Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

Ah, if only all of us felt the way dogs do about snow! (Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.)

Video art of the day

A sweet little Christmas card.

Generation Why

Even for seasoned ART-goers, who are used to putting a brave face on disappointment, the past year has been tough going. Louise Kennedy seemed slightly stunned by Julius Caesar; Caroline Clay for once was nearly pun-less when confronted by Cardenio. Then came the elaborately discombobulated Communist Dracula Pageant; by the end of the year I realized I'd only had the heart to write about a single ART production - by and large the shows had just been too depressing even to ridicule.

Of course this was the last season patched together by Gideon Lester, once part of the artistic triumvirate guiding the theatre, and his strategy, which clearly was to hang onto whatever momentum he could by touching base with as many past successes as possible, partly delivered the goods only when he could actually bring back earlier imports, like Anna Deavere Smith, and now Aurélia Chaplin (above left), daughter of the creators of Le Cirque Imaginaire, an ART hit from the 90s. Smith's performance, Let Me Down Easy, proved shapeless but often affecting; alas, Chaplin's reprise of her parents' signature style is probably even less successful, due to the simple fact that so much of it feels second-hand. Still, Aurélia's Oratorio has its moments, and makes for a mildly diverting evening out - if you haven't seen Cirque Imaginaire, or Bill Irwin or even Cirque du Soleil, it's certainly worth considering at the half-price booth at Faneuil Hall.

The original Cirque Imaginaire, of course, more than deserved its wide reputation for surreal charm, which derived not only from the skill of its performers but also from its clever concept. Two people - Victoria Thiérrée Chaplin (daughter, yes, of the great Charlie) and husband Jean Baptiste Thiérrée, essentially conjured an entire circus before our eyes: Thiérrée handled the clowns and puppets, while Victoria impersonated the animal acts and performed mesmerizing feats of derring-do on the high wire and trapeze. A surreal, precise dreaminess ruled the show: Chaplin's walk on the wire, for instance, took place upside down - and there was also a sense of the danger floating under the actual big-top operating more freely in this new, imaginary space: puppets would sometimes pull knives on each other - or even on their handlers. The results were eerily sweet, slightly menacing, and strangely contained, as if the whole production were happening inside a snow globe.

Now Aurélia Chaplin - who as a child helped out on her parents' show - certainly has inherited their sense of showmanship; indeed, her Oratorio reprises almost all their tricks, but to slightly diminished effect. Part of the problem is that Chaplin has not also inherited their physical precision, but more importantly, she hasn't formulated a coherent new format for their sensibility. She has at least updated the viewpoint of the show from that of an introspective child to that of a twenty-something single girl with, apparently, boyfriend issues. But that's about all she's thought through, and without the assumed boundary of an imaginary circus ring, the show tends to grow amorphous and lose focus; it's just one bit of forced whimsy after another. To be fair, many of its images are striking - some are even poetic - but many tend to boil down to simple reversed or ironic juxtapositions (a kite "flies" a person; a mouse kills a cat, etc.) This "wit" begins to feel a bit mechanical, the menacing puppets and mind-games feel somehow warmed-over, and the little shards of narrative that drift through the ongoing pageant (the ex-boyfriend every now and then runs through calling her name), tease rather than enlighten. Like so many Gen Y pop acts, Aurélia has appropriated a solid base track from a boomer hit, but hasn't really brought any new melodies of her own to the project - there's no "why" to this Gen-Y re-incarnation of Cirque Imaginaire. As a result, I found my mind wandering (and I loved the original); still, if you're a new-vaudeville neophyte, this Oratorio could prove a satisfying-enough introduction to its genre.

Jingle-bell Bach

The chorus of the Handel and Haydn Society.

It's rare that a classical music concert manages to be cozy, and actually capture something of a "just us friends" holiday atmosphere; but that's what's most striking (for good and, perhaps, a little bad) about Handel and Haydn's "A Bach Christmas," which repeats this Sunday afternoon at Jordan Hall. Conducted by H&H's longtime chorusmaster, John Finney, the program features two lesser-known Bach cantatas, No. 151 and 191 (yes, you read those numbers right, toward the end of his career the great J.S. was cranking out a cantata every week) as well as the famous Magnificat, and depends for its soloists on the singers of the H&H chorus itself (almost every singer, in fact, gets a solo).

This particular gambit provided the concert with much of its charm, but perhaps also set upon it certain limitations. For while there's no question that every singer in the H&H chorus has the vocal chops to take center stage, it's also clear that not all of them are actually happy there; sometimes it seemed one bashful wallflower after another was being dragged out onto the dance floor - where, whaddya know, it turned out they could cut a rug after all; after which they quickly fled back to the anonymous comfort of the chorus line. There were even a few goofy bows from folks for whom the spotlight was clearly an unusual event.

Still, some of these wallflowers did bloom before our eyes. Basses Nicholas Nackley and Donald Wilkinson, along with soprano Susan Consoli, clearly had the confident stage presence required for solo careers; more self-conscious, but still lovely, turns came from soprano Roberta Anderson (who seemed unaware her top notes were pure as pearl) and tenors Murray Kidd, Thomas Gregg, and Mark Sprinkle, as well as altos Susan Byers Paxson and Katharine Emory.

The orchestral soloists were likewise sparkling, including, as always, Jesse Levine and Paul Perfetti on natural trumpet (here almost comically long, like trumpets from Whoville, as J.S. tends to write for the top of that instrument's range), but in particular Stephen Hammer on "oboe d'amore" (I'm not kidding, that's what it's called) and flutists Christopher Krueger and Wendy Rolfe, who played gracefully together in one exquisitely fluid duet. Somehow the warm, humble sound of the flute seemed almost a signature of this concert, as conductor Finney (above left) steered clear of the magnificence that sometimes accrues, ironically enough, to the Magnificat - originally a kind of ode to the humility of Mary - and emphasized instead the rustic humility of the source story of Christmas.

That this gentle warmth is sometimes lost in both the secular and sacred expressions of the holiday only made Finney's approach more welcome. To be honest, I wasn't wild about his integration of orchestra and chorus (which seemed even smaller than it did in Messiah); perhaps due to its small size, the multifaceted vocal line seemed at times to blur into the instrumental playing, when my sense is both should be crisply defined components of the overall sound. After all, Bach (so unlike Handel!) essentially wrote for the human voice as if it were just another keyboard instrument - with somebody else handling the bellows offstage - and even when his mood is humble, his mode is always precise. Still, in the smaller ensembles the interweave of voice and instrument was impeccable and gently lively, and Finney is to be thanked for bringing a note of humble, but genuine, joy to the holiday season.

Skimming Milk

Sean Penn wants to recruit us in Gus Van Sant's Milk.

It's hard for a gay man like me to criticize Milk, because in so many ways it's precisely the movie gay folks have always wanted Hollywood to produce: a major release, with a major star, about a gay hero who is celebrated (if not actually hagio-grified). Gay life is portrayed with basic honesty - genital warts and all - and what's more, all this has been done in the middle of a political controversy (around Prop. 8) that actually mirrors one of the central controversies of the film (around Prop. 6). There's even a straight hunk (James Franco) wandering around wearing a porn-star moustache and sometimes not much more.

But I'm afraid I'm going to try to criticize Milk anyway. After all, isn't that the final step forward, when we can treat pro-gay material just as we treat everything else (and no, I don't mean "critique" in the transparently homophobic manner of say, Gene Siskel)? And the truth is that Milk is - well - sometimes rather thin milk, especially given the evident richness, both emotional and dramatic, of the life it sets before us.

In purely political terms, however, Milk could hardly be more fortified - tellingly, it even toes a line between drama and documentary. Director Gus Van Sant opens his movie with grainy film from the 60's of gay men being rounded up and arrested for the simple crime of being who they were - a mute testament to the progress gay people have already seen in this country. And the director, who often tends to noodle around like an art school grad student, continues to play with film stocks and archival footage to keep that conceptual boundary blurry. He even closes the film with a scene from the excellent documentary The Times of Harvey Milk (and, if memory serves, borrows its framing device, too).

Likewise the most interesting aspect of the film's narrative is its "yes-we-can!" political documentation - how transplanted New Yawker Harvey Milk gained a foothold in the San Francisco power structure by striking a deal with the Teamsters, how a re-definition of local election rules worked in his favor, and, most surprisingly, how many times he was met with political defeat before he was finally elected a City Supervisor. That's not even mentioning, however, the film's most powerful political content - the nearly-eerie parallel between Anita Bryant's Prop. 6 (which would have banned gay men and women from teaching school) and the Mormon-Catholic Prop. 8 (which unlike Prop. 6, squeaked by with the voters); over and over again, it seems, crypto-religious nutjobs have come out of the woodwork to insist on bigotry as their mission from God. What this behavior "means" I leave to psychologists; but something tells me it will be supplying the backbone of plenty of movies for years to come.

And - dare I say it? - somewhere in the deep background of the movie's climax (Milk's assassination by fellow supervisor Dan White) there's even the shadow of progressive America's greatest nightmare: that out there on the fringe of the grid somewhere, Obama's own Dan White is waiting. Assassination in America, after all, is merely politics (usually conservative politics) by other means!

Or maybe I ought to say that shadow should be moving in the movie's deep background; actually, it's not. Indeed, there's not much in the way of America's angrier passions shadowing this movie at all - or, to be honest (and here's the rub) much real passion of any sort. It's hard to sense from Milk the crazy, scary elation that the sexual liberation of San Francisco (and to a lesser extent the rest of the country) meant at the time (simply compare Milk to, say, Dirty Harry or even What's Up Doc? and you'll see what I mean). Even though director Van Sant is old enough to have lived through the period (his screenwriter isn't), he misses its zeitgeist entirely, but instead conjures the far less-threatening millennial atmosphere of fetish operating under market controls, and progressivism as a mode of careerism. In Milk, the characters' political actions grow directly out of their sexual actions - which seems really cool until you begin to ponder what such an equivalence might iron out of everyone's lives. And at any rate, this isn't how politics or sex felt in the 70s at all - not at all, not at all; indeed, Milk does for seventies sex what Almost Famous did for seventies rock - it meticulously builds a physical recreation of its subject, then overlays it with a comforting contemporary mindset that smothers the meaning of that re-creation.

Perhaps, of course, that's what every movie about the past has always done, but somehow I'm not so sure. Perhaps The Godfather misrepresented the late 40's, and maybe American Graffiti distorted the late 50's - only I recall clearly that at the time, older folks didn't seem to feel that way. But more and more I hear moviegoers of a certain age protesting that the newer period films (or series like Mad Men) don't get the "vibe" of their supposed mise-en-scène at all - and tellingly, these pieces' greatest fans tend to be twenty-somethings, who really couldn't know any better.

But back to Milk, in which this passion gap clearly undercuts the power of the climax. For without the dark side of the zeitgeist, Milk's assassin, Dan White (Josh Brolin), is merely a cipher, and his suicidal lover, merely an anomaly. The movie makes gestures toward these figures - I sensed half-hearted hints of "repressed homosexuality" in Brolin's performance - but can't really engage with them, because these strange dudes just don't "get" it in millennial terms. And yet to understand the 70s - or even the real America of today - I'd argue you have to "get" them.

Still, it would be unfair to pretend that Milk isn't worth seeing despite these caveats. Even with its zen conceptualism, and the gaps in the script by Dustin Lance Black (who pops up in the movie), Milk is always thoughtful and often absorbing, thanks largely to the nearly flawless acting of its committed ensemble. Top acting honors, of course, should go to Sean Penn, who once again grandstands in a beautifully naturalistic manner; he's unafraid to milk Milk's essential showman- and sales-manship (his signature line, which is essentially that of all salesmen, was "I want to recruit you!"), nor his seductively mixed persona of sweet, bashful hustler; you can actually believe this plain Jane could talk James Franco (above left) into bed with him. By now, of course, Penn is the pre-eminent film actor of his generation - with more great performances (almost in a row) than virtually any other working actor can claim; and Milk is yet another feather in an already-studded artistic cap. Meanwhile James Franco is sweetly affecting as the boyfriend who finally has enough of the political rat race, and there are distinctive, assured turns in sometimes tricky roles from Emile Hirsch, Alison Pill, and Diego Luna. I'm often struck by the way film actors so often come through - they're really the last bastion of artistic quality in Hollywood (where I can't think, off-hand, of a successful director with the mojo of Penn, for instance). And many of our most "interesting" mainstream films are made not because of the patronage of Harvey Weinstein or some other producer, but because a name actor is intrigued by the project and attaches his or her name to it. So here's to the artists whom we're all still milking for whatever quality this benighted industry can still supply.

Web art of the day

Jason de Caires Taylor’s sculptures are often sited underwater, where they "become artificial reefs, attracting marine life, while offering the viewer privileged temporal encounters, as . . . the works change from moment to moment." Rather than operating within art's traditional denial of the passage of time, Taylor's works are intended to incorporate into their meaning their change and decay. Above is part of the "TamCC Project" off Grenada. Below, film of an underwater approach to his works, including the large piece "Vicissitudes." More underwater art from Mr. Taylor is here. Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

Wow. And thank you.

I just wanted to issue a heart-felt "thank you" to everyone who has written in over the past few days (I hope to reply to each of you individually by tomorrow). Trust me, you have made a big difference in my frame of mind. And don't worry, I'm not going to stop blogging - oh hell, how could I? I'm an institution by now, apparently! And btw, the play Orfeo Group presented last night proved lively and interesting, and there was a very free and open discussion afterward. You are hereby advised to attend their next reading, whenever that may be! Take care, my friends - and remember (dare I say it?) that the Gold Dust Orphans are performing in All About Christmas Eve through January 3 at Machine!