Seattle Center Murals

I was at the Seattle Center earlier today and saw a bunch of murals on the wood barrier outside of Key Arena.  I thought they were pretty cool, so I took some pictures.  And here they are...

The American Businessman

In 1963 German journalist Hans Habe met Arizona’s Republican Senator Barry Goldwater.  This was his takeaway:  

Hans Habe

Here, I thought, stood an American businessman who, when he goes to sleep at night, does not dream of the Knights of Camelot or of Thomas Jefferson or even of Napoleon Bonaparte.  The hero of his dreams, in color TV, is the self-made man of America’s pioneering era.  Is such a man a conservative?  Perish the thought!  Conservatism implies the strict rule of law, respect for the existing order to the point of snobbery.  The American businessman, on the other hand, admittedly no snob, dreams of the Golden Age of disorder in which a man like H.L. Hunt, the richest man in America...could win his first oil well at a poker game.  He dreams of plain lawlessness to which, according to him, America owes her greatness, he dreams of...a form of government without taxes and without central direction.  Since we Europeans are accustomed to identify fascism with uniforms, the goose step and discipline of every kind, we find it very difficult to understand the fascism of the American businessman, who would only impose that minimum of discipline required to protect the economic chaos which he favors.  

      - Hans Habe, The Wounded Land: Journey Through a Divided America (1964)

Arts West: The Last World Octopus Wrestling Champion

Went to see The Last World Octopus Wrestling Champion, a new musical, at Arts West yesterday.  Bad.  Really bad.  It’s about Lee, a Seattle college student who discovers that she’s part octopus, or, rather, some kind of human-octopus hybrid.  See, back in 2000 Lee’s mom, a martial arts enthusiast, took part in Seattle’s octopus wrestling competition.  This was a real thing.  Local divers would go into Puget Sound and bring up the largest octopus they could find.  It was then weighed and safely returned to the water.  Whoever caught the largest octopus won.  Now if you're like me, you're probably wondering how a sport with this kind of bone-rattling excitement and action ever died out.  Sadly, we'll probably never know.  Anyway, Lee’s mom was its champion, but on her last outing things went horribly wrong and….well, it gets a little convoluted and I don’t want to ruin it for you.  The Last World Octopus Wresting Champion is part myth, part folklore, part local history, part fantasy.  And part love story as well (spoilers ahead).  Lee notices her cephalopod abilities when she falls in love with Nia, a fellow college student.  Nia soon notices that she, too, is able to transform into an octopus.  

With book, music, and lyrics by Justin Huertas (who got some help from Steven Tran), the main problem with The Last World Octopus Wrestling Champion is its overall mediocrity.  The story isn't told well.  The characters are stage caricatures, they never approximate real people.  With the the exception of the song "Sleep Well, Love", the music is largely unremarkable and unmemorable.  An air of amateurishness hovers over this play and never leaves.  It need re-writes.  It feels like a work-in-progress.  Even the title is off: The Last World Octopus Wrestling Champion.  What's a "world octopus"?  Shouldn't it be called The Last Octopus Wrestling World Champion?  If this were a high-school production one would say "Wow, these people certainly have promise".  But it's not a high school production.  One expects more - but doesn't get it.

The Last World Octopus Wrestling Champion will play at Arts West to July 28th. 

Arriving in Vietnam

On the morning of the fourth day the dawn light daubed our faces as we came down the skies of Cochin-China*.  The passengers were squirming in their seats, not sleeping and not waking, and the air-hostess’s trained smile came stiffly.  With engines throttled back the plane dropped from sur-Alpine heights in a tremorless glide, settling in the new, morning air of the plains like a dragonfly on the surface of a calm lake.  As the first rays of the sun burst through the magenta mists that lay among the horizon, the empty sketching of the child’s painting book open beneath us received a wash of green.  Now lines were ruled lightly across it.  A yellow penciling of roads and blue of canals.

A colonel of the Foreign Legion awoke uneasily, struggling with numbed, set facial muscles to regain that easy expression of good-fellowship of a man devoted to the service of violence...

      - Norman Lewis, A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Indo-China (1951)

* Vietnam

Dignity

Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had.

   - Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953)

Seattle Rep: Tiny Beautiful Things

I recently saw Tiny Beautiful Things at the Seattle Repertory.  It was awful, just terrible.  Between 2010 and 2012 author Cheryl Strayed worked as an advice columnist for the website The Rumpus; her nom de plume there was Sugar.  She was very good at this job and soon developed a big following.  In 2012 she published a collection of her advice-column correspondence under the name Tiny Beautiful Things.  That book is the source for this adaptation by Nia Vardalos (of My Big Fat Greek Wedding).

The play is set in Sugar's apartment, where she reads the letters which pop-up on her laptop.  Three people on stage act as the letter writers; they go in and out of various characters.  Sugar is a winning confidant.  When people present her with their life problems - adultery, depression, miscarriages, etc. - she usually responds with a story or confession of her own.  Her advice is exactly what one would expect - upbeat, affirmational, heart-felt, etc.  

If you are (or were) a fan of those confessional daytime TV shows - Jerry Springer, Maury Pauvich, Sally Jesse Raphael, etc. - then this play is for you.  It has the same earnest banality.  Someone tells Sugar their problem.  Then she relates an anecdote from her own life and delivers advice of TED-talk-esque depth - believe in yourself, you have more strength than you know, you inspire me, etc.  Then on to the next letter - and so on for an hour and forty minutes.  It's all very easy, neat, simple to digest.  But the more I thought about this play, the more I disliked it.  In no other art has the human condition been put forward more starkly than in theater, yet this play is little more than a parade of pat and facile answers to the difficulties of life.  And if you believe that theater has something important to say about being human (and I do) then there's something off-putting, even offensive, about Sugar's ultimately shallow responses in the face of suffering.  No doubt if we dropped her into the end of King Lear she'd tell the old duffer that his courage under his misfortunes is an inspiration to her, that his love is greater than his grief, etc.  If she popped in at the end of The Iceman Cometh she'd let everyone in the saloon know that the resilience they'd shown over the past few days fills her hope and optimism, and that, deep down, all of them, especially Hickey, need to learn to forgive themselves.  And I'm sure she'd have some uplifting words for Oedipus: "Don't be so hard on yourself.  So you have a thing for MILFs..."

Julie Briskman, Charles Leggett, Chantal DeGroat, and Justin Huertas (Photo: Alan Alabastro)

Sugar is very candid and open about her own life but I'm not sure that serves her well.  At one point she admits that her grandfather sexually abused her.  Apparently he made her give him handjobs when she was between the ages of two and five.  This obviously fucked her up.  Years later, she dealt with this trauma in an unusual, and for me a very questionable, way.  One day when she was outside she came across a newly hatched bird that had fallen out of its nest and onto the ground.  She picked it up (which she knew automatically meant that its mother wouldn't acknowledge or care for it).  Then she put the little birdling in a paper bag and smothered it to death.  The writhing of the struggling creature against her hands somehow recalled grampy's flaccid penis.  Eventually the bird stopped moving.  This experience was cathartic for Sugar (though, one imagines, less so for the bird).  Although at this point, if I, too, may be candid, I had to ask myself "Is this really someone I should be taking advice from?"

The most powerful letter is one from a man whose 22-year-old son was killed in a car accident.  It’s a missive of pain, grief, and anger.  Effectively it constitutes a long confessional monologue, and it’s a genuine tour de force for the actor performing it.  Charles Leggett plays it in this production and, like a dog with a bone, once he gets hold of it he ain't letting go.  He stammers, hems and haws, pauses very pregnantly.  He's very good - and I do mean that seriously.  As the letter goes on, he starts blubbering.  Then everyone in the audience starts blubbering too.  How could we not?  Sugar starts to give him her advice, and soon there's more waterworks in the audience. It’s so sad.  And yet - thinking about it later - there was something cheap about the whole thing.  Cheap and sordid.  Like when they shot Old Yeller in the movie just to get a roomful of kids to cry.  Ultimately, it felt very manipulative.

Charles Leggett and Julie Briskman (Photo: Alan Alabastro)

So, with the writers I find fault, but I don't find any with with the actual production itself.  The actors are all very good.  It would be hard to imagine a better Sugar than Julie Briskman.  The moment she walked onstage the entire audience warmed to her.  I've already praised Charles Leggett as one of the letter readers; the other two - Chantal DeGroat and Justin Huertas - are equally good, even if they don't have quite the show-stopper that he has.  The set design by L.B. Morse wonderfully captures the ordinariness in which most of us live our lives (no matter how messy), and the lighting by Robert Aguilar manages to sculpt the action and provide a sense of variety to what is essentially a very static play.  Despite this play's shortcomings director Courtney Sale did a commendable job.

Tiny Beautiful Things will play at the Seattle Repertory Theatre until June 23rd.

Intellectuals

Intellectuals are the only group in society who are fundamentally international.  Everyone who believes in the intellect takes his place in the great family tree of the human intelligence in which those who have influenced him are his true ancestors, and these ancestors are from every race, every creed, and every condition.  I am all for regionalism, for decentralization, for the “goût du terroir” [local flavor] in our artists, but I think that nationalism, though it has proved the soundest and deepest instinct in this war, and is beyond praise as a sentiment when our country is in danger, is not one of the most forward-looking of human creeds.  It has won wars, but it has also made them, and it is to that love of truth which unites artists and scientists, that common belief in virtue and reason, that we must look for the perpetuation of peace and the prevention of wars to come.

      - Cyril Connolly, “French and English Cultural Relations” (1943)

The Nose of the Alligator

We drive to the French Embassy in a hired Daimler…The Churchills were the last to arrive and I was surprised to notice that when they enter, the whole room stands up as if they were reigning sovereigns.

Winston pays me lavish compliments on my speeches in the House and deplores my absence from it...He said that he had made friends with de Gaulle at last, whom he had found “much mellowed”.  He said that he had liked the Russians.  “The disadvantage of them is”, he says, “that one is not sure of their reactions.  One strokes the nose of the alligator and the ensuing gurgle may be a purr of affection, a grunt of stimulated appetite, or a snarl of enraged animosity.  One cannot tell.” 

      - Harold Nicolson, Diary, December 19, 1945

Seattle Opera: Carmen

Saturday evening was opening night for the Seattle Opera’s excellent new production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen.  Set in nineteenth century Seville, it tells the story of Don José, a soldier who falls in love with the hot-blooded and dangerous factory-girl of the title.  Once they’re together Carmen easily leads the boy astray.  Soon he abandons the army and they both join up with a group of bandits.  Along the way Carmen hooks up with Escamillo, a bullfighter, and it's with him that she finds true love.  José is soon out of the picture, but not out of the opera, where his murderous jealousy will play out in the finale.  Also in the mix is Micaëla, a sweet, innocent girl (she loves our hero, of course) sent by José’s mother to recall her wayward son to his duty.     

Carmen is often billed as a tale of passion and wild sexuality.  It is supposed to have an air of eroticism about it.  Now I don’t doubt that for some viewers the tale of this impudent cigarette-girl may set their libido ablaze.  But frankly the lass does nothing for me.  Perhaps if you were a normal bourgeois male who saw this in 1875 her insouciance and female misbehavior would have provided just the transgressive spark to blast your Victorian-era lust to new heights, but a century and a half later this is tame stuff.  The opera’s original sexual charge seems to be much more centered around issues of class and power than around anything which goes on between the sheets.  As for Carmen herself, her tale doesn’t strike me as especially dissolute: she sleeps around but then meets a guy who wins her heart.  As the pop-song puts it she “fooled around and fell in love.”  No biggie.  In fact our twenty-first century sensibilities are more likely to be offended by the fact that her boyfriend engages in the senseless slaughter of animals rather than in Carmen’s hussy past.  

Ginger Costa-Jackson and Rodion Pogossov (Photo Credit: Sunny Martini)

Part of this may be due to Bizet’s music: it’s lovely, memorable, a delight, the tunes are immediately hummable.  Listening to Carmen is the musical equivalent of walking into a candy store.  But the score hasn’t a trace of sensuality in it.  There are none of the vocal and/or orchestral surgings and climaxes that we find in Wagner or Puccini.  In fact Bizet’s music doesn’t even rise to the erotic level of the Barcarolle in Offenbach’s Les Contes d'Hoffmann or the aria Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix from Saint-Saën’s Samson et Delilah.  And perhaps that explains Carmen’s longevity; on the surface it seems risqué and naughty, but at its core - in other words, in its music - it’s clean-cut and unthreatening.  

And in the SO’s current staging it is also highly entertaining.  Director Paul Curran has wisely focused on the comic aspects of the opera.  The production is bright, colorful, at times even boisterous.  It is a lot of fun.  If there’s a children’s chorus in this opera - and there is - then it will be an adorable bunch of scamps singing and marching around the stage.  If some gypsy gals (or, “Bohemians,” if you prefer) sing a song at the beginning of Act II which has nothing to do with the story, then Curran sets them up before an old style microphone stand and turns the whole thing into a song and dance routine.  Although never camp, one senses that tongue was not unacquainted with cheek in much of this production.  Escamillo the toreador, for instance, enters on a motorcycle and is dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and a leather jacket - in other words, he's the Fonz from Happy Days.  As the story turns darker in the second half the staging becomes more sedate but never fails to dazzle.  The sets by Production Designer Gary McCann are vivid and eye-catching, full of bold colors, multiple layers, and diagonals.  His Act III set, which simulates depth of field inside a warehouse, is breath-taking.  

Ginger Costa-Jackson (Photo Credit: Sunny Martini)

Scott Quinn was set to play Don José on opening night but came down with a cold, so instead his place was taken by Frederick Ballentine, who did a fine job in the lead.  Rodion Pogossov’s Escamillo is energetic and lively.  His clowning around during the “Toreador Song” - I believe he steals a move or two from Chuck Berry - fit in nicely with the production's light-hearted tone.  Vanessa Goikoetxea is magnificent in the role of Micaëla.  Her rendition of the Act III aria Je dis, que rien ne m’épouvante - in which Micaëla admits to her own fears in attempting to save José - was deeply moving.  Its vulnerability and beauty really constituted the emotional heart of the drama.  And as for Carmen, Ginger Costa-Jackson is superb in the role.  She has played Carmen many times before and will no doubt continue to do so.  The role seems custom-made for her. Her dark and smokey, yet powerful, mezzo-soprano voice adds just the sultriness the part requires.  Decked out in red for much of the night she dominates the stage not only vocally but physically.  Carmen is only as alluring as the actress who portrays her and Costa-Jackson enchants.  

Carmen plays at the Seattle Opera until May 19.