Monday, December 22, 2014

Christmas Belle, or: Saving Miss Fezziwig

Another episode in the continuing adventures of Clarence, the It’s a Wonderful Life angel.

[Related reading: Saving Mr. Potter]

As Ebenezer Scrooge polished the knocker on his door, using the freshly gravy-daubed sleeve of his day coat as a Handi-wipeTM, Clarence beamed stupidly at the cloudstreaming vision of this oft-told tale.

“Oh, I just love it in high-def,” Clarence chirped as he stood up and stretched, “especially that little wink the knocker gives old Ebbie after he’s gone in and shut the door again. Tell me, Joseph, what’s your favorite part?”

Joseph was getting used to his doddering companion’s chronic cluelessness and patiently explained that effecting a miser’s spiritual resuscitation by loosening his purse strings for a day really wasn’t such a hard trick.

“It’s quite the roasted chestnut, really, as you can tell by all the versions there are,” said Joseph, helping Clarence tug down on his ivory fit-and-flare AngelwearTM to cover his fuzzy ankles. “Goes to show you what happens when you let your copyright expire. I’ve never understood the message, though,” he confessed.

“If I may,” Clarence offered, “it’s that you can buy love, am I right?” He delicately fingered the satiny fabric crisscrossing his clavicle. “Oh, I don’t like the sweetheart neckline so much, but it’s all they had when I got my promotion.”

Thunder clapped, as godly thunder does, not in applause but in appalled approbation.

“Oh-oh,” Clarence whimpered. “Um, I am in trouble again, am I not? Here Comes Mr. Jordan©.”

Jordan lightly pirouetted (a quadruple, no less) before presenting himself before his airy intern.

“Ah, dear Clara, how comely you are in ivory,” Jordan sighed with a merry purr.

“Clarence!” cried the intern. “Clara’s that Nutcracker© girl.”

“Ah, yes,” Jordan said, squinting at the odd bridal form before him. “It’s that Magoo© version, you know. I empathize a little too much. [In his best Jim Backus] Ah, Jordan, you’ve done it again!”

Joseph struggled to retain his relevance in the plot, for he usually has little to do or say at this point in the Jordan viz. Clarence proceedings. With a wiggle and an ahem, he succeeded in catching his supervisor’s squinting eye.

“We were just discussing the moral of the story, Mr. Jordan. I’m afraid that Clarence, here, was under the impression that Mr. Scrooge lived happily ever after.”

Mr. Jordan’s twinkly eyes grayed with sadness as he replayed on the Sony® CloudstreamTM the scene of our dear hero, having emptied his personal cash boxes to treat the neighborhood to Christmas dinner, returning to an empty home.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Mr. Jordan tutted. “It’s a shame that you never got past Tom Sawyer in your literature assignments, my dear Clarence. You really should have stuck with Dickens all the way. There’s Bleak House and Oliver Twist, for instance—so much more to say on capitalism and social inequality and its consequences. But no, you left it to Piketty and such to have to show where things in the nineteenth century all went hoo-hah.”

“But Tom Sawyer did show picketty fences and how to whitewash them,” Clarence protested.

“That little Machiavellian fool,” Jordan sneered. “His friend Huckleberry was the true moral touchstone in Twain.”

Joseph helpfully wiggled and ahemed again to rein the plot that threatened to gallop away.

“Thank you, Joseph,” Mr. Jordan said, adjusting his own posture to something more professorial and Mr. Chips©-like. “Clarence, my good fellow, I am sending you on another assignment. Now, tell me, whose soul has been left behind in this Carol? What lives were omitted when, thanks to the protocols of serial publication, narrative momentum prevailed over backstory?

Clarence sat down again, hiking up the tulle poofery around his ankles, and scratched his shaggy head. These actions in no way facilitated his imagination.

“Let me think, now,” he thought aloud. “That poor clerk, Cratchit, got a raise, check. Tiny Tim, affordable health-care subsidy, check. Oh, and I saw that old Jacob Marley was brought up the other day, thanks to his brilliant Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future® thingy. Good job, well done. I should go and pay him my compliments, should I not?”

Joseph glanced back over his shoulder to the holding room and reminded Mr. Jordan that Marley’s new hearing date had yet to be determined. As even Clarence now understood, spiritual missions are rarely so black-and-white, cut-and-dried as the storytellers would have us believe.

“Marley, then?” Clarence attempted. Joseph bowed his head in silent prayer for Clarence’s wit.

“Old Jacob Marley,” Jordan explained wistfully, “was not just Mr. Scrooge’s partner; he was his role model. And for that, he has much to account. However, though this episode shall retain his services, he is not our particular interest. Please, darling Clarence, think a little harder. Why are you wearing the bridal AngelwearTM?”

“Maybe if we’re dropping hints, we need more than some lacy tulle,” Joseph joked feebly.

Clarence began to feel the hint clamoring to his beaded bodice, and an expression not unlike a bride’s glow spread across his crinkly eyes.

“Oh my, my, we forgot the leading lady, didn’t we?” Clarence said at last. “Scrooge was in love, engaged to be married. What happened? I hardly remember that part. She said he fell in love with a golden idol, and then she dumped him. What happened to her? And how come he became so miserly in the first place?”

“Great questions, very astute,” Mr. Jordan praised. “Why don’t you go and find out.” As rhetorical questions often are, Jordan’s last was answered with a scene-changing wave of his wings, accompanied by his cherubic, Crest White Strip®-enhanced smile and a little less-aggressive thunderous fanfare.

Stepping out of the Wayback Machine®, Clarence instantly recognized the scene of Ebenezer Scrooge’s Christmas Past, the schoolroom from which his beloved younger sister, Fanny, had once fetched him home.

“Didn’t we go too far back on this?” Clarence muttered upwardly to Joseph, whom he knew was watching over his progress. “Fan is the sister, not the fiancée, right?”

“Hush, now, and just watch,” Joseph responded in a voice-over. “Follow them when they go, instead of following Ghost of Christmas Past and the old man.”

Clarence felt a bit proud with this discovery of the powers that angels have versus simple post-mortal ghosts. Sure enough, as GoCP left the scene, with the nightgowned, sleepwalking Mr. Scrooge in tow, Clarence was able to follow the younger schoolboy, Ebbie, who hopped into a one-horse open sleigh©-hey with Fanny and headed home.

With a Quantum Leap©-like wave of his bedazzled AngelwearTM Wing-a-Ding WingTM, Clarence accelerated time and place to the Scrooge family homestead, finding the patriarch pacing gloomily in his shabby study. The cold room and its furnishings, books and all, were coated in a thin gray veneer, which could have been either dust or hoarfrost, or both at once. The elder Scrooge welcomed his darling daughter with a warm embrace, burying his own tear-stained cheek on her Killer Rabbit®-trimmed cloak.

“Don’t cry, dear Papa, I’ve brought our Ebbie back home! He’ll cheer us with a song and a story, and he tells King Arthur’s Tales of Spamalot© so awfully funny! We’ll laugh and laugh and be oh so merry again!”

To his only son and heir, Scrooge Sr. offered a dignified but chilled and chapped handshake.

“Ni!” Ebbie offered feebly, to his father’s indifferent confusion. There was a generally awkward clearing of throats among the room’s population of Scrooges.

“Fan,” the father said to the merry child, “please go and tend the Jell-O® pudding. There’s a good dolly. We men have business to attend to.” Though wincing at the belittling epithet, Fan obeyed.

When the young female was safely removed from the scene of manly business, Father Scrooge grabbed a threadbare blanket off the back of a side chair and dusted off a spot for Ebbie to sit upon. The chill that met the boy in the seat of his pants moved rapidly through his heart and fed broken ice chips to his very soul.

“Ebenezer,” the father began hesitantly, “are you prepared to leave the fantasies and games of schoolboys behind?”

“Yes, Father,” said our heroic young liar.

“Remarkable boy,” old Scrooge mumbled thoughtlessly to himself. “Eb. Ebbie. Ebenezer. The truth is, you and your cherished sister are my only remaining … assets.”

Clarence could feel his face mirroring the confusion he saw on young Ebenezer’s countenance, a mix of disbelief and dismay, with a touch of sullen foreboding. The father continued, his melancholy voice leaving frosty echoes in the silent room.

“I find I must sell you both, and for a price unworthy of either of you.”

“What do you mean, sell, Father? What can you mean?”

“You are a clever boy, er, man, my son, and quite accomplished with your ciphering, your masters tell me. Here,” the elder Scrooge said, handing a ledger to his incredulous son. “Look through these pages, and tell me what you see.”

Young Scrooge did, indeed, have a gift for numbers and could see at a glance that his father was a financial moron. The red ink spewed like blood from dagger wounds, up and down the debit columns, on page after page.

“Father,” young Ebenezer said with an authority beyond his years. “You fatheadTM!” The patriarch dropped his head down remorsefully, surrendering his right to the respect due from one’s own offspring. “You humbug! I care not for my own fate; sell me to your highest bidder, if you will. I am prepared to be apprenticed anywhere. But what about Fan!! You monster, you fiend, you … humbug!”

As little Fan sprang back into the doorway to report good progress with the Jell-O®, she could not avoid infection from the room’s chill. “What’s this?” she cried. “What monstrous humbug hubbub could there be to do with me?” Scrooges pere and fil froze, not knowing how to hand the poor girl her fate.

“Don’t worry, little Fan,” Clarence called out to the vision of the child he could not interact with, she being but a phantom in the backstory of, well, a fictional character, after all. It’s hard not to want to get involved, admit it. “D’ohTM!” he exclaimed to himself, lightly slapping his own angelic forehead.

Recalling his mission, Clarence reassured himself that, however Fan was “sold” into the arrangement, her future marriage was written to be a reasonably contented one. Fast-forwarding himself in the Wayback Machine®, he learned that young Fanny Scrooge’s marriage would in fact last a satisfying 10 years into the life of her only child, to wit, Fred, the nephew she left for her beloved brother as a legacy of family happiness, should he have no other opportunities to attain such on his own.

Clarence joyfully clapped his hands together. “Opportunity! Family happiness! Finally, we get to the heart of the matter! What was her name again, the fiancée?”

“Belle,” Joseph responded authoritatively in his rich, baritone voice-over voice.

“Are you catching cold up there, Joseph? Never mind. What’s this place? Oh, Fezziwig’s warehouse. What did they actually keep in that place, anyway? I always wondered.”

Clarence took the liberty of scouting around the premises and was thrilled by the fabrics and garments he discovered stowed neatly away in cedar-lined crates: Satins, silks, velvets, crepes, laces, taffetas, organdies, and yes, yards and yards of tulle! Oh, my! And if that carton in the corner didn’t contain a shipment of ostrich feathers, Clarence would have cheerfully surrendered his own Wing-a-DingsTM on the bet.

But we digress. The Fezziwig House of Brides® was, in its day, a popular destination for young ladies with budgets compromised by general hard times. All mothers of the middle classes knew where to send their daughters, and the management’s cheerful temperament (and notorious carelessness with the placement of decimal points when totaling the bill) warranted no criticism. It was to this happy but soon-to-be bankrupt establishment that Ebenezer Scrooge found himself sold into apprenticeship, the principal complaint of his position being that it brought only already-spoken-for brides into his narrow society.

The exceptions among Ebenezer’s potential female companions were the assortment of daughters provided by the Fezziwigs, the top two of which were of age to become customers of the bridal house in which they had grown up playing make-believe Housewives of Victorian England©. It was the second of the two eldest Fezziwig offspring, the lovely Belle, who took the notion of allowing Ebenezer the opportunity to realize her fantasy. It was an opportunity in which Ebenezer, naturally, delighted.

As Clarence soon observed, the bridal warehouse apprenticeship brought one other odd character into Ebenezer’s narrow society: Jacob Marley, a rival warehouseman anxious to poach not the inventory but the talent so undeservedly devoted to Fezziwig and his infuriatingly fuzzy business practices. Marley entered the Fezziwig warehouse just now, slamming the old oak door behind him and bringing much of the winter air in with him.

“Marley,” Clarence muttered to himself when he saw the already-old man of business skulk into the establishment that promised only future joy. “I never did know what to make of him. Friend of Scrooge, business partner with Scrooge, during Scrooge’s scroogiest era. Mentor, eh? Why? You can see already he’s got not an ounce of human kindness coursing through his veins. Still, he did save Scrooge’s soul later on, didn’t he?”

“Hush, now, and just listen,” Joseph voice-overed patiently.

“I know, I know. No more spoilers.” Clarence trained his eyes on Ebenezer as the young Apprentice® watched Marley’s dealings with Mr. Fezziwig. With his angelic powers (and dramatic license), Clarence was able to hear what Ebenezer could not:

Fezziwig: “Please, my good Sir, Mr. Marley, it is Christmas Eve, after all! Shall we not put off this dour business until after we have all made merry? Join us this night, do, for we’ll have Cold BoiledTM and plenty of beer, and our favorite game of forfeits.”

Marley: “If it be forfeits you’re wanting, Sir, ye shall have your wish with the additional two days’ interest above what ye owe me now. I have your marker, same as I had old man Scrooge’s before you swooped in on my bounty.”

Fezziwig: “Oh, please. You were paid in full out of the bounty of the sale of Scrooge’s own flesh and blood. It is a tragedy when a man is reduced to selling his own children, and I have taken good care to treat young Ebenezer as my own. In fact, my dear wife and I have hopes of soon welcoming him as an honored son-in-law. My fair Belle has this very morning confessed a secret engagement, and—”

Marley: “AaaarrrrghTM!”

Fezziwig: “Well, don’t blame me if the football keeps getting snatched away before you get around to kicking it. Of all the Charlie Browns in the world, Jacob Marley, you’re the Charlie Browniest©.”

Marley: “Then you leave me no choice, Fezziwig. Surrender your apprentice to me, and I’ll expunge your debt.”

Fezziwig: “He won’t go. He’ll not have you for an employer, if I know young Ebenezer’s incorruptible heart.”

Marley: “Nothing so simple; I shall make him an offer he can’t refuse©. I shall make him my partner.”

The rest of this story line was as familiar to Clarence as Tom Sawyer’s fence-painting scheme. The only blank to be filled was how Marley got Scrooge to paint his fences. Our angelic project observerTM continued on his quantum leaping through time and space, observing the following not incidental (but egregiously edited out) plot point: Marley taking Scrooge on a tour of the ramshackle dwellings of the most indigent of debtors on the company ledgers, and Marley subsequently showing Scrooge the bitter Family Feuds© among these impoverished masses, by way of illustrating that, whether or not money buys happiness is not so relevant as whether the lack of it purchases misery, which, of course, it invariably did, at least in the anecdotal evidence Marley chose to present.

Indeed, Scrooge vowed never to go hungry again, No, nor any of his folks! If he had to lie, steal, cheat, or kill, as God was his witness, he’d never go hungry again©!

Sobbing helplessly, Clarence dabbed the tears from his craggy cheeks with the fleecy ends of his Wing-a-DingsTM. “I always cry when the Tara© theme plays.”

At last we turn our attention to the second-eldest Fezziwig daughter, Belle (or Isabelle, in some versions). A rarely reenacted episode from our original history shows Belle many years after she has abandoned Mr. Scrooge to his misunderstood pursuit of material well-being. She is a contented matron surrounded by a rambunctious brood of children. The brood’s father comes home on a Christmas Eve and tells this matron of spying her old friend, Mr. Scrooge, alone in his shabby office on the night that his partner, old Jacob Marley, lay dying. The couple have a good laugh over Scrooge’s self-imposed loneliness.

“That doesn’t sound right,” Clarence complained aloud. “No wonder they always leave that scene out.” He scrunched his scraggy brow down over his eyes, as though the repositioning provided more thinking room for his overtaxed brain. “The oldest daughter in that household does indeed resemble the young Belle who jilted poor Ebenezer. Clearly, Belle produced this daughter at some point. But how could she have found happiness with another husband when she had been so devoted to Ebenezer Scrooge? Does a bride Say Yes© to every Dress in the shop?”

A clap of heavenly thunder announced a swift scene change, and Clarence found himself returned to his home in the Celestial CloudSphere®, now ensconced in the Department of Rewrites and Redemptions. Mr. Jordan himself greeted him with that famously warm, twinkling squint. At a tall, wobbly clerk’s desk sat the Ghost of Marley, bent over an open script, scratching out unsuitable passages and replacing scene after scene in the old Carol.

“You see what happens to the poorer writers of Life’s stories,” said Mr. Jordan in a tone of gentle warning. “They are condemned to edit other people’s stories.” Turning his attention to Marley, he cried out, “How’s it coming, there, now? Are you up to Nephew Fred’s Christmas party in Stave Three?”

“Yes, Mr. Jordan, I’m just finishing up the second rewrite now,” Marley obsequiously lied.

“Now, Biff©, don’t try and con me,” Mr. Jordan responded suspiciously.

“I mean, I’m just starting that scene now.” Marley shrugged sheepishly and bent back down over the script.

“Oh, that Biff Marley,” Mr. Jordan sighed, “always trying to get away with something.”

“‘Biff’?”

Mr. Jordan sensed Clarence’s confusion—indeed, anticipated it—and volunteered to escort our friend through the proposed new backstory of Belle, the Neglected Love Interest. He waved his splendid custom AngelwearTM Wings-of-ZingTM and transported himself and his guileless pupil back to the room with the rambunctious brood.

“A minor adjustment, but a significant one,” Jordan preluded the scene before them.

The matronly Belle, seated by the fire with the daughter whose countenance mirrored her younger self, blushed with shame after laughing at the image of her lonely old friend entombing himself in a drab and desolate office.

“Uncle Billy was wrong to laugh at Mr. Scrooge so, wasn’t he, Mummy?” the younger female spoke quietly, drying her mother’s tears with a coarse flannel handkerchief. “We shouldn’t make fun of poor people, should we.”

Belle looked into her wise daughter’s bright emerald eyes. “Poor? Do you imagine Mr. Scrooge to be so poor, my love?”

“Yes, of course. A man is never rich who has no friends.”

Belle laughed at her darling girl’s fumbling logic and hugged her tenderly. “Then shall we make a pact to enrich this poor man one day?”

“Oh, yes, Mummy, let’s!” The two charitable females pinky-swore their allegiance to Mr. Scrooge’s future happiness.

The patriarch of the household lumbered back into the room to warm his McDonald®’s Mug-o-GrogTM by the fire, his rambunctious brood in tow. Even above the noise and caterwauling, he could hear the two ladies’ surreptitious plotting.

“Now, no surreptitious plotting, you two,” said this Uncle Billy, “or it’ll be back to the agency with the pair of you. Governesses and their daughters need to know their places, and their places are back into the schoolroom. These young geniuses of mine need discipline. I’ll not have them dream away their holidays©.”

Clarence grinned brightly. “Ah, so they are not married to each other after all! So, Belle is what, a widow or something?”

Mr. Jordan patted Clarence’s shoulder gently. “No, my dear Clarence. You are such a child, you understand so little of the human heart. In the accurate version of Miss Fezziwig’s backstory, she is what was once referred to as a ‘sadder but wiser girl©.’ Her daughter—if you’ll be so tolerant as to hear us out—her daughter is in fact the product of a post-betrothal, prenuptial moment of irrepressible passion.”

“Not Mr. Scrooge?” Clarence’s emotions teeter-tottered between shock and elation. He at last chose to stick it out on the elation side of the board.

“As sometimes happens with humans, their hearts got the better of them,” Mr. Jordan continued. He revealed the gist of the story quickly: Belle released Ebenezer from their engagement before learning she was bearing their child. Rather than returning to the fantasy world of her father’s then-crumbling House of Brides®, she enrolled in the Jane Eyre Academy of GovernessesTM in hopes of finding a respectable position in a liberal household. She was fortunate, as few in her situation were, to receive good references among several households, the last of which we have seen with this jovial but stern widower, “Uncle Billy.”

“That’s still Stave Two, though,” Clarence observed. “That’s Christmas Past territory, that.”

“True enough,” Mr. Jordan said. “I believe we will now have to switch the narrative to a present tense. Please bear with me.”

With a graceful sweep of the good old AngelwearTM, Mr. Jordan returns us to that exalted Christmas Day following Scrooge’s encounter with the three Ghosts bearing gifts of self-observant insight.

We scurry through Stave Five as our redeemed hero knows not how to control his impulse to overcompensate for an adulthood of miserly habits by handing out sacks and sacks of cash. It is dizzying to see the delight in the eyes of hungry children tasting Christmas candies while their tummies grumble for beef or fish. Their hearts are warmed fleetingly with fanciful toy soldiers and hobby horses, which they understand shall be stacked away in cold corners the rest of the winter, waiting to be broken up for kindling in the old wood stove.

Drunk with this spurious charity, Scrooge totters into his nephew’s humble home and is welcomed with surprised amusement among the party guests. He eats, he drinks, he plays games, he laughs until he cries. And all cry with him, pitying the loss of the man’s senses, even if they are despicable senses, indeed.

“Shall we call for the doctor?” asks Mrs. Fred, deeply concerned by the brightening redness in her uncle-in-law’s cheeks.

“He shall be fine in a moment,” responds a soft, lilting voice from a corner of the room. “He just has to learn how to live again.”

All eyes turn to the matronly governess quietly observing her old friend’s hijinks. She wrings out a cotton cloth in cool water, folds it in thirds, and carefully places it on the exhausted Mr. Scrooge’s forehead. His eyes glisten with recognition.

“Belle,” he sighs, finally surrendering to his exhaustion and falling into a deep, contented sleep.

And, true to their pinky-swear, Belle and her daughter would from thenceforth devote their lives to showing old Mr. Scrooge how to live again, with the purest love from the truest hearts.

“Now, about Jacob Marley, or Biff, or whatever you’re calling him now,” protested Clarence.

“Another year, dear Clarence,” Mr. Jordan replied. “We’ll give him another year or so. That one needs a lot of work.”

The End

Author’s note: Use of copyright, trademark, and registration symbols is largely ironic. Product placements are gratuitous and gratis, representing neither paid content nor endorsements. This story is copyrighted inasmuch as I claim to have written it, but sharing it beyond this post (with appropriate credit and linking) is okay by me. Screen or stage rights are available for Writers Guild minimum, some cookies, and a reasonable percentage of gross receipts, in perpetuity; negotiable.

Love, hosaa
wondering who needs saving next year


Saturday, December 6, 2014

Art versus Art Book: A Day with the Phillips Collection

A little bit of art therapy never hurt anyone, so off I went the other day to The Phillips Collection off Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., where the big show on now is Neo-Impressionism and the Dream of Realities. It was here and in the room downstairs containing D.C. and Baltimore area twentieth-century artists that I was reminded again why you need to visit art in person and not just buy the exhibition books. Nice souvenirs, but not the same, really.

Yearning to get in? Bernardi Roig's light sculpture Acteón (2005), detail. Photo by C. G. Wagner
Roig's The Man of the Light (2005) illuminates the trek upstairs in the Phillips's grand stairwell. Photo via The Phillips Collection.

During my visit, I tried to spend a little more time looking at the art, noticing and noting. For example, there was a bit of damage at the bottom of Orange and Red on Red (1957), one of the four large canvases in the Rothko Room, which I never noticed before.

In the D.C.-Baltimore room, I loved the collection of like-themed circles and colors with Thomas Downing's Grid 31 (1970) and Blue Spell (1964) with Gene Davis's Untitled (1971) tall vertical rainbow board and the LED installation of concentric colored squares by Leo Villareal, Scramble (2011), which I'd advise you not to stare at. It'll burn your retinas out. 

It was Blue Spell that kept me a bit more spellbound, a piece that would seem somewhat monochromatic if examined from afar (or from a book), but upon closer inspection reveals the surface texture of the canvas and the subtle shadings of the acrylic paint. When you can see this evidence of the process, you are in the same room with the artist.

Blue Spell, 1964, by Thomas Downing (1928-1985). Photo by giveawayboy, Flickr, Creative Commons

But in that room there was one "Which thing here is not like the others" piece in Morris Louis's Seal (1959), a blue-black-ivory swash of formless abstraction departing from the neat geometries of Downing, Davis, and Villareal.

Upstairs was a tribute to art collector Anita Reiner, to whom Duncan Phillips once said, "Young lady, you always have to meet new art half way." She apparently didn't think much of the Rothkos. 

I especially loved two pieces glancing across the room from each other with complementary compositions of groups of people: Shilpa Gupta's untitled archival print showing schoolboys lined up along a shore, each imposing a "see," "hear," or "speak no evil" gesture on the boy in front of him; and Shirin Neshat's Soliloquy Series (Veiled Women in Three Arches) (1999), another group but not posed, expressing a more natural, quiet but disquieting feeling. With the boys, I felt the story was imposed on them. I would like to know more about both groups, but I was disappointed not to get more caption information, which was hard to find (the captions were grouped on one panel and positioned in the archway entrance to the gallery) and hard to read once you could find them (eye-test small print).

Finally, upstairs were the Neo-Impressionists, those pointillists (and others) who break moments down to study their creation by light and shadow. Here is where you really need to be in the same room with the art works to appreciate them. As I said, I'm usually all about the souvenir exhibition book so I can keep my art experiences alive. But the sample book left in one of the galleries here was a real eye-opener. 

I stopped in front of the mesmerizing Jan Toorop landscape, Broek in Waterland (1889), with its pattern of light and dark, aqua and amber, a twilight sky casting the figures in the foreground into quiet silhouettes. But the plate for this painting in the exhibition catalog didn't come close to matching the live canvas. The book flattened, muddied, and muddled the colors into almost a sepia tone. I held the book up to the light, right below the canvas; another couple in the gallery saw and had the same complaint--no match. In fact, even this image from the Web doesn't adequately capture the canvas in the room, although the figures are sightly more distinct.

Broek in Waterland (1889), Jan Toorop (Dutch, 1858-1928). Image via Wikiart.org

All this is a gentle note to self, Self: Go visit art. You know Paul Klee always makes you smile.

Young Moe (1938) by Paul Klee (Swiss, 1879-1940). Image via The Phillips Collection.

Love, hosaa
Meeting art (old and new) half way.



Thursday, November 27, 2014

Nutcracker Versus The Rats

Back from the first preview performance last night of Round House Theatre's production of The Nutcracker, subtitled "A New Holiday Musical" in the banner ads, but unofficially subtitled, "No, Not That Nutcracker."


Not that that Nutcracker doesn't already have a mad kaleidoscope of variations available for public display, at least in the dance world. Those of us who grew up with the Baryshnikov version (with his then-girlfriend Gelsey Kirkland as Clara dancing all the juiciest roles) are sometimes surprised by the many different ways that the story and the steps can be rearranged. The one that made the most sense to me (and yes, even fantasy needs to make sense) was the Washington Ballet's version at GWU's Lisner Auditorium a couple of decades ago.

The RHT's production of the Hoffmann fairy tale focuses on a family tragedy that interrupts Christmas, and its impacts on the impressionable Clara (is it a nightmare or a nervous breakdown?). At least one major plot point is retained here, in Clara's defeat of the Rat King. (At last year's Joffrey overproduction, if Clara threw her slipper at the fiend, I missed it in the busyness of the stagecraft.)

Oh, sorry, should that have had a spoiler alert? No, the real spoiler here is in the design and staging of the Rat King himself. Honestly, that was my favorite part of this production.

Less successful to me were the fits and starts in the scenes, some empty aural and visual gaps, and a few technical glitches and unevenness in the actors' body mics. Those could just be early-in-the-run issues, but there was just an overall unevenness in the tone throughout.

Even the costume design seemed uneven, with all the imagination going into the dolls and rats, and the "contemporary" family dressed in generic Mid-Twentieth-Century Nostalgia.

I would also like to have seen the musicians and conductor, since this production actually bothered to have live music!
Costume sketch for "Phoebe" doll by Helen Huang (Costume and Puppet Designer), image via Facebook

But the dolls and rats were all delightful, though of course it's disappointing to see a couple of my favorite actors (Erin Weaver, Will Gartshore) buried in makeup design. Oh, well. Their talent couldn't be buried. The Phoebe doll (Weaver) used her pull-chord-triggered recorded phrases with assertive, plot-turning emphasis: "I'm afraid of the dark!" (Cue: hey, let's turn on the lights.)

The updated story no doubt touches a chord in most families--dealing with the loss of a loved one at holiday time. I'm just not sure it's a great way to start celebrating the holidays. Sometimes we just need to make cookies.

Love, hosaa
making cookies

The Nutcracker
Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Maryand, through December 28, 2014
Director: Joe Clarco
Created by Tommy Rapley, Jake Minton (book and lyrics), Phillip Klapperich (book), and Kevin O’Donnell (music), based on the story by E.T.A. Hoffmann

Cast:
Clara: Lauren Williams
David (Clara's father), Rat, Teddy: Mitchell Hébert
Martha (Clara's mother), Rat, dance captain: Sherri L. Edelen
Drosselmeyer, Rat: Lawrence Redmond
Fritz, Nutcracker: Vincent Kempski
Monkey (sock toy): Will Gartshore
Hugo (robot toy): Evan Casey
Phoebe (doll): Erin Weaver

Music director: William Yanesh
Scenic designer: James Kronzer
Costume and pupped designer: Helen Huang
Lighting designer: Daniel MacLean Wagner
Sound designer: Matthew M. Nielsen
Props master: Jennifer Crier Johnston
Dramaturg: Sarah Scafidi




Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Reflections: Art Day Out and Old Friends

Always take the opportunity, when you can, to let art expose itself to you. Downtown for an "informational interview" yesterday, afterwards I found myself once again in the neighborhood of the divine National Museum of Women in the Arts, where I got to visit a few of my old friends - Alice Neel, Frida Kahlo, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, et al.

I also took more time with some other, iconic pieces in the New York Avenue mansion, including Ellen Day Hale and Lilla Cabot Perry occupying this cozy niche:



Another is Alice Bailly, whose selfie features a peculiar reflection across the lens of her monocle:

Alice Bailly (Swiss, 1872-1938). Self-Portrait, 1917. 
According to the caption, this side of her face is apparently painted out, "reflecting what may be a dissociation of the artist from her own image--in short, an identity crisis." More likely, IMO, it reflects a real reflection, the movement of light across her face at that moment in time. That is, after all, what cubism and the futurist movement were about, incorporating the third and fourth dimensions on flat 2-D surfaces.

But the greatest pleasure is in welcoming some newer (new to me) sisters now exhibiting in the third floor permanent collection, including these sadly sweet kiddies by Amy Sherald:

Amy Sherald (b. 1973, Columbus, Georgia). They Call Me Redbone But I'd Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake, 2009

Amy Sherald (b. 1973, Columbus, Georgia). It Made Sense...Mostly in Her Mind, 2011. 

The captions were helpful to me here; the flattened style was the result of treating the skin tones in "grayscale" (there is some tint, you can see, even in these very poor reproductions. Sorry). The children are dressed playfully, but their somber and expressionless demeanor illustrates a deep-seated sadness. Still, the bright, primary colors in which they "play" give me a sense of innocent hope for them.

The other piece that captivated me at the museum was this (again, playful) Edwina Sandys bronze in its own stairwell niche:

Edwina Sandys (b. 1938, London, England). Flirtation, 1994.

Edwina Sandys (b. 1938, London, England). Flirtation, 1994.


Edwina Sandys (b. 1938, London, England). Flirtation, 1994.
I don't suppose the fact that I'd just had pears and bananas for breakfast had anything to do with why this piece caught my eye! Face it, who doesn't like flirty, birdlike fruit.

The second floor was closed off for between-exhibitions reconfiguring, so my visit was a little shorter than I would have liked. (And when, oh when, will the Mezzanine Cafe ever serve food? Nary a morsel in any of my visits.)

So over the blocks I go toward the Smithsonian American Art Museum to see what's what, and what was what now was the fabulous Richard Estes exhibit. Speaking of old friends! Estes was among the "superrealists" I covered in my senior year seminar on modern art. That was decades ago, and the man is still working his magic!

Okay, I don't want to go to Copyright Jail, so go here to see an example of what Alice Bailly started with that reflection in her monocle:

https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/estes


Checkout (2012)

What we see are multiple images, reflected, contorted by other, overlapping realities. In many of the images, people are seen from different angles. The effect of the pictures, though serene in tone, is a taut reminder that we not only see, but are seen by others, whose eyes may see us in twists and turns, fractured and filtered through many surfaces.

Love, hosaa
reflecting on art

P.S. - I still love the old Greyhound Bus Station on New York Avenue. The birds loved it, too:


All photos posted here are by C. G. Wagner. If you use them, credit them, and link back here. Thanks.



Sunday, October 26, 2014

Ears Gladded, Eyes Pleased at Blackfriars

A last-minute decision to join the Shakespeare Explorers' Meetup group's planned weekend excursion to the Blackfriars Playhouse/American Shakespeare Center (I don't know which is the container and which is the thing contained) in Staunton, Virginia, took me on a pre-foliage-season Saturday morning/noon/early-PM battle with bumper-to-bumper traffic. The rewards: a venue I'd never visited, a play I'd never seen, and friends I wanted to keep close to despite a summer of frugal nonindulgence in the arts.

Pericles produced at Blackfriars Playhouse, Staunton, Virginia. Photo by Lindsey Walters, courtesy of American Shakespeare Center

Gregory Jon Phelps as Pericles, overlooking audience at Blackfriars Playhouse. Photo by Lindsey Walters, courtesy of American Shakespeare Center.

The matinee performance of Pericles, Prince of Tyre delivered on the prologue's promise "to glad your ear and please your eyes." The venue and the production both were audience friendly, even chummy at times as the actors engaged with those nearest the stage. When Bawd (Allison Glenzer), the madame of a brothel, complained of her lack of sufficiently enticing stock, I was glad that she was pointing to the females in the other side of the audience and not on my side:

We were never so much out of creatures. We have but poor three, and they can do no more than they can do; and they with continual action are even as good as rotten.

The so-indicated creatures in the audience were good sports about it, however. All in good fun. Since I didn't have time to read the plot summary before the performance, I didn't know what to expect. Pericles just isn't as familiar to this aging former English major as are the greatest hits, the Romeos, Hamlets, and Macbeths.

The program notes report that the artistic director, Jim Warren, knew this play would be unfamiliar to the audience, and he specifically called for clarity "of words, thoughts, sentences, and story." For the most part, these instructions were well followed, and my only trouble was in following the plot line of the first of three father-daughter stories: the incestuous King Antiochus and his unnamed daughter, which sets up the good-versus-evil machinations.

The problem I had was that the daughter was played by the same actress (Sara Hymes) as someone else's virtuous daughter, Thaisa, who becomes Pericles's wife. It can be an interesting artistic choice to have the same actors playing "mirrored" parts (as in Shakespeare Theatre Company's Winter's Tale), but unfortunately I did think it was the same character. When I finally realized it wasn't, I wondered what happened to Antiochus and benighted daughter.

Temporary confusion aside, I enjoyed the second half of the production a bit more than the first half, and Harold Bloom (in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 1999) explains why: "The first two acts of the play are dreadfully expressed, and cannot have been Shakespeare's." The attribution for the dreadful parts went to George Wilkins, "a lowlife hack."

The second half of the play, Acts III through V, are of Shakespeare's glorious hand and voice in the depictions of the drama's lives low and high, from the brothel scenes (As Bloom notes: "Shakespeare surpasses all possible rivals in the gusto with which he portrays the oldest profession") to the climax of Pericles's reunion with his lost wife and daughter: "The 150 lines of the recognition scene (V.i. 82-233) are one of the extraordinary sublimities of Shakespeare's art. ... Shakespeare holds us rapt."

It seems, though, that everyone's favorite parts were the pirates, and the actors played their modern pirate accents up to full cartoonish comedy. Arrrrggghhhh!! Arrrrggghhhh!!

Lauren Ballard as Marina, flanked by pirates Patrick Midgley, James Keegan, and Chris Johnston. Publicity photo by Michael Bailey, courtesy of American Shakespeare Center. 

The glorious second half of this play belonged to the character of Marina, Pericles's daughter, whose indomitable virtue turned lechers into saints. I liked that. Usually you never think that innocence is a trait worth cultivating, associating it instead with naivete or even helplessness. But Marina's virginity wasn't that kind of innocence; it was a virtue with the power to instruct, to tame, and ultimately to lead. And she was portrayed by Lauren Ballard with every bit as endearing a performance as the far more comical corollary, Philia, in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

For it was truly the rewards of all this goodness that brought tears to this sentimental old creature.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre
By William Shakespeare
Blackfriars Playhouse, American Shakespeare Center, Staunton, Virginia, through November 28, 2014
Director: Jim Warren
Costume Designer: Jenny McNee
Set Design is not credited; Blackfriars Playhouse emulates original stage conditions. As explained in the program notes: "Shakespeare's company performed on a large wooden platform unadorned by fixed sets or scenery."

Cast
René Thornton Jr. (Gower, the Chorus)
Gregory Jon Phelps (Pericles, Prince of Tyre)
Sara Hymes (Thaisa, Pericles's wife; Antiochus's daughter)
Lauren Ballard (Marina, Pericles's daughter)
James Keegan (Antiochus, King of Antioch; Bolt, servant of Pander and Bawd)
Patrick Midgley (Helicanus, Pericles's friend and counselor; Pander, brothel owner)
Allison Glenzer (Escanes, a counselor; Lychordia, Marina's nurse; Bawd, Pander's wife)
John Harrell (Cleon, governor of Tarsus)
Sarah Fallon (Dionyza, wife of Cleon; Diana, a goddess)
Jonathan Holtzman (Simonides, Thaisa's father; Philemon, Cerimon's servant)
Chris Johnston (Thaliard, an  assassin; Cerimon, Thaisa's protector)
Benjamin Reed (Leonine, an assassin; Lysimachus, governor of Mytilene)


Sara Hymes (Thaisa) and Gregory Jon Phelps (Pericles). Photo by Lindsey Walters, courtesy of American Shakespeare Center.

René Thornton Jr. (Gower, the chorus). Photo by Lindsey Walters, courtesy of American Shakespeare Center.




Sunday, October 19, 2014

Flying Art in Bethesda

Back from the Bethesda Row Arts Festival yesterday, going in for day two today. I knew as soon as I saw the flying elephant from last year--and in the same spot along Woodmont Ave.--that I'd be seeing some familiar work this weekend.

Though I was keeping my eye out for new stuff among the wood and fabric and metal and glass works and the photos and paintings, I really did want to check in first to see if Brad Pogatetz was back. And there he was, in the same spot as last year, and with as many folks flocking into his tiny booth as before. (See my previous report, "Art of Devastation.")

Bethesda Row (Maryland) Arts Festival, Oct. 18, 2014 - Brad Pogatetz's booth. Photo by C. G. Wagner

Brad Potatetz (left) takes a break at the Bethesda Row Arts Festival, Oct. 18, 2014. Photo by C. G. Wagner
I got to chat with him briefly, and joked that I thought I could point out the pieces that were new since last year. One of the "devastation" images that caught my eye was the gigantic rusted industrial hook hanging from an abandoned warehouse or factory, shot from below so that the eye traces frayed ropes to the opening in the ceiling above. Brad confirmed that this was a newer image, and he used it on one of his new business cards. (I didn't spot it online, but check out his New Work under Galleries at his site.)

The subjects in Brad's photographs are abandoned human spaces--factories, stadiums, depots. Naturally, I am curious about their stories, but as an artist, Brad is attracted to patterns, colors, lights and shadows.

I asked him if he thought about putting together a book: "Yes!" he replied quickly and brightly. He said he gets asked that question a lot, and I confessed I probably asked him the same thing last year.

Sample business cards, text added.

So, what else is on display? Again, maybe I'm seeing too much of the same thing, and not much stands out anymore. I love the wearable art, the beautiful garments in varieties of fabrics. But it is too tempting to my compromised budget, so I had to pass those booths and admire from afar.

What did stand out were the flying sculptures. Right, mobiles. The Calderesque whimsies by Bud Scheffel cast interesting shadows on the booth's backdrop and soaring silhouettes against the bright blue autumn sky.

Bethesda Row Arts Festival, Oct. 18, 2014 - Bud Scheffel's booth. Photo by C. G. Wagner

Bethesda Row Arts Festival, Oct. 18, 2014 - mobiles by Bud Scheffel. Photo by C. G. Wagner

Bethesda Row Arts Festival, Oct. 18, 2014. Mobile by Bud Scheffel. Photo by C. G. Wagner

On the other side of the street, air space was claimed by another metal artist, Michael Gard, whose balletic forms danced through light and re-created space with their shadows.

Bethesda Row Arts Festival - Oct. 18, 2014. Michael Gard's booth. Photo by C. G. Wagner

Bethesda Row Arts Festival - Oct. 18, 2014. Sculptures by Michael Gard. Photo by C. G. Wagner

Bethesda Row Arts Festival - Oct. 18, 2014. Sculptures by Michael Gard. Photo by C. G. Wagner

Love, hosaa
Looking up, seeing dance

Saturday, October 11, 2014

Phil Vassar at The Birchmere

I've never had a bad time at the Birchmere, but tonight was one of the most enjoyable times I've had there. Always at the top of the list is getting together with my cousin, who could pass for my big sister, and her sweet husband. Our company mixed and blended into the audience of others sharing time and space with meaningful company, and somehow the shared experience made us all one. That's the magic of live music.

Add into that alchemy the joy of discovering another new-to-me artist, and my evening was fulfilled. On the bill tonight was singer/songwriter/piano man Phil Vassar and his two back-up musicians (no drummer, though an audience member offered).

Phil Vassar, via philvassar.com/about



Whatever happens in a man's life to make him write about it may be a blessing, including awakening to the simple lesson not to miss your own life. And it makes a great song. Being on tour and away from family cannot be easy, and Virginia native Vassar sprinkled his 105-minute set with gratitude and enthusiasm for being back home. It was a happy man who took the stage tonight, who even rolled the bluesier songs into joyful riffs.

The audience had plenty of fans to cheer and sing along, but as a new fan, I could only cheer. The prompts for "what do you want to hear next" were easily answered, though I suspect some were inside jokes. One of the first requests was "Purple Rain"--and yes, Vassar offered a few lines of the Prince classic with a grin.

From the discography on his Web site, I see the wonderful anthem "American Child" was an album title; others I liked a lot were "Amazing Grace" (not the one you're thinking of), "My Next Thirty Years," "Black and Whites," and "John Wayne," a tribute to what it means to be a man. I think my brother would have loved that one.

Not being much of a music critic, I would have a hard time putting Vassar's music into a particular genre. He's a piano man like Billy Joel, with blues accents and an occasional '80s pop vibe (at one point I was "hearing" the soundtrack to a movie like Big somewhere in there). But Wikipedia labels him a country artist, so there you go. At one point, the self-described ADD Vassar joked that he was going to rap. And country rap is ... crap. 

Bah-dum bum. (See, we did need percussion, if only for the rimshot!)

love, hosaa
grateful for digital souvenirs after the live experience has ended

eta, photos of the live performance courtesy of The Birchmere's Facebook page:



And, thanks to Twitter, this fun convo with the artist:


Sunday, October 5, 2014

Having Driven Miss Daisy

Back from yesterday's Ford's Theatre matinee of Driving Miss Daisy, starring local favorites Nancy Robinette and Craig Wallace.

promotion art for Driving Miss Daisy, Ford's Theatre

Like the theatrical ballet Chéri over at the Kennedy Center, Daisy covered the arc of a relationship, principally between two people but supplemented with a third-party narrative thread weaver--in this case, Daisy's dutiful but condescending son Boolie (new to Ford's Ron Heneghan).

I was familiar with the film version of Daisy but hadn't seen it in a while. Fortunately, the lady sitting behind me was helpfully providing her companion information about what she remembered would be coming up in several scenes. [/sarcasm]

Unlike the movie, though, the stage production extracted the essential drama out of a realistic environment and placed these crucial moments on small vignettes, smoothly driven on and off stage on gliding platforms. The feel of the play was thus more like a series of memories.

Nancy Robinette ("Miss Daisy") and Craig Wallace ("Hoke"). Production photography by Scott Suchman, via Ford's Theatre
As interesting as Nancy Robinette always is to watch, it was Wallace's embodiment of "Hoke" that really impressed me. His voice for Hoke was as strong as that for his Frederick Douglass, which brought all the more dignity to a role so vastly different from the latter.

Despite the vignette-to-vignette "memory" feel of this production, I liked the realism in the characters' interaction; they actually acted with each other. In some shows I've seen in recent years (Carpetbagger's Children, ReEntry), the actors seem to be standing alone or talking out over the audience's head to an unseen character, even though their fellow dramatis personae are standing next to them. What's that about?

As always, I was impressed with the economical creativity of staging at Ford's (credit scenic designer Tony Cisek), a stage that never seems as small as it is. And I was delighted to find at least one more good seat in the house besides the one up in the dress circle that seemed to work for me. Sight lines are bad almost throughout the theater, especially when the tall tourists are in town. So, gentle readers, please save L-1 in the orchestra for me. Thanks.

Ford's Theatre | 511 10th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20004
Driving Miss Daisy
by Alfred Uhry; directed by Jennifer L. Nelson
September 26-October 26, 2014

Love, hosaa
A seat with a view