Alice in Wonderland

Posted on by Dale

I haven’t blogged about seeing Alice in Wonderland, the new opera by Unsuk Chin at the Bayerische Staatsoper.

This is Ms. Chin’s first opera, and it premiered at the Munich Summer Festival this year. In other words, this is a really new work, and you know how I am, searching for new stuff that works.

Let me restate that. I am constantly examining new music, especially new opera, in the hopes that contemporary composers can speak to me (and presumably other audience members) in ways that composers of the past have. As I type this, for example, that old reprobate Wagner’s “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde is playing on iTunes. Even given the march of progress in tonality and all that jazz, can a new work elicit that kind of eyeballs-rolling-back-in-the-head response?

Generally not, is my finding so far.

My response to Alice has a lot of tangled threads, involving the nature of creativity (vid. sub.); the purpose of opera; and William Blake’s Inn, both music and stage version. So bear with me if I don’t get them all separated.

First, the music. Ms. Chin studied with Ligeti, and it shows. She allowed herself a little leeway in the melody department, but not much. Every other piece dissolved into polyphonic cacophony; once you’ve heard all four percussionists banging on everything in the room, you’ve heard it. Adding a few more trombones does not change the essence of the experience.

However, I think her score was generally solid. There were a couple of lovely moments in it, and more than several witty ones. (I think I caught a Mahler joke when the Mad Hatter was singing “forever” on the same notes that end Das Lied von der Erde.) I might even have liked it a lot if the staging hadn’t killed it, about which see more later.

The book was by David Henry Hwang, and it was not bad at all. (The opera was, amusingly, in English; I found myself reading the German subtitles more than half the time.) It follows the general outline of the book; some of the arias swerve off into some really nice surreal lyrics. Again, the design of the production completely undercut the actual libretto (which is in the souvenir program I bought). I’ll discuss the beginning and ending later.

Alice’s design looked, from the Staatsoper’s website, to be cutting edge European, so that was part of its appeal when I booked the tickets.

Behold:




But in fact the design killed the entire show. Look at the last one above. That huge raked stage was permanent. It was at a 45° rake the entire evening, which means that the nine performers (not singers) who popped out of the nine holes had to be tethered with wires the entire time. And that meant that they were more or less stationary puppeteers the entire show. Alice herself never moved from her down center hole. [Note to Marc: Shut up.]

The disembodied heads you see at the bottom of the set in their own separate trench are the excellent cast of seven. Those are not their arms/hands in front them. They are puppet arms, manipulated in unison usually by the cast.

Check out the third photo. That’s the Duchess and the first of many Cheshire Cat avatars. They are sung by the disembodied heads down front and pantomimed by the tethered performers. In place. If you’re thinking that this might get to be boring, you’d be right, especially since no one onstage ever had a face; they were all masked or puppeted. In fact, in one number, top of the second half (billed as an opera in one act, it nonetheless had an intermission halfway through), the puppets shook their heads once, then didn’t move for the rest of the scene. Oh. My. God.

That last photo also shows the chorus, in their separate trench at the top of the set. File on, file off. The children’s chorus appears at the top of the second photo. I don’t remember what significance the giant jar of pickles had, if any.

Static, static, static. I was especially appalled by this elaborate oratorio approach after intermission, during which I read Hwang’s libretto and found that he and the composer had called for a rambunctious staging. How do you get from the Tea Party scene and the Croquet scene to an immobile cast of puppets?

So let’s see if I can enumerate my issues.

The purpose of opera. As you may know, the old argument is “words or music,” which is more important? Richard Strauss even wrote an opera (Capriccio) to debate the issue, albeit comically. Of course, the debate ignores that there is another layer for the audience to contend with, and that’s the production itself. (Remember, especially for Mozart and fellows, there was no such thing as the disembodied opera of CDs or radio.) I have an Alexandrian solution to this Gordian Knot: theatre is most important. If it’s not viable theatre, then neither the words or the music are going to have the impact their creators hoped for.

In this case, while the music and the words might have provided a springboard for something entertaining and/or provocative, they were stopped cold by the designers and director’s choices. I was reminded repeatedly throughout the evening that our ragtag Lacuna workshop worked more magic with our cardboard-and-hot-glue version of “Man in the Marmalade Hat Arrives” or “Two Sunflowers” than what I was seeing on an international stage. I kept thinking that our methods and our goals breathed more life into our text than did the Staatsoper’s; Lyles and Willard were a lot luckier than Chin and Hwang.

Of course, Chin and Hwang themselves were the source of the bizarre opening and closing, two non-Carollian “dream” sequences. (Hello, the whole thing was a dream, remember?) The opening involved a boy dragging a mummified cat, singing, “It is my fate.” Honey, please.

The ending was worse: Alice was singing a plaintive “What kind of garden has no flowers?”, and the two old men (“twins,” according to the libretto) from the opening returned and commanded her to plant a garden. After some odd and pointless repetition, suddenly hundreds of balls/seeds/testicles? avalanched down the stage. (Previously, at the climax of the “Off with her head” sequence, there was an avalanche of heads. One stopped rolling about a third of the way down, and there it remained for the rest of the opera; no one could reach it to kick it into one of the manholes. A lesson for us all, I’m sure.) There was some “burgeoning” music, the stage floor was lit with colored dots, just as the stage floor had been lit with brightly colored lights throughout, so it was not an efflorescence of any kind, Alice pantomimed “wonder,” and it was over.

What?? Since when was Alice’s story an Amfortas’ wound myth? It was lame and ineffective.

I was very frustrated by the experience: Lacuna couldn’t find backing for William Blake’s Inn, and so it’s a dead issue for Newnan. Yet our vision for the piece far exceeded the Bavarian State Opera’s both in terms of creativity and effectiveness. I realize that’s a personal issue, but I get angry when an organization has the resources to do something really fabulous, something beyond what I could accomplish myself, and they don’t.

And no, they’re not allowed. I pay them to show me something that works, artistically, and they didn’t. If they were NTC or Lacuna, fine. I’ll take my chances and failure is OK. But at the professional level, and such an exalted level as this, I expect success.

Golden Compass idiocies

Posted on by Dale

By now you’ve heard, and have probably received the emails, about the religious right’s newest hobbyhorse, the movie version of The Golden Compass opening this weekend.

Personally, I think the design of the thing looks like the price of admission. I intend, if nothing else, just to luxuriate in the subcreation. But I do hope it’s a good flick.

Our right-wing friends have no such concerns. As bloggers smarter than I have pointed out, they cannot conceive of art without a political purpose. (And yes, I know there are left-wing nutjobs the same way.) Every offering must be judged as to whether it will support their worldview or not. The idea that an alternate or even opposing viewpoint might have some artistic soundness or be a viable means of enlightenment never enters their brains.

Or how about this: The Golden Compass might have been written by what the right-wing Christianists are describing as a “devout” atheist, a neat dialectical position, to be sure, but what if it were a tremendously well-done work of fiction? Or film? What if it were a rollicking good time?

Ah, there’s the danger, you see. If children enjoy this movie — follow the argument closely, it tends to dissolve — then they will ask their parents for the book, and then… they’ll read it! And if they read it, they would be completely unaware that Philip Pullman is leading them down the path to eternal damnation, because in the third book, not in this one, you see, but in the third book, he reveals that the conflict the whole time is over control of the universe, because, again, pay attention here, the God of his particular and particularly fictional set of parallel worlds is, besides being tangible and comprehensible, worn out, a senile nothing. Heaven and the saints preserve us from Norsemen and science fiction conceits!

Yes, I understand they fear the children will be suckered in by the metaphor. I also understand they fear that the children will have their brains cracked open by art and too much light will flood in. I understand completely that their secret fear is that their children’s faith, and their own, for that matter, cannot withstand a different idea.

So, the newest email to make the rounds calls for a boycott, and, isn’t this just so subversive?, silent:

The weekend of December 7, 2007, we are encouraging all Christians to boycott your all movies at your local theatre. We are asking that for the entire weekend (Dec. 7-9), you not attend, rent, or purchase any movies. Hollywood understands one thing for sure: “If it makes money, we’ll do it”.

We, as a body of believers, can show Hollywood that although we are quiet, we still have strong voice. My hope is that we will let the silence in the theatres be deafening to the producers, actors, sponsors, and supporters of movies like “The Golden Compass.”

Oh, why not? Full speed ahead, I say.

Here’s what I predict, though: nothing will happen. On Monday, in the Times, I’ll read that Golden Compass topped the box office. The simple fact is that this subculture is actually very small, if loud and nasty. They haven’t caught on yet, but they never were winning the “culture wars.” There are no culture wars, there are only 21st-century Christianists who really really wish there were a Colosseum with lions, and since there’s not one, they project its façade every time they can and hope we’ll all think it’s real.

Read this!

Posted on by Dale

Stop what you are doing right now, I’ll wait, and go buy The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett.

One has just finished this wonderful bagatelle in about an hour or so, and one must say that it’s an exhilarating little romp through the meaning of reading, writing, and life.

The Queen, unnamed, but one knows who is meant, is led by her ill-bred pack of Corgis to a bookmobile at the edge of the gardens, and having blundered into it, checks out a book out of sheer politeness.

Hilarity ensues:

There was a sadness to her reading, too, and for the first time in her life she felt there was a good deal she had missed. She had been reading one of the several lives of Sylvia Plath and was actually quite happy to have missed most of that, but reading the memoirs of Lauren Bacall she could not help feeling that Ms Bacall had had a much better bit at the carrot and, slightly to her surprise, found herself envying her for it.

The Others do not know quite how to take Her Majesty. There are difficulties. Growth occurs; changes are made. And there’s a killer ending that is breathtaking in its cheekiness, and Mr Bennett is as cheeky as they come.

The evolution of creativity

Posted on by Dale

There was an article in the NY Times on Tuesday on some recent thinking about where art comes from. Why do we draw and paint and dance and sing and, as the article stated, “[tell] fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists”?

I make the point in my arts speech that the impulse to create is universal, not only in the sense that every child in our culture sings and dances and draws and pretends, but also in the sense that every culture on earth has some form of art. They may not have a name for the number 42, but they have stories or pots or decorative tattoos or nicely decorated penis sheathes (not to be confused with penis gourds, which are not usually decorated, since that would apparently be a bit much.)

Anyway. Scientists have been puzzled by the creative impulse, because it just doesn’t make evolutionary sense. Where did it come from? It’s so energy and time intensive, it doesn’t make sense from the evolutionary point of view. Some have posited it had to be a sexual display thing, but that doesn’t make sense when you consider the Lascaux paintings, for example. Others have said that it came from having such a large brain and being bored easily; it was an evolutionary hiccup.

But Ellen Dissanayake, an independent scholar, says that it is an evolved trait. She argues from an interesting standpoint, that among other things art makes us feel good, and things that give us pleasure generally have not been left to chance by evolution. Actually, my reading of The Blank Slate and Parasite Rex suggests that everything is left to chance by evolution, but I see what she means. Eating, sex, swirling a Q-tip™ in your ear, or is that the same as sex?, have developed to produce yummy sounds in us.

There were two ideas in the article that struck me as especially intriguing and worth thinking about/discussing.

The first is the origins of art. Dissanayake suggests that Chartres Cathedral, the “Resurrection” Symphony, and Notorious B.I.G. all derive ultimately from the ritualistic interaction between mother and child:

After studying hundreds of hours of interactions between infants and mothers from many different cultures, Ms. Dissanayake and her collaborators have identified universal operations that characterize the mother-infant bond. They are visual, gestural and vocal cues that arise spontaneously and unconsciously between mothers and infants, but that nevertheless abide by a formalized code: the calls and responses, the swooping bell tones of motherese, the widening of the eyes, the exaggerated smile, the repetitions and variations, the laughter of the baby met by the mother’s emphatic refrain. The rules of engagement have a pace and a set of expected responses, and should the rules be violated, the pitch prove too jarring, the delays between coos and head waggles too long or too short, mother or baby may grow fretful or bored.

To Ms. Dissanayake, the tightly choreographed rituals that bond mother and child look a lot like the techniques and constructs at the heart of much of our art. “These operations of ritualization, these affiliative signals between mother and infant, are aesthetic operations, too,” she said in an interview. “And aesthetic operations are what artists do. Knowingly or not, when you are choreographing a dance or composing a piece of music, you are formalizing, exaggerating, repeating, manipulating expectation and dynamically varying your theme.” You are using the tools that mothers everywhere have used for hundreds of thousands of generations.

This makes a lot of sense, I think. However, how we got from cooing at the infant to cooing at each other is still a question.

The other idea I found illuminating is a suggestion she made about the nature of art. Unlike our current perception of art and artists as singular, solitary expressions of individual agendas, art in most of our history has been mostly communal:

…among traditional cultures and throughout most of human history, she said, art has also been a profoundly communal affair, of harvest dances, religious pageants, quilting bees, the passionate town rivalries that gave us the spires of Chartres, Reims and Amiens.

Art, she and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade… Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what Ms. Dissanayake calls “artifying,” people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world.

Of course, as a theatre person, I’m more ready to accept this idea than a painter or composer might be. It’s all communal for us, all “harmonic magic.” We won’t discuss “relative weakness of the individual.”

But it’s true that was my whole atttude with NCTC all those years. It was a place for all of us to come together to make theatre. I used to call it a place for the “citizen artist,” i.e., the non-professional, the “untrained,” the great unwashed. The undaunted. As the Equity actress whose name I’ve forgotten who drove from Atlanta to play Hermione in The Winter’s Tale said to me at the cast party, admiringly, “They don’t know they’re not supposed to be able to do this, do they?”

Indeed they did not. We began that production by having the large cast assemble on the stage and dividing: everyone who had ever done a play before on the left, those who had not on the right. Then I asked everyone who had never done Shakespeare before to join those on the right. Many people crossed over. Then I asked those who had never done Shakespeare with me before to cross. That left maybe three people on the left, maybe Craig Humphrey and Matthew Bailey and someone else. Having “leveled” the playing field, we then began to come together to make that play.

Basic instinct. Discuss.

War & Peace, Part 2, ch. 7-21

Posted on by Dale

War: battle and retreat from Vienna.

I’ve picked up War & Peace again in a quiet moment during lunch today. I had, like an idiot, carried it with me to Munich, but if travel does anything, it robs the mind of the sharpness necessary to read a book like this.

It is brought home to me again how incredibly remarkable this book is. We observe in minute detail the personal stories of the battle and how senseless it all is, senseless in the fact that no one in their right mind could believe anyone was controlling the outcome.

Again and again, the movements of the French and the Russians are actually blunders. No one understands what’s going on, and whole battalions of men turn and flee without really knowing why, or, conversely, turn and save the day without meaning to.

We return again and again to the little artillery captain Tushin, who holds the center of the Russian line with his four cannons, setting a village on fire and bedevilling the French, or stopping their charges altogether. He never receives two orders to retreat, and in fact the French react to his insistent cannonade as if that is where the main Russian force must be.

Finally Prince Andrei arrives and stays with him until he understands that the order to retreat has been given. Then we get an incredible passage: as night falls, Tushin and his men are swept into “an invisible, gloomy river… flowing in the darkness, all in one direction, with a hum of whispers, talk, and the sounds of hooves and wheels.”

Tushin, after the adrenalin of battle, is in a daze, but still looking after his men and anyone else who shows up at the campfire, including young Nikolai Rostov. Tolstoy shows us men who are utterly drained, who cannot yet register the events of the day. Random snapshots of men, officers, wounded, horses, life, death.

Tushin is called to Prince Bagration’s tent, where for a moment it looks as if the day’s defeat is going to be pegged on his failure to retreat. Tushin is unable to speak clearly in his defense, and finally Andrei, sick of the whole business, tells what he saw and stands up for the captain.

The section closes with Nikolai Rostov nursing a severely bruised shoulder and deliriously wondering why he’s not at home where he’s loved.

Tolstoy’s ability to depict both the confusion of battle in all its panoramic horror and the inner confusions of his characters is mind-blowing. He uses his camera like an auteur, and we are swept along with it. He’ll pull the soundtrack as we hear someone’s thoughts, then cut to a totally different part of the battlefield, even introducing a brand new character in the midst of the excitement, expecting us to follow the action without pause. It’s amazing.

Random rants

Posted on by Dale

I had a week’s worth of New York Times waiting for me when I got back from Munich. I can’t leave this nation alone for a minute!

Herewith are a couple of quick rants:

It seems we are considering a new way of achieving Eternal Lasting Victory Over Evil™ in the Near East, as we used to call it. We’re thinking of giving arms to that sea of troubles (i.e., the tribal factions in Afghanistan and Pakistan) and by letting them oppose the Taliban and Al Qaeda, end them.

Well, it’s never worked before, arming people who don’t like us but who appear to hate some of the same people we do, other than help create Al Qaeda in the first place, so why not see if it might not help this time?

In a really neat little story, the Belgian Federal Police have hired a handful of blind detectives. The reasoning was that their more acute hearing would prove useful in surveillance and in analyzing recordings, and so it has proved. The detective featured in the article, one Mr. Van Loo, is a neat guy and has chalked up several anti-terrorism cases. He’s able, when listening to surveillance tapes, for example, to tell where the person is calling from by listening to the ambient sounds and echoes on the tape.

I suppose our country could try hiring blind detectives to help with the Eternal War on Terror™, as long as they weren’t gay.

India has started requiring tourists to pay admission fees to national monuments like the Taj Mahal in rupees. They used to accept dollars, but they found they were losing money as the dollar slid more than 12% against the frigging rupee! What can one say?

In the Eternal War Against Brown People Who Mow Our Lawns™, we were successful in tracking down the arch-criminal Saída Umanzor, a maid. We quickly imprisoned her and were able to snatch her three children at the same time, including her nine-month-old daughter, who adhered to her communist/Marxist/socialist/liberal background and immediately refused to eat for three days. Something about being breast-fed and refusing a bottle or something. The arrogant infant also tried to hide behind her status as a natural-born citizen.

According to the Times:

Groups advocating curbs on immigration say that children of illegal immigrants cannot be spared the consequences of their parents’ legal violations just because they are American citizens (…or children! , Ed.)

“Children are not human shields,” said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Hear, hear, Mr. Mehlman. Next thing you know, that damned baby is going to be squalling about equal justice for all. But let her; she and her whole family were deported later this week. Suck on that, brown underaged American citizen communist!

Tomorrow, Al Gore returns to the White House. It’s sort of embarrassing, really. It seems the man who won the 2000 popular vote also won the Nobel Peace Prize, and since the White House has always honored American laureates, it couldn’t find a way to back out this year just because Mr. Gore has been honored and vindicated every which way to Sunday. However, Dear Leader’s administration has overcome tougher realities than this one, so I look for the Eternal Terror Alert Level™ to be raised to PURPLE by tomorrow afternoon.

The Democrats continue to pass funding for Bush’s Eternal Iraqi Occupation™, and Bush continues to block it via his Congressional toadies and lickspittles like, oh, every one of Georgia’s delegation. Must be one of those Washington things.

Munich, Monday, 11/19/07

Posted on by Dale

My, how time flies when you’re slogging through Munich.

As much as I would have liked to, it was just impossible to blog about each day. We’d get back to the hotel late, and then, if we wanted to be any kind of rested for the next day, we’d have to hit the sack.

So, apologies for not blogging the trip in real time. I will now attempt, in some multiple posts, to give the hilights version.

On Monday, Grayson took us to three major churches we had missed on Saturday.

First, the Asamskirche: built by the brothers Asam as their private church (it’s sandwiched into a tiny lot beside the home of one of them), it was eventually opened to the public as it became more and more expensive to complete.

Here’s the street it’s on. No, that’s not it in the distance. That’s the Neue Rathaus. The church is on the left, above the DHL truck.

Here’s the door of the exterior:

And here’s the top of the exterior:

And inside?

That last little bit is in the narthex: it’s an angel with a distaff, spinning the thread of life. Death is snipping the thread with his shears.

Our next stop was the Theatinerkirche, at the Odeonsplatz:

This is the Odeonplatz, built by Ludwig I, who did some town planning in the early part of the 19th century, including this nice little folly at the end of Ludwigstrasse, a main thoroughfare leading into town, lined with the magnificent buildings of the University. To the left is the Residenz, the palace of Ludwig’s Wittelsbach family, and to the right is the Theatinerkirche:

Notice the scaffolding across the front, and how it has both a photo-poster of the actual facade, plus an ad. Hold that idea; it will return.

And the inside:

Woof. “Soaring” and “baroque” do not begin to describe this interior.

The altar.

Architectural detail, above and below:

Part of what numbs the brain about most of these places is that these are actually, essentially, replicas. Most of Munich was damaged, like 90%, in the final year of the war. We were trying for the Nazi headquarters; without smart bombs, we got places like this. (The Nazi headquarters was unharmed. It is now a performing arts high school. Jews and queers, could it be any more poetic?) Anyway, Munich set about and rebuilt all of what you see here.

Our tour guide:

As you can see, he looks self-satisfied. Finally, he took us to his favorite church, the Ludwigskirche:

He likes its clean, neoGothic lines, and for some reason, its quasi-Renaissance frescoes.

At this point, the child begged off: he had work to do. We were astonished and pleased. We ate at a really crappy restaurant that was pretentious but awful. German haute cuisine is not quite there yet.

Munich, Sunday, 11/18/07

Posted on by Dale

We slept in. Grayson came to the hotel, then off we went.

Our hotel is the Creatif Hotel Elephant. We chose it on the internet because the price was right, the location was good, and the design was irresistible. Here’s the exterior:

The rooms, recently renovated, looked bright and funky:

As it turns out, we like the Elephant very much. The room is very comfortable, with the duvets actually being a perfect sleep situation: we each have our own, so there’s no tugging at the sheets. The neighborhood is relatively quiet (although as Grayson pointed out, there is not much traffic to begin with and certainly none after 10:00.)

The staff is friendly; their English is good, and they don’t laugh too much at my German.

First we hit the Hauptbahnhof, right across the street almost, for breakfast and ATMs. I had a chocolate croissant, which I didn’t realize meant “with thick, goopy chocolate huddled at the end of the croissant.” Chocogoop, mmmmm.

Our agenda of the day was museums, specifically three of the four major museums. We took them in chronological order, starting with the Alte Pinakothek. This is the early Renaissance to late 18th century stuff, including the largest collection of Rubens on earth. Apparently, according to our tour guide Grayson, the whole museum was built around one gigantic Rubens, the centerpiece of the central hall. It’s about 30 feet tall, depicting the reward of the virtuous at the Last Judgment.

No world-famous works here, except maybe the Dürer panels of St. Matthew and Luke. Still, seeing such great work is still an education for the eyes and brain.

The museum itself (no picture; at this latitude the sun is always behind it) is magnificent: one long gallery of huge rooms on the back of the second floor with a secondary gallery of much smaller rooms (and smaller works) across the front. The exterior is therefore a long, thin building, fronted like a palace.

To get to the gallery, you climb this gigantic double staircase which was tacked on to the back of the building in the 1950s as they were rebuilding it. (Yes, we bombed the place. At least it could be repaired, with brick that deliberately does not match the original; its partner, the Neue Pinakothek across the street, was completely destroyed. Its building is modern.) The effect of the staircase is quite nice: the former back of the building was left, the brick scrubbed, the architectural detail mirrored on the new exterior wall. It’s quite a post-modern look.

Next was the Neue Pinakothek. Most of this was worthless 19th century Academic crap. I am not over-exaggerating. When we got to the period where they decided the best thing to do was to fall back and copy the Renaissance masters, I just started walking through the rooms without paying much attention.

Finally we hit the room where the late-19th century began to fall apart, and the art once again became interesting. You could tell that someone had been to Paris and seen what was going on. There were a handful of the French.

Lunch was at a little Italian place near the museums. Ginny said her spaghetti was good. My lasagne was not quite what we’ve been taught to believe Italian cuisine is like, nor was it warm.

Third and last on the day’s agenda was the Lenbach Haus. Herr Lenbach was a portrait painter of the gilded age, and he built himself this quite large Italianate mansion. It now houses the Blaue Reiter group, plus exhibits of new, and here I mean new, stuff.

The exhibit was very nice, showing the growth of the Reiter style through Kandinsky’s work and that of his lover and their best friend couple, none of whose names I remember. As they picked up adherents, those paintings joined the walls. I was delighted to see Paul Klee, one of my favorite artists.

After the three museums, I was parched, so we went to a bar and quenched our thirst before setting out for supper. This was at a restaurant recommended by our hotel, the Al Teatro, which true to its name was next to a Fox-style theatre. A show called Miami Dance was playing, and it looked truly trashy. However, Grayson resisted seeing it, too gay or something, so we ate and let him hit the bus to go home.

We headed back to the hotel and were soon asleep.

Munich, Friday & Saturday, 11/16-17/07

Posted on by Dale

Already it’s a hassle:

At least one of the travel websites we’d gone to said to declare any electronics before leaving the country so that Customs wouldn’t give you a hard time when you brought them back in.

So after we made it to Concourse E, I went to do so: back down the escalator, where there was no visible office for Customs. At information, I asked and was given a paper slip, a pass to get to the Customs office. Where was it? “Around the glass.” I fumbled my way down a glass corridor, where a TSA lady sat at an office desk plopped in the middle of a hallway.

She looked at the pass, called on her walkie-talkie for a supervisor. Eventually one showed up. I needed to go to the Customs office to declare some electronics, I said. You don’t need to do that, he said.

Oh, OK. As we began to move back, I asked for his name, suggesting that it would come in handy if I were in fact hassled on my return to the country.

Well, we’re just TSA, he said, we have nothing to do with Customs. I need Customs, I said, I told the lady I needed Customs. Around there, he said.

On I went, allowed through two little stanchions by a polite TSA lady. Into the Customs office I went, where I was told by the Customs man that I could declare them if I wanted, but it wasn’t really necessary any more.

::sigh::

So back I went.

Only I was now in the international transfer area, and to get back to the other side, I had to once again go through security. I asked the polite lady who had let me through if she could let me go back through, but no, I had to do the whole security thing.

In my case, it’s not only the shoes and the jacket and the personal effects, it’s the laptop (out by itself) and my carry-on bag and my C-PAP, which is in the carry-on bag and has to come out. It takes three trays, plus the bags.

I get all the way through and am waiting for the final item, when here comes a TSA person with my C-PAP. Is this a breathing machine, he asks? Yes, of course. It has to come out of its case. Don’t touch it. You have to go back and unpack it and send it through. It’s the new policy.

New since ten minutes ago upstairs? When I went through upstairs, no one was aware of this new policy. So back I went, leaving my laptop and everything to the mercy of the continuing flood of international drug lords coming through.

He plopped the C-PAP case and a tray down and walked away. I peremptorily called him back to ask exactly what had to be unpacked. He pointed to the reservoir. I asked if he didn’t mean the motor part. He mumbled. I took both of them out. The next guy told me only the motor part needed to be out, and waited until I repacked the reservoir.

Finally I was through and began repacking all my crap. I was down to my personal effects, and that’s when I noticed my passport was missing. I was about to blow my stack when the first guy came back, bearing it.

Grr. It is no wonder that undercover people from the GSA were able to sneak bomb parts past security in all 19 airports they tried it in. They are inefficient and inconsistent.

An uneventful flight. The dinner was not bad. We watched Hairspray on the little monitors, and it was entertaining, although I was not convinced by Travolta in drag. He seemed to be in another movie altogether; his accent especially seemed more authentic than the rest of the cast was willing to commit to.

Fitful sleep, of course, and we arrived in Munich about 20 minutes late, 8:11 CEST.

There is no child to greet us, needless to say. He had all the information he needed, and at this very moment it is one hour past our original arrival time. I imagine he will wish he had written down all the info I’ve sent him over the past few weeks, like the hotel we’re staying at. There is no internet access here at the arrival gate. We may actually have to wait until we abandon hope and go to the hotel to email him and catch him up to speed.

Ginny has wandered off to the shopping area to see if she can find a cell phone for the week. I wish we had a camera crew with us; she has absolutely no German.

Soon we will have to figure out how we’re getting to the hotel on our own. An adventure!

It seems that the child had already booked an adventure with friends. He didn’t know exactly when or even what day we were coming in. (Can I show you the emails?)

We took a cab, which was stupid and very expensive. We’ll be taking the train back, needless to say.

The hotel is small and funky, very cute. Our room was not going to be ready until 2:00, so we left our luggage and headed out to see what we could see.

We managed to make it to the Marienplatz in time to hear the newly restored Glockenspiel play, with its double-tiered parade of carved characters. The Neue Rathaus in which it perches is an excessive pile of late Gothic civic pride:

We saw three major churches, each a different style: Peterskirche, majorly roccoco; Frauenkirche, quiet neoGothic; and Michaelskirche, a tremendous baroque effort. (I have no pictures. I don’t know why.) The Frauenkirche’s chorus and orchestra were rehearsing Bruckner’s Mass in F, which they performing tomorrow night. We may attend. It is gorgeous, especially in a space with a 5-second reverb.

We also stumbled across what passes for the Apple Store. Whee! I went in to play with the new operating system, Leopard, my first chance to do so. Very cool, as advertised. I tried to pull up this blog, just as a mark-leaving kind of deal, better than tagging buildings, I dare say, but that particular iMac was not hooked up to the internets. (Not really an Apple Store, was it?)

We finally wound our way back to the Creatif Hotel Elephant, where we found that someone had been looking for us, fruitlessly. Good. Serves him right.

After a nap, I finally got in touch with the child. He came back in from his suburban home and we walked the city with him, getting history and art along the way. We ate at one of his favorite restaurants, where the food was good if not exactly cheap. (Is anything here cheap at this point in history?)

He took great delight in correcting my faltering German, and especially clueing us in to the social niceties. Not just nochmal gin und tonic, but nochmal, bitte.

Overall: Munich is a beautiful city. Ludwig I did a massive building job post Napoleonic Era, and even after the city was bombed to bits in WWII, they rebuilt it all.

30 years later

Posted on by Dale

Last weekend Ginny and I returned to the University of Georgia for the first real visit since we left, which was 30 years ago. What a long strange trip it was.

The occasion was the Department of Theatre & Film Studies’ invitation to the New Georgia crowd to come and share its collective wisdom with the student body. And what might the “New Georgia crowd” be, exactly? After they graduated (more or less) in 1977, David Wright and Wayne Knight went to New York City to break into show business. They found an apartment, and in their own words, “we were all like cockroaches: you open the door for one, and the rest streamed in.”

Others followed to the 71st St. apartment, fanning out to their own places, but never losing touch with the home base. These 10-15 UGA theatre students found jobs for each other, found places to live for each other, supported each other through the hard times, rejoiced when they triumphed. And every year they came together for a Thanksgiving feast.

The Dept. of Theatre & Film Studies thought it was important for their students to see what that kind of support group was like, a group that was still in touch with each other 30 years later. Also, I’m sure that the fact that one of the group was Wayne Knight helped in deciding to pull this thing together.

As it came together, there were more than a few of us from that era who had not gone to NYC who got pulled into the event: me, Paul Pierce from the Springer Opera House, Paul Gendreau from LA, a couple of others. Our tangentiality to the main New Georgia crowd didn’t seem to present a problem to the department.

There was to be a large dinner on Thursday night, a Friday full of sessions, and then a tailgate party and football game on Saturday. Ginny and I had planned to drive up Friday morning and lurk through the Friday events, staying in a hotel in Commerce before coming back on Saturday morning.

So I was a little astonished when we all got an email outlining the agenda for the day and I found I was part of a session with Paul Pierce discussing “Future Developments for Regional Theatre.” What? I quickly emailed back and said that was fine as long as everyone understood that I ran an adventurous community theatre, not a regional theatre in any sense of the word. Not a problem, they said, the students will love it. Which does not argue for any perspicacity on the part of current UGA theatre students.

Both Ginny and I had deep misgivings about going to this thing. Ginny, especially, felt she had gone far astray from the path we all thought we had set 30 years ago, and the thought of coming back into contact with those who followed that path did not make her happy.

I had different feelings, of course, because I essentially have followed the path I laid out for myself: teach, run a community theatre. But there’s always the Road Not Taken, isn’t there? I have absolutely no regrets over my choices; I have gotten exactly what I wanted and probably more than I deserved. But I don’t think anyone can avoid the wistfulness that comes with age: what if I had gone to New York? What would my life have been like then?

Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, in all likelihood. But at least one of those alternate lives had glittering prizes, didn’t it? I can’t even solidly imagine what those might have been, of course, but I know they’re there, in that other there. As Hemingway wisely says, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Overall, the event was a lot of fun. The memories poured out, one former professor, now retired, showed up for the tour of the building just because he wanted to hear the stories he knew would emerge. Wayne, our most famous compeer, is still just as funny as he ever was, and seemed quite happy to be among those of us who knew where he came from. He and Paul Gendreau, also a tremendously funny guy, had a lot of interesting things to say about life in the Big Time at lunch, especially with the writers’ strike going on.

We were all appalled to see that the Fine Arts Building, after being renovated during our final years there, has not been touched since in any meaningful way. The department has expanded to fill the building, the music department got its own huge, new, shiny building on South Campus, and they are about to begin major expansion/renovation, but last weekend it was exactly the same as we left it.

That led to a lot of interesting frissons: seeing the costume shop, where most of us toiled in joy; the stages where we directed and acted; the classroom where Ginny and I first met. It seemed a lot smaller. At least one other former couple in the group had a similar experience, in a different classroom.

Everyone’s lives have gone nicely and everyone seemed happy. Of course, we were the ones who chose to return and whose lives have positioned us so that we could afford to. (Another plus to the Current Road, of course.) There were quite a few people whom we missed; some of them, we don’t know where they are.

You always wonder: how far off our glorious path have they wandered? It’s easy to say, Oh, that doesn’t matter, they should have come, we just would love to see them. But I know that if even someone as successful as Ginny and I are had qualms about attending a reunion for “real” theatre people, how much more daunting might it be for someone who is selling used cars in Indiana? If one thinks that one’s undergraduate degree was simply a stupid detour, an ill-conceived conceit of a clueless adolescent that gave no meaningful direction to one’s eventual life, how crushing would it be to have to revisit that decision in earnest?

And what a relief, truly, to know that I have never been faced with that particular Road.