with the same degree of involvement that sports fans bring to their turf. I cannot for the life of me fathom the point of dissecting the latest Giants or Knicks or Mets' collapse, but I'd love to find a forum where we could bring out similar focus and dedication to the discussion of, say, the baffling way the Roundabout programs its seasons. That company pretty much is the equivalent of the Yankees when it comes to New York theater: using its generous payroll to bring stars onboard, then trying to figure out what to do with them.

Back in the 1950s, then in the late 60s/early 70s, the monthly mags Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif represented two completely different ways to look at cinema and threw mud at each other constantly. You had to pick a camp and be ready to attack the theoretical and aesthetic positions of your adversary. What fun! It'd be great to inject a little dose of that type of zealous conviction to arts coverage.

Look back in wonder, part 3

I realize I said this would be an occasional series and I just wrote about seeing Saint Etienne a few days ago, but I could not let this particularly anniversary go by: On September 29, 1989, I saw the Jesus Lizard for the first time. Oh mama!

Back then I was in grad school at Rutgers in New Brunswick, so I saw a lot of shows at the Court Tavern, a local dingy, super-low-ceilinged basement venue. Of all the good gigs I caught there (Mudhoney, Laughing Hyenas, Tiny Lights, the A-Bones, Beme Seed), none made as much of an impact.

According to the Touch & Go site, the Jesus Lizard played its first-ever show on July 1, 1989, in Chicago, so the band must have been on its first tour when I saw it. And maybe a band can only have that sense of unhinged mania on its first tour; later, you learn that it's probably a good idea not to get wasted—in every sense of the word—every night. The Lizard mixed a sense of threatening, quasi-psychopathic rage with a surprisingly disciplined reptilian crawl forward (the band wasn't big on BPMs). The explosive rhythm section of Mac McNeilly and David Sims plus the economical Duane Denison on guitar plus one of the best frontmen ever in David Yow: These guys were the perfect rock unit.

It's too bad that Yow is now remembered, if at all, as that guy who used to drop his pants during shows. And yes he did expose himself during "Tight ’n Shiny" at the Court, but it's not like he was just letting it all hang out, as it were: Like everything else the Lizard did, he went further by pulling and stretching and choking himself in a way that would have been painful if he hadn't seemed to be in some kind of trance. Some people speak in tongue, others become rock singers.

Another thing about Yow: He was a man, not an overgrown boy indulging in rock because it's a cool thing to do. He was around 29 in 1989 (he'd already been in Scratch Acid in Texas), and he had a kind of beat-up gravitas. When he got in your face at a show, it was scary because you felt that he was old enough to know better—he just didn't care to know better.

The next time I saw the Jesus Lizard was on April 28, 1990, at Maxwells, where it was opening for some new Seattle band called Nirvana. Nirvana didn't stand a chance following up the Lizard; I left after maybe four or five songs by Cobain & Co. In retrospect of course I regret not staying longer for Nirvana, a band I never saw again, but that night in 1990, nobody could play after the Jesus Lizard.

That particular bill illustrated a dichotomy very much of its time: grunge vs pigfuck. I preferred pigfuck, especially in its midwestern incarnation, which included the Lizard, Killdozer and pretty much the entire Amphetamine Reptile roster. I just loved that amorphous genre's violent misanthropy and its strong strain of elaborate artiness, for lack of a better word (best example: Killdozer); the music was a lot more fucked-up, aggressive, and complex—and a lot less predictable—than grunge, which relied way too much on tension-and-release dynamics that quickly became generic. Plus pigfuck didn't wallow in self-obsessed misery: Pigfuck was all about taking it out on others!

The Jesus Lizard released the Pure EP in 1989 but I'm going to forego historical purity and post tracks from its 1991 album Goat, the studio album that to me best captures the mix of genius precision and batshit abandon that characterized the band live, and one of the best albums of the 90s. Here's a sensational three-track consecutive sequence from it.

Jesus Lizard "Karpis"
Jesus Lizard "South Mouth"
Jesus Lizard "Lady Shoes"

Foreign tongues

Listening to France Inter radio recently, I learned that Mimi Perrin, the founder and lead member of les Double Six vocal group in the 60s, also translates books from English into French. The revelation came in a discussion of the latest John Le Carré novel, which just came out in France; turns out Perrin and her daughter Isabelle have been Le Carré's regular French translators for the past 20 years.

What's fascinating about this is that les Double Six specialized in translation as well: the transformation of an instrumental jazz solo into a vocal one, with lyrics. Known as vocalese, this exercise has been made famous by Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, and the Manhattan Transfer, and les Double Six was the best-known (the only?) French act specializing in it.

Another fun tidbit is that during its short existence (1959–64), les Double Six featured a great roster of singers, including Ward Swingle (founder of the Swingle Singers), Eddy Louiss (usually known for his piano and organ playing), Bernard Lubat (also a drummer) and Christiane Legrand (sister of composer Michel, and the singing voice of Delphine Seyrig in Jacques Demy's crackpot musical Donkey Skin).

French is usually perceived as a language that's rhythmically unwieldy because it lacks a tonic accent as strong and adaptable as the one in, say, English. Since Perrin was the one writing the Double Six lyrics, she was accutely aware of that problem as she formed sentences that could flow in a way similar to a flute, trumpet or sax solo. You can check out how she did by "Rat Race" and "Meet Benny Bailey" (two Quincy Jones composition, with the Double Six adaptation based on Count Basie recordings), and Gershwin' s"Fascinating Rhythm" (based on a Stan Kenton recording).

Les Double Six "Rat Race" (Perrin's sings Billy Mitchell's sax solo)
Les Double Six "Meet Benny Bailey" (Christiane Legrand sings Frank Wess' flute solo, Perrin sings Henry Coker's trombone solo)
Les Double Six "Fascinating Rhythm" (Claude Germain sings Frank Rosolino' trombone solo, Eddy Louiss sings Bill Holman's sax solo, Perrin sings Bill Perkin's sax solo, Louis Aldebert sings another Perkins solo)

Look back in wonder, part 2

Another installment of the occasional series in which I dig up my old logs and look back at something I saw the same day x years ago…

September 24, 1994: Saint Etienne at the Manhattan Centre on W. 34th St. For its first American gig, the band was stuck on a disparate Warner Brothers showcase for CMJ that also included American Music Club, Soul Coughing and Grant Lee Buffalo.

The reception at the time was noticeable cool. Typical was Neil Strauss' review in the New York Times: "The English band's singer, Sarah Cracknell, was a forgettable diva, unable to project her voice and almost painful to watch as she danced out of tempo to the band's weak disco beats. Even the synthesizers of Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs sounded too watered down to be effective except on ballads like 'Hobart Paving.' (…) On record, the appeal of St. Etienne is in the way it cuts out all the emotional and lyrical depth from pop songs and keeps only the structure and gloss to create infectious dance Muzak. Live, however, music without substance sounds simply like music without substance."

We've come a long way since then, and fortunately many more critics have now figured out that "substance" is both overvalued and able to take many forms.

Of course unlike Strauss I had a grand time that night; so grand, in fact, that I went back for seconds the very next day, when the band put on a repeat (and even better) appearance at Limelight.

Not too many specific memories from both shows: contrary to what Strauss wrote, Stanley wasn't on stage fiddling with synths; one of the backup vocalists was ex–Dolly Mixture Debsey; Cracknell wore a boa. Instead of individual songs I remember an overall feeling of intense happiness.

Cracknell's role in Saint Etienne has often been undervalued but she was particularly essential live. What threw a lot of critics—still mostly male at that time, and still very much in thrall to rock aesthetics—is that on record she could come across as impossible cool, but on stage she was friendly, accessible, goofy. She didn't fit in either of the basic rock categories for female singers at the time: tough girl or sexpot.

Looking back at Saint Etienne's early years, it's also obvious they were way ahead of the curve in their mix of pop and dance. Listening to Annie, Robyn or some indie band remixed by a hot German duo feels natural now, but when Saint Etienne had their tracks retooled by people as diverse as Autechre, Andrew Weatherall, the Dust Brothers or house honcho Roger Sanchez in the early 90s, the move was misunderstood as much by indie-poppers as by hardcore electronic fans (I vaguely remember Aphex Twin sniffing that he didn't care for Saint Etienne's music to begin with, so it was a pleasure to dismantle it).

Plaza wars

Like many in town, I'm excited by Gérard Mortier's impending arrival at City Opera. He's just outlined some of his plans in an interview, and the expectations are even higher.

Which brings me to a general point brought up by this interview: Mortier's arrival symbolizes the arrival of competition, and that's something opera lovers are not used to here. The Met has for years been secure in its self-appointed role as the center of opera, not only in New York but in the world (sure, if it makes them happy to think that). Suddenly, a new sheriff waltzes into town, goes up to the old one and says "Show me your stuff!"

Another monopoly being challenged here is the New York Times' hold on arts coverage: It is significant that Mortier's interview was in the New York Sun, not in the Times—seen by many as the go-to place to read the Met's press releases.

While Americans give verbal props to capitalism and competition, the reality often boils down to monopoly situations. (If you've ever had to deal with a cable company in New York, you'll know exactly what I mean.) Of course the world of opera is a rarefied one, but what's at stakes here is actually rather wide-ranging.

In cultural terms, you have an outsider coming in and showing that there are ways to do things other than the ones adopted by the local powerhouse. (Despite its cosmopolitanism, New York is actually relatively provincial when it comes to being aware of what's going on in other countries.)

In media terms, it means the local 800-pound gorilla may need to start looking over its shoulder a little more.

Exciting news, indeed.

Elegant sleuthing

I love crime fiction, so it's no wonder that some of my favorite long-form non-fiction involves the meticulous dissection of a sham. The New Yorker has published two such pieces recently, one about counterfeit olive oil and one about counterfeit classical recordings. Tom Mueller's "Slippery Business" turned out to be rather frustrating—like most of the food-themed issue it was part of, actually—and I started skimming halfway through. Mueller just couldn't get me interested in the topic, perhaps because while he had a good villain in the shrewd, literally oleaginous Domenico Ribatti, his point just kept getting diluted, just like the oil he was writing about. (A nice coda the following week, however, when another Tom Mueller, ironically an exec in an American olive-oil company, wrote to complain that the journalist should have included a disclaimer that the two men are not related!)

The main themes of Mark Singer's "Fantasia for Piano," about the Joyce Hatto scandal, are similar to the one in Mueller's piece: The elaborate lengths to which some people go to deceive others, and how hardcore fans and professional critics can be fooled by the "product" (olive oil, piano recordings) they so passionately obsess over. This is compounded by the fact that in both cases said product is a symbol of sophisticated taste—though olive oil's become so commonplace that, like chocolate, coffee or tea, the challenge is now to make it re-"elitize" again by focusing on vintages and areas of origin. (This is why it's so fun reading about those deceptions: What's at stake usually is punctured ego rather than, say, the entire life savings of the poor, uneducated victim of a scam artist. But then The New Yorker isn't really interested in the grittier issues affecting the little people.)

Anyway, the Hatto scam is wonderful: In the ’00s, some dedicated fans of piano music became entranced by a British interpreter who, in her seventies, had started cranking out exceptional recordings on a label run by her husband, the wonderfully monickered William Barrington-Coupe ("Barry"). Long story short: Turns out Hatto didn't play on those albums—her husband just recycled relatively obscure recordings by other, better pianists and pass them on as his wife's.

A striking element in the story is that while Joyce Hatto was interviewed by various classical-music outlets, nobody checked with the people she supposedly played with. On some of her recordings, she was backed by a seemingly non-existent orchestra, but nobody—nobody!—looked into it. And this was in the mid- to late ’00s, when everything already was only a Google search away. No basic reporting was done, and there were no corroborating secondary sources in any of the Hatto profiles other than Barry.

Another great bit is that the switcheroo was first exposed by a New Yorker who in February 2007 put his newly purchased Hatto CDs in his iTunes, and another performer's name popped up from the Gracenotes database. Does this mean that no Hatto fan before that one had listened to her on a computer?!? It boggles the mind.

Train in vain

The NY Times' "Business Travel" supplement today includes a telling juxtaposition. The lead front-page article is about the ever-increasing delays at airports. In short: They're bad, and they're only going to get worse.

Inside the section is another, shorter piece, about the rise of high-speed train travel in Europe. Travel between Paris and London will go down to 2h15 in November; the French high-speed train, the awesome TGV, keeps growing eastward, linking up to more and more European cities. And needless to say, this is comfortable, virtually hassle-free travel since train stations tend to be in the center of cities, and you don't need to show up hours in advance either.

It doesn't take much IQ power to see that the US is completely clueless when it comes to transportation, and that its stubborn emphasis on planes and automobiles is pathetically short-sighted. Of course air travel cannot easily be replaced on long, cross-country distances, but all the short and medium trips could be done by train…if there was a political will to spend on infrastructure. And don't give me any of that "But the Acela doesn't even work!" crap: It doesn't work well because not enough money has been pumped into the infrastructure. There should be high-speed trains covering the Washington-NYC-Boston axis (no, the Acela doesn't count), as well as San Diego-LA-San Francisco-Portland-Seattle, or various routes around Chicago. It's completely useless to spend hours worrying about small ways to improve your "carbon footprint" when public transportation—which can have a major impact, much greater than recycling your office xerox paper—is so woefully neglected.

Clay-motion

Like Basil Twist's Dogugaeshu, Josef Nadj and Miquel Barceló's Paso Doble (at St. Ann's Warehouse this weekend) tends to be filed under Dance. Both pieces, however don't resemble anything usually associated with dance. There are no humans on stage in Dogugaeshu, and the two men in Paso Doble spend the entire time sculpting clay. In both cases, the set becomes the show, and vice versa. In Paso Doble, the concept is taken to its logical conclusion as art literally ends up eating up/absorbing its makers. A brilliant conceptual move there.

In contrast, the much-publicized King Lear at BAM was completely lacking in the concept department. I enjoyed much of the acting, and Ian McKellen hit all the grace notes, especially in the second half, but Trevor Nunn's staging was stunning in its dullness—with special mention going to his use of music, which was full-on cheese. The storm scene was particularly underwhelming, with a light mist gently falling the center of the stage. On the plus side, the place seemed to be packed with a lot of Harvey Theater newbies; I can only hope they will be return customers and try out some of the more daring offering BAM has lined up in the Next Wave.

My favorite "traditional" Lear remains Ingmar Bergman's version, seen in Paris in the mid-1980s, with Akira Kurosawa's Japan-set Ran (with three sons instead of three daughters) topping the film adaptations. When it comes to Euro-directors dynamiting a classic, Jan Lauwers' Lear, culminating in an apocalyptic, deafening finale, and seen at BAM at few years ago, is hard to top. That show actually got the most hostile reception of anything I've ever seen at BAM—two thirds of the audience were gone by the end, with many patrons expressing their rage by departing very noisily. I can't say I have any idea of what was going on much of the time, but I loved the overall chaos—precisely choreographed and sound-designed, of course. Much to its credit, BAM invited Lauwers back and he returned with the amazing Isabella's Room, which replaced shock value with intelligent emotion and made lifelong converts out of those lucky enough to see it.

Something's missing

I'd been meaning to check out Corey Dargel for a while and finally did this weekend when I saw his song cycle Removable Parts at HERE. Sadly I was a little underwhelmed: I felt the songs were hard to tell apart from each other, and that too often the show's theme, Body Integrity Disorder (a syndrome in which the afflicted searches for voluntary amputation), was a skin-deep (ahem) pretext for groan-inducing word play. I did very much enjoy the musical and dramatic interaction between Dargel, who sang, and the always-game, will-try-anything pianist Kathleen Supové.

At the very end, Dargel asked her if what she played depended on her mood. She answered by singing the first few lines of the Chapi Chapo theme (a recording then played over the curtain call). This was completely unexpected and completely delightful, as that theme is a longtime favorite by one of the most cultish film and TV composers ever, François de Roubaix.

De Roubaix's career spanned just ten years—he died in a scuba-diving accident in 1975, at age 36—but it was extraordinarily fertile. In the 1960s, he was among the first to incorporate synthesizers into his scores, and he displayed a constant melodic streak, which worked wonders for the many noir scores he wrote, but also for about 150 commercials and children's shows such as Pépin la Bulle (1969) and the aforementioned Chapi Chapo (1974). You can watch a full episode of Chapi Chapo here; De Roubaix's music throughout is a neverending pleasure.

MP3 François de Roubaix "Chapi Chapo" (from La Télé des Tout P'tits)
MP3 François de Roubaix "Pépin la Bulle" (from La Télé des Tout P'tits)
MP3 François de Roubaix "Xavier à la maison d'arrêt (Main Theme)" (La Scoumoune soundtrack, 1972)

Chewing the scenery

For some reason it bugs me a bit when audiences applaud the sets on Broadway. On the one hand we cheer the cast at the end, so why not give the set designer some love as well? On the other hand, it's a chandelier, people! The worst is when overstuffed, super-realistic apartments pop up in Roundabout or Lincoln Center Theater productions. Interrupting the flow of a show to applaud them is pushing interior-design envy a little too far…

But if there's one show where the sets deserve applause, it's Basil Twist's Dogugaeshi at Japan Society. In fact, they literally provide the action in the wordless piece. A puppet pokes its head up from time to time, but otherwise the show consists of series of painted backdrops moving back and forth to create an illusion of depth, plus occasional projections (I often was reminded of that falling feeling in Hitchcock's Vertigo).

I'm far from being an unconditional Twist fan: I thought La Bella Dormante nel Bosco a couple of years ago at Lincoln Center Festival was a precious snooze, and I tend to prefer when he contributes to a preexisting production, like Paula Vogel's Long Christmas Ride Home in 2004, or even Theater Couture's Carrie and Mabou Mines' Red Beads.

But Dogugaeshi, I'm happy to report, is a genuine trip—in both the literal and figurative senses. Twist respectfully uses an arcane Japanese tradition, but he also updates it by incorporating very clever electronicky sound design along with Yumiko Tanaka on the shamisen. The scene in which the scenery decays under our eyes is spellbinding, for instance, and the balance between projections and moving backdrops in the city scene is perfect. In fact, it's the ever-shifting relationship between high- and low-tech, past and present, figurative and abstract, that makes Dogugaeshi so appealing.

Hurry if you want to go: The Japan Society's performing space had been reconfigured to fit the piece's stage and it only seats 70 people at a time.

On a sorta related note, Steve Smith's come up with an excellent review of Wednesday's Chthonic show at BB King's, and so I invite you to pay a visit to Night After Night posthaste.

The Swedish enigma

Of course Sally Shapiro is not the only Swedish enigma preoccupying me (others: why is Swedish pop music so consistently amazing? What's with herring for breakfast?) but it's the one that holding my interest right this minute. The official line is that there's no Sally Shapiro: The woman singing on the album Disco Romance is anonymous and all the tunes and sounds come from songwriter-producer Johan Agebjörn. The singer is so mysterious, in fact, that supposedly she records on her own and nobody's actually seen her behind the mike. Agebjörn said to Svenska Dagbladet: "I still haven't heard her perform one single song from the album live. I was outside mowing the lawn when we recorded the vocals." (Many, many thanks to Pr. Hans Huss for the translation.) There's few things I enjoy as much as a highly elaborate art prank.

Disco Romance is about to get a US release with three extra tracks, including the exquisite "He Keeps Me Alive," which sounds poppy and romantic and joyful until you start paying attention to the lyrics. What's fascinating about the song is the way it sugarcoats abject need—"Sally" is desperately in love with a boy but they're just friends; still, she's happy anyway because his mere existence keeps her alive.

"He Keeps Me Alive" could be the theme song to a remake of Back Street, Fannie Hurst's tearjerker about a woman who sacrifices her personal life because she's in love with a married man. According to imdb, the tag line to the 1932 movie version was: "Waiting—always waiting—in the shadows of the back streets…longing for the man she loves…asking nothing, receiving nothing—yet content to sacrifice all for him. WHY?"

And, of course, there's a Vocoder.

MP3 Sally Shapiro "He Keeps Me Alive" (from Disco Romance, 2007)

England in particular

The historian in me is getting a workout these days: A new retro-minded piece is posted at eMusic. It was really fun revisiting the explosion of unabashed Englishness known as él Records—a label I followed so slavishly that I'd buy everything and anything they released. (Similar past label obsessions have included early 4AD, Disques du Crépuscule and, ahem, cassette-era K.)

Because I was trying not to go completely overboard with the references embedded in the él aesthetics, I did not mention one of my personal favorites: Stephen Tennant, a "professional beauty" who turned his life into an existential masterwork, and was so fascinating that he was the subject of a big fat biography in 1991 despite never having achieved anything resembling a traditional goal. As John Waters put it in a review of that book, "Cecil Beaton was one of the first to encourage Tennant's eccentric vocation of doing nothing in life—but doing it with great originality and flamboyance." The link with él? Eagle-eyed observers will have noticed that the cover of the 1987 compilation London Pavilion Vol. 2 was a direct tribute to Beaton's 1927 photograph of Tennant as Prince Charming.

Sedaritude

As we all know, David Sedaris' prose is opaque. What do we learn about liberal America's favorite humorist by reading him…other than pretty much everything? A book like Kevin Kopelson's new Sedaris feels rather redundant not only because it relies on frequent and long excerpts ("I'll use both extensive quotation and paraphrase—something, I confess, my own students aren't allowed") but because it does not provide much analysis; rather than looking at what Sedaris means in the context of contemporary America, it looks at what the humorist tells us about himself. As if we didn't get enough of that from an author who can crank out a 3,000-page New Yorker essay about changing a lightbulb.

Kopelson, who teaches English at the University of Iowa, acknowledges on the first page of his hagiography that his subject may not be all that innovative: "Not that Sedaris is the only satirist to deprecate himself. The British poets John Donne (1572–1631) and Alexander Pope (1688–1744), for example, acknowledge their own failings along with those of primary targets." Donne and Pope? I'd have picked Phyllis Diller and early Woody Allen, but never mind.

It gets worse on the second page, which indicates that Kopelson may well have misread his subject's entire oeuvre: He posits that Sedaris is not a "cynical" satirist but a "sanguine" one, and that "the sanguine satirist likes people." Actually, David Sedaris only likes himself, while pretending to mock his own shortcomings. He looks down on everybody, especially his own family. But Kopelson's underlying point, one never confessed, is that Sedaris grants others license to indulge in constant navel-gazing and self-congratulatory onanism.

Sedaris is what happens when egos collide. Kopelson comes across as a typical superfan whose devotion ultimately is a way to express self-obsession. The book is "autobiographical in that I'm now dealing with my mother in print," he admits in one of his many howlers. Elsewhere, he explains that for Sedaris he modestly toned down his usual approach "It's time, that is, to renounce a certain style—a certain selfish virtuosity."

As one of the Heathers put it: "Fuck me gently with a chainsaw."

Sing out, Louises!

I cannot sing (it's a birth defect I'd rather not talk about) but that doesn't prevent me from enjoying listening to others do karaoke. Go to the TONY blog for an account of our wild night at SpotLight Live.

Look back in wonder, part 1

Being on the anal-retentive side has its benefits. One of them is that since 1989 I've been keeping records of every performance I've attended. At first I wrote down only rock shows, then I added theater, dance and opera, along with films and videos for good measure. "You might as well use this stuff" said the Sheila, looking at my old notebooks. And so here it is: the first installment of an occasional series in which I will look back at something I saw on the same date x number of years ago. I hope this won't be mere nostalgia but a look back at a thin slice of time, often in a now-gone venue, with a now-gone band.

Ten years ago exactly, I saw Joan of Arc and Danielson at Brownies; on September 4, 1998, it was a triple bill of Magnetic Fields, My Favorite and Kiki & Herb at the Knitting Factory, while in 2001 it was Urinetown on Broadway. But it's September 4, 1996, that kicked the most ass.

Thread Waxing Space, a performance/art gallery space that used to be on Broadway and Broome, felt like a furnace that night. There was no air conditioning and a small fan only churned the fetid air around. I vividly remember stepping in the main room and feeling as if I'd just hit a wall of heat; many people just fled. I was there for the High Llamas (who may even have been making their eagerly awaited New York debut), but I don't remember much from their set because they had the misfortune to play after Prolapse, whose show that night was one of the best I've ever seen—we're talking all-time top ten here.

Prolapse was a band from Leicester whose existence almost neatly coincides with the 1990s. (Typically for a band with such a surreal sense of humor, someone—either a former member or a dedicated fan—has set up a Prolapse MySpace page that announces a reunion for 2073.) Musically it mixed the locomotive drive of krautrock mixed with quasi-psychotic unpredictability and a My Bloody Valentine–like wall of sound, but the group's most distinctive trait was the volatile, highly theatrical interaction between its two singers, Mick Derrick (he of the impenetrable Scottish accent) and Linda Steelyard; together, they turned Prolapse gigs into Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf performed by Mark E. Smith and Rita Tushingham. The best recorded evidence of their unique rapport remains "Tina This Is Matthew Stone," which explodes/devolves into a barrage of insults.

They were so incandescent that night that I returned to see them two days later, opening for the just-reformed Raincoats. The Raincoats were absolutely fine, but once again Prolapse walked away with the show. YouTube has a small but decent selection of Prolapse videos, with some choice live performances like this one from 1995; even though it's shot from afar, you can still tell the band produces thermonuclear energy.

Here's a small selection of songs covering the span of Prolapse's career:
"Tina This Is Matthew Stone" (from Pointless Walks to Dismal Places, 1994)
"Flex" ((from backsaturday, 1995)
"TCR" (from the US version of backsaturday, 1996)
"A Day at Death Seaside" (from The Italian Flag, 1997)
"Fob.com" (from Ghosts from Dead Aeroplanes, 1999)