Elliot Cole, “De Rerum,” OperaSHOP II, High Concept Laboratories (Photo by Omar Robles).

OperaCabal‘s OperaSHOP II takes as its mission the exploration of new forms of opera for the twenty-first century, but the two workshopped pieces it presented were not as concerned with claiming the mantle of opera as drawing upon operatic forms to create new works. They cared not whether they were called opera. But without opera’s traditions they could not exist. By not caring whether they were labelled opera or not, they wound up realizing OperaCabal’s mission.

The double bill featured two well-matched performances—a wordy, nerdy, hypercharged, archeological hip-hop-jazz performance piece about the dawn of human agricultural and urban society  and a quiet, meditative, introspective exploration of the passing of time driven by digitally-looped violin and voice.

Like a Wagnerian Ring Cycle excerpt with a good dose of playful humor, Elliot Cole’s “De Rerum” drew upon the mythic dimensions of opera. With a crack band and a dancing libretto whose letters tumbled and swirled around a digital screen, Cole delivered serious mythos with a grin, reinvigorating the spectacle and grand scope of opera through an intriguing mix of sly ridiculousness and dead-serious purpose.

Caroline Shaw’s “Ritornello,” OperaSHOP II, High Concept Laboratories (Photo by Omar Robles).

Caroline Shaw’s “Ritornello” went in almost the opposite direction, returning to an aria form of the baroque and taking it to a place reminiscent of Andrew Bird’s music. As a piece of paper repeatedly folded and unfolded on screen through stop-motion animation now rendered digitally on an LCD projector and as Shaw used a loop pedal to record layers of harp-like, plucked violin arpeggios and sang into the pickup on her violin to add harmonies to harmonies to harmonies, one slowly got lost in the gentle repetitions. With fragments of text from Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, this was a piece about something forgotten, or perhaps even something that never took place in the first instance. It wasn’t so much a reverie or a return as a kind of emulation of lostness, a sonic and visual evocation of memory as a Mobius-strip. There was beauty in the restraint, a kind of calm, impenetrable sense of imperviousness to catastrophe and, perhaps at some lower level, deeper in the digital loop, a longing to measure how far endlessness could go, how deep stillness might quiver.

Could one get back to something that never was? This was the question Shaw asked. Could one make sense of how far we have come? This was the question Cole explored. In a way they were the very questions that OperaSHOP II itself posed. As Cole propelled the listener forward on the progress of civilization and Shaw drew us back to the stillness of self-investigation, the past and future of opera glimmered in the repurposing of its forms and traditions toward new and artful projects.

De Rerum (part 1: The Angle) from Elliot Cole.

ritornello { preview } from Caroline Shaw.

Links:

• OperaCabal
• OperaCabal Blog
• High Concept Laboratories
• Elliot Cole
• Caroline Shaw

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Recent articles (here and here) about the British ITV series Downton Abbey (now playing in the United States on PBS) have noticed its odd incongruencies (and its tantalizing intersections) with the Occupy movement in the United States and around the world. These articles point out that the middle classes are, at first glance, largely missing from Downton Abbey. The show seems to be a classic story of British upstairs-downstairs, of lords and their servants and the ceilings and floors between them. Why then, Irin Carmon asks on Salon, has the program struck a chord with American “liberals” in the upper middle class at precisely the moment when many are largely supportive of (or participating in) a movement against the contemporary aristocracy of monied elites?

It’s a valid observation to make until one thinks about how the figures of Matthew Crawley and his mother are central to the show. This middle-class lawyer and his social reformist mother place the middle-class front and center. However, the way they do so is telling, particularly for the American viewing audience.

What the articles largely miss is that Crawley is upwardly mobile in the most melodramatic of ways—he wakes up one day and discovers that he is next in line to become an Earl. What this sudden deux ex machina does in the American viewing context is to link his middle-class identity at once downwards and upwards. On the one hand, his story is the dream that links the middle class to those below them: anyone might win the lottery, might suddenly strike it rich, might wake up to find themselves a lord or a lady. On the other hand, the Crawleys are a symbolic link of the middle-class to elite power: they are, after all, distantly related to the Granthams.

This shadow life of class relations, stirred up and in flux, is shot through Downtown Abbey, from the plotline of Lady Sybil and Branson the chauffeur to the figure of Sir Richard Carlisle to the downstairs love story of Anna and Mr. Bates. In fact, it is the main concern of the show. The force driving this melodrama is not a nostalgia for feudalism but precisely that the old order of lords, servants, and vassals is under pressure from the forces of modernity.

The sense of the last days of an epoch and its crumbling system echoes contemporary times, when the hierarchies of rich and poor are increasingly coming under pressure. Downton Abbey displaces and resolves these modern tensions by reasserting the paternalistic commitments between the elite and their underlings. Lord Grantham and even his mother, the prim and proper Dowager Countess Grantham, always eventually adjust to the new realities of class in their historical moment. Sometimes they even lead the way.

The emphasis, even celebration, of paternalistic empathy, I would argue, is exactly what many in the American liberal middle classes feel is missing in the current system of American neoliberal capitalism. Many middle-class Americans do not begrudge the rich their riches, but they do long for a sense of reciprocity. They would live gladly with hierarchy within certain codes of the common good.

Others are beginning to doubt even this ideology. The specter haunting Downton Abbey‘s vision of reciprocity reestablished between the one percent and the ninety-nine is the question of whether the twenty-first century demands a new conceptualization of the very relationship between reciprocity and equality. Which is to say that gnawing at the edge of our mass-produced screens and mass-consumed pleasures that give us the melodrama of Downton Abbey is something more disconcerting: the outright drama of contemporary democratic social relations.

For the most part, the show resolves comically into a world of noble aristocrats and aspiring serfs in harmonious social progress. The program’s order is disturbed only to be reestablished anew. It provides a vision of society in which paternalistic reciprocity works. Perhaps this is, at some deep level, what many Americans long to bring to the United States.

But this comic resolution has a tragic undercurrent, for it marks the abandonment of the radical dream of American democracy, which was supposed to replace the English and European structures of hierarchical society with a world in which all were created equal, in which everyone acquired nobility by deed rather than birth. (Admittedly, this is a somewhat exceptionalist interpretation of the American dream; one thing Downton Abbey might be saying to American viewers is that this dream was always a facade, that they were never so far from the English and Europeans as they believed; but if this dream of democratic equality was but a superficial one, belied by a pile of catastrophes, ruins, and hypocrisies, it nonetheless still holds great allure for many Americans as a dream.)

The great question of the twenty-first century may well be one that Downton Abbey dramatizes by being unable to melodramatize it. How can egalitarian power and its tricky processes of effective representation and collective commitment be authentically enacted when the old system does not function anymore? That question is our property, not Downton‘s, and the answers will have to be found beyond where the estate ends.

Links:

• Downton Abbey
• Irwin Carmon, “Why Liberals Love ‘Downton Abbey’”
• Katie Roiphie, “Of Noblemen and Investment Bankers”
• Tanya Gold, “Downton Abbey: class and distinction”
• Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “The Fight for ‘Real Democracy’ at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street”

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Tenured Radical (Claire Potter) has a typically incisive blog post about the recent “No More Plan B” brouhaha (upcoming panel this Friday at the AHA in Chicago). Calling Grafton a rock star, hers is a synthesis of his call to restructure the values of advanced historical training and Jesse Lemisch’s retort that what we need are jobs, jobs, jobs in education.

Of course, as TR points out, we need both:

Although I think that Lemisch would agree with me on the point I make above, the implications of his argument are that expanded employment (which would enact other kinds of social justice agendas, not the least of which would be expanded opportunities for education) would be enough. I disagree: it is not enough, and this is why Anthony Grafton is a rock star. Arguing that we stop pushing young scholars into a failed market where the most successful will be constrained in their opportunities and intellectual choices, Grafton wants to change the values that have been ineffective in creating jobs for historians. Public history has the potential to create a more free employment system that would support an expanded intellectual community and allow creativity collaborations to flourish.

Furthermore, in a topic that I will take up in part II of this series, Grafton is arguing that the most path-breaking and influential scholarship in the twenty-first century is likely to be collaborative and accessible to a broad public.  Breaking with the model of the exceptional individual, who works in private and competes successfully among professionally and narrowly similar peers, a paradigm that has governed access to the profession for over a century, is in its own way revolutionary.

There’s a lot to consider in TR’s synthesis, but I want to weigh in again with the point that we need to honor the desire of many hopeful history graduate students to become tenure-track professors. Yes, we can, should, and must imagine new modes of cooperative, public historical scholarship (digital humanities in the house). We just need to do so in ways that do not wind up reinforcing experiences of precarity, exploitation, and contingency among the intellectual laborers in the field of history.

In other words, there are important things to cling to in the older, increasingly impossible model of tenure-track professorships. In fact, the longing to be a tenure-track professor seems to me to be connected to the larger critique of intellectual labor within neoliberal capitalism implicit in Lemisch’s curmudgeonly response to Grafton and Grossman. People want to practice the independent craft of history securely, with a range of autonomy and freedom that empowers democratic historical activity rather than impoverishes it.

Ultimately, the question is not just what kind of history we pursue, but also what kind of public we pursue it in. We need to imagine and work toward a public life that supports the knitting together of university history departments, public institutions, and people’s lives in ways that are robustly intellectual and economically innovative. It needs to be a public that expands individual autonomy and collaborative historical research at the same time.

If we do not think carefully about the profession and public life in tandem and work toward changing both, we risk creating a field and a public that merely incorporate historians into existing, exploitative labor markets instead of transforming labor conditions to unleash improved historical investigation and a better public life.

This project, however, will require more collective modes of historical creativity, not just a rock star in the spotlight.

Links:

• Tenured Radical
• Claire Potter, “History and the Politics of Scholarly Collaboration, Part I: Or, Why Anthony Grafton Is a Rock Star”
• Jobs for Historians: Approaching the Crisis from the Demand Side
• Culture Rover, “#498 – Don’t Know Much About History crisis in the humanities, part one: a response to anthony t. grafton and jim grossman on graduate history programs”
• Culture Rover, “#505 – Reinventing the Wheel, on developing critical and methodological frameworks for the digital humanities, or the digital humanities is the humanities”
• Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life
• Culture Rover, “#511 – New Deal History time for plan wpa: history corps, a proposal for the job crisis in history ph.d. programs”

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Lucky Plush Productions, The Better Half (Photograph: Cheryl Mann).

Lucky Plush never quite got to their adaptation of the noir film Gaslight in The Better Half, but that was the point. This was a performance about breaking out of scripts, about the way that the real stories always start around the frame, drawing from it but never quite fully entering into it.

The very nature of the production—half dance, half theater—located the authentic tale at the interstice, the edge between forms. But Lucky Plush went further. The dancers kept interrupting the story to ask the director questions about their roles. They ran out of the auditorium and back in. Yet then they would move into quite beautiful repetitions of dance sequences, as if to suggest that we always must return to the gestures, hints, clues, roles, and rituals that existing scripts, films, norms, and forms provide for us—indeed demand of us.

The Better Half, as its name suggests, was most of all an exploration of the assumptions that steer courtship. How do two people move from being strangers to becoming intimate? How do they do so by entering into existing narrative structures yet also resisting those structures? When does the mystery of intimacy emerge in all its glory, and how?

The play portrayed individuals in a couple as dancers playing actors trying to grasp their roles in an old film script. But the actual plot of the film was not important. It was merely in the background, dimmed by the spotlights on the transformations happening through the adaptation. The two main dancers, a man and woman assigned the role of a married couple, were like metal filaments with shifting charges: sometimes they polarized, sometimes they magnetized, at first they were utterly strange to each other, but eventually they connected, at the back corner of the stage, gleaming and glowing even in the darkness that surrounded them.

They had kissed awkwardly at first, testing each other out, feigning intimacy, pretending to be an established domestic couple when they knew they were not. Then, continuing the dance, they moved dizzily through farce, burlesque, melodrama, comedy, theater of cruelty, Brechtian exposition, cheesy postmodern pastiche, athletic movement, startling weirdness, and everything in between until it mattered not what they were supposed to do, only that they had done it. They adapted—and in doing so were changed for the better halves.

The Better Half: work-in-progress excerpts from Lucky Plush Productions on Vimeo.

Links:

• Lucky Plush Productions
• Gaslight

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Mary Halvorson Quintet (photograph: Peter Gannuskin).

Playing to a sold out room at the Umbrella Festival, guitarist Halvorson and group made music that was very urban, full of cement, steel, and glass. There was not a lot of nature in here except for the feeling of glimpsing it occasionally on the edges or in the cracks between the built environment. Maybe a park here or there, the river or the bay just beyond the buildings, but mostly sidewalks and vertiginous gazes upward at the sky or down the grid.

Yet there was no feeling of being trapped. There was something else, not ominous, but comfortable, cosmopolitan, curious, something crisp and sharp in the music, the pace of walking through the city, ducking in and out of subway entrances, popping down there and up here, around squares and through small parks, between private and public spaces, moving with timed traffic lights and occasionally down side streets only to turn back again to the main thoroughfares.

The compositions and improvisations were complex, but they had an organization to them, a discipline. In fact, much of the music seemed to be more about locating steady balance and occasional leaps of insight within order than about locating the order in some kind of free jazz flight. This was music of the mole’s eye view, not the bird’s escape. It never went beyond the ken of one person’s perspective at the ground level. It wasn’t really about liberation, nor spirituality, nor even group interplay. There was plenty of excellent ensemble work of course, but it all seemed in the name of evoking the individual’s brainy pleasure of simply feeling alive in the built environment of the postmodern city. Halvorson and group entered into something rather than escaping it.

Bent note and dissonant arpeggios were not bluesified but intellectualized. This was a sound of thinking as well as feeling—and of probing the relationship between them. It wasn’t body music but perhaps it was social body music, interested in sensations and ideas of autonomy among the multitudes, of living not obscenely rich but not desperately poor either, well-educated but unwilling to go along with the dominant system, seeking out the connections and movements to be made in the hidden spheres, the corridors beyond the corridors of power.

This was music that occupied the city’s labyrinth and charged it with life. In their own, highly original way, Halvorson and group stomped the blues, but they were not trying to finger the jagged grain of aching consciousness so much as navigate a system of infinite networks. Though maybe, these days, for many people, those are one and the same.

Links:

• Umbrella Festival
• Mary Halvorson Quintet
• Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues
• Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues”

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True history seeks, it does not gather; for the deeper we seek, the deeper we descend from knowledge to mystery, which is the only place where wisdom abides.

— Nick Tosches, Where Dead Voices Gather

The cellular core of what we call history—knowledge itself—is diseased. It is not the artful novelist who has blurred the divide between fiction and fact: it is the professor of learning, the peddler of secondhand misknowing. The more we “know,” the less we know. It is better to keep away from words, “facts,” “knowledge.” They are almost always the carriers of disease.

— Nick Tosches, Arnold Rothstein, King of the Jews: The Greatest Mob Story Never Told

(From Dave Sanjek’s unpublished comments on Tosches at LitPop: Writing and Popular Music conference, 2011)

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John Baldessari, (Blue), Lithograph 18 1/2 x 24 1/2 inches.

John Baldessari’s Raw Prints series (1976) features color photographs that Baldessari took of street scenes at the Santa Monica Mall in 1976. The artist then placed the photographs in the lower-right hand corner of large sheets of paper, and restricted himself to one line and one color in a lithograph on the rest of the print

What is so striking in this minimalist exercise is that the single line and one trace of color evoke the essences of the photographs. A triangle and a scratch of purple for a man’s V-necked sweater and a woman with white hair and sunglasses. A crooked square for a van and yellow for what looks like the top of a fire hydrant. A squiggle for an evergreen tree and a striated, broken rectangle of brownish orange for a brunette woman in a blouse just about to vanish around a corner. The outline of a woman in profile and two flashes of blue for the scarf over her hair. A group of people walking toward the camera, but Baldessari notices the white side of a skyscraper in the background and a splash of green below it.

The back-and-forth between the lithographic reproduction and the photographic one creates a kind of depth, the feeling of observing someone who has observed at great length, with perceptive care. This is the art of watching someone watching. But it is not particularly voyeuristic. There is a spirit of multiple communions in these prints: connections made between hand and machine, the looker and the looked at, the moment of impression and the great blankness in which it exists.

There is an economy in these works of art that knows no bounds. The cliché is that a picture says a thousand words, but these prints suggest that but one line and a bit of color might express even more.

Links:

• John Baldessari

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Some Crazy Magic: Meeting Harry Smith from Drew Christie on Vimeo.

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More here on a kind soul and wonderful scholar.

I was one of the many graduate students Dave befriended in his manic, giving, wide-ranging way. He was damn funny even about his professional and personal heartaches, and he was damn smart, not just about music, but about film, literature, cultural criticism, summer camps, the music biz, and–most of all–about intellectual friendship and how much it was worth.

Dave has a wonderful and moving essay about sneaking childhood peeks into his father’s briefcase, which always contained numerous magazines, newspapers, record albums, recording contracts, letters, publicity photos, and more. In a way, that briefcase became Dave’s mind itself—a place full of treasures, from obscure guitar-slinging Nashville cats to the dance moves of ardent Northern soul fans, from crooners to funksters to folkies to free jazz, from copyright law to summer camp lore, from obscure film noir to the classics of American lit to the latest plays on the stage. The guy had range and he had love: for art, for music, most of all for people. Sometimes he could drive you crazy, but most of the time he made you appreciate finding ways to love the world’s beauty despite all its flaws.

Dave left a lot of essays and books half written. We should pull them together and get his words out. It’s something he struggled to do in his lifetime, but he had something to say in a lot of that material, and it deserves the kind of intense, serious-fun, wide-eyed, appreciative attention that he himself gave to art, music, culture, life—and to all of us. Count me in for that.

Sadly but in deep appreciation of Dave.

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