20 Days in the City of Angels: The 12th Day (Getting Along)

Reginald Denny and his attacker

Certainly the city of Los Angeles and its hundreds of suburban communities were aware of the April 1992 trials, held in the outlying community of Simi Valley, concerning the four Los Angeles Police Department officers accused of beating Rodney King on March 3, 1991. We had all watched the tapes, played over and over in the public media, of King's 1991 beating, and almost everyone I knew was outraged by the police brutality. Although the police and their lawyers declared that King was violent, resisting arrest, and insisted that not everything occurred as it seemed on George Holliday's amateur camcorder, we felt it represented a truth that was hard to erase. Both the tape and pictures of King after the incident testified to the outrageous anger of the police.

It came as somewhat a shock, accordingly, when on the afternoon of April 29th, 17 years ago from today, the jury decision came down at 3:15, acquitting all four officers of assault and acquitting three of the four of using excessive force.

That night, however, was something that few of us could have imagined. It began at about a quarter of seven as many in the city were watching the evening news. At the corner of Florence and South Normandie Avenues in South Central Los Angeles, crowds had been gathering for some time. Suddenly they attacked a stopped truck, dragging its white driver, Reginald Denny, from the vehicle, beating him, culminating in someone throwing a concrete fragment at his head as he lay unconscious in the street. News helicopters hovered over the entire scene, and dinnertime watchers were forced to witness not only the beating but the horrible whoop and dance of derision by one of Denny's attackers. Police stayed back from the scene, and Denny was saved only by an African-American, Bobby Green, Jr., who, watching the scene on television, rushed to the location and drove Denny, in his own truck, to the hospital.

Other beatings followed, including a local construction worker, Fidel Lopez, a Guatemalan immigrant who was pulled from his truck and robbed of almost $2,000 while Damian Williams slammed a stereo into Lopez's head and another rioter tried to slice off his ear. Upon losing consciousness, Lopez was spray-painted by members to the crowd across his chest, torso, and genitals.

The terrifying savagery of these events, witnessed by millions of viewers, horrified the city. Within about an hour and a half, the entire area near Florence and Normandie had been looted and burned, and rioters began moving into other neighborhoods, torching cars, beating drivers, looting stores, and burning homes and offices; even a Black bookstore was destroyed. Protestors at the police headquarters, Parker Center, began to throw rocks at the entryway to the building. Responding firefighters throughout the city were met with rocks and gun-fire. Some flights at Los Angeles International Airport were cancelled or diverted. The police seemed to have disappeared as a mad and frenzied lawlessness had exploded into the streets.

By the morning of April 30th Los Angeles mayor, Tom Bradley, declared a state of emergency and California Governor Pete Wilson activated the National Guard.

That same morning, I received a call from my shipper, Reggie Jones, a Black man who lived in South Central. In a hurried and near-breathless tone he recounted the horrors of the night, how numerous homes near where he and his family lived had burned to the ground, how intense the noise had been, and how he had spent much of the night attempting to put out local fires which the Fire Department were unable to reach. "I feel like I'm sort of reporter calling in from the warzone of some foreign country," he gasped.

"Reggie," I think it may be safer if you don't try to come in today, particularly since you do it on bicycle." He agreed, but by about noon, Reggie arrived, almost out of breath.

"I just couldn't stay there anymore. It was just too difficult to remain," he explained.

At 12:15 Bradley announced a dusk-to-dawn curfew, and Reggie and I began talking about possibly closing the office—located on one of the major thoroughfares of Los Angeles, Wilshire Boulevard—early. Soon after, I received a call from my companion, Howard, who reported that the museum had suggested its employees leave for the day. As he crossed the street to go home, he'd encountered a long line of cars and trucks, each filled with shouting beings, armed with long sticks and guns. I ran to the porch of my office and saw the procession moving toward us.

Together, Reggie and I watched as they jumped from the cars, vandalizing and looting the May Company department store (now part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), located a block from the Sun & Moon offices. Again, there were no police in sight.

I quickly demanded that Reggie come inside with me, locking the doors. As the angry procession passed us without incident, I told him we should both leave while we could. He agreed, but was determined to stay a bit longer, hinting that he had nowhere else to go. As I left, I told him to keep the doors locked.

I quickly walked home, looking back only to see the violent revelers attacking a small shopping mall just west of me. We later heard that the cars and rioters had been turned back at the edge of Beverly Hills, a few blocks further west. The police there were evidently not intimidated. But the gang, in turning, attached a sports shop, loading up, so I heard, with guns and other weapons. Fifty-three people died over the six days of the riot.

At home everything was eerily quiet, but as I sat watching the television set in horror, I suddenly told Howard that I was afraid that Reggie left without locking the door. He had forgotten the keys to the building before, and there was every reason that he might have forgotten today.

Howard and I began to drive toward the office using the back way, taking Eighth Street instead of Wilshire. Not a soul was in sight. But suddenly out of nowhere a car came racing toward us, almost forcing us to take to the sidewalk, the driver and passengers screaming obscenities to us as they passed.

The building was wide open. I quickly locked it and returned to the car, and we rushed back home again.

As the sun begin its slow set, the television helicopters revealed hundreds of fires throughout the city. At times it looked as if the entire metropolis was ablaze, and we could see the sky over our courtyard lit up with yellow and orange flames. Curls of paperous ash fell to our balconies and walkways. Yet a few minutes later, it seemed that every child in our building was in the pool, which our windows overlook. "Why are all the children suddenly swimming?" asked Howard.
"I think their parents were probably afraid of their watching any more television, and sent them out so they could play."

"That seems reasonable," Howard answered. But as we turned our eyes from the flaming city upon the television set to the screaming and shouting children frolicking in those blue waters the scene seemed surreal, as if somehow all those in our building could not comprehend the severity of the situation.

Finally, as darkness prevailed, and the children returned to their apartments, a strange quiet overcame everything as we listened to the newscasters softly echoing their dismay from nearly all the units of our condominium building.

By the morning of May 1st, the National Guard units had reached the size of 4,000, moving throughout the city in Humvees. Rodney King appeared on television, asking his simple, but profound question that would haunt the city for years: "People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?"

Reggie called in, reporting that he and his girlfriend had spent much of the night helping to fight fires in our neighborhood, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's warehouse, near Pico Avenue.

Although no one could condone the acts going on about us, many of us also recognized the extreme bigotry of the community. While Los Angeles is always proud to boast that it is one of the most diverse places on earth, we also know that the layout of the city is a jigsaw puzzle of segregation, with the Hispanics clustered in the East, Blacks restricted to South Central, with vast areas to the West and North of these communities of Central Los Angeles populated by Japanese and, particularly, Korean immigrants. Hundreds of small Koreatown stores and shops had been hit by the virulent wave of riots, and Asians were particularly outraged by the absence of the police to protect their "American Dreams."

Despite a black out in areas that had been hardest hit, the night of May 1st was calmer. Sports games and other events had been cancelled. Public figures began to speak out, some, like Bill Cosby, attempting to alleviate the hostilities, others like George H. W. Bush, seemingly stirring them up by denouncing what he described as "random terror and lawlessness." Still other figures attempted to explain the African-American anger and resentment, pent up for years after the 1965 Watts Riots.

In some respects, all who spoke were right. The actions of the rioters were ugly and violent, and demonstrated some of the terrors we might expect when the city is hit by a strong earthquake—which will inevitably happen. But the police, long profiling individuals from the Black and Hispanic communities, needed to change their behavior and attitudes. It's hard to know whether those changes were ever thoroughly effected, even though Los Angeles Police Chief, Daryl Gates, lost his job because of police irresponsibility and inaction.

At the time, I attempted to put down some of my feelings and reactions in a letter I sent to a few friends, most notably Lyn Hejinian. Lyn seemed a little overwhelmed by what she read; I think she thought I had been a bit melodramatic. But even now, as I relive those awful few days, my eyes begin to tear.

Order was finally restored on the fifth day, and the curfew lifted on Monday, May 4th.
Can we all get along? Some weeks it appears that we have wonderfully achieved that goal, but at other times it seems we still have a long ways to go. But the answer is "yes," if only we seriously try.

Los Angeles, April 29, 2009


Describing this planned essay to my dear friend, poet Will Alexander, he noted that he experienced both the Watts Riot and the Rodney King Riot at "ground zero," and suggested the he also planned to write about his experiences. I strongly encouraged him to do so. We need a large number of recountings of those events, I argued, if we are to release ourselves from the hateful past these events represent and remind ourselves of the changes still necessary to bring this vast, disparate community of Los Angeles into a caring and shared future.

Los Angeles, April 20, 2009

20 Days in the City of Angels: The 14th Day (All Shook Up) [on the Northridge Earthquake]

On Sunday, January 16, 1994, Howard and I traveled by car to Orange County to see a show at the Newport Harbor Art Museum. Neither of us can recall what show we saw, but on our way back, I felt uneasy, for the first time, about driving beneath the vast interchanges of highways through which we had to pass.

That evening I inexplicably asked Howard as we lay in bed, "Do you know where your clothes are?"

He looked at me quizzically. "What do you mean by that?"

"In case there's an earthquake," I found myself saying. What had I meant? I hadn't been thinking of anything in particular; the words had simply slipped from of my mouth.

At 4:31 AM, our bed began shaking, and, as we ran into the living room with clothes in hand, the large roar* and shaking of what we knew was a serious earthquake continued. As I tried to step into my pants, I fell to the floor, startled by the fact that the shaking was continuing much longer than any temblor we had previously experienced. The quake lasted for about 20 seconds.

"Was that the big one?" I asked.

"Big enough," Howard responded.

We finished our dressing and took up a flashlight to inspect any damage. A large bookcase in our den had fallen across the desk, sending the computer to the floor, but little else was in disarray. We decided to check out my office, located two blocks away.

As we exited the front door of our building, however, a strange gathering had taken place. Several individuals stood on the terrace outside, looking out in one direction, as if there was something to see there. Everyone whispered, many hardly daring to speak. It looked like a frieze out of some disaster film: the silhouettes of these fearful people, some of them dressed only in bathrobes, eerily reminded me that people sometimes do imitate art.

Meanwhile, we could see a few men trying to pull back the gateway to our parking lot, locked because of the power failure. Howard and I helped them to pull it open part way, and a few cars drove off into the semi-dark.

At my office, only a few books had fallen to the floor, and I left them where they lay. Howard determined that we must go to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, across the street, where he worked. The guards let us in, and another curator who'd immediately driven to the museum, led us through Ahmanson Building, where much of the ceiling had fallen to the floor. A large ancient Buddha lay in fragments, with a few specialists inspecting at the results. We were led on to what is now known as the Art of the Americas Building, where the modern and contemporary art collections were shown.

With a conservator in hand, Howard and I separately toured the several rooms on each floor, observing and calling out news of any fallen or destroyed objects. In one gallery, all of the small, beautiful sculptures of Degas's ballerinas had fallen to the floor. At the top of the stairs, the huge Anselm Kiefer sculpture, Das Buch (The Book), although held against the wall with hidden rope, had turned nearly 180◦. A few glassworks were shattered, but, all in all, the collection had primarily survived.

It was a painful experience, nonetheless, to access all of the damage that had been done.

The earthquake was not the big one, but, nevertheless, was the largest ever recorded by instruments in an urban area of North America. Centered in Reseda and Northridge, areas of the San Fernando Valley, the 6.7 quake, as we gradually discovered throughout the day, had destroyed hundreds of fireplaces, numerous homes and buildings, and, most startlingly, several major underpasses—precisely what I had feared the day before.

A short walk around our neighborhood revealed dozens of brick fireplaces laying on the ground. And just south of us, the underpass of the Santa Monica highway (the 1-10 Freeway), had broken in two pieces and collapsed. That afternoon, we walked down to see it, with dozens of others joining us along the way.

Later that day the power returned, and through television we discovered that there had been fires in the Valley and that a parking garage had completely collapsed, killing several people. Part of the Northridge Fashion Center had been destroyed. Overall, about 72 people were killed in the quake and 6% of structures were determined unfit.

The next day, my senior editor, Diana Daves, who lives in the Valley, called to report that everything in their kitchen had crashed to the floor, and that part of their ceiling was now on the living room floor. Their daughter, Molly, had been terrified as she became trapped in her bedroom.

For weeks, the stories continued. But, I think the most horrifying thing about the earthquake was our knowledge that, beyond the 20 million dollars in damages from this quake (later called the Northridge Quake), we had still to face a much larger and more destructive one in the future.

A couple of days later, I stopped into our local coffee shop, the famed Johnnie's, a place now closed, but still used as a location in dozens of films. The waitresses always seemed to be from another time and place: "Hi, honey," said my favorite waitress. "Hower you? And where you been?"

Los Angeles, April 22, 2009

*For those who have not experienced an earthquake, one of the most terrifying aspects of the event is the sound of everything shifting and twisting in space.

Irritable Comfort (on Howard Hawks's film, Rio Lobo)

This is the third in my discussion of Howard Hawks's three westerns he directed late in his life. To revisit the other two, go here:

http://greeninteger.blogspot.com/2009/04/geriatric-heroes-on-howard-hawks-el.html
http://greeninteger.blogspot.com/2009/03/leaving-nothing-to-chance-on-howard.html

Leigh Brackett and Burton Wohl (screenplay), based on a story by Burton Wohl, Howard Hawks (director) Rio Lobo / 1970

At times in director Howard Hawk's last film, Rio Lobo, it almost seems as if he is tempting the Hollywood idols. Except for the dozens of brilliantly comic one-liners of Brackett's script, the story is a shaggy dog tale without any "fur" to it. And it's hard to imagine a cast of less convincing actors than the Mexican heartthrob Jorge Rivero (whom Wayne addresses as "Frenchy" throughout), Brazilian actress Jennifer O'Neill (Rio Lobo was clearly the best movie of her career), and future studio director, Sherry Lansing! Publisher George Plimpton plays the 4th Gunman. Even Jack Elam (standing in for Walter Brennan and Arthur Hunnicutt) and John Wayne, at his most laconic (in one of his first lines of the film Wayne reports to his soldier friend, "Ned, your neck's broken."), have seen better days. At one point, as the Rebels try to carry Wayne to his horse, they report what is obvious to all: "He's heavier than a baby whale!"

The film begins near the end of the Civil War as Col. Cord McNally (Wayne) and his Union soldiers attempt to transfer a large container of money from one town to another. The Rebels, headed by Capt. Pierre Cordona, whip up a plot to steal the money by greasing the tracks, rigging up trees with ropes, and tossing a hornet's nest into the armored car wherein the Union soldiers are contained. The plot succeeds, and McNally, determined to seek out the Rebels, is captured and forced to lead them out of harm's way. But as he quietly leads them around a Union encampment, he shouts out for the troops, and the Rebels are foiled.

None of these series of high adventures, however, has any major significance for the rest of the film. The War is declared over the moment the rebels are captured, and McNally treats his former enemies to a drink. Their actions, he reasons, were determined by war; the men he's after are the treasonous Union soldiers who clearly betrayed their own forces by leaking information to the other side. Neither of the Rebel soldiers knows the name of the two traitors. McNally charges Cordona and his friend, Tuscarora Phillips to report to him through the sheriff of Blackthorne, Texas if they ever encounter these two men again.

In Blackthorne, McNally awaits the appearance of Cordona, bedded down with a woman. Cordona has evidently encountered the men. Suddenly a gun-toting woman, Shasta Delaney (O'Neill) enters, demanding to see the sheriff: there has been a murder in Rio Lobo. Blackthorne sheriff Pat Cronin reports that it's our of his jurisdiction. Delaney reports, however, that the sheriff of Rio Lobo is corrupt and himself involved in the shooting. A posse from the nearby town arrives to take Shasta away. She shoots one of the men, Whitey, under the table and McNally finishes off all but one of the rest; the final posse member is about to shoot McNally in the back, when Cordona appears, pulling up his pants and shooting the other man dead. Whitey, Cordona reports, has been one of the traitors.

Shasta faints and Cordona insists that she should be taken to his room, as he dismisses the woman with whom he has just shared the bed. Shasta's awakening is one of the most humorous scenes in the film, and best conveys why Rio Lobo works despite its loony storyline and its unconvincing actors:

[Shasta wakes up in Cordona's bed after fainting]
Shasta: What am I doing here?
Cord McNally: Well, you fainted after you shot Whitey, so we put you
to bed.
Shasta: Wait a minute! Where are my clothes? Which one of you took my
clothes?
Cordona: I did.
Shasta: Why?
Cordona: Well, we flipped a coin and I won?
Shasta: Where are your pants?
Cordona: You're sleeping on them.

Brackett, in my estimation, should have won an award just for those lines!

Off go the unlikely trio, McNally, Cordona, and Shasta, to Rio Lobo, 70-80 miles away, to save the day and restore and law and order. We know the formula: the three fall into a kind erotic relationship that strengthens their determination to protect each other, drawing others to their side.

While in the previous two films of Hawks's Western trilogy, Wayne was surrounded by weaker women and men, here McNally is himself a kind of agèd alcoholic, offering a round of drinks at every opportunity and demanding a swig of any liquor he can get. As the three spend the night in an old burial ground, McNally, sitting by himself in the cold, giggles in mysterious delight. Asked what he is so happy about, he answers: "I've had about the right number of drinks. And I'm warm, and I'm relaxed." Awakening the next morning to find Shasta by his side, McNally is startled. Shasta explains that she slept next to him because he was "comfortable." And it is clear that, if he is no longer a hero, he now represents a kind of irritable comfort, a safe place in a world of immanent dangers.

The rest of the story hardly matters. Of course they find graft and corruption facing them in Rio Lobo, as they are met with guns, imprisonment, and hate. A local bully, Ketcham has installed his man, "Blue Tom" Henricks as sheriff, and is trying to overtake the farms about. Tuscarora, Cordona's former Rebel partner, has been arrested on trumped-up charges. Visiting Ketchum's farm, the three overcome Ketcham, upon which Cordona reports that Ketcham is the second of the traitors. Forcing Ketcham to sign over the deeds of the stolen farms, McNally and his friends temporarily win the day. But, soon after, Cordona is taken by Ketcham's gang and an exchange, Ketchum for Cordona, is arranged. The local farmers join McNally and Delaney in the standoff, as Cordona dives to safety into a nearby river, and the evil gang is destroyed.

Paralleling the plot of El Dorado, McNally, who has been shot in the leg, walks off using his rifle for a crutch, while Amelita (Lansing) runs forward to help him walk.

Few critics, with the exception of The New York Times' Roger Greenspun, appreciated the film. And Greenspun's faint praise, "the movie is close enough to greatness to be above everything se in the current season," evidently produced a flurry of angry letters. Despite Hawks's apparently lackadaisical attitude about his last film, the work is extremely amusing and was one of the biggest earning films of 1970.

Los Angeles, April 18, 2009

Rara Avis (on Walter Braunfels's opera, The Birds)

Aristophanes The Birds, in Three Comedies, ed. by William Arrowsmith (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1969
Walter Braunfels Die Vögel/The Birds, LA Opera, conducted by James Conlon / the performance we attended was the Los Angeles premiere, April 11, 2009

On April 11, 2009 my companion Howard and I attended the Los Angeles Opera premiere of composer Walter Braunfels's The Birds, a opera performed as part of their "Recovered Voices" series devoted to bringing attention to "lost operas," operas banned by the Nazis and neglected since.

Braunfels was certainly not the typical banned artist. Although part-Jewish, Braunfels had converted to Christianity after serving in World War I, an experience which transformed his view of life. The opera, begun before the War and finished after, premiered in Munich in 1920 and received at least 50 performances over the next few years. With its Wagnerian and Strauss-like harmonies, and its restatement of Germanic Romantic values, the opera, indeed, might have nicely served the Nazi cause had it not been that Braunfels was adamantly anti-fascist, refusing to write an anthem for Hitler. His music, accordingly, was labeled as "Degenerate" (Entartete Kunst), and he was removed from his position as co-director of the Hochschule für Musik Köln (the Cologne Academy of Music); Braunfels waited out World War II in Switzerland, returning to a post-War world in which his music appeared as old-fashioned and completely out of touch with its time.

Yet, as several music critics have observed, there is shimmering beauty to The Birds that creates a comforting sense of homage to Wagner and Strauss which easily enchants its audiences. Based loosely on Aristophanes's hilarious satire of Athenian society, Braunfels's version follows the journey of Good Hope and Loyal Friend to visit the head of the birds, Hoopoe, paralleling Pisthe-tairos's sudden inspiration—stimulated, in part, by his fear that he and his friend will be killed by the skeptical avians—that the birds regain their rightful place as rulers of the heavens by rising up against the gods and building a heavenly walled city in the sky. As in Aristophanes's play, Cloudcukooland is built and the birds, delighted with their success, award Pisthetairos (Braunfels's Loyal Friend) with their friendship and wings.

In Aristophanes's work, however, the building of the great city brings on a plague of visitors, each satirizing an aspect of Athenian society; Good Hope in the ancient version of the play is all but lost as Pisthetairos, one by one, mocks and wittily dismisses his "enemies," and, even outfoxing Zeus, marries the figure who translator William Arrowsmith describes as "Miss Universe."

From the evidence of his Act I, Braunfels may have originally intended to more closely follow Aristophanes, but Act II of his opera diverts the focus of the work away from Loyal Friend's grand schemes by having Good Hope fall in love with the song and being of the Nightingale, resulting in one of the most memorable of the opera's duets between tenor Brandon Jovanovich and soprano Désirée Rancatore. He further imbues Cloudcukooland with Utopian possibilities by adding a marriage ceremony and dance between Miss Dove and Mr. Pigeon (Yvette Tucker and Seth Belliston).

Omitting the series of visiting troublemakers to Cloudcukooland, Braunfels focuses instead on the mythic possibilities of the bird kingdom and the birds' hubris in attempting to rise up against the gods. Whereas Aristophanes's Prometheus comes to Cloudcukooland to warn his human friend, Pisthetairos, suggesting how he might outwit Zeus, Braunfels's Prometheus (brilliantly sung by Brian Mulligan) is more like Strauss's John the Baptist, a prophet crying in the wilderness.

The terrifying storm of lightning Zeus reigns down upon the upstart kingdom, reduces the birds and humans involved to the twittering, fearful creatures they had been at the beginning of the work. The Utopian world sought by Good Hope and Loyal Friend has been destroyed, perhaps Braunfels's presentiment that the Weimar Republic would not survive. Certainly he would not be the first German-language writer to predict the dangers that lay ahead; two years after the premiere of The Birds, Austrian writer Joseph Roth wrote a scathingly realistic portrait of the conspiracies of the radical right in his novel, The Spider's Web.

Yet Braunfels's work, with Good Hope's final insistence that his encounter with nature has changed him, healed him perhaps, an experience that will remain with him forever, merely reiterates the Germanic Romanticism that lay behind so much of the Nazi ideals. And in that sense, the dream of a militaristically-determined city-state, as presented in Braunfels's conception, may be a likely desire of another generation.

Los Angeles, April 16, 2009

Independent Dependents (on Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire)

A Streetcar Named Desire, scene from the opera

Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: New Directions, 1947)
Tennessee Williams (screenplay), Oscar Saul (adaptation), Elia Kazan (director) A Streetcar Named Desire / 1951
Philip Littell (libretto), based on the play by Tennessee Williams, André Previn (music) A Streetcar Named Desire / premiered at the San Francisco Opera, 1998, PBS production in their Great Performances Series, Wednesday, December 30th, 1998

The death on September 11th, 2002 of actress Kim Hunter sent me back to Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, in which Hunter played Stanley Kowalski's wife Stella in both the 1947 stage production and Elian Kazan's film of 1951.

Although I have seen the film numerous times, and watched it again last week, I have never seen a staging of the work. I was only six months and few days old at the time of its original production, and, although I am sure the play is popular with some college and repertory theater groups, the intense acting required from its two major figures, Stanley and Blanche, make it a very difficult play to revive, although Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange were fairly well received in the 1992 Broadway production, which I also missed.

Accordingly, I have spent the past three nights rereading the play, which allowed me some new perceptions about this work.

Because of the stunning acting of both Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando in the film version, it has always ap-peared to me that their characters are at the center of this work, and the very acting styles they embody—Leigh's highly theatrical performance and Brando's, influenced strongly by the Actor's Studio method acting—created an high tension that drove the work into its near manic expressions of cultural extremes, one of Williams's major subjects.

This time, however, after watching both the film and reading the text, I realized—much as I did for O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night in My Year 2004—that the actual fulcrum of the work was an apparently weaker figure, in this case Stella.

Although all of the characters in this play must function in an ensemble manner, their radical differences in acting styles, language, and personalities is what the work is about. Indeed, one might almost argue that each of the three major figures living in the Kowalski hovel have an act devoted to them: Stella is the dominant figure of Act I, Blanche of Act 2, and Stanley of Act 3. In Act I, Stella is the first figure we see in the play, and draws both Blanche and Stanley to her throughout.

Williams's stage directions make quite clear that Blanche is the center of Act II:

Some weeks later. The scene is a point of balance between the plays two sections, BLANCHE'S coming and the events leading up to her violent departure. The important values are the ones that characterize BLANCHE: its function is to give her dimension as a character and to suggest the intense inner life which makes her a person of greater magnitude than she appears on the surface.

The rape and its aftermath ends in Blanche's fall and departure. In Act III Stella is simply compelled to accept Stanley's version of reality, and he and his poker-playing friends are quite clearly in charge, as he returns to being the rightful "king" of his "domain."

In short, Williams attempted to give equal weight to all three characters. Yet, Stanley and Blanche stand out, primarily because they are both such absurd figures. At times Blanche seems to be performing more in manner of the mad scene in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermor, than in an American-conceived stage drama, yet she is often quite capable at punching back at Stanley with realist-like quips. For example, she comments to Stanley upon meeting him:

You're simple, straightforward and honest, a bit on the primitive side, I should think.

And throughout the play she devastatingly puts Stanley in his place, as when she hands over the papers detailing the loss of her and her sister's home, Belle Reve:

There are thousands of papers stretching back over hundreds of years
affecting Belle Reve, as piece by piece our improvident grandfathers
and father and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their epic
fornications—to put it plainly. The four-letter word deprives us of our
plantation, till finally all that was left, and Stella can verify that, (Moves
to him, carrying papers) was the house itself and about twenty acres of
ground, including a graveyard to which now all but Stella and I have
retreated. (Pulling papers out of envelope, dumping them into his hands on
table. Holds empty envelope.) Here they all are, all papers! I hereby endow
you with them! Take them, peruse them—commit them to memory, even!
I think its wonderfully fitting that Belle Reve should finally be this
bunch of old papers in your big, capable hands.

For the most part, however, Blanche is not as realistically combative or even insanely abstracted as she is simply witty. Like a campy gay man of the old school dressed in drag (is it any wonder that she demands the lights are left low?), Blanche is a ridiculously humorous figure, and I think we have to admit that ridiculousness, accepting the comic elements of the entire play, if we want to understand Williams's characters. Even simply addressing her sister Blanche is a "hoot" who would be at home in any gay bar of an earlier generation:

Stella, oh Stella, Stella! Stella for Star! ...But don't you look at me,
Stella, no, no, no, not till later, not till I've bathed and rested! And
turn that over-light off! I won't be looked at in this merciless glare!

Along with dozens of such lines ("Never, never, never in my worst dreams could I picture—
Only Poe! Only Mr. Edgar Allan Poe—could do justice!," "The blind are leading the blind," and her renowned last line, "Whoever you are—I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers") Blanche's dialogue belongs more to the world of melodrama and camp epics peopled with the likes of Lana Turner and Charles Ludlam than the world of a former beauty from the South. Williams points this up even more dramatically by portraying her husband—a nervous, soft, tender boy—as having been gay (which in the film is almost erased) and revealing that, although she poses as a virginal beauty, Blanche is well known back in her home community of Laurel, Mississippi for her sexual excesses, including bedding down with one of her own 17-year old students. If Jessica Tandy or Vivien Leigh hadn't so brilliantly defined the role of Blanche, Ludlam might later have been an appropriate choice.

While Brando may seem, at times, to be performing a role from the realist school of Clifford Odets, Williams gives Stanley lines that catapult him into a kind of loony soap-opera or a vaudevillian production of Tobacco Road. Stanley's hilarious fascination with the idea of the Napoleonic Code, his famous deconstruction of Blanche's clothes trunk ("Look at these feathers and furs that she comes here to preen herself in! What's this here? A solid gold dress I believe! And this one. What is these here? Fox pieces! Genuine fox fur pieces half a mile long! Where are your fox-pieces Stella? Bushy snow white ones, no less! Where are your white fox-pieces?"), and his macho-laden outburst against his sister and wife ("That's how I'll clear the table [he has swept the plates and food to the floor] Don't ever talk that way to me. 'Pig—Polack—disgusting—vulgar—greasy!' Them kind of words have been on your tongue and your sister's too much around here. What do you think you two are? A pair of queens? Remember what Huey Long said—'Every man is a King!'—And I am king around here, so don't you forget it!") all point away from a realist construction. Like Blanche, no matter how Brando might believe he's portraying a kind of reality, Stanley is an absurd stereotype born in theatrical fantasy rather than New Orleans' Elysian Fields.

How then does Williams "get away with it," so to speak? Why do we truly care about and are moved by these larger-than-life figures. For unlike Rhett Butler of Leigh's Gone with the Wind, we are compelled in Williams's drama "to give a damn."

In part, of course, it is the remarkable acting. I never saw Tandy play the original Broadway role—although I've seen her in other roles, and I am certain she was splendid—but Leigh is quite simply a genius given the slightly confused mix of poetic fragility, wonderment, and sexual distractedness through which she realizes Blanche. Brando may talk, at times, like an illiterate beast, but his sexuality is evident in every smirk of his lips and swing of hips. And despite his masculinity, which can even be scented over the smell of lit-up celluloid, there is something almost feminine about everything below his waist.

Increasingly, however, I have come to see that Stella is most important in bringing the play and its characters any credibility. If A Streetcar Named Desire has any realist potential, it lies in her character, who, although constantly abused by both husband and sister, quietly loves while attempting to disabuse them of their fantasies. She is truly the star brought to earth, a figure fecund in her ability to love and nurture. And the power of Stella, who time after time refuses to enter into the gushing anger and self-hatred of Williams' comic types, keeps silent or leaves the room or house, demonstrating a strength that helps us to recognize that there is an underlying reality, a secret humanity to both Stanley and Blanche.

For the dueling couple, appearing as rivaling individuals of astounding independence, are one and the same thing, exaggerated portraits of the extremes of society. And in that sense they are also dependent on each other as types. Both Stanley and Blanche are naturally sexual beings who live in imaginary worlds where they drink, gamble, and incessantly bathe their bodies—he in sweat and beer, she in scalding water—requiring them to endlessly undress and dress. Both seem defined by but also estranged from their cultural and social identities. As Stanley remarks as he is about to sexually attack: "We've had this date with each other from the beginning."

Stella is a steady force of balance between these two, and her child, we can hope, will incorporate the imagination and animal sexuality that lies in both Stella's sister and husband.

Unlike Kazan's film, where, upon her horrific realization that Blanche is now insane, Stella turns on Stanley, rushing up the neighbor's staircase to escape her bestial lover (a second—and I have always felt a permanent—ascension of the star to its natural habitat) in the script, Stella stays in the arms of her husband below, while he, for one of the few times in the drama, attempts to comfort her:

Now, honey. Now, love. Now, now, love. Now, now love. Now, love....

In that gentle reiteration of the present, we realize that Stanley has perhaps changed ever so slightly. The past is over, a new world possible, a world determined by love.

Los Angeles, October 5, 2002
Revised, April 10, 2009

On the evening of December 30th, 1998, Howard and I joined Armin and Barbara Sadoff (Armin is on the Directors board for the Los Angeles Opera) for dinner at their house with other friends, followed by the Public Broadcast Service's "Great Performances" telecast of the San Francisco Opera production of André Previn's A Streetcar Named Desire. I recall little of the music, but I do remember Rodney Gilfry was quite convincing as Stanley Kowalski. And my fondness for Renée Fleming must have counted for something in my evaluation of the work.

In late 2008 my young friend Felix Bernstein sent me a screenplay he had written for a high school assignment in which, in a quite precociously intelligent introduction, he described his preference for the highly theatrical and the use of the exaggerated genres such as romance, Soap Opera, and works of camp such as Ludlam's plays or Warhol's films. He argued, quite convincingly, that such forms helped to reveal issues of gender and the roles we assign to others in a culture which still, to a significant degree, embraces and advocates sexism.

The screenplay was a rather astounding production for a sixteen-year-old exploring these very issues, and I wrote Felix commending him on his writing abilities, with which I continue to be impressed. I also suggested, however, that despite my agreement with him of the necessity of theatricalism in both theater and film, I found that when one used only such types as characters it became hard to care about a play or the figures who inhabited it. Although they may have revealed valuable truths, they seemed so exaggerated that both author and viewer could easily dismiss them or even come to despise them. What I had always tried to do was to find a kind a middle-ground to center the play while its characters could explore the fringes of reality. In my play, "The Confirmation," for example, the story pretended to be a realist family drama which was undermined again and again by the characters' inability to present a consistent reality.

But, an even better example, I argued, was Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire which employed both figures of Soap Opera and camp who are drawn to a third character grounded in realism. I suggested Felix reread the play or again watch the movie, which he did. I also promised him an essay on the subject, which I had first written in 2002, and now have revised, within the context of our discussions, in 2009.

Los Angeles, April 11, 2009

State of Uncertainty (Three views of Oklahoma!, Rodgers' and Hammerstein's musical)

The barroom can-can from Oklahoma!

Josefina Gabriele and Hugh Jackman in Oklahoma!

Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics) [based on Green Grow the Lilacs by Lynn Riggs], Richard Rodgers (music) Oklahoma! St. James Theatre, New York / 1943
Fred Zinneman (director) Oklahoma! [film version] / 1955
Oscar Hammersein II (book and lyrics), Richard Rodgers (music) Oklahoma! Royal National Theatre, London / 1998 Gershwin Theatre, New York / 2002 [televised version with a slightly different cast presented on PBS stations in 2003]

The first thing that springs to mind when thinking of the musical Oklahoma! is its joyousness. This is, after all, a paean to the settlement of the American West—without all the guilt-evoking images of Indians, buffalo, and gunslinger-ridden bars with their show-girl hussies. It takes place on a farm where “the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye,” far away from the sumptuous temptations of Kansas City. Its major action is a journey to a nearby ranch, where a combination potluck, hoe-down is to be given in order to help raise money to build a new school house. The intimate jealousies of the characters are overcome by the obvious love between Curley and Laurey which must inevitably be consummated in marriage, with chorus in tow, in an anthem to statehood that quite literally spells out their affirmation of place.

But beware! This is, after all, an American work, and as I have demonstrated throughout my writings, there’s quicksand in these here parts. First, there is the case of Ado Annie, practically a nymphomaniac (a girl who “cain’t say no”), who, although loved by the gentle cowboy Will, is just as ready to run off with a Persian traveling salesman, to whom her own father (a role I played in a high school production) is perfectly willing, even eager, with shotgun in hand, to give her away. Curley, moreover, is a bit too self-sure with regard to Laurey; and to spite him, she agrees to attend the upcoming affair with the hired hand, Jud—a filthy pig of a man who buys pornography from the traveling salesman and spends some of his spare time playing a voyeur to his employer. The young woman is clearer dumber than she seems.

Curley takes time off from his flirtations with “that Jenkins gal” to visit Jud in his hovel, implanting within the creature’s mind the joys and beauty of suicide. “Poor Jud Is Dead” may be a wonderfully comic number, but it represents black humor worthy of John Hawkes or the British writer Joe Orton. And the scene ends, predictably, with guns—fortunately aimed at a hole in the wall and not at one another.

The center of this great musical lies not in its hoe-down or in its ending affirmation, but in Laurey’s dream, a scene in which the “drugged” girl (to be fair it’s only smelling salts named “The Elixirs of Egypt”) attempts to see into the future. What she witnesses we could have easily predicted: in Agnes DeMilles’s stunning dances the cowboys and farm girls serve up a celebration of Americana with particular emphasis on DeMilles’s hands-to-hips to outstretched gestures of community, prayer, and, ultimately church steeple. But, in some ways, this part of the dance is purely gestural. Even the cowboys’ oval-legged step into hoe-down, suggesting obviously their more common placement on the rump of their horses, seems a bit wooden—despite occasional exuberance, pattern and propriety dominate. Of much more interest to me—particularly when I first saw the film as a child and despite what I recognized even then as kitschy sets—were the long-legged contortions of the bar-room molls controlled by the dancing Jud. Their final fling into a French can-can was far more exciting, even if a bit horrifying. And Laurey’s terror at not being able to escape so powerful a force is quite justified. She’s an innocent, totally unable to assimilate Jud’s pent-up passion and lust. Even as she accepts his company on route to the social event, it is inevitable that she must flee his presence like the serpent Curley has compared him to. He, in turn, just as inevitably seeks other remedies in the form of “the little wonder,” a mechanical device that, while revealing pictures of naked women, releases a knife that slits the throat of its viewer.

Meanwhile, back on the ranch, or should we say farm, a range war is brewing. Even as they dance, it is clear that it is difficult for the farmer and the cowman to remain friends. In truth, the battle was waged for decades throughout Texas and Oklahoma; in the film it merely takes Aunt Eller a bit of strong-arm cajoling and a gun to return things to order. And so, too, does Aunt Eller save Curley from viewing Jud’s dirty pictures.

Laurey is restored to Curley’s arms, but the so-called friendly society treats him to a somewhat sinister shivaree, which isolates them on a mountain of hay, the perfect place for the immolation Jud has now planned. Fire breaks out. Curley’s dive onto his nemesis accidentally implants Jud’s knife into his own chest.

The good folk of the soon-to-be new state set up a hasty trial, but in their impatience to see Curley and Laurey catch their train to happiness, they hurriedly—and without due process—pronounce him innocent. Of course, he is innocent, but one wonders about such a society, with the violent forces and raw feelings lying just below its surface. Perhaps that’s why DeMille’s depiction of the community in dance appears so gestural, so procedural. Only a strong anthem can drive away the elemental rhythms of a can-can.

Ristorante Galessi, Piazza S. Maria in the Trastevere, Rome, October 18, 2003

In the few weeks since I wrote about Oklahoma! I watched a version of the British 1998 revival on television. That production, a generally fine one—with particularly good performances by Hugh Jackman and Josefina Gabrielle, but with weaker secondary character actors than the movie and what I felt was uninspired choreography by Susan Stroman (the good territory folks were even more gestural and less exuberant in her version)—basically supported my feelings about the dark elements of this fable.

Even though the Trevor Nunn production attempted to portray Jud in a more balanced manner, and actor Shuler Hensley succeeded (compared to the film portrayal by Rod Steiger) in making Jud more likeable, the dangerous aspects of the culture he represents remained embedded in his behavior. Indeed, in this production it became even more apparent that Laurey had chosen to go with him to the social because he was a farmer, and, accordingly, someone more familiar than the self-assured cowboy Curley. What the film had not revealed to me quite as clearly as the play was that, upon asking Laurey to marry him, Curley “converts,” so to speak, promising to become a farmer. The two warring factions—farmer and cowman—demand alliances, it appears, almost like the family kinships of Romeo and Juliet. And the musical even more pointedly reveals that Aunt Eller and friends are ready to break the law—or at least, as she puts it, “bend it a little”—in order to speed love on its course.

I am even more convinced after seeing this stage production that Oklahoma!, despite its energetic portrayal of the American frontier, just as clearly reveals the underlying contradictions and perversities of American life.

Los Angeles, November 30, 2003

Perhaps the only advantage to not having the financial means to publish books closer to the date in which they written is that I get the opportunity to rewrite and revise—in this case nearly six years after the fact!

I recently saw Oklahoma! again on The Movie Channel on television, and found the work almost as refreshing and entertaining as the first time saw it as a child. As I told Howard, I'm still convinced that, along with West Side Story, the nearly impossible Finian's Rainbow, and Guys and Dolls, it is one of the great American musicals.

Some of Hammerstein's lyrics, however, have yellowed a bit over the years, particularly those of the memorable anthem "People Will Say We're In Love." It is hard to imagine, for example, that a farm girl such as Laurey might even have had "a rose and a glove" which she exhorts Curley to return. Although spirited, Laurey seems to lack a sense of humor which might lead her friend to "laugh at her jokes too much." And even more to the point, it seems ludicrous for her to sing "Don't please my folks too much" when she has, evidently, no living parents, only a maiden aunt.

In fact, there are hardly any normal family units in this popular family entertainment. Ado Annie apparently lives alone with her father, who, as I mentioned above, is only too ready to have his daughter taken off his hands. Most of the males in this work, unmarried cowboys, work for rancher Andrew Carnes, who also seems to live without a wife, with no children in sight. The beautiful women of the chorus, all quite desperate for husbands, seem to have had no success. This 1955 film, most importantly, presents a world entirely without young children—unless you count the two youngest dancers as kids; to me they seem more like young adults. It is as if the small town of Claremont and environs has been emptied of normal families. Why, one can only wonder, are they attempting to raise money for a schoolhouse? If there was ever example of "voices without a voice," Oklahoma! represents it. For the family values it espouses seem to have little effect upon the figures we encounter.

Finally, I would suggest that Curley and Laurey—now that handyman Jud Frye is dead—cut that honeymoon trip short and return immediately to pick and shuck that corn "as high as an elephant's eye" if Aunt Eller and her farm is to survive.

Los Angeles, March 4, 2009

Acting and Perceiving (on Peter Handke's On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House)

Peter Handke On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House, translated from the German by Krishna Winston. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).

The small village of Taxham—on the outskirts of Salzburg, Austria—was constructed early-on in the manner of many villages throughout the world today, with barriers blocking most of its entrances and exits due to the highways, nearby airport, natural boundaries, and old military bases. In short, it is a city unknown almost to all except those that live and work in it.

Peter Handke's most recent novel, On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House, centers on one of Taxham's citizens, the local pharmacist, whose life, like that of the village, has been carefully constructed to keep others out and himself locked in. Although he shares his house with his wife, she and he have little communication and live in spaces (real and imaginary) that each other does not inhabit. His major activities other than the daily pattern of opening and closing the town's pharmacy, is a morning swim, his reading of medieval romances, and his love of nature which is particularly focused on the gathering, tasting and analyzing of various varieties of mushrooms.

Indeed for the first third of this work, he appears as an unlikely candidate for the fantastic fable that he, the narrator of the work, and Handke himself are about to tell. But one evening, while in the woods, his is apparently attacked and hit severely on the head. The injuries, which at first seem minor, are soon recognized as serious when, at the local airport restaurant, he is unable to speak. There, as if in a dream, he picks up two strangers—a former Olympic sports champion and a poet, both now down on their luck, and travels with them into a strange world, which, although later named as Spain, represents an archetypal city "of the night wind," as surreal as the worlds created by Kafka, Walser, Celine and other continental fabulists.

They've chosen the city, almost by accident, because the poet recalls that his ex-wife and a child he has never met lives there. But upon arriving in the strange Santa Fe, they perceive the city is celebrating a festival, and the poet can recognize very little. Although they find the house, his wife no longer lives there. Nonetheless, the pharmacist, now described by the other two simply as "the driver," there encounters, once again, the former woman friend of the ski champion in whose house they had spent the previous night and who had strangely enough entered the pharmacist's room and pummeled him in his bed; and he also recognizes, among the gypsy musicians, his own son, who had abruptly left his family years before upon being slapped by his father in the face upon the boy's release from the authorities for a petty theft. And soon after, the poet recognizes his own daughter as the queen of the festivities at the very moment she is arrested and taken off.

In short, the three together vaguely represent aspects of one being, and events in each of their lives recall and newly effect one another. In the days following the first evening of the festival, the town and townspeople gradually take on stranger and stranger qualities as a plague of near-madness begins to effect the citizens, one by one, each of them falling into tirades and attacking, for no apparent reason, others, often killing them. Upon saving his poet friend from just such a fate, the pharmacist realizes he must leave, and enters the seemingly endless vastness of the surrounding steppes.

Accordingly, Handke sends his character across a near-desert in a kind of pilgrimage into the self, the past, and all that in the bunkered-up village of Taxham the pharmacist has attempted to escape. The surreal voyage across this seemingly desolate and empty space—which we gradually come to see is actually filled with animals, vegetation and other itinerant voyagers—is a true literary tour-de-force, as Handke's anti-hero both suffers and finds, at times, near ecstasy in the inexplicable search for something different in his life. The vague magnet of this voyage is the skier’s friend, the woman described earlier in the book as "a winner," presumably a term applying to her appearance and personality, but growing in the pharmacist’s voyage to mean so much more: a winner in life, something as the young skier was, a champion, perhaps a prize.

Handke's hero does ultimately find something of value, his own voice, a reconciliation of sorts with the son (who is seen with the poet's daughter), and the discovery of love with the "winner." But the final section of the book is not a record of fulfillment and rewards, but a statement of the role and purpose of art. For life has returned to its usual pattern, slightly altered perhaps, but filled with the tedium of the daily repetition and workaday acts. The pharmacist, now designated as "the storyteller," has experienced something amazing, and he knows that he must record it, not only "tell" the story, but as he says the narrator, to see it in print, in "black and white." "I want to have my story in writing. From speaking it, orally, nothing comes back to me. In written form, that would be different. And in the end I want to get something out of my story too. Long live the difference between speech and writing. It's what life's all about. I want to see my story written. I see it written. And the story itself wants that." Handke brilliantly points up the differences here between the act of living and the recognition of it, the reception of those acts. They are not the same. As in this profound, short work, things simply happen in life, one is pulled, driven to it in a world where the acts themselves often make little sense, often seem to be without meaning; while art records them, reveals them, allows one to observe them, to give them substance.

Los Angeles, 2000

New Green Integer title: Nikos Engonopoulos, Acropolis and Tram: Poems 1938-1978

Nikos Engonopoulos Acropolis and Tram: Poems 1938-1978 (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2009)

Green Integer is proud to announce the publication of a new collection of poetry, Acropolis and Tram: Poems 1938-1978 by the renowned Green modernist poet, Nikos Engonopoulos. The book, translated by Martin McKinsey, is available from Green Integer (pay through PayPal, https://www.paypal.com/) for $13.95.

Nikos Engongoupoulos is surely one of the most curious figures in twentieth-century poetry. An ambidextrous painter-poet and early convert to surrealism, Engonopoulos joined forces with Andreas Embirikos and Odysseus Elytis in the late 1930s to change the course of Greek poetry.

Bruised by the reception of the Athens press of his first two books, Engonopoulos spent the next 40 years in semi-seclusion, evolving a theater of gesture and sign in which were acted out the drama of twentieth-century geopolitics. For Greece, this meant military dictatorship, foreign invasion and occupation, a brutalizing civil war and subsequent Cold War lockdown. On the stage of Engonopoulos's poetry these events appear in costumes from other times and places, most the former Greco-Balkan world that reached from the Rio dei Greci in Venice to the ancient city of Sinope on the Black Sea. Against these backdrops roam his cast of characters: fantastical Albanians, Montenegran monrachs, Orthodox warrior-saints, Bulgarian woodsmen and Smyrnian beauties. In a short lyric set in Paris (or Constantinople, or Venice, or all three) Engonopoulos writes about "the Grand Initiates" who once "my means of gestures / asked / that I meet them outside." His poems, like the Initiates, beckon us outside to a meeting with the unfamiliar.

Acropolis and Tram, Engonopoulos's first collection in English, spans his career from the early experiments in surrealist disassociation to the late elegies for a lost world. it also includes the long poem "Bolivar," his covert ode to the Greek resistance first published in 1945.


Exemplar of Flight

a woman undresses
amid a thunder
of rattlesnakes
she casts her eyes to the wind
likewise her nipples
she makes mothers weep
and horses whinny
clocks to stop
and skies dead
she cranks the winch of her corset
paints
the handsome boxer's reliquary
otherworldly
swears herself to love's loss

and tomorrow? tomorrow

nothing: no night is free of her hail.

Review copies are available.

Also available from Green Integer: Andreas Embiricos Amour Amour, translated from the Greek by Nikos Stangos and Alan Ross. $11.95

Language Writing Machines (on Tom La Farge's 13 Writhing Machines, No. 1: Administrative Assemblages)

Tom La Farge 13 Writhing Machines No. 1: Administrative Assemblages (Brooklyn: Proteotypes, 2008)

This is the first volume of Tom La Farge's promised 13-volume series on structures for writing, which he describes as "writhing," "writing with a difference," as if the activity were something accomplished with a coiling snake in hands or through a discharge of electrical energy. Certainly the kind of "writhing" La Farge speaks of—writing with constraints, arbitrary rules "imposed upon composition that drive you to say what you had not thought of saying in ways you would not have chosen to say it"—in its formal and often comical Oulipian twists, bends, and folds—requires a mastery of language and an artistry that allows one to give oneself up to the possibilities and accidents produced through the form itself.

In Administrative Assemblages La Farge explores several larger systems of arrangement: "Lists and Catalogs," "Memory Arrangements," "Full Disclosure," "Invisible Libraries," "Classifications," "Timelines," "Map & Gazetteer," and "The Composite Portrait," and suggests some methods of composing in each of these categories. These systems, based primarily on methods attempted by members of the Oulipo writers, offer up new possibilities of how to write; and La Farge's clear and concise descriptions, along with his list of methods, if nothing else, should well serve creative writing classrooms from here to eternity, particularly when he has completed all 13 volumes (forthcoming pamphlets will consider Dictionary Drives, Permutants & Recombinants, Visual/Verbal Hybridizers, Decryptions & Reëncryptions, and Homomorphic Converters).

That is not to say that every form will appeal equally to all. While I am a born list maker, I find the kinds of listings La Farge mentions—shopping lists, the lists of Walt Whitman, and even the lists of the American Oulipo-influenced author Gilbert Sorrentino (whom La Farge does not list), often as mindless narratives that demonstrate a lack of connection and complexity—things I seek in fiction. Similarly, although the "Memory Arrangements" of books such as Joe Brainard's I Remember are often charming to read, I think of them as literature "lite."

More interesting, it seems to me, are the formulations of Marcel Bénabou's patterns of "Perhaps you ... Not me," or "Me too."

Perhaps you like the records of Lawrence Welk. Not me.

Of far more interest are the constraints of "Formal Disclosure," which often use official-seeming forms as guides to creative composition. La Farge points the works of J. G. Ballard, who "uses physical structures that assemble a social reality in order to shape his fictions." For example, Ballard's 1975 High-Rise "uses the stratified sociology of an apartment building as the basis for a story of class war in a disaster scenario prompted by the failure of the complex systems on which such buildings rely." In my own condominium building it would be fascinating, I suspect, to explore the radical differences between the numerous older Jewish couples, the younger Korean families, and new Russian immigrants, along with the several gay couples that make up the majority of units.

My companion Howard would adore La Farge's "Invisible Libraries" systems, in which, for example, he suggests amalgam-books such as Crime and Prejudice or The Bleak Doll's Heartbreak House. Howard is always spouting such titles as Death of a Venice Salesman and The Color of Purple Summer.

Of equal interest is La Farge's discussion of "Classifications," works which deal with issues of classification such as "kinship systems," or "inheritance patterns." In Jorge Luis Borges's "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," the author explores that founder of the British Royal Society's attempt to create an ideal language by dividing the universe into forty classes, a systemization that quickly falls into a kind of absurdity that is ridiculously poetic.

Whenever I think of "Timelines" I am reminded of Harry Mathews's brilliant experiment in My Life in CIA, where, pretending to be a travel guide, he lectures on a possible trip through the USSR using several systematic rules: 1) They should only take trains and buses whose departure times read the same right to left as they did left to right; 2) For every departure, a return must be assured that strictly obeys rule one.

"Map and Gazetteer" forms more directly involve the visual artist in presenting various allegorical travel routes and comic maps based upon the outlines of countries coinciding with what La Farge describes as "an agglomeration of national caricatures." But, of course, there are verbal gazetteers, an example of which was recently presented in the New York Times, a map of Britain showing only towns with profane sounding names such as Crapstone, Penistone, East Breast, Pratts Bottom, Titty Ho, Crotch Crescent, etc.

Similarly, visual artists are at the center of La Farge's discussion of "The Composite Portrait," particularly by the painter Nicolas de Larmessin, who created portraits representing human figures made up of the things of which they were associated, such as his "Librarian," a man made up of books, or his "Musician," a man wearing various musical instruments. I once used just such a portrait of individuals in my fiction Letters from Hanusse using 19th-century phrenological systems that depended upon the bumps and fissures in the skull to determine the moral condition of the individuals to characterize the people of my mythical country Hanusse.

In short, La Farge's 13 Writhing Machines, given the contents of this first volume, promises not only to be an utterly entertaining presentation of various formal systems of literary writing, but an illustrative example of how to get writers, young and old, to experiment with new and empowering systems outside the scope of realist psychological narrative. We have long needed such a thorough discussion of such works, and perhaps in the 21st century our younger authors can go forward from these with an exciting energy of new possibilities.

Los Angeles, January 27, 2009

Geriatric Heroes (on Howard Hawks' El Dorado)

Leigh Brackett (screenplay), based on a novel by Harry Brown, Howard Hawks (director) El Dorado / 1966

Seven years after filming Rio Bravo Howard Hawks produced the second film of his late Western trilogy, El Dorado, a movie, as countless reviewers and film historians have pointed out, that is extremely similar to the previous one. Here too, a Sheriff (J.P. Harrah, played by Robert Mitchum), in need of help to protect his small community, gains the support of an older deputy (Bull Harris, humorously played by Arthur Hunnicutt), a former friend and top gunman (Cole Thornton played by John Wayne), and a younger man who becomes involved in the acts almost by chance (Alan Bourdilllion Traherne, nicknamed Mississippi, played by a youthful James Caan). The only superficial difference in the two films is that this time around the Sheriff, himself, has become the alcoholic—also on account of a "no-good" woman—allowing Thornton/Wayne to step in as a kind of symbolic sheriff. Together this foursome, spurred on by the love of a local saloon operator, Maudie (Charlene Holt), returns the town to order through a shootout between Bart Jason and his men, who are trying to take over the water rights of another local rancher-family, the MacDonalds.

The various vagaries of the plot, the fact that Thornton refuses to sign on as Jason's gunman and accidently shoots one of the MacDonald boys, are of no great importance, for, once again, the theme here is friendship and the love and heroism it evokes. Indeed, as in the earlier film, the relationship between the men is embedded in a series of comical homoerotic metaphors. After an encounter with hired gunman Nelse McLeod and his gang, Thornton insists Mississippi wait with him while he warns McLeod and his men not to sign on with Jason. After insisting twice that the impatient young man wait with him in the bar, Mississippi blurts out, "Would you mind telling me why you have such a great passion for my company?"

Thornton has, in fact, saved his life; had he left the bar alone others of McLeod's gang would have shot him down in the street. By saving his life, moreover, the two men are symbolically wed. Before long, Thornton, insistent upon going it alone, is joined in his journey back to El Dorado with the young man. As they head into town, Mississippi asks Thornton,

"Well, where are we headed?
Cole: To see a girl.
Mississippi: To see a "girl?"
Cole: Yes, a girl! Don't you think I could know a girl?

And when the two men are sworn in as deputies by Bull, the script even presents us with a metaphoric wedding ceremony:

Bull Harris: Now, raise your right hand [they do as they are told]
I forgot the words, but you better say "I do!"
Cole and Mississippi: I do!

If in Rio Bravo the Sherriff and his gunman friend were getting on in years, in this movie Hawks practically turns them into geriatric figures. Thornton is shot early in the film by MacDonald's daughter, Joey, and suffers throughout much of the film from spasms, leaving his shooting hand temporarily paralyzed. Suffering from a home remedy for alcohol cooked up by the enterprising Mississippi, Harrah spends much of the later part of the film doubled over in pain, and, along with Thornton is shot in the leg. The final showdown is hilariously played out as both men hobble down the street on crutches, Mitchum's crutches sported sometimes on his left and, at other times on his right; apparently Hawks shot whatever he felt looked best, and later was forced to add a line to the film noting the inconsistency, as if Harrah suffered not only from gun wounds but Alzheimer's disease.

The two sheriffs may save the day, but by movie's end they are in sad shape. The next generation, represented by Mississippi and his potential relationship with the wildcat Western girl Joey, will clearly be different. While these men and Bull fight out of responsibility and honor, Mississippi, freshly in from the Delta, is fighting another kind of battle, a war of revenge. His best friend, a part-Cherokee river gambler has been killed, and over the years he has been seeking out and killing the murderers. This man of the new generation, moreover, does not even know how to use a gun; Mississippi prefers to kill his victims with a knife. Later, joining up with Thornton, Mississippi proves such a terrible shot that older man buys him a double-barreled shot-gun that splatters shots at everything in sight. Quoting Edgar Allan Poe's poem "El Dorado,"* it is clear that Mississippi's relationship to the West is a romantic one, that he sees Thornton as a kind of gallant knight who will soon ride in the Valley of the Shadow. Alan Bourdillion Traherne's refusal to give up his friend's river chapeau for a cowboy hat, makes it clear that, like the trumpet-toting Bull Harris—a remnant of the Calvary and Indian days of the early West—the values and heroism of Thornton and Harrah are almost a thing of the past.

Los Angeles, April 5, 2009

____
*El Dorado

Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old,
This knight so bold,
And o'er his heart a shadow,
Fell as he found,
No spot of ground,
That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength,
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow;
"Shadow," said he,
"Where can it be,
This land of Eldorado?"

"Over the mountains
Of the moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied,
"If you seek for Eldorado!"

The Blindfold (on Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly)

Lugi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa (libretto), based on the play by David Belasco and the story by John Luther Long, Giacomo Puccini (composer) Madama Butterfly / the production I saw was a recast in high definition of the Metropolitan Opera production on Saturday, March 7, 2009 with Patricia Racette, Maria Zifchak, Marcello Giordani, and Dwayne Croft

Nearly anyone who has seen an opera knows the story of Puccini's Madama Butterfly. Having fallen in love with the dashing American Navy Lieutenant Pinkerton, the fifteen-year-old Cio-Cio San marries him, despite the fact that in doing so she must give up her own family and friends. With Yankee haughtiness and a sense of superiority, Pinkerton scoffs at the American consul's advice that Cio-Cio San is taking the marriage seriously, and soon after, leaves her behind as he sails off to America and, ultimately, a "real" wife.

Meanwhile, Cio-Cio San trusts that eventually he will return, singing her famed aria "Un bel di," in which she describes one beautiful day when a ship will sail into the harbor, returning Pinkerton to her. Meanwhile, Cio-Cio, courted by local men such as the wealthy Goro, refuses to give up her so-called "American" marriage and ardently denies their insistence that Pinkerton has left her for good.

The consul, Sharpless, has been given the difficult task of reading a letter from Pinkerton to Cio-Cio, reporting that he has been married, and will not return, but she, so delighted to hear any word from her husband, cannot comprehend what he is attempting to tell her, and when Sharpless tries to explain the facts in a more outright manner, she produces her and Pinkerton's son whom she is sure will draw Pinkerton back to her.

Pinkerton, in fact, has already returned to Nagasaki, and has no intention of visiting Cio-Cio. When he does hear of the child's existence, he, his wife, and Sharpless, convince Cio-Cio's servant Suzuki, to break the news that Pinkerton and his new wife will adopt the son.

Finally, Cio-Cio, who has been blinded throughout the entire opera to the truth, has her eyes opened, realizing, in horror, her delusional condition. She asks Pinkerton, a man so selfish that he has refused even to face her himself, to return so that she may offer up the child. But we also know that she intends to leave him her own body, committing ritual suicide. Who could not be moved by Patricia Racette's dramatically convincing performance? The Lithuanian-born American next to us—who had never before attended a Met video performance—was in tears, as were Howard and I.

Belasco the original playwright and storyteller John Luther Long, upon whose work Puccini based his opera, was quite prescient in his fin de siècle piece, establishing a type, the ugly American, which has remained in place for all those years since, particularly in the context of the Korean, Viet Nam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In Puccini's hands, the dichotomy between the all-consuming Yankee and the self-sacrificing Japanese maiden could not have made clearer.

Yet, one can only recognize that it is Cio-Cio San's propensity for self-sacrifice is as much a problem in this relationship as has been Pinkerton's greed and disdain of her life. In her absurd innocence, she has been blinded not only to the impossibility that she could be recognized as an American wife, but has forgotten who she herself is and how her traditions and behavior conspire to permit the Pinkerton's of the world to prey upon such youths.

Puccini poignantly points up this fact by having her son, whom she has sent out to play, wander into sight just as she is about to draw the knife. To protect him, she blindfolds the child, sending him on his way. But in doing this she merely reiterates her own condition all along. Singing of her hope that her son will remember her at the very moment that she is about to disappear from his life, we can only perceive that were he to do so, it could only bring him great pain for the rest of his days. In Anthony Minghella's Metropolitan Opera production Howard and I saw, the child, "Sorrow"/"Trouble" was played by a Bunraku-like puppet, manipulated by three hooded assistants, which visually restated the child's future sense of emptiness, his destiny, perhaps, to join in the world of hollow bodies.

Accordingly, although the opera ends with a corpse upon the stage, we know that it is already a disappearing thing, representing as it does a way of living that will inevitably be replaced by the avaricious gluttony of the survivors.

Los Angeles, March 28, 2009