April 18, 2017 Our Correspondents Sing, Together, as Long as We’re Alive By Alison Kinney and Mechi Annaís Estévez Cruz A conversation about ¡Figaro! 90210 and immigrants’ rights at the opera. Mozart’s 1786 opera Le nozze di Figaro has been set in a Trump Tower penthouse and at a Jewish wedding in contemporary Germany. Now, for a week in New York City, Vid Guerrerio’s adaptation, ¡Figaro! 90210, sets Mozart’s music to an English/Spanish libretto—and puts Conti in a red baseball cap. Of course, the plot still features two spirited, ingenious working people trying to free themselves from the abuses of the powerful, but now Figaro and Susana are undocumented Mexican household workers singing their opening duet in Spanish, on the grounds of the Beverly Hills mansion of their pussy-grabbing employer, Mr. Conti. Susana explains that the boss has given them a pool-house apartment to facilitate his assaults on her: “I see this coming when he tell me he help me get my visa … ‘Good girls, they get green cards. Girls who don’t obey their boss get deported.’ ” Le nozze di Figaro lends itself well to this kind of reworking; rebellion is in its DNA. Its eighteenth-century premiere came only a few years before the French and Haitian Revolutions. The opera derived from a play by Beaumarchais (who was also an arms dealer for the American Revolution) of which Louis XVI said, “For this play not to be a danger, the Bastille would have to be torn down first”; Napoleon, for his part, called it “the Revolution in action.” The opera’s librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, lightened the play’s political radicalism to bypass Austrian censors, earning Joseph II’s approval and a special palace performance commission. Yet the plot remains subtly subversive, addressing both the vulnerability and moral superiority of women and workers, and the violence of the ruling classes and their henchmen. After the marvelously entertaining opening night, the two of us compared notes to figure out what kind of audience ¡Figaro! 90210 was for. Not everybody, we observed, was happy with the adaptation. Read More
April 18, 2017 Arts & Culture Jungle Love By Darrell Hartman Why we keep looking for lost jungle cities. An illustration of Colonel Percy Fawcett doing battle with a giant anaconda, from the cover of Exploration Fawcett. Dry, desolate landscapes tend to preserve any evidence of human passage—they cling to artifacts like precious memories. A Tyrolean glacier hugged the 5,300-year-old iceman to its breast. The desert helped the ancient Egyptians launch their earthly vessels into eternity. More recently, Antarctica has joined in. The frozen continent recently coughed up a 104-year-old biscuit left by an expedition of Ernest Shackleton’s—in pristine, “perfectly nutritious” state. The jungle, though, does not take naturally to cultural preservation. The obscuring overgrowth never stops; the landscape digests all. Excavating a 5-year-old site, let alone a 500-year-old one, can be like sifting through a well-advanced compost pile in search of something edible. And yet, we try—especially when inspired by a figure as captivating as Colonel Percy Fawcett. Fawcett was an intrepid British explorer who disappeared in the Brazilian Amazon in 1925, presumably killed by Indians. He’s the subject of a new biopic, The Lost City of Z, an adaptation of David Grann’s 2009 book of the same name. The Amazon’s greatest cover-up, Fawcett believed, was an utterly forgotten civilization named Z. He aimed, in his quasi-invincible, slightly nutty way, to find it. Read More
April 18, 2017 On the Shelf The Art of the Lobotomy, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Yikes. Happy National Lobotomy Day! Take a moment to reflect on the pioneers of this innovative, deeply disturbing procedure, which proudly lives on in our nightmares, where it continues to stain the reputation of psychiatry. Clyde Haberman recalls one Dr. Walter J. Freeman, who helped popularize everyone’s favorite brutally efficient surgery in the mid-twentieth century. (He even gave a lobotomy to a Kennedy once.) Haberman writes, “Freeman, who died in 1972, presided over an estimated 3,500 lobotomies from 1936 to 1967. Early on, the actual cutting was done by his neurosurgeon partner, Dr. James W. Watts. He sawed two holes in the skull and, with a device called a leucotome, lopped off cells in the brain’s frontal lobes. The partnership dissolved a decade later when Dr. Freeman embraced a procedure called a transorbital lobotomy. It was not for the squeamish. Dr. Freeman would insert a tool resembling an ice pick beneath each eyelid, hammer it into the patient’s brain through the eye socket, and maneuver it to cut away frontal lobe cells believed to be trouble spots … Dr. Freeman set out on his own, performing hundreds upon hundreds of what, unsurprisingly, came to be known as ice pick lobotomies. He delighted in a craft that critics deemed reckless. Part showman, he even barnstormed the country. In one twelve-day period, he operated on 225 people during a swing through West Virginia.” Doreen St. Félix profiles Kara Walker, whose 2014 work A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, “a chimera of unvarnished American desires,” was the largest piece of public art ever to appear in New York City. Now Walker has her sights on something new, St. Félix writes: “It’s been nearly three years since the Sphinx, and Walker has spent the time interrogating what it means to make monumental and political art—representational or abstract—on the terrain, sites, and buildings in which the lives of black people have been compromised in some way. That is, how to exhume the traumas and delights of an environment rather than fabricating scenes out of black paper—and how to guide the problem of how people look. ‘I am still wrestling with my relationship to what my art might do in the public space,’ she says. ‘How I can control it’ … She sometimes refers to herself as a ‘Negress of noteworthy talent,’ a reference to the slave girl-child character Hilton Als once identified as the ‘saint figure’ of her compositions. She looks to the languid narrators of Southern novels like Gone with the Wind for the flamboyance and piquancy of her drawings. To Walker, art is description, not advertisement.” Read More
April 17, 2017 Correspondence The Quarreling Gondoliers By Dan Piepenbring John Singer Sargent, Gondoliers’ Siesta, ca. 1904. From a 1952 letter by the playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder, who was born on this day in 1897. “A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it,” Wilder told The Paris Review in his 1956 Art of Fiction interview. “On the stage it is always now: the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being; the words are rising to their lips in immediate spontaneity.” Read more of Wilder’s correspondence in The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder. Where do I go next? I don’t know … I don’t want to go to Paris. I want to go to a little hotel in St. Moritz (already under snow) and work at what only pleases me. What is there to confer about? Let them come to me. I think that Monday or Tuesday I will entrain for Milan and there at 1:25 take the autobus arriving at 6:10 in St. Moritz … Think of that drive, past Como, up up the dramatic Italian alps and then in the evening light in the square of that Swiss village. Read More
April 17, 2017 Literary Architecture Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend By Matteo Pericoli Matteo Pericoli is the founder of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, an interdisciplinary project that looks at fiction through the lens of architecture, designing and building stories as architectural projects. In this series, he shares some of his designs and what they reveal about the stories they’re modeled on. From a structural point of view, tension and compression often meld into each another. In this building, two volumes are interwoven by strong connecting rods, extended columns and daring beams, with one of the two seemingly suspended from the other. With its mass and swirled dynamism, the suspended volume (that we will call Lila) seems to be slipping away from the one that is holding it up (that we will call Elena) making it extend and stretch as if it was Lila that was shaping Elena and providing her with her dynamic energy, so vital to any piece of architecture. The name of this architectural complex is My Brilliant Friend, after Elena Ferrante’s novel in which the relationship between its two protagonists (Elena, the narrating voice, and her childhood friend Lila) is a constant, alternating flux of blurred identities and imperfect dreams. Now that we know that this is My Brilliant Friend, let’s try to analyze and allow ourselves to be transported by the stresses that occur within its architectural elements. As with structural calculations, the reading and interpreting of a building of this kind are not at all linear and predictable, but rather fluid and certainly not univocal. It is evident that if one of the two elements were to be missing, the other would have no reason to exist. Without Lila there would be no Elena, and vice versa. There are points in the structure where it is not clear in which direction stress is expressed. The weight is transferred from the supporting structure onto the supported one—a problem for both the calculations and the idea we were getting of the relationship between Lila and Elena. It is a building in which neither volume has, so to speak, clear control over the other—i.e., upon which element the functioning of the whole depends. At times it seems like Elena, while making the extraordinary effort to support her, wants to detach herself from Lila. We, too, are suspended—suspended between tension and compression. Motionless. If we were the very fibers of the structure, if we were—as we actually are, as both visitors of the building and readers of the novel—experiencing these forces, we would also understand and feel the additional torsion, shear, and momentum. In reading a structure such as this, it is better not to stop at its surface. “ … We delayed, challenging each other, without ever saying a word, testing our courage.” Suspension, patience and attention. The physics of narrative has its own way of arriving at structural audacities made of hidden tensions and compressions. We must always be ready. In collaboration with Giuseppe Franco.
April 17, 2017 On the Shelf Join Me in Polar Paradise, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring William Bradford, An Arctic Summer: Boring though the Pack in Melville Bay, 1871. My fantasies of the Arctic derive from the backsides of kids’ cereal boxes: I want colonies of penguins in sleek jumpsuits navigating a labyrinth of ice luges and dancing on geysers of anthropomorphic frost. This, as Kathryn Schulz points out, is not so far off from the contemporary ideal of polar life: we want “a faraway frozen land unspoiled by humankind.” But in the nineteenth century, Schulz writes, the Arctic gripped the national imagination for just the opposite reason; explorers wanted to discover a place that was warm and hospitable to human civilization. She writes, “An ancient myth had mutated into a serious scientific hypothesis: the theory of the open polar sea. The most ardent supporters of that theory believed in a kind of Nordic El Dorado. Beyond the eightieth parallel, they held, the ocean was not merely ice-free but actually warm, leading to a kind of tropical paradise—possibly complete with a lost civilization—tucked away at the top of the planet … It is difficult, these days, to appreciate just how deeply everyday citizens of the Victorian era were absorbed in Arctic arcana, how central the otherwise remote poles came to seem. Nineteenth-century Britons sang polar-themed songs, attended polar-themed dinner parties, and flocked to re-creations of polar expeditions staged in the temperate bowers of Vauxhall. And, as Henry Morley observed, they read every polar-themed story they could find.” Marshall Berman, the author of All That Is Solid Melts into Air, fused his Marxism to a freewheeling cultural criticism. A new collection of his essays, Modernism in the Streets, finds him at odds with most of the leftists of his day, Max Holleran writes: “In many of these pieces, his thoughts on freedom, alienation, and community are filtered through an exuberant appreciation of culture, from William Blake to Cyndi Lauper. To make a lasting impact, he believed, the left had to combine the wisdom of Das Kapital with an all-out attempt to recapture American culture through music, art, and poetry … Berman was a philosophy professor in the image of Allen Ginsberg rather than Lionel Trilling. He reveled in Cyndi Lauper at a time when most people in his circle were decrying the depoliticization of mainstream music. For Berman, pop animated debates over values for a large audience, even if the artists were not expressly political.” Read More