Firefox 3.1beta3 and open web multimedia

Mike Linksvayer, March 12th, 2009

The third beta of the next version of the Firefox web browser is now available for download. For the approximately half of you reading this in a Firefox browser, the next version of Firefox will be (because the beta already is) much faster and more awesome all around (and will be released as version 3.5 to denote the significance of improvements over Firefox 3). You can help ensure the release is even better by using the beta. For the rest of you — now is a good time to get with the program.

Perhaps the most exciting feature in the future Firefox 3.5 for the commons is built-in support for the new

Think about Public Art

Instead of the cows, etc, the Royal Parks Foundation has commissioned paintings or prints on the drooping canvas of a classic deck chair. The Foundations states: Deckchairs have become a very British icon since the design was patented by Macclesfield businessman, John Moore in 1886. The Titanic boasted 600 deckchairs - only six of them survived the sinking and one of these, believed to have been used as a makeshift life-raft, was sold at auction in 2001 for £35,000.

The "Celebrity Artists" did a fine job. One of the artists, Jonathan Yeo, was withdrawn from public display for a clever pun of falling leaves (oak, but think fig) with images of formerly covered genitalia. The Foundation is displaying and selling the Yeo chair at its website. See the Guardian. Bid now on online or attend the auction on June 3 in London

360 Degree Room of All Colours turns color into music. The circular space changes its pastel colors in slow repetition. The light level is PERFECT for the human eye in that pupil is fully open without the need to squint. If you stare into the fabric walls from 10 inches, your entire field of vision fills with one color. Only on a sail-less boat in the sea with a low sun, can you stare at the dome of the sky with a similar full view of blue. I loved it, but this is not the surprising part. If you sit of floor and a stare, the color change from washed out to very intensive pastel. My body started to feel the motion of the colors in ways that can only be compared to music. The chemical levels in my body shot up with the swelling of the color intensity.

Since architecture school, I had been told of psychological power of color, but never the physiological. Still part science, but like other chemicals in the body, I am hooked and looking for my next dose.

MOMA and PS1 prepare the public for the "Watersfalls" later this month in NYC. The the scaffolding has been constructed under the Brooklyn bridge. Photo taken on May 26.

From the Bay Area and Boston emerge artworks that are mainly science projects overlaid with pretty colors so they can be called "art". The interaction is fun for ten minutes and we like to take new visitors as they will marvel. We fake enthusiasm based on a memory our our first time so that we can truly enjoy their reaction. But the work fails to provide any personal thrill again. And for all the statements by the artists and curators, no significant thought comes to mind at all - except the terror of the possible future.



Olafur Eliasson moves between public science project and public art. Many are science tricks directed toward internal artworld reflections. A moving colorfield painting in light, the live black&white 3-D movie or the invisible white gallery box inside the white gallery box. Some are little silly like the reverse cascading waterfall where he sprays the water up from one pool to the next.



The genius of Eliasson emits from his stubborn battle with the photographic record: still or moving. He seeks to make works that can only be completely appreciated through "being-in" the artwork. (I have written about "being-in" regarding the architecture in the northwest USA - a place grounded in Scandinavian culture like Eliasson). Yet, many of Eliasson's best installations "The Weather Project" at the Tate Modern in London and the 360 Degree Room of All Colours at MOMA generate "artistic" amateur photos in the same way as Gromley's work. His is a battle, not a rejection.

ElliasonTatel.jpg

Anything claiming to be art requires the in-person experience to be fully appreciated. If you see a documentary picture or video of an artwork and think the artwork will be the same in person, then in my book you have a problem. (Of course the LCD monitor or paper magazine can be the intended home of the art.) The amateur photographs of The Weather Project make me want to be there. Through the photos, I have a sense, true or not, that the experience would be romantic and enveloping. Gromley's work makes me want to compete in the undeclared photo taking contest, not necessarily to be in the space. Eliasson's photos make me dream of the visit.


Two of the works at MOMA are brilliant and the "Take Your Time" room at PS1 exceeds any carnival fun-house of mirror rooms and tricks. Completely ignored by nearly all visitors, beige moss - of a type used for architectural models - densely covers each inch of the large gallery wall. Moss Wall is a visual trip over the Amazon Rain forest. Only by viewing the work from 6-10 inches can it unfold. As that visual range, the human eye and brain together imagine "depth of field" and a complete 3D visual experience that become physical. The human brain feels the tiny changes in elevation as you move your head and eyes like an airplane plane. But at 200 or 300 feet above a real forest, the eyes and brain do not feel any 3D effect. Eliasson discovered that multidimensional physical reactions can be sparked in the body.

Finally, Take Your Time at PS1. A huge disc cover red in reflective mylar rotates very slow on the ceiling. Immediately, everyone dives to floor and looks up. Your brain tells you that all the people - including yourself - are not lying on the floor, but suspended magically on a vertical wall with less effort that Spiderman. That is the fun house trick. The questions is - why do you want to lay there for minutes and minutes? People don't want to leave.

The mirror is tilted about 3%. Patience and 3% is the genius of the work. The angle causes the reflection of the visitors and the walls of the room to change very, very slightly in a loop. Again, somehow and for some reason, the brain knows that the view is changing and therefore remains alerts and interested. Unless you move the very edge of the disk, you can get yourself to consciously recognise the change. Like the colors in the 360 Degree Room, you body responds - in this case the brain - without consciousness.

Perhaps Eliasson has invented the first of science of art since gestalt.

I don't know how other creative people can utilize Eliasson's operational observations, but the work drives home the memory of special sunsets and hours napping adjacent to a waterfall in the forest. He proves that humans can make the spaces that facilitate these calm and happy moments. Thank you Mr. Eliasson.

How to Think about Public Art

How to think about public art? Do you just keep doing the same thing? Big art? Architectural intimacy? Site-specific narrative? Locally responsive?

Internationally, public art has been institutionalized as the founder's dreamed in the 1960 and 1970s. Big - intimate - narrative - responsive. Most importantly, appreciated by a small, but growing group, and accepted by most. Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc" would NEVER be removed today.

What was not anticipated was 1.) public art as a defined field separate from museum art and 2.) global uniformity. They could not have imagined 1.) daily Internet access to any public artwork and 2.) participation in public art through cell phones and Internet.

What has not materialized in the USA is 1.) respect for the individual artistic career and 2.) pride (or tolerance) in a culture that sponsors artworks of political and social content. Respect continues to expand for artists in the corporate or spectacular arts - movies, music videos, concerts, advertising, fireworks, theme parks, architecture (and some urban space or landscapes). For time being, the Internet provides the public venue for creative public works in politics and social observation.

Perhaps, the Internet removes the psychological need for public political expression in physical public art (except when used as a method to gain access to broader media channels and new audiences). At a recent dialogue at the New Museum in NYC with street artists selected by the Wooster Collective, politics had almost no role in the content of the art. These street artists personalized the generic elements of urban places such as billboards, light poles and road markings. Individualizing and manipulating the institutional forms has a political dimension as an act where acts by individuals are prohibited, but abandons public space as a canvas for unique commentary on culture.

As I try to come back to discourse - a mental activity removed from professional public art administration - I have been reading about "Relational Aesthetics". Although this theory that has inspired many public works of interaction among particular publics, Relational Aesthetics confirms the tiny, insignificant role of visual art by removing any cultural objectives beyond a knitting function for different groups and ideas. Any goals of global transformation are abandoned as 20^th century failures. The dreams expressed as utopia have no value. Just make the best of the circumstances.

In general, theory is mainly the emphasis of one part of the same reality. "Making the best of circumstances" was an important element of any revolutionary act. In the 20^th century, the objectives reigned supreme. Now the circumstances have the public relations edge, but art is still a singular act to make something that will change or reinforce human knowledge, values and future acts.

Revolution is a communal act in which art was a symbol and an example - not the motivation. A minority of artists - open to change and desiring notoriety - were frequently with the vanguard. In this world without hope in communal acts, Relational Aesthetics and contemporary public art practice makes sense as the symbol and an example. Make the best of circumstances with a clever mind, sensitive heart and functional results. Leave the best of all possible worlds to another generation.

Well that did not answer anything about public art. Except to say that the best public art in our time would be big, intimate, narrative and responsive with a functional justification and produced by an artist(s) with a clever mind and sensitive heart.

A lot of examination of public art this week (Sept 7-Sept 14, 2008). Get online or a subway car.

1. Giant mechanical spider roams the streets of Liverpool, UK. Produced by Royal de Luxe, Artichoke and/or La Machine that produced the "Sultan's Elephant" in London in 2006.
2. Dozens of small scale, site-specific interventions through out New York City via the Conflux Festival
3. Blast Theory's new virtual/real space game can be played on-line in the morning on Friday, Saturday or Sunday (EST) (Click here to play) or at Royal Opera House in London for the Deloitte Ignite festival.
4. Bronx Museum of the Arts opens the "Street Art" exhibition documenting a selection of performance or action driven outdoor artworks since the 1950s. Street festival on Sunday afternoon.

In two weeks, Creative Time's Democracy Project opens in NYC and by its existence, tests the old definitions of artist actions in today's world.

Mobile Art: Chanel and Curved

In May 2008, two Mobile Art projects were displayed in Tokyo, Japan and Madison, Wisconsin, USA. The blog is composed of stolen images from Chanel Art Mobile website and the Curved Collective Flickr site and text from Art Daily press release and an email from Jennifer Anne in Wisconsin. The Chanel Art Mobile will be in Central Park between October 20 and November 9, 2008. Perhaps, the Curved Collective will join them in New York.

My comparison is completely respectful of both projects. They both responded to their economic abilities. Curved spent $29.95 for the U-haul truck and volunteers set-up the mobile gallery at three locations on one day. Chanel has not revealed the cost of Zaha Hahid's pavilion for the 50-year anniversary of the Coco Chanel's design of the 2.55 handbag.

Comparing the public art events did spark a kind of checklist for public art project promotion.

1. Reinforce the brand (Know what your brand is.)
2. Produce a real event (What is wrong with celebrities?)
3. Secure great photography, not good documentation.
4. Partner with others that might benefit - but be in control yourself.
5. Plan all events a long way in advance.
6. Replace the word dedication with party.
7. Always have great (big) signage.

Why not Chanel quality photographers for Curved?

Entrances to Chanel and Curved Mobile Art Pavilions

Chanel really thought out the signage.

Perhaps one small critique. Hadid clearly ignored Chanel's request to respond to the 2.55 handbag, yet all the PR celebrates the conceptual relationship. This blind hype is what gives fashion a bad rap in the artworld.

Jennifer Anne from Curved Collective

The mobile art truck on my Flickr page was a roving gallery, rather than an interactive public art project like the ones on your blog/web page. Our artist group, the Curved Collective, had participated in Madison's biannual gallery nights in 'traditional' gallery spaces (four walls, a roof and a door) and wanted to do something different. Our Art Truck was a U-Haul in which we displayed our art at 3 different locations over the course of the Gallery Night evening. Some work was hung inside the truck; there was a site-specific installation on the ceiling of the truck; and 2 people had pieces on wheels that they displayed outside the truck at each location. At our second location we were rousted by the cops, who'd been called by the owners of the storefront adjacent to our (completely legit) parking space.

Art Daily Chanel Press Release

Mobile Art was commissioned by CHANEL and conceived by the company's renowned designer Karl Lagerfeld. It was originally imagined as a means to mark the first appearance fifty years ago of the iconic CHANEL "2.55" quilted stitched-leather handbag. Designed by Coco Chanel, the 2.55 has evolved over the decades into one of the most enduring examples of 20thcentury fashion - a kind of cultural totem collected by museums and coveted by consumers in countries around the world. That bag and the traditions of the factory in France, where it is still made today, were presented to Zaha Hadid and the participating artists as jumping off points for their contributions to Mobile Art. The resulting exhibition is a multi-dimensional meditation on fashion as a powerful, exciting, sometimes perverse and occasionally poignant conductor of fantasy, identity, culture and self-expression.

Zaha Hadid's response to Lagerfeld's Mobile Art concept was to create a pavilion that, like a handbag, is a completely portable and functional container with vast symbolic potential. Made of highly engineered, gleaming white arched fiberglass-reinforced polymer panels, the architect's enigmatic itinerant building is a sculpture in its own right. It is comprised of 700 components that, once assembled, appear to be a very distant abstraction the famous quilted CHANEL handbag. "There is a touch of quilting in the geometrical structure of the art Container," added Karl Lagerfeld.

For Mobile Art, CHANEL assembled a roster of leading contemporary artists with the assistance of Fabrice Bousteau, curator and editor of the art magazine Beaux Arts, and invited each to empty his or her proverbial bag in a singular way. Representing different generations, diverse nationalities and wide-ranging points of view, this group of artists has engaged in an exploration of the handbag as a way to examine an array of experiences, ideas and issues suggested by the intersection of art, fashion and architecture.

Mobile Art launched its two-year worldwide tour in Hong Kong in February 2008, before traveling to Tokyo, where it has been on view at the National Yoyogi Stadium Olympic Plaza. Following its presentation in New York City, Mobile Art will travel to London and Moscow, concluding its tour in Paris in 2010.

Lovecat

Among the many absurd and badly paying jobs I've had--ghostwriting a mail-in Ph.D. on economics, wrapping holiday Crate and Barrel purchases in enough paper to have kept little Jesus warm, translating Richard III into easy English--one I recall without shuddering is as an all-purpose office assistant to some all-purpose Israeli émigrés in the Bay Area. Their various schemes included buying rundown apartment buildings, renovating them for cheap, and then renting the units at a steep markup. This being only a few years after the quake of '89, another project was to retrofit houses to withstand the next big quake. (Retrofitting, said my sister, a structural engineer, is pure construction quackery.)

The Ashkenazis owned the apartments and fomented the plans, while the Sephardis did the dirty work, as they always had, they said--these swarthy, stocky, beautiful men whose families arrived in Israel from Egypt and Morocco or merely stayed put in what they had known as Palestine. Up until the late '60s, the Sephardis were called blacks--after the American situation--and were kept down.

They taught me modern Hebrew parables--there are hundreds, as you might expect, redolent of desert, with abundant stone and bird. In exchange, I vetted their theories on American women. Their main evidence was an advertising executive who lived in one of the renovated apartments. She had slept with one of them, and quickly got tired of him. He was outraged: How could a person treat sex so casually? How could it mean so little?

Which somehow led to cats--what was wrong with them. Cats, as opposed to dogs (read Israeli women?), would never do anything for you: no fetching of slippers, no ingratiating wagging of tail. The arrogant bastards lived entirely for themselves.

I am not a "cat person," as people like to put it, any more than I'm a "people person," so I knew what the man meant. I have witnessed many a cat get what she wants while remaining largely impervious to the person giving it.

But not Noodles, not Lump-Lumps--not Alfredo Fettuccine Scherr, who died on July 17 after a run of sixteen years.

WHENEVER WE WENT TO THE VET, I'd exclaim, "Isn't he beautiful!?" and the doctor would say yes--what choice did she have? But she also said, unprompted, "What a good cat. What a sweet cat."

Isn't he beautiful?!

Alfredo was impressionable. He was responsive. He ventured into territory he would never entirely understand simply because it was where I was.

For example, there was the dance. It began 12 years ago, with him meeting me at the front door and racing through our railroad apartment to the bedroom in the back, where he executed quasi-Aikido rolls that finished with his bunny feet flopping up into the air as he landed heavily on his side. He did this one move until he calmed down enough to let me rub his belly. Within a month I could summon the belly-rub desire with, "Do the Dance, Alfredo. Do the Dance." In the weeks before he died, when he hardly had a belly to rub or much to feel pleasure about, he was still falling to his side to await my giant hand.

Unlike his human, Alfredo was taciturn most of his life. Other than squawking at the birds when we lived in an apartment level with a wild garden (Did he mistake himself for a bird or hope to trick them?), he mainly communicated by the distances he kept, plopping himself down just out of reach or way out of reach. He wanted attention, but not so much as to be pounced on. Once he hit middle age, though, and his bones began to creak, he came closer and learned to rant. Stationed next to my desk so I wouldn't miss a word, he'd start off mildly but soon be overtaken by a juggernaut enthusiasm that rolled on for whole minutes: a cat rendition of me.

He also learned late along to wonder about the Great Beyond--or at least the hallway. No matter how much I might try to disguise it, he must have sensed that I didn't always leave the apartment reluctantly. Sometimes when he was at loose ends--when the je ne sais quoi of contentment had escaped him--he'd remember the bolted door and make a dash for it, impatient to wander under the flickery florescent lights and sniff. (Watching him down the hall, I was struck again by how big he was: softer than a fox and not so high, yet at least as long. At night in bed, though, his size was never in doubt, especially when there were three of us. Spread out stiffly wherever you were hoping to put your arms, your legs, your feet, or head, he became unrearrangeable: a lunk.)

Two and a half years ago Alfredo developed chronic renal failure. This progressive kidney disease is nearly synonymous with old age in cats, so many of them die of it. But in the meantime (anywhere from six months to a few years), the cat feels pretty good as long as he's eating and drinking. The problem is, he experiences hunger as nausea and doesn't want to eat. Alfredo, once an avid diner ("He chomps like a dinosaur," complained a friend), would hardly touch food or water on his own.

So after trying all sorts of fussy-cat foods, I fed him myself. I'd snatch him off the bed, where he assumed a defensive crouch as soon as he saw me coming (when I waited too long, he'd take the position unprovoked), and carry him into the bathroom. Wrapped in a towel and held between my legs, he'd down droppers of imitation fish-milk with smacks and gulps and grunts and sighs. We reminded my mother of the Madonna and Child. I thought Fern and Wilbur from Charlotte's Web was more like it, but it did feel special.

IN THE LAST MONTHS on the way to the bathroom, he fell into flamenco deep song, where the keening descending chords expire in an exhalation of despair. If he was silent, I'd start us off--and Alfredo, king of suffering, would sing louder and longer to drown me out.

My life revolved around twenty-seven droppers a day, five to seven at a shot, timed as well as my work would allow to keep his nausea at bay. I had a job away from home now that often held me late; on the subway back to Queens, I scrawled my schedule on the backs of envelopes:

feed alfredo
pet alfredo
do stretches
feed alfredo
dinner
feed alfredo
bed

It was the job I resented, not the feedings. After a meal Alfredo sat sphinxlike on our mattress, his eyes half-closed in pleasure. I lay face down with my nose pressed against his side and wreathed my arms around him; he draped a paw over the closest arm, as if to say, You are mine.

It is possible that a person trapped in such close quarters with me for sixteen years would also eventually have shown he felt my love, that I mattered, that I had touched him: proof that I am not alone. But it probably wouldn't have been so clear. Person-to-person love can seem awfully like self-duplication or self-betrayal--and vice versa. With Alfredo, there was no danger of getting mired in a hall of mirrors: however many of my habits he took on, I would never mistake him for me. It's a wonderful paradox that, in being so alien, an animal allows you the same unself-consciousness he glories in. You can tell you've touched him, but you don't worry about the you or the him. And he lets you find yourself in him without you even knowing it's you.

Alfredo changed me--the ideas I live by. More and more, I imagined the luxurious fruitlessness of lying all day on bed or carpet, in soft holes in backyards, on piles of dirty clothes in closets that reeked of cat at his mustiest, with nothing much to think about or worry over. My wretched food would be provided for, and the special lady's enormous face would rub against my whiskers. Shaded in melancholy, Alfredo proved the perfect source for daydream: I wouldn't have to relinquish my muddy mix of feeling to be in his place.

But he couldn't have said how he felt, like I can. It's an old question, what humans gain from our keen consciousness. And for me it's had a particular New York cast to it for the last ten years. I moved across the country, to a room with a view of pigeon-shitted brick, because I didn't want to be an office assistant for scheming Israelis forever. I wanted work that mattered.

Now that I'm older and more defeated (that's a New York state of mind, too), I'm not sure any work could matter as much as a big, soft hole.

The month Alfredo died, I added another absurd job to the roster. The week at the office ends with the usual ritual questions about what you're doing this weekend. People understand that those two leftover days may say more about you than anything over the last five. When, a few Fridays ago, a colleague asked me, I said, "I'm going to lie around with my kitty."

Books and flowers

Wood engraving by Raoul Dufy from my namesake's bestiary poems, subtitled "Procession of Orpheus" (1911)

Notes on ballet events long past

William Forsythe's "Impressing the Czar," performed by the Royal Ballet of Flanders at the Lincoln Center Festival in the company's U.S. debut, late July. I was particularly struck by the choreographer's deftness at fomenting spectacle. The guy's a theater animal! a genius showman!--whatever his avant-garde ambitions. Why does no one talk about this?


The royal court, an Olympian, and bongo teen spirit mashed together in "Impressing the Czar"


Europeans and Europhiles tend to focus on Forsythe's deep meanings--his subversions of ballet convention, of theatrical convention, of narrative, of capitalism, of what have you-- and applaud him for his wisdom. Not finding much wisdom, his fellow Americans (the guy's from Manhasset) deem him a fake. (His ponderous program notes don't help.) They especially take issue with his torquing of the ballet torso, contending that it's not an evolution of classical symmetries so much as their destruction.

But with the slippery, smooth Royal Flanders dancers, you can see his love of ballet--of its flight, in particular. The Belgians' arms extend from their backs like wings, evoking the infinity lines of tiled Eastern arabesques.
And the way Forsythe keeps the action moving--his masterful, cinematic capacity to get us to follow the frames of action he has envisioned, no matter how much action is transpiring at once--is exciting throughout.

Act 1 (pictured above) recalls Balanchine's "Nutcracker" party scene--our gaze somehow lured first to the naughty boys, then to the docile girls, then to the serving maids and the grandparents, even though he has none of the focusing advantage of a camera, only a magician's knack for attracting the eye or letting it wander--except Forsythe's configurations are more unruly and the clans more motley.

In dancey Act 2, titled "In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated" and regularly presented by American troupes as a stand-alone piece, dancers on the stage's shadowy margins evoke the action at centerstage like an echo fading into silence recalls the instigating shout. The eerie effect is to soften the proscenium's hard edges so you imagine feathery versions of this beautiful, hypermute dance floating out into the city like deja-vus.

The final scene effectively takes the piss out of Nijinsky-Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," with men and women--dressed alike as dumb, disobedient Catholic school girls--doing a funky circle dance (aptly dubbed Bongo Bongo Nageela) around the prone figure of one mythical Greek figure you probably haven't heard of, Mr. Pnut.

Of course, the program notes make huge claims for Forsythe--that he's resurrecting and simultaneously dismantling the history of Western dance. But for me, "Impressing the Czar" doesn't stand up under much analysis. Except for "In the Middle," the evening's piece de resistance, in which the effulgent stream of movement hides vortexes of invisibility (just as in Thom Willems's Sound of Noisey score there are moments when the sound gets sucked into a vacuum), the main virtue of the evening-length work is how fun it is: no mean feat.



Veronika Part in "La Bayadere," American Ballet Theatre, Monday June 23. I'll get in trouble for this--especially after ballet fans praised Part so highly--but when someone (a colleague I am friendly with, Laura Jacobs) puts out the critic's equivalent of a fatwa --"Part is a tautology: If you can't see what makes her great you're not really fit to judge her," from a New Criterion essay excerpted here on husband James Wolcott's Vanity Fair blog -- how can I resist?

I think I understand why critics are so divided, with Jacobs and Joel Lobenthal of the New York Sun loving Part, Alastair Macaulay of the New York Times and Robert Gottlieb of the New York Observer despising her, and many of us somewhere in between. It's because she is being divided. She's a lyrical, non-actorly dancer in a company that specializes in story ballets.

She's got one texture, one setting--a very lovely legato--whether she's playing a doomed temple dancer or a teenage princess. Part is always more herself than she is a vessel for the role. That's not a fault in itself--Nureyev was like that too--but I do think it's why critics object to her. (People objected to him too, and he was greater.)

You could divide people--and among them, critics--into those who are impressed with artists who make us conscious of their style and those who are not: those who love the verbal acrobatics of a Nabokov and those who prefer the self-effacements of a Willa Cather.

Me, I'm probably closer to the Cather side--convinced that personality and style per se (it probably never is per se, but people speak of it as if it were) are overrated, in art as in everything else. Still, Part has impressed me in lyrical roles, where no acting is required. Though she dances Balanchine's "Symphonie Concertante" and "Mozartiana" slowly, she's musical enough to justify the tempo, and the texture this leisurely pace enables is delicious.



American Ballet Theatre's "Giselle," Monday July 7 at the Metropolitan Opera House, with Nina Ananiashvili as Giselle, Angel Corella as Albrecht, and Gillian Murphy as chief Wili, Myrta. I've seen "Giselle"--and especially ABT's stirring version--many times, but only on this sultry summer night did it occur to me that Giselle is making a double sacrifice when she rescues Albrecht from the clutches of the Wilis--the tribe of once jilted maidens, now spirits, who dance to death any man wandering into their woods after dark. (How does Giselle save him? She gets him to dance with her until dawn.)


The choreography for the corps is so strong and was so well delivered July 7 (led by Melissa Thomas and an astounding Zhong-Jing Fang, whose arching back created a maelstrom of conflicting feelings with every arabesque) that they became a sisterhood: a positive thing in itself, whatever its purpose. Once she's finished saving her lover, Giselle won't ever belong. For a ghostly eternity, she will be a pariah to the women and apart from the man. That she will always be in his heart hardly matters since it won't be within reach.

The sisterhood, with deputies Melissa Thomas and Zhong-Jing Fang in front

As lead Wili Myrta, Gillian Murphy underscored how much these women had lost. In her opening solo, she introduced the tribe with a steely chill: after bourreeing in and out of view like the wraith she is, she stopped dead in a perfect 90 degree arabesque, sharp and fine like a sword. But the bourrees, and the arms she wreathed around her torso, were so soft and sensual that you heard the music's pathos. Murphy brought into focus how Myrta's lethal resolve arises out of great disappointment. (This is what an actor-dancer can do: illuminate the story.)

I was also struck by the symmetry of Giselle and Albrecht's romanceful dancing in Act I. It's rare that a ballerina and her cavalier perform the same steps. He's usually consigned to the heavy lifting that allows her to float, plus some big jumps and turns. But in this 1841 ballet they leap and hop together. It's such a nice Romantic touch, that despite the unevenness of their stations (he a prince, she a peasant), in love they dance alike. Forward to the Revolution!

Even in the tag-team endurance test that makes up most of Act II, Albrecht and Giselle do versions (inversions, really) of each other's steps: her ghostly two-footed hops (up and up and up and up!) and backward-moving ronde de jamb hops echo his cabriole beats and forward slides into assemble-entrechats. In the final moments, when they have come full circle, they return to mirroring each other. They once played together without a shadow of doubt. Now again there are no doubts, but many shadows.

Nina Ananiashvili came into her own in the second act. She was bright, soft, determined, and a bit frightened by her own ghostly shell. Angel Corella has always been spectacular in the final scenes, but it was hard not to giggle when he'd throw himself recklessly into a turn and still manage a kabillion revolutions before the bar of music was out. You weren't watching Albrecht, desperate for his life. You were watching cocksure Corella. Now when he's closing in on dawn, he doesn't look like he could get up and run through the whole trial again. And when Giselle leaves him to make his way back to life, it's not a moment of triumph or defeat but of acquiescence: he's alive, but the woman he's finally convinced he loves is gone. As the curtain falls, Corella looks out at us without relief or hope and walks with a steady, slow gait toward the lip of the stage.

American Ballet Theatre should do "Giselle" every summer. Though surely the ballet has survived because it is better than most from the Romantic era, it makes me want to see some others, even ones in at least irregular rotation, such as "La Fille Mal Gardee" (how is the version by Nijinska, that latter-day revolutionary?) and "La Sylphide" (which I've never seen ABT do, though know they have not long ago. Perhaps if their latest version isn't up to snuff, they could work out some sort of exchange with Nikolaj Hubbe, new Royal Danish Ballet head: you can have our best Fokine --"Petrushka" and "Les Sylphides"--for your "La Sylphide.")

I'm grateful for how much dance matters to the "Giselle" libretto and how the ballet spares us the divertissements of the late 19th century that neither advance the story nor its themes, as well as the rickety remains of imperial thinking, such as those balletified folk numbers that invite us to play kings, queens, dukes, and duchesses and imagine the world as our precious oyster. However much "Giselle" is a fairytale, the core of the drama is real--not just that an aristocratic cad takes advantage of a woman and a peasant, but also that desire isn't predictable, that he thought she wouldn't matter but she did; that he thought he knew what joy was, but he didn't, not until she showed up.

And it complements the other emancipations that Romantics wrote about, rallied for, or at least sympathized with: the idea of elective affinities--a wonder about the phenomenology of desire; the notion that feeling is inherently uncapturable and even unabatable, like the Sylphide whose dancing her lover James can't control without destroying her; the terror and triumph of the mob, the clan, the folk, the nation (a new idea, nationhood); the yearnings for nature, for natural man, for exchanging places with creatures (nightingales, sylphs, women and peasants [oops!]) who have no idea about this "I think, therefore I am" credo of the Enlightenment (without which there would have been no Rights of Man, sure, and the Romantics knew it): the Romantics believed in extending dignity even to those who didn't think, or at least not like them.

Granted, Petipa-Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake," from the late 19th century, has all the supernatural elements of "La Sylphide" or "Giselle." There's a swan-woman, fickle royalty, the unpredictability of love. But this lady swan is a queen from the start. She's like Cinderella, who may look like a char girl but at heart is an aristocrat, while her wicked stepsisters are hopelessly bourgeois--gauche because striving. Odette the swan queen's evil double, Odile, is also ambitious. She has no idea how to be demure: she is a brazen hussy. Plus, those ballroom interludes of ethnic dances had long lost whatever sense they once had of celebrating nations budding out of fragmented former empires and became a memento to a Czarist audience who were voyeurs of the world.

I don't think it's an accident that you can trace the most glorious moments of the late 19th century ballets back to Romantic precedent: the morbid Kingdom of the Shades in Petipa's "La Bayadere," where the fickle warrior Solor dreams of an infinite peace far outside any kingdom's grasp (like Keats' anguished poet, De Quincey's opium eater, and the dejected Coleridge, seeing in the moon a "cloudless, starless lake of blue," Solor is half in love with death); or Lev Ivanov's chorus of swans in "Swan Lake" or snowflakes in "Nutcracker," who embody the grace where swan and dancer meet, where nature and culture merge; or the fairy solos at the birthday party in Petipa's "The Sleeping Beauty," in which each fairy bestows on baby Aurora her own unique gift--as unique as each of our pursuits of happiness. Together the fairies' gifts make up a whole that is greater, even, than the sum of its marvelously idiosyncratic parts.


For your viewing pleasure, here are the final moments of ABT's 1977 "Giselle," with Baryshnikov as Albrecht, Natalia Makarova as Giselle, and Martine Van Hamel (who performs character roles with the company these days--and she's terrific) as Myrta. Baryshnikov interprets the ending very differently than Corella. He piles petals in his arms only to shed them like tears: life and happiness don't last is the tragic fact he can't get out from under as the ballet comes to a close.

Here's a minute of the audience going crazy at the July 7 curtain calls.

MORE on Foot: For more on the "terror and triumph of the mob," see Paul Parish's incredible post from spring 2007, in which he discusses ballets by Eugene Loring, Bournonville, Forsythe, and several other choreographers. Related is a multipart discussion between Paul, Brian Seibert, and me on the corps in Balanchine's "Serenade" (and the effect of the ensemble size in his "Liebeslieder Walzer")

jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology

I'll never know why didn't he snap up the vintage photo of Public School 238's eighth-grade graduating class. He had a really good reason to do so -- but maybe an even better one to leave it be.

Who can doubt that flea markets are museums?

Yard and garage sales are those museums' feeder galleries, and all of them provide a surprise immersion into the lives that neighbors past and present have led. Those of us who are hypnotized by these object lessons in popular culture also understand that the rich discards displayed for sale have soaked up buckets of emotional juice -- some actually vibrate with survival after years of use and handling.

You may be stopped cold by one of these items, petrified by its story.

Faithful yard-salers, even the most blithe or cynical, will recognize each particular madeleine, be it the ceramic ashtray identical to the one your dead father filled or the old postcard of a pastel hotel you happened to have stayed in when, as a tan young man, you discovered the salty taste of a stranger's kiss.

I can't remember at which parking lot or upon what lawn I found the sepia graduation photo of the "Class of June 1949, P.S. 238, Brooklyn," showing rows of boys in suits and ties and coy girls in cliche-prim white blouses. I do know that I bought it because it was my very own school, the one I attended from the first to the seventh grade -- at which time we moved abruptly from the tulip-lined plots of East 8^th Street to a raw, swampy development in Howard Beach, Queens, directly under the path of flights to and from Idlewild Airport. We learned to lip-read at our new apartment, because no episode of Gunsmoke or Alfred Hitchcock Presents could be watched without the deafening interruption every few minutes from the roar of a plane. Funny how you become accustomed to regular holes in a plot and learn to fill in the blanks. I was well-prepared for postmodernism.

That photo, though of a much earlier class, still pushed me to recall the names of my teachers: third grade's plump, encouraging Mrs. Horween; the disgusting Mr. Barash, who clipped his nails at his desk and never answered questions; the wondrous Miss (Jane) Costello, whose clearheaded kindness and direct intelligence I will never forget. You probably don't care to read about how she passed around Halloween apples with hidden coins stuck in them, pennies in the large ones, nickels in the littlest, to make her modest moral point. I can still hear her calm voice, see her generous gray-blue eyes. That's my treasure, not for sale.

Selling Day

So, the photograph under glass in its ridged wooden frame is propped against a box on a lawn, part of our yard sale, along with more than a hundred material friends.

The day, hot as blazes, goes by quickly as folks stroll among the stuff. Some shoppers are grim, even offended. "That '10' is dollars? Should be cents!" one shouts, referring to a Mexican tourist-ware candelabrum of inlaid brass. Others are genial and happy to finger whatever's in front of them.

An older man and woman come by. They are somewhat sloppily dressed for their age, though their car is hybrid and expensive. She picks up a single dish with an ugly floral rim and turns it over. "I know who designed this. Now what was his name?" she asks aloud. I had a dollar on it, a steal.

Her companion lifts the school photo.

"That's from Midwood, Brooklyn," I say from my aluminum chair.

"I know."

How does he know?

Robert Kusmirowski, Unacabine, 2008

Art forms that appeal to modern leftist intellectuals tend to focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation and all that was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment. -- Theodore Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future ("The Unabomber Manifesto")

A perfectly fine artist few in the U.S. have heard of named Robert Kusmirowski has a perfectly fine piece in "After Nature," the first perfectly fine group show at New York's still new New Museum. Kusmirowski, from Poland, specializes in evocative models of the past, encrusted memorial recreations, and his work in "After Nature" -- whose modest theme embraces a world "darkened by uncertain catastrophe" -- is nothing other than a creepy redo of the primitive cabin in which Theodore Kaczynski lived, wrote, and assembled his fatal explosive packages.

The poor gallery guard standing by the cabin had to keep repeating that no, the door didn't open. (Same problem with the Bucky Fuller 1930s Dymaxion car in the lobby space at the Whitney. That guard agreed in a charming way that it would be valuable to allow us to see the quirky vehicle's rotten or gutted or absent interior, and he would do what he could.) Everyone, of course, wants to open doors.

Wouldn't you know, at least a few of the younger folks didn't know who the Unabomber was -- or is, because Kaczynski's still alive, 66, in a Colorado prison for the rest of his days. He keeps up with current events, though, which we know because a few weeks back the cyber-must Smoking Gun wrote that Ted was perturbed that the actual cabin was on view as part of an exhibit in the Newseum, the ill-named temple of journalism that opened this year in Washington, D.C.

In a truly contemporary, interactive institution, one should be able to choose the soundtrack of one's experience. So Out There must therefore ask, what exactly would you, kind reader, wish to hear spoken from beneath the Unabomber's various floorboards?

Art forms that appeal to modern leftist intellectuals tend to focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation and all that was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment. -- Theodore Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future ("The Unabomber Manifesto")

A perfectly fine artist few in the U.S. have heard of named Robert Kusmirowski has a perfectly fine piece in "After Nature," the first perfectly fine group show at New York's still new New Museum. Kusmirowski, from Poland, specializes in evocative models of the past, encrusted memorial recreations, and his work in "After Nature" -- whose modest theme embraces a world "darkened by uncertain catastrophe" -- is nothing other than a creepy redo of the primitive cabin in which Theodore Kaczynski lived, wrote, and assembled his fatal explosive packages.

The poor gallery guard standing by the cabin had to keep repeating that no, the door didn't open. (Same problem with the Bucky Fuller 1930s Dymaxion car in the lobby space at the Whitney. That guard agreed in a charming way that it would be valuable to allow us to see the quirky vehicle's rotten or gutted or absent interior, and he would do what he could.) Everyone, of course, wants to open doors.

Wouldn't you know, at least a few of the younger folks didn't know who the Unabomber was -- or is, because Kaczynski's still alive, 66, in a Colorado prison for the rest of his days. He keeps up with current events, though, which we know because a few weeks back the cyber-must Smoking Gun wrote that Ted was perturbed that the actual cabin was on view as part of an exhibit in the Newseum, the ill-named temple of journalism that opened this year in Washington, D.C.

More links

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)
• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, reviewed here)
• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Enter Laughing (musical, PG-13, closes Oct. 12, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN HARTFORD, CONN.:
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (comedy, G, surprisingly child-friendly, closes Oct. 5, reviewed here)

IN SPRING GREEN, WISC.:
• A Midsummer Night's Dream/Widowers' Houses (comedies, G, playing in repertory through Oct. 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Around the World in 80 Days (comedy, G, closes Sept. 28, reviewed here)

CLOSING FRIDAY IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:
• Half a Sixpence (musical, G, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear."

James Thurber, letter to Malcolm Cowley, March 11, 1954

OGIC: Morning coffee

After ages and ages away, I'm going to ease back into this blogging business with a few good links.

• Are you reading Patrick Kurp's literary blog Anecdotal Evidence every day? Patrick is a widely traveled and discerning reader whose posts I've begun to regard as almost a fourth daily meal: I leave them feeling not only delighted but somehow substantially fed. Here he is on the evolution of literary taste with age, on Chekhov and oysters, and on our newest poet laureate. Essential.

• An editor friend sends along Brian Doyle's Kenyon Review essay on the art of saying no--and yes--to writers. Doyle is the editor of one of the most distinctive university magazines in the country, Portland Magazine from the University of Portland. Here's a bit from Doyle's essay:

Many magazines lean on a form letter, a printed note, a card, and I study them happily. The New Yorker, under the gentle and peculiar William Shawn, sent a gentle yellow slip of paper with the magazine's logo and a couple of gentle sentences saying, gently, no. Under the brisker Robert Gottlieb, the magazine sent a similar note, this one courteously mentioning the "evident quality" of your submission even as the submission is declined. Harper's and the Atlantic lean on the traditional Thank You But; Grand Street, among other sniffy literary quarterlies, icily declines to read your submission if it has not been solicited; the SunNation thanks you for thinking of the Nation; and the Virginia Quarterly Review sends, or used to send, a lovely engraved card, which is worth the price of rejection. The only rejection notice I keep in plain view is that one, for the clean lines of its limbs and the grace with which it delivers its blow to the groin. responds some months later with a long friendly note from the editor in which he mentions that he is not accepting your piece even as he vigorously commends the writing of it; the

In addition to its tales of rejection and acceptance--experienced from both sides of the editor's desk--the essay is notable for containing this account of the author's proposal to his wife:

She did say yeah, or I thought she said yeah, the wind was really blowing, and then she slapped her forehead and went off on a long monologue about how she couldn't believe she said yeah when she wanted to say yes, her mom had always warned her that if she kept saying yeah instead of yes there would come a day when she would say yeah instead of yes and really regret it, and indeed this very day had come to pass, one of those rare moments when your mom was exactly right and prescient, which I often think my mom was when she said to me darkly many years ago I hope you have kids exactly like you, the ancient Irish curse.

TT: Snapshot

A brief silent film of Pierre-Auguste Renoir at work, shot circa 1917. For more information about the clip, go (his is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

TT: Almanac

"When a friend speaks to me, whatever he says is interesting."