Gary Leonard's long-running series appears on LA Observed on Thursdays. Click the photo to see it bigger. Here's the Gary archive.]]>
Two and a half years ago I left Los Angeles for Chicago by choice, and since then I've struggled to write the definitive explanation, my goal being to satisfy the curiosity of the hundreds who have since asked ... why?
Why would anyone dare to check out of Southern California?
I'd all but given up. I tried, and tried. One year passed. And then, I remembered something the character Davis said in "Grand Canyon:" "All of life's riddles are answered in the movies."
So, about 18 months ago I began rewatching a lot of good films, and a lot of guilty pleasures, and I noticed an undeniable pattern -- Movie characters that succeed in their quest to reach Southern California are rewarded. Movie characters who dare leave Southern California are punished, severely ... usually with death, and not a pretty death, more like an alcoholic's death.
You see, Southern California isn't just where happy endings happen. Southern California is the happy ending, and who would ever leave that?
]]> Sometimes, it's subtle. "Pretty Woman," for example, could have easily ended with the comely, Hollywood hooker chasing the millionaire businessman back to New York City. But no. It ends with said millionaire rushing after said hooker. He climbs her fire escape (yes, a fire escape in Los Angeles) and kisses her right there, happily ever after, in Los Angeles.But that's not all. As the credits roll, some guy on the street hammers the audience with the not-so-subtle message: "What's your dream? Everybody comes here. This is Hollywood, land of dreams."
The story's the same in film after film. "National Lampoon's Vacation," "Midnight Run," "Little Miss Sunshine." In every one of these pictures, LA is the drop-dead goal. These characters experience desperation, devastation, and even the loss of frail, elderly relatives (and one dog belonging to a frail, elderly relative) along the way. But, once the primary characters arrive in sunny Southern California, everything is made right. The deaths of any minor characters are forgotten -- little more than collateral damage. It's party time!
In "Rain Man" the protagonist actually leaves SoCal in order to journey back to it. And how cool is it that, as difficult an expedition as that trip proves to be, once they stop in Las Vegas, they win all the money necessary to solve all the financial woes waiting back in California.
That's what happens when LA is the goal. Flop that storyline, however, and the world nearly ends.
At the start of one of my all-time favorites, "The Long Goodbye," the antagonist Terry Lennox is in a rush to leave LA for Mexico. This doesn't end well for Terry. First he tries to fake his death, but then he really dies.
In another favorite, "Leaving Las Vegas," Hollywood screenwriter Ben leaves LA ... and then he dies too, which was sort of what he wanted. Who better than a Hollywood screenwriter to figure out that the easiest way to kill yourself is to leave LA?
In "Lost In America," a husband and wife sell their house in LA intent on living an adventurous life on the road, then they stop in Las Vegas ... and then they lose the nest egg. Correction: The wife loses the nest egg. How could she lose the nest egg? The nest egg! It's the nest egg!
In "Pulp Fiction," Butch is a fighter who double-crosses the mob and must struggle to leave LA with his girlfriend and some considerable cash. First he escapes several attempts on his life by the antagonist and his henchmen. Then, he and the antagonist are taken hostage by murderous rapists. Lucky for Butch, he breaks free, slays the rapists, and saves the antagonist, the mob boss Marsellus Wallace. Taking this into consideration, the mob boss grants Butch limited amnesty. He can leave LA, but he can never speak of the situation from which he saved the mob boss, and he can never return to LA.
"You leave town tonight, right now," Wallace tells Butch. "And when you're gone, you stay gone, or you be gone. You lost all your LA privileges."
This pattern goes on, and on, and on.
Two of Michael Mann's best movies set in Los Angeles -- "Collateral" and "Heat" -- focus on men who, as the climax approaches, just need to do one more thing before they can leave LA, but it turns out the one thing they need to do is die. One gets killed by an LA cop. The other gets it from an LA cabbie.
A cabbie! A cabbie who dreams of starting a limo business that will be so pleasurable it'll trick you into thinking you've been on an island vacation when, in reality, you've been right there in that limo in LA the whole time.
Real life is nothing like that. My wife and I left LA more than two years ago and, although the transition has presented us with more challenges that we expected, none of them have involved mob bosses, hookers, car chases, or hit men (although there was this one incident involving a cabbie, but this is Chicago and everybody's got a story about a cabbie).
When I moved to LA in the mid 1990s, no one asked me "why." But when I left in 2011, "why" was all anyone wanted to know. Friends. Strangers. Everyone still wants to know why in God's name I would leave LA on purpose? The non-LA residents who ask this question inevitably share their own dream of one day moving to LA, if ever they "get enough money together." Those already living in LA mostly cling to their choice like it was money, which is even funnier considering that, if you live in LA, you never, ever have enough money.
I've thought of all kinds of clever things to say. I've explained that Route 66 was never envisioned as a one-way street. I've played to the LA stereotypes. I even, once or twice, tried to suggest that people in Chicago were nicer, but they're not, really, not at all. Chicago people would eat LA people alive, or dead, no preference, and definitely with mustard and sport peppers, but no ketchup. Seriously, NO KETCHUP!
I remember someone saying to me when I first moved to LA that it was the place people went so they could make enough money to get out of it. That wasn't me either. I loved most all my time in LA.
Nowadays I still don't know what to say. We moved here because we like Chicago. That's about it. There are things I hate about LA, but there are things I hate about Chicago too. Yes, it gets cold here. Yes, there are earthquakes there. No, people here aren't as pretty. No the food there isn't as good.
Perhaps this is another of those riddles that's answered in the movies. A Chicago movie. Maybe ... "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." Maybe it's like Ferris said:
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
Although everyone laughed and applauded every character and Los Angeles landmark, from the Sherman Oaks Galleria to the Mulholland Drive overlook and Grauman's Chinese, no one would argue with Coolidge when she said of the film, "It's serious." Nicolas Cage made his screen debut in the film, at age 18, and Coolidge entertained with stories from the set. She said that despite the backer's demands that breasts be bared for rating's sake, when they saw the whole movie for the first time they said incredulously: "It's a real film. It's about something." Indeed, the screenwriters were determined to make a film that mattered, not just another movie about teens looking for sex. There are threads that go back to Romeo and Juliet, and scenes with the heroine's hippie parents nearly brought down the house while showing the movie's great heart.
After the show, those audience members who dressed up were summoned to the stage for a costume contest. Then everyone headed to the LACMA courtyard for a reception under the watchful eye of Jack Nicholson in "The Shining."
Photos by Iris Schneider. Top, the crowd. Bottom, Coolidge and Elvis Mitchell.
The film opens on a masculine pair of hands having intimate relations with a deck of cards. Shuffle, cut, caress, they are as rhythmic and intricate as partners in a "Swan Lake" pas de deux.
"Cards are like living, breathing human beings," intones a male voice, "I suppose because they give you real pleasure."
The speaker/card choreographer is Ricky Jay, whose sleight-of-hand artistry has long secured his spot atop the magic mountain. "Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay" shows as much as tells his story at the Nuart Theatre in West L.A. starting Friday.
Occasionally cantankerous and famously brilliant, Jay is an historian and scholar of magic, an author, speaker and actor who has been known to make people weep with incredulity. In reviewing his 1994 one-man show "Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants," The New York Times said "You aren't asked to suspend disbelief--you have no choice."
He's juicy grist for the documentary mill. This is a man who can turn the jack of clubs into club soda but can't program a number into his cellphone. This is a man who claims to "know absolutely nothing about the 20th century," but waxes sweetly in a telephone interview about Nippy cheese and the joys of pastrami at Langer's Deli.
Like many illusionists and conjurers, Jay's affection for deception came early, courtesy of his grandfather Max Katz and his network of renowned magicians--Slydini, Cardini, Al Flosso, Francis Carlyle and Roy Benson--who taught the kid how to fool people. By the time he was 4, Jay was performing, and by 7 was making money at it.
Magic is deception, but also, as Jay says in the film, "inherently honest. That's the major difference between deception as crime and deception as performance."
The best practitioners amuse while they deceive. A black-and-white TV clip in the film features Flosso's Catskills patter as he pulls coins from the nose of the usually leaden Ed Sullivan, who can't contain his laughter. As a kid, Jay, who grew up in Brooklyn, was enamored of Flosso; estranged from his family, Jay recalls poignantly that the only kind memory he has of his parents is when they arranged, as a surprise, for Flosso to perform at his bar mitzvah.
In the 1970s, after appearing on "The Tonight Show," flirting with academia at Cornell and performing at The Electric Circus nightclub sandwiched between Timothy Leary lecturing about acid and Ike and Tina Turner, Jay left New York for Los Angeles, where he hooked up with two seminal influences, Charlie Miller and Dai Vernon. As Jay describes, it was a time of "total immersion" in the art of artifice, when they'd hang out at the Magic Castle until 2 a.m., then repair to Canter's until dawn.
Vernon, a charming raconteur and ladies' man, approached card handling as an engineering feat. He once told Persi Diaconis, Jay's friend and a professor of statistics and mathematics at Stanford, that he had captured the essence of pure sleight of hand in a single sentence. Which he declined to share with Diaconis.
"Did he ever tell it to you?" LAObserved asked Jay in the phone interview.
"No."
"Do you think he'd formulated such a sentence, or just said he had?"
"It's absolutely possible that [Diaconis] was being conned," Jay said with a note of reverence. "Vernon was that kind of character. ... He was a game player and a terrific one." Jay spontaneously recites by heart a passage from a decades-old New Yorker profile of Vernon: "In the performance of good magic the mind is led on, step-by-step, to ingeniously defeat its logic."
Some of the film's talking heads are recognizable. David Mamet, who directed Jay's stage shows as well as his performances in feature films, speaks to his intellectual devotion to magic. Steve Martin makes us laugh as he's being conned by the long-haired, bell-bottomed Jay on Dinah Shore's afternoon talk show.
Other satellites in the Jay orbit are unfamiliar. Fred Neumann was Jay's aikido teacher. He remembered his pupil's stage trick when he turned two $1 bills into a single $2 bill, and decided to test Jay's magic mettle one day after class. Jay was in the shower when Neumann asked him to perform the trick.
"I'm not prepared," Jay objected. Then, naked and dripping wet, suddenly conjured two $1 bills and rendered them into a single $2 note. There is no martial art with that kind of power.
Jay's currency is the small-scale, sleight-of-hand act, so LAObserved asked his opinion of the Baz Luhrmann-esque magic extravaganzas popular in Vegas--you know, where the Statue of Liberty disappears, or people get sawed in half, then, one hopes, reconstituted. "It would be nice," Jay said, "for people to realize that magic is as different as styles of dance."
So the deceivers' clubhouse is a big tent, and if Jay isn't always keen to work with the elephant who is or isn't in the room, he still can do business there. Medical shows hire doctors and police procedurals hire cops to ensure plausibility, if not veracity, in their storytelling. Illusionists hire Deceptive Practices, the consulting company Jay and his partner, Michael Weber, own. Secrecy is to magic as omerta is to the Mafia, so Jay and Weber don't necessarily dish the tricks of their trade; they're more illusion-helpers who supply, as they say, "arcane knowledge on a need-to-know basis."
They made Gary Sinise's legs disappear in "Forrest Gump." They built the heavenly stairway in "Angels in America." Such projects, Jay said on the phone, are an "exercise in problem-solving, which is particularly intriguing when it's probably nothing you'd do in your own performance. It's intellectually exciting."
Jay, who lives in L.A. (and won't identify the neighborhood because he deems that information "on a need to know basis"), seems unable to live without intellectual excitement, whether he's in the shower or having lunch.
Suzie Mackenzie knows. The British journalist was covering the filming of a BBC documentary about Jay when the director wanted him to recreate an illusion originally performed by Max Malini, a notable magician from the early 20th century. Jay balked at the request and left the set, suggesting to Mackenzie that they go to lunch. It was a hot day, the restaurant was noisy and Mackenzie was wary of Jay's mood and his prickly reputation.
Once they were seated, Mackenzie recalls in the film, Jay began to relax and talk about the difficulty on the set. With his menu propped in front of him, he explained the trick he'd been asked to replicate. Malini had made coins appear three times under a lady's hat sitting on a restaurant table. The fourth time he lifted the hat, instead of a coin there was a block of ice the size of a six pack.
At that point, Jay lifted his menu to reveal a huge, six-pack-sized block of ice.
Mackenzie burst into tears. "He said, 'I deceived you. It's what I do for a living."
"It's a moment I'll never have again. ... It was a supreme piece of artistry I witnessed, it was done for me. It was the most extraordinary thing I've ever seen in my life."
You must be quick to see "Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay" at Nuart — it's a disappearing act after May 23.
Photo and trailer courtesy Kino Lorber Inc.
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Take My Picture Gary Leonard appears every Thursday at LA Observed. Check out Gary's archive.]]>
Most weekday mornings--maybe every weekday morning; your reporter lacks the perseverance to confirm--the formidable bald man in a white T-shirt and jeans stands outside the Santa Monica courthouse/civic center holding a black umbrella and a picket sign that reads: "No family court chicken hawks judging straight family values."
He's got a large audience in this busy part of town, where cars must slow or stop as they pass a major construction site across the street from bustling City Hall. What protester wants to strut and fret his hours upon an empty stage?
But Sign Guy's soliloquy lacks clarity. Is he unhappy with a custody ruling? Is he anti-gay, or does "straight" imply something else? Whose family? What values?
Assuming Sign Guy would welcome an opportunity to tell his story, we approached one day, identified ourselves and asked: "You seem to have an issue with the court--can you tell me what your sign means?"
"Do you know what a chicken hawk is?" Sign Guy barked.
"Well, it has a couple of meanings; I was wondering what your context is."
Sign Guy embarked on a hostile rant about "writers who don't do their homework" and how he won't "talk to lazy writers."
"But you're seeking attention; here's an opportunity to tell your story..."
Sign Guy glared and interrupted, "I only talk to dailies."
He seems unfamiliar with the concept of spreading the word, he seems less Occupy Courthouse than Vacate Message.
When we tried to snap a photo of Sign Guy, he turned away to elude the camera's lens. (We gumshoed our way around it, courtesy of Canon's telephoto feature.)
No one in the court's administrative office knew his name or his beef. No one in the L.A. Superior Court's public information office had heard of him or his protest. The Santa Monica Police see him every day, but the media relations officer, Sgt. Richard Lewis, who seems almost as grumpy as Sign Guy, doesn't know anything about him: "He hasn't broken any laws."
Google "Santa Monica Family Court," click on the "pissed consumer" link and you enter the expansive world of Damon Duval. He responded to an unfavorable court ruling a few years ago by picketing here, establishing a web site to tell his endless story and to request donations to fund his legal appeals.
We talked to the Family Court clerk (by request, we're withholding her name--sometimes people unhappy with the court express their displeasure inappropriately). She remembered Duval. "He was out there for a couple years," she said. She estimates Sign Guy has been picketing for only a couple of months. "We don't recognize him as being one of our litigants. ... We think he's confused, he's at the wrong courthouse. He has an agenda--we're just not sure for what."
Chicken Hawk:
1. a hawk that preys or is believed to prey on chickens
2. slang -a man who pursues boys or young men for sexual purposes
We could write our own story, Sign Guy, but we'd rather hear yours.
Photos: Ellen Alperstein
He was greeting people good naturedly on Barrington Avenue just south of Sunset on Friday. The only name he wanted to give was Giant Robot. He said he made the costume from computer packing styrofoam and other materials he recycled. He was asking passersby for donations that he said would "go straight to my therapist."
Photos by Iris Schneider
Jones and his partner Frederick Emmons participated in the Case Study program as the only architects to submit a tract house proposal (Case Study house #24, planned for Chatsworth but never built.) In addition to his residential work, Jones designed churches, university buildings (including UC Irvine), libraries and commercial spaces. His concern for integrating the indoors and the outdoors, his love of experimentation with building materials, and his commitment to efficiency and sustainability were a thread through all his projects. In addition to his practice, Jones taught at the USC School of Architecture from 1951 to 1967, and was the school's dean from 1975 to 1978.
Born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1913, Jones moved to Southern California with his grandparents in 1917. He grew up in Gardena. Early on he became interested in art and nature and during his high school years an after-school job with an architect helped to focus his direction. Following architecture school at the University of Washington he paid his dues working for various firms in Los Angeles. After serving in the Navy during World War ll, he returned to Los Angeles in 1945. He began his practice the year he was discharged from the military, perfectly poised to make the most of the post-war trend toward the less formal lifestyle many clients would adopt. His style became a signature of the postwar era in Southern California, admired by many colleagues in the field.
"There is a direct influence on our work because he was so into the California lifestyle," says Miracle Mile architect Philip DeBolske. "For him the outdoor space was just as important as indoor, and this is something we think about all the time." DeBolske and his partner, Lisa Landworth, were students in the USC architecture program when Jones was the dean. "He practiced 'green' ideas before they were labeled that, with the idea of natural ventilation and natural light," Landworth said.
DeBolske and Landworth still look to Jones as an architecture mentor. They accompanied him to conferences and attended parties at his residence just west of Century City affectionately referred to as The Barn. Students could meet figures in architecture and design such as Charles and Ray Eames and Buckminster Fuller at The Barn, which still stands on Little Santa Monica Boulevard. "We would be in this space that was just so magical," says DeBolske. "I remember the stacks of books everywhere. It was my first exposure to living, eating, and breathing in modern architecture."
A. Quincy Jones: Building for Better Living , May 25-September 8 at the Hammer Museum in Westwood.
Photos all by Jason Schmidt, courtesy of the Hammer Museum. Top: Milton S. Tyre house, Los Angeles; Middle: Fairhaven Tract Eichler Home, Orange; Bottom: St. Michael's and All Angels Episcopal Church, Studio City. Perspective view of St. Michael's exterior by A. Quincy Jones and Frederick Emmons Architects, 1960-62.
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On Monday night, at the city's "community workshop," residents opposed to certain aspects of the Planning Commission's Downtown Specific Plan turned Dell and the Miramar's proposed 21-story hotel/condo project into the Gordon Gekko of urban development. Upward of 320 people packed the east wing of the Civic Auditorium. Most of them seemed to think development came at the cost of livability, but some copped to the inevitability of growth, including commercial towers as high and goofy as Frank Gehry's imagination can take him.
It was a marathon, five-hour session, but, as usual for these civic meetings, there was food. Santa Monica grapples with development, but it has catering down cold.
The Planning Commission began with a Power Point presentation about FARs (floor area ratios); "opp sites" ("opportunity sites" where developers get more flexibility for height and/or density in exchange for "community benefits," a term as squishy as cold cream); and "wayfinding" (um ... parking signs?) that no one sitting beyond the first couple rows could see.
Not that it mattered. This wasn't a meeting to become informed; this was a meeting to vent. The Planning Commission promised that the plan was a "work-in-progress" and that residents' concerns were welcome. And 66 of them accepted the invitation.
At a cost of "maybe a couple thousand dollars," according to Francie Stefan, manager of strategic and transportation planning, the city hired consultants MIG to summarize comments on a white board and manage the speakers, and you have to wonder why: No time limit was imposed, and although some comments were windy and inarticulate (our democracy guarantees free, not concise, speech) everyone was respectful, if passionate, and no one was interrupted.
Many residents, some of whom spoke in German, British and Aussie accents, said the city had demonstrated a shocking lack of transparency in developing the Specific Plan and accused the Planning Commission of being a tool of carpet-bagging developers; a few stuck up for denser, higher downtown buildings reflecting Santa Monica's evolution from a sleepy seaside enclave to a tourist destination where you should take the bus if you don't like the traffic.
Mindful that some names are incomplete (or flat-out wrong--your correspondent was waaay in the back), here's what some of the neighbors had to say:
Like the waves lapping at Santa Monica Beach, to be continued...
This post was edited to correct the spelling of Gordon Gekko and Jackson Pollock.
To the Editor of LA Observed:
Mark Lacter is absolutely right to have characterized me as a "left-winger" in his indignant response to my Washington Post column about the problems attendant to the Koch Brothers buying the L.A. Times. But he's off the mark to characterize my colleague Steve Pearlstein that way in his ad hominen bid to dismiss Steve's suggestion for how Times employees might stave off a Koch purchase. Credibility follows from the merits of an argument, not from ideology, but in case anyone was put off by Lacter's labeling Pearlstein a lefty, let me assure them that Steve is a certifiable centrist, and a professor at George Mason University, which is on nobody's list of left-wing colleges. More relevantly, Pearlstein, who's won a Pulitzer for his work, is also widely regarded as the single best business columnist in the United States.
More relevantly still, Pearlstein's outline for what Tribune employees could do to impede the Kochs (and impede Tribune's board if they wish to sell to the Kochs) isn't the left-wing fantasy that Lacter says it is. Here are the key paragraphs of Pearlstein's piece:
This is a rare moment for Tribune's beleaguered journalists. For the first time in a long time, they actually have leverage. They'd be crazy not to use it.
All it would take would be a letter to Tribune's owners and investment bankers declaring that if the newspapers were sold to an owner who would not invest in quality, politically independent journalism, they will take their talent and experience elsewhere. A one-day strike or sick-out on the day the company is put up for sale would help to reinforce the threat.Under such circumstances, Tribune and bankers would have a legal obligation to disclose this substantial risk to any prospective buyers in its prospectus. The effect would be to lower the eventual sale price, no matter who eventually buys it. And there is a good chance it would scare off any buyers whose aim is to turn Tribune's news organizations into mouthpieces for ideological propaganda.
For any one journalist to make such a threat would be folly. For hundreds to do so collectively would be to lob a stink bomb into this carefully orchestrated sales effort.
Some might wonder what would happen if the threat fails and a hostile new owner takes over and promptly fires all the signatories. My guess is that if an owner has such little respect for value of knowledgeable and experienced journalists, then the chances are those journalists would wind up leaving or being fired for other reasons.
My guess is that readers of L.A. Observed don't share Lacter's indifference or resignation at the prospect of a Koch purchase of the Times. For them, and most especially for Times employees, Pearlstein's column can start a discussion of what, if anything, can be done about it.
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And that, folks, is a rarity, a rebuff of tradition. Especially when we're talking about leadership roles. Especially when 2008 almost brought about the first woman as U.S president -- watch out for 2016 -- and when 2013 may see the same as Los Angeles mayor.
Oh, yes, we've had female baton-wavers at the Phil before, starting in the '70s with Antonia Brico, who, with skirts swaying, took the podium at Hollywood Bowl after spending a lifetime by then waiting in the wings (perhaps deservedly!)....and some recent others, including Marin Alsop and Joana Carneiro.
But Finnish-born Mälkki came with elite credentials -- a notable nod from Pierre Boulez to stand as director of the Ensemble InterContemporain in Paris. And she's being hailed as a conductor of today's most heady music, invited even to Milan's La Scala, that most hide-bound, male bastion where catcalls are commonplace and where she became the first woman to occupy the pit.
Mälkki's manner, like Boulez's, is to keep the scores at hand (even overly familiar ones, like Brahms' Fourth Symphony) and leave the baton at home. Ram-rod erect, tall and thin, she's something of a spectacle in a long, close-fitting tail coat.
Her calling card here was the U.S. premiere of the German composer Enno Poppe's "Markt," a thing of astringent beauty and startling clarity of lines, which the orchestra delivered in its full glory, along with powerful exclamations.
Bully for them all. And bully for that other star, Josefowicz, who opened new vistas with her account of Stravinsky's Violin Concerto. How often we've heard this alluring work on which Balanchine set his remarkable ballet (and thus do we "see the music"), yet never so alive or searingly intimate in its slippery asides as this fiddler made it. Mälkki backed up that interpretive stance, emphasizing the composer's devilish little dialogues, alternating the jaunty with the swoony.
In other circles, there were long careers to note. Namely those downtown New York avant-gardists, starting in the 1970s, who took on the same devotion to collaborative spirit as did Diaghilev in early 1900s Paris. Think Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Laurie Anderson, Robert Rauschenberg, Trisha Brown, et al.
Well, UCLA became the open arms of a major Trisha Brown Dance Company retrospective, the choreographer's last hurrah capping her career. There were site-specific offerings, films and theatrical events all over Westwood for several weeks. Its own kind of minimalism, the Brown aesthetic deals with repetitive movement, a softly shifting kaleidoscope of loose limbs swinging and hips undulating back and forth within an endlessly geometric network of patterns.
Guess The Ending became my own game while watching Brown's "Foret Foray" -- because the program note listed the Hamilton High School Marching Band as part of the piece. To be sure, distant sounds could be heard and they got closer and closer. But I was right: the marching musicians would not actually enter Royce Hall on whose stage the piece took place, they would not break into the sanctum sanctorum of this shrine-like, ever-closed-off opus...
At its end, though, Megan Madorin, who could have been Isadora herself -- such floated finger curls and foot falls as even that famous one had not the virtuosity to flaunt -- left us in staggering disbelief of her phantom image.
Brown's most current and, actually, her final piece, "I'm going to toss my arms - if you catch them they're yours" (a farewell title if ever there was one), shows her transition from that long-established uniform of floppy trousers and shirts to sleek swimsuits, a reflection of today's bare-it-all ethos, wherever you look. Who says nothing changes?
Probably not Bebe Miller, who qualifies as nearly vintage, celebrating her company's 27th year. She showcased Angie Hauser and the incomparable Darrell Jones in "A History," downtown at REDCAT. Throughout the piece, Miller seemed to be asking: What do we hold in our consciousness? Over and over, the duo showed us an answer: the creative process -- a whole variety of body linkages that are awkward and difficult. Through spoken word, sometimes by way of softly singing to herself (recorded), Miller also tells us they are dream fragments and that memory is possessed by the physical images of other dances.
But for the Trey McIntyre Project -- based in Boise and seen here at the Broad Stage -- there is no long history, just a wide net in which this gifted, young dance-maker catches fodder for his creative sensibilities. And what fodder that is. Songs of Richard Strauss, for instance (a recording with soprano Jessye Norman) form the basis of "Pass, Away," a mélange of lyrical movement that verges at times on acrobatic but strictly as an expression of intensity, not physicality for its own sake. The tone harkens back to German modern dance innovator Mary Wigman and even German cabaret, but the mode is rapturous, as in Strauss's sweeping music.
Altogether different was McIntyre's other extraordinary work, "Arrantza," a docu-dance of Basque immigrants in America, their recorded narratives heard above tambourines and recorders, their personas a thing of berets and kerchiefs, sneakers and jeans, their gathering place a village plaza filled with seemingly spontaneous but deceptively complex dances. Less known than the Ratmanskys and Wheeldons of the world, McIntyre is a genuine treasure.
And so, of course, is Angela Gheorghiu, who appeared in recital at that same Santa Monica oasis, the Broad.
"Brava, mi diva," shouted a fan from the audience, as the Romanian-born soprano headed out on stage, beaming broadly, taking a queenly stride. She knows she's beloved. And why. It's that magical voice, a liquid column of sound that can seduce with its sheer quality, its smoothness up and down the scale, its lustrous top and that signature Gheorghiu legato. Remember how she even captivated President Obama at the 2009 Kennedy Center Honors when she sang "Vissi d'arte?"
On this night, accompanied ably by pianist Jeff Cohen, Gheorghiu proved to be that same shrewd artist. Oddly, she kept a music stand throughout and used it almost like a prop, swinging it from here to there, making it a point of direction as she sang well-known ditties ("Plaisir d'amour") and other recital-appropriate songs in unrecognizable French before continuing to a whole range of lovely Romanian songs. All of it was gorgeous.
So was the singing at LA Opera's "La Cenerentola," or as it's lately called, "Cinderella." But as one wag put it, much of this Rossini work is repetitive, so that a good edit could ease its three hours to two -- nothwithstanding the lively treatment by James Conlon and orchestra, and the virtuosic performances of Kate Lindsey, Stacey Tappan, Ronnita Miller, Nicola Ulivieri, Alessandro Corbelli, René Barbera and Vito Priante.
Top photo: Susanna Mälkki. Bottom photos: Angela Gheorghiu
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