Richard Avedon Retrospective: Celebrities and Models

Today, dressed in my best black-and-white outfit as a sign of homage, I visited the MOMA retrospective of Richard Avedon photographs. The works included in this, the largest exhibition devoted to the photographer since his death in 2004, can be divided into three basic categories: fashion photos, celebrity portraiture, and images from the big "American West" project that Avedon undertook in the early '80s.

It seems that everyone has been going just gaga about this exhibit, so is it wrong to say that I was slightly disappointed? The show felt small, for one thing: it advertises itself as "More than 200 Images," but about 75 of those images are 5-by-7 portraits of American political figures that Avedon snapped in 1976 for Rolling Stone, so unless you really like small photos of 1970s political figures, the ad is slightly misleading. There was almost nothing in the exhibition from the last 20 years of Avedon's career, and almost no fashion photography from after the '60s. But Avedon kept working up until the very end--I was moved to discover that one of the last photographs he took was a portrait of a young Illinois State Senator named Barack Obama.

So I felt that this exhibition showed a lot of the most "expected" Avedon images, ones that I had already seen on websites or in books, without offering much in the way of the unfamiliar-but-brilliant. I mean, I adore practically everything about this image--its composition, its style, its insouciance...

...but I can't say I got anything more out of it seeing it on a museum wall than I did when I first saw it online.

Furthermore, I couldn't help but wonder about the motivations for assembling an art show that is so full of images of famous people. Is this exhibit packing 'em in because we want to admire Avedon's artistry, or because we want to see pictures of celebrities? ("At least we know who these people are, and we can understand these photos," we think, "not like that weird abstract or conceptual stuff that's on the other floors of the MOMA.") When the curators chose which portraits to display, did they select them because of who posed for them, or because of how well they demonstrated Avedon's talent? One striking pair of photos shows Bob Dylan at two different points in time: in 1963 he is an earnest folkie in a flannel shirt, but in 1965 he has transformed into The Electric Dylan, skinny pants and wild hair and brooding attitude. The obvious question to ask is: how much of this is due to Avedon's skills (placing Dylan in the right settings, getting him to reveal his personality before the lens), and how much of it is due to the change that took place in Dylan between 1963 and 1965?

Bob Dylan juxtaposed (click to see it larger).

I guess these photos do get at Dylan's essence(s), though, as do other of Avedon's celebrity portraits. Another excellent juxtaposition hung a portrait of Katharine Hepburn next to one of Brigitte Bardot. Hepburn is all angles and bones and hardness (even the cartilage of her nose looks chiseled) while Bardot is all soft curves. Anatomy is destiny, Avedon seems to say--these actresses' bone structures accurately predict their onscreen personas.



And there is a photo of Dorothy Parker (see prev. post) in the '50s that fully captures the sad state to which she became reduced in her last years. She has worse bags under her eyes than anyone I have ever seen--and you know that she used to be a very cute young woman.

Detail shot of Parker's eyes (the actual portrait shows her whole face)

It's funny: the exhibition is set up so that it gives more weight to Avedon's celebrity portraiture than to his fashion shoots (the fashion photographs are all in the first, smallish, room, while there are four or five rooms of portraits). But because celebrity photography is such a sticky issue, I think it is easier to judge Avedon's artistry on the basis of his fashion work. When we admire his fashion photographs, at least we're saying "Ooh! Pretty!" rather than "Ooh! Famous!" Because they are pretty--and sometimes more than that, striking or strange or memorable. Think of the famous "Dovima with Elephants," or this other shot of Dovima, biting on a pearl necklace. You can see her moles and freckles and incipient crows'-feet. Her expression is extraordinary, indescribable. And there are very few fashion photographs that can compare to it nowadays, over fifty years after the fact.

On Trying to Do Too Much

If you know me in person, you're probably aware that I am a perfectionist--and even if we've never met, you might get that impression of me just from reading this blog. Lately I've been contemplating my perfectionistic tendencies--my habit of trying to do too much, of thinking that everything I create needs to be stunningly original and word-perfect and complex and insightful. And I'm realizing just how detrimental that is. My perfectionism, that is, my fear, is slowing me down.

These reflections were prompted by going to see a new play called Zombie Town, by my blogfriend Tim Bauer. Zombie Town has a fun structural conceit: it asks us to believe that about a year ago, a zombie uprising actually took place in a small town in Texas, and that afterwards, a troupe of actors from San Francisco traveled to the town, interviewed the survivors, and made a documentary theater piece. And that is ostensibly the play that we are seeing performed. This amusing idea allows Tim to make fun of both the small-town Texans and the pretentious San Franciscans, and also offers a way around the difficulty of showing a zombie apocalypse onstage. It's The Laramie Project, but with zombies! Take a hook like that, develop it well, and you've got a good play on your hands.

But, I realized, the thing is that if I had come up with this idea, I wouldn't have developed it well. I'd have tried to do too much. At first, I would've dismissed out of hand the idea of writing a zombie play: "You're the wrong person to write it, Marissa," I'd tell myself. "You're not a horror fan and your audience is sure to have seen way more zombie movies than you have!" But then, if the idea kept niggling at my mind, insisting that I had to write this play, I would go too far in the opposite direction. I'd convince myself that I couldn't write it until I had learned everything there was to know about the history of zombies in popular culture--watching the most notable zombie films so that I could then either pay homage to them, or avoid plagiarizing them. I would get so enthralled with the metatheatrical conceit that I would give all of the characters an elaborate backstory that slowly got revealed over the course of the evening. I would probably burden the play with some kind of overarching metaphorical structure about the Significance and Meaning of Zombies in the 21st Century.

In short, I would be a Pretentious San Francisco Playwright.

But Tim is not pretentious, which allows him to skewer his characters' pretensions all the more effectively, and to write a fast-moving, entertaining zombie comedy without looking over his shoulder the whole time and wondering if he's doing it right. His play gave us what we wanted and was never lumbering or ponderous; but I have this feeling that if I had started with the same conceit, I would have overworked it and come up with a play that was much baggier and more complex, less sheerly fun. And the writing process would have been agony the whole way through.

Similar thoughts occurred to me after reading the short story in last week's New Yorker, called "While the Women are Sleeping," by Javier Marías. Have you read it? Es bueno. In it, a first-person narrator describes meeting some strange people while on vacation with his wife. And I really enjoyed the story while I was reading it, but then I started to second-guess myself. "We don't learn anything about what kind of a person the narrator is," I thought. "He's obviously meant to be normal, an Everyman, a stand-in for the reader, in contrast to the weird guy he meets at the beach--but isn't it lazy, to write a narrator who has no personality?" But then I realized, maybe I wouldn't want to read a whole novel narrated by this guy, but it's just fine for a short story. I didn't notice the narrator's lack of personality when I was reading and liking the story--only afterward, when I started to nitpick it to death. (And upon further reflection--the narrator's passivity might make the end of the story more effective.) And so, again: if I had written this short story, I'd have expended way too much effort in trying to give the narrator a unique personality, and the result would be overdetermined.

So yeah, in my writing, I have a bad habit of wanting to do too much. Which means it's ironic, isn't it, that I've set myself the task of writing a blog post every day this month--isn't that a symptom of doing too much? Well, no, actually. Instead, I'm hoping that NaBloPoMo will have the opposite effect on me. If I write only a few blog posts a week, I can convince myself that everything I post has to be lengthy, brilliant, word-perfect, etc. But if I blog every day, I will have no choice but to post some things that aren't perfect. To post a video with limited commentary as opposed to a beautifully argued essay that over-explains everything. To write shorter posts or more humorous ones. Or, if I write a longer post, to have it ramble and be self-critical and perhaps "not of general interest." Like the post you have just read.

Dorothy Parker, Playwright in Disguise

Of the books I've read lately, the one that I can sense will most influence my playwriting, and has inspired me to sit down and write a few scenes, isn't a playscript or a book on theater history. It's Dorothy Parker's Complete Stories.

These days, Parker seems best known for her persona: the iconic Algonquin Round Table wit, one of the world's first snarky women, author of mordant little poems. But that leaves a lot out. For one, we forget her deep troubles, that she was "one of the saddest rapid-burnout cases in American letters," as Joan Acocella once described her. (My father once accused me of "wanting to be Dorothy Parker"--Heaven forbid, I say!) But we also forget that, out of all her writing, she was evidently proudest of her short stories, not her poetry or epigrams.

I picked up the Penguin Classics edition of Parker's Complete Stories (I have a Penguin Classics fetish and a "complete works" fetish, so this was a must-buy), and, after I got past the irritating introduction by scholar Regina Barreca, discovered some wonderful writing. (This review at the site Words on Us perfectly expresses my grievances with the introduction. Basically, Barreca noisily defends Parker against every criticism that has ever been leveled at her--even though some of those criticisms are valid, and not just malicious invective cooked up by the patriarchal establishment.)

I'll begin with a criticism of my own: yes, Parker was funny and cynical, but she could rely too much on cheap ironies. Reading this collection, it gets to the point where you can anticipate the plot of the story from seeing its title: if a story is called "Oh! He's Charming!" or "The Wonderful Old Gentleman," you can predict that the man in question is going to be horrible.

But not all of the stories are this simplistic--and, as I said, I was surprised and thrilled to discover that most of them function like one-act plays. A man and a woman, or sometimes two female friends, have a conversation in a taxicab or on a banquette at a cocktail party--and that's the story, the effects all achieved with dialogue. Some of my favorites: "A Terrible Day Tomorrow" (guy tries to get a girl drunk--his speech getting more and more rambling as he drinks), "Arrangement in Black and White" (which indicts racist attitudes by letting us overhear the patronizing things said by a woman at a party), and "Dusk Before Fireworks" (a painfully observed account of a clever young woman in love with a man who keeps stringing her along). Interspersed with these stories-in-dialogue are some other stories, told in the first person--that is, "dramatic monologues." The narrator of the monologue is often Dorothy Parker herself, complaining humorously about her broken garter or her awful dance partner or her insomnia. But sometimes she writes in a different voice--check out "Lady With a Lamp," the monologue of a rather unlikable woman visiting her friend, who is indisposed after having an abortion. It captures the personality of this "frenemy," and I am sure it was quite daring for 1931!

Has anyone ever acquired the rights to some of Parker's stories and adapted them into a theater piece? I can picture it now--"A Dorothy Parker Evening." It would alternate her dialogue sketches with her dramatic monologues, and then finish up with a dramatization of one of her longer stories... might I suggest "The Game" (a collaboration with Ross Evans, from 1948), which is a fantastic, tense story about a game of charades that reveals a sordid secret. It would be a fun evening in the theater--and because of Parker's name recognition, I think it would also have commercial appeal!

And in the meantime, I know I'll be returning to Parker's stories, examining how they work and how much her dialogue conveys. I love discovering "playwrights-in-disguise"--authors of prose fiction whose greatest asset is their dialogue. There's Parker, Hemingway, Armistead Maupin... who else?

Undertow

Continuing my mini-series of "Circular Songs in Foreign Languages that I Really Love," here's the classic Brazilian song "Aguas de Março," sung by Elis Regina and "Tom" Jobim (who also wrote it).



This is another song where the music seems to circle around and around--the best description of this is in, of all places, the Wikipedia entry... which points out that the music matches the lyrics, because it sounds like water inexorably flowing through gutters and swirling down drains. (Listen to the way the bass line is a steady downward progression--and the high piano notes at the end of the song bounce like little water droplets.)

And, just as hurricanes swirl counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern hemisphere, this song takes on a different meaning depending on where you live. In the northern hemisphere, you hear the title "Waters of March" and picture the last rains of winter, melting the snow, nourishing the young plants... but the Portuguese lyrics are "São as águas de março fechando o verão"--"It's the waters of March, ending the summer." And the other lyrics describe sticks and stones and bits of refuse, all caught up in the torrent.

So, despite the relaxed bossa nova beat and the laid-back singing, the song has a dark undertow, an awareness of death. And yet, Elis and Tom manage to have fun with it--they swim against the current, even as they know that one day it will sweep them away. As the lyrics go on to say, "É a promessa di vida no teu coração"--"It's the promise of life in your heart."

I swear, you listen to these three songs in a row--Brel, Moreau, Regina & Jobim--and you come away feeling that you have touched some very profound truths about life and love and death... and it took only ten minutes!

Whirlpools

It's late, so another video tonight: "Le tourbillon de la vie," sung by Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim.

My mom rented this movie for me the summer after my freshman year of college--I had a year's worth of French under my belt, so she thought it was something I ought to see.

"I saw this movie once, years ago, and I don't remember anything about it," my mom said as she put the disc into the DVD player, "except that at one point Jeanne Moreau sings a little song with a guitar."

After watching the movie, I understood what my mother meant. Because this song is unforgettable.

JEANNE MOREAU LE TOURBILLON DE LA VIE
Uploaded by kirivalse.

It is a perfect two minutes of film--all the more so because of its imperfections. Moreau sings the wrong lyrics at one point, and later she dips her head so her mouth nearly moves out of frame. But I love that Truffaut chose to use this take, rather than one that seemed less natural and spontaneous.

I'm posting this today because Jeanne Moreau is my new favorite actress and so this song has been running through my head. And also, I think it goes well with the Brel song I posted yesterday, for reasons that I am having a hard time articulating. Well, so "le tourbillon de la vie" means "the whirlpool of life," and the lyrics describe a never-ending cycle of an on-again off-again relationship. And even if you don't know French, you can hear that the music of it is circular too, going round and round. Because it's a perfect moment, you imagine you could go on listening to it forever, its endless circularity.

And the Brel "Valse à Mille Temps" is a circular song too--it's about a dance, the waltz, where you whirl around and around; the music churns and repeats; the lyrics have to do with the cycle of growing up and falling in love; Brel performs it while spinning on a merry-go-round. (In the American musical Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris, this song got translated as "We're On a Carousel.") So I get a similar feeling when listening to both these songs--like there is some wisdom buried within them, though they may seem like mere little ditties on a first hearing. And I've been wondering why these circular chansons affect me so deeply, and feel so profound.

"La Valse à Mille Temps" and a Month with 30 Posts

I just learned, courtesy of Jaime at Surplus, that November is NaBloPoMo--and because I unintentionally got things off to a good start by posting something yesterday, why shouldn't I make it official and try to write a post a day? Yes, I tried and failed at NaPlWriMo (National Playwriting Month, for you acronym-averse) two years in a row--that's why I'm not participating in it this year--but one blog post per day doesn't sound too hard. And I won't lack for subjects: the theater season is in full swing, movies are opening, I've been meaning to post about several books I've read this year...

But because it is 11:30 PM, I'm going to fulfill today's requirement by posting a video: Jacques Brel singing "La Valse à Mille Temps."

Jacques Brel La Valse à Mille Temps 1959 English subtitles
Uploaded by lightning49.

I discovered this song thanks to Youtube (it doesn't appear on my Brel greatest hits CD) and now I am obsessed with it. It starts out as a very sweet, sentimental waltz about Paris and young love and the springtime (not that there's anything wrong with that!), but then the lyrics get much more intricate and punning and impossible-to-translate than you'd expect for a typical song of that genre, and it crescendos and speeds up, till at the end the great Monsieur Brel is just spitting out the words as fast as he can... you must see and hear it. Enjoy!

Les Voix, Les Voici: Damrau and Flórez in "Fille du Régiment"

In 2008, I watched Laurent Pelly's production of La Fille du Régiment, starring Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Flórez, as a Metropolitan Opera TV broadcast... so why did I go see it when it came to the San Francisco Opera last week? First, because Flórez came with the production to San Francisco, and I couldn't pass up the chance to hear him live. And second, because I was curious how soprano Diana Damrau would fare in a staging that had been built around Natalie Dessay's talents and persona. So much of Pelly's production relied on the fact that Dessay is kooky and athletic and a petite gamine Frenchwoman. What would it be like with Damrau--who sings many of the same roles as Dessay and is known as a good actress, but looks stereotypically German and might bring a different energy to the role?

As it turns out, Dessay and Damrau seem to approach the role of Marie, "the daughter of the regiment," from opposite directions. Dessay starts out as a bundle of manic energy, singing forcefully and doing physical comedy tricks; and just when you think that's all there is to her, she dials it back and breaks your heart. Damrau executes the same gestures and choreography as Dessay, but in a much more controlled ("regimented"?) way. Her Marie is tomboyish, but never kooky. Her singing is more controlled too--so maybe it is closer to ideal bel canto style, and it's proof of her skill that she can sing softly during elaborate coloratura passages. All the same, there were times when Damrau was almost too quiet--and it's not that she has a tiny voice, because there were moments when she let it out and easily filled the auditorium. And those were the moments that you tended to notice and want more of.

There is a lot of spoken dialogue in Fille du Régiment, where Dessay probably has the advantage, being a native French speaker. Damrau's pronunciation wasn't bad, but she lacked Dessay's comic timing (e.g. the scene where Marie reads a letter aloud, sounding the words out because she hasn't had any formal schooling). I could also tell that Damrau and Flórez faked the kiss after their love duet--but, as I learned from the New Yorker profile of Dessay last spring, she insisted that Flórez had to really kiss her, or it wouldn't look believable.

Overall, I think that this production still works best as The Natalie Dessay Show--but in a more traditional production of Fille du Régiment, one that treated its heroine as a more conventional ingénue, I might prefer to see Damrau. This was Damrau's first attempt at the role of Marie, but I do hope it isn't her last!

Juan Diego Flórez is the real deal, and I will count myself lucky to have heard him perform the role of Tonio in person. No, we couldn't get him to encore "Pour mon âme," but his joyful rendition of it is something to treasure. (He also has perfected his French pronunciation: when I watched the telecast it annoyed me that he sang "J'y sa flamme" instead of "J'ai sa flamme," but he didn't do that last week!) And we gave Flórez another thunderous ovation, welcoming him into our hearts, after his tender Act II aria. He sings with brilliant musicality, looks good onstage, and makes everything seem effortless. I also like that he was unafraid to give Tonio an endearingly dorky quality, especially in his first scenes. I can't imagine opera divos of the past, like Pavarotti or Domingo, allowing themselves to act so goofy.

As for the supporting cast, Meredith Arwady was delightful in the role of the Marquise de Berkenfield--acting like Margaret Dumont and singing with a huge contralto voice. I do not think that Bruno Praticò was an ideal choice to play Sergeant Sulpice, however: Sulpice does not have a lot of difficult singing, but he does have a lot of French dialogue, and Praticò's thick Italian accent rendered him almost incomprehensible when speaking French. It seems like it wouldn't be too hard to find a bass-baritone who sang just as well but could handle the dialogue better.

Photos from San Francisco Opera. Top: Marie saves Tonio from certain death. Bottom: Marie, Tonio, and Sulpice reunited.