"Some day someone ought to explain to me the theory behind dust jacket designs. I assume they are meant to catch the eye without offering any complicated problems to the mind, but they do present problems of symbolism that are too deep for me. Why is there blood on the little idol? Why is the idol there at all? What is the significance of the hair? Why is the iris of the eye green? Don't answer. You probably don't know either." - Raymond Chandler, writing to his editor Paul Brooks in 1954
for the record, i like the cover, though it has pretty well nothing to do with Chandler's storyline. i can't decide if a cover is obliged to relate closely to the contents.
now this is a great honest way to wrap up a novel, i say...
"But, truthfully, these glorious pauses do, sometimes, occur in the discordant but complementary narratives of our lives and if you choose to stop the story there, at such a pause, and refuse to take it any further, then you can call it a happy ending."
from the last pages of Angela Carter's fabulous (and tragically, last) novel, Wise Children
went out last night into rainy Paris to see Robert Lepage's Eonnagata...the show was very flawed, but it was a wonderful excuse to visit the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, built by one of my favourite French architects, the often-radical August Perret.
in 1913, his newly-opened theatre was the site of one of the more interesting riots in Parisian history...because this is where Stravinsky's Rites of Spring was first performed.
Stravinsky's music was booed, and Nijinsky's choreography infuriated the crowd--one elderly Duchess apparently thought the whole thing was some kind of hoax. (here's a great description) But the producer, Diaghilev, was serene... Stravinsky later wrote:
"After the 'performance' we were excited, angry, disgusted, and . . . happy. I went with Diaghilev and Nijinsky to a restaurant... Diaghilev's only comment was 'Exactly what I wanted.' He certainly looked contented. No one could have been quicker to understand the publicity value, and he immediately understood the good thing that had happened in that respect. Quite probably he had already thought about the possibility of such a scandal when I first played him the score, months before, in the east corner ground room of the Grand Hotel in Venice.”
for a great recreation of this moment, there's the film 'Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky' --check out the first 27 seconds of this promo video, below (and then go see the movie! it's gorgeous.)
last night, it was a thrill to look down from my seat in the gods, to see the old fauteuils--because this theatre has small armchairs on its main floor, not fixed theatre seats. And whenever my interest in Lepage's performance waned, i thought about Josephine Baker, who made her premiere here with the Revue Negre in 1925. Baker took Paris by storm, from this very stage. showered with jewelry & marriage proposals after every performance. she wryly said, "Beautiful? It's all a question of luck. I was born with good legs. As for the rest...beautiful, no. Amusing, yes." interesting quote--because watching the few remaining early clips of her Revue dances, what's really surprising is her great comedic timing. she's a real live wire on stage--making crazy faces, laughing at herself, goofing around--and yes, dancing & singing. no wonder Paris was amazed.
so, yes, Eonnagata was disappointing (Lepage was interesting on stage, as were the two dancers, but the overall concept just didn't work. everyone seemed under-utilized, the movements were predictable, and even the late Alexander McQueen's costumes were dull), BUT i still had a great evening thinking about performance & art. maybe part of the point of performance is to risk failure--or at least, to risk being ridiculous, at least some of the time.
Les jardins du Luxembourg, today in a rare Paris snowstorm.admittedly, i work at home, so technically the weather shouldn't impact my ability to sit at my desk... but i couldn't resist going for a walk.
i have a whole new outlook on the life & death of American cities now, after spending 4 days in downtown Detroit. so much has been written about the ruined core of this once-great city, and i knew i would be impressed by the grand, though largely abandoned, architecture.
i didn't realize HOW deserted Detroit really is...notice the empty street...this is a normal weekday morning downtown! i expected the vast empty buildings to be colonized by squats, by artists, by anyone needing room to breathe and work.
but strangely, in Detroit, that isn't the case. nearly half a century after the worst riots occurred, long after the manufacturing & auto jobs were packed up and shipped overseas, the city of Detroit remains a ghost-town, seemingly incapable of a new start. maybe it's the violence (but New Orleans is violent, yet its soul somehow survives tragedy after tragedy.) maybe Detroit's soul left sometime in the 70s, leaving beautiful empty skyscrapers behind, like this one below, where one mysterious light glowed in a room beneath the roof, night after night...
i spoke with some great people in Detroit. bartenders and arts workers and academics who are fighting the good fight to make Detroit honour its heritage. they told me stories of two heritage skyscrapers--one now demolished, the other well on its way to collapse--where the landlords consciously forced out their successful tenants by refusing to heat & maintain their buildings. an empty lot is worth more in this city--or at least, the empty lot might be worth something in the future, and the real estate mavens are simply going to dig in their heels and wait. meanwhile, the streets seem empty even of ghosts, most nights.
where other cities have found that artists are a powerful positive force in urban renewal, Detroit's powers-that-be don't seem to be interested in that route.
But there is a bit of good news, slim but shining. Detroit has forward-looking people, inspired by its intense history, with a peculiar potential to reimagine what a city should look like. one of the most interesting thinkers on this prospect is John Gallagher, who quotes the Japanese poet Masahide: "Barn's burnt down / now / I can see the moon."
the time is long overdue for politicians & planners to see that moon, and put their backs to the wheel in Detroit. they should spend some time at the Detroit Institute of the Arts, in front of Diego Rivera's inspiring mural about labour: Detroit Industry.
and so i finally found myself near the amazing, the absurd, the astonishing GREAT VERMONT CORN MAZE, which is exactly what it sounds like: a lot of very tall corn, arranged in an intricate pattern.
i first read about this place five years ago, while living in Paris. seemed like a perfect example of old-fashioned American weirdness, and i immediately added it to my "must-see" list. there are in fact all kinds of corn mazes in the U.S.--who knew--but this one caught my imagination. last week, we managed to get there on a perfect day...after stopping to ask for directions at this wonderful gas station. (note their nice Canadian flag)
now, you would imagine that finding a giant corn maze with 2 miles of labyrinthian passages would be fairly easy. mais non. in fact, we drove in circles for about an hour, up small dirt roads, down small gravel roads, through lovely Vermont farm mud & around forests, looking for the maze.
but eventually we found it, paid the very reasonable admission, and spent 90 wonderful minutes walking around in the corn fields. for you non-farm types (uh, like me), corn at this time of year is well over 8 feet, up to 12 feet in places, rustles dry in the wind, and it's really difficult to see over. if you stand on a ladder in the middle of the maze, you can't make out the pattern or even figure out which way to go. it's only in the aerial photo that you get a proper vision of the maze (and they don't post this year's photo until after the maze has been turned into silage for the cows at the end of October.)
this particular maze is the inspired creation of one obsessed guy who married into a farming family, and decided he needed to save the family farm. so now he spends his summers standing on a small bridge, giving people advice on how to get out of the corn. it's a strange job, but he seems truly delighted by it. and he got me thinking about the nature of creative inspiration...whether it's writing a story or planting a field of corn...planning, plotting, imagining how it will intrigue & delight people...
finally catching up with my blog. i'm still impressed with the latest Toronto version of Nuit Blanche. i don't know how the numbers compare, for this year versus earlier incarnations, but i think the work this time round was so much better than prior years! i was lucky to drop into some especially great musical pieces for the 'white night' project.
first up was Daniel Lanois' Later That Night at the Drive-In in front of City Hall
we got a bit cold, so we didn't stay for the full performance. instead, for something completely different, we went down Bay Street to check out the performance of Erik Satie's -hour piece, Vexations, written in 1893. i'm a big Satie fan (and in Paris, i live five minutes from his old tiny Montmartre apartment) so i was thrilled to hear and see this installation.
as the pianists finished playing a page of the score (which repeats 840 times, each page being identical), a folder retrieved the page and the people seated at this enormous table turned each page into a careful origami section. by the end of the night, that whole table must have been filled with jagged blue pages. it was a spectacular way to visualize the progression of the piece.
