Ceci n'est pas un blog

There was a recent article in the NYTimes about the rise of the Weimar aesthetic in some very off-color adult political cabaret.

And this struck me because just earlier this week I was listening to the Dresden Dolls, who describe themselves as "Brechtian Punk Cabaret" partly because it is so evocative and partly to make sure no one calls them Goth. Their infectious clangy piano and passionate vocals got me hunting for more "Dark Cabaret" scene music.

And while I was thinking how interesting it is that this trend harkened back to 70s glam scene (also visually referenced several times during Eurovision), there was yet another sign that Weimar is having its place in the zeitgeist: the Metropolitan Museum in NY had an exhibit just a few months ago called Glitter and Doom at the Met. Some very interesting pieces that capture the loosened morals and more liberal laws of the era but also a sort of sadness, it seems to me.

When I fell into the wikipedia rabbit hole on this topic, I saw an amazing picture of a young lady feeding huge stacks of money into her fireplace since it was so much cheaper than firewood. The spiral of massive inflation and devaluation helps explain the context for the ugly brown-shirted end of the period.
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On an unrelated macabre note, Damien Hirst has made the most expensive piece of art ever, a human skull encrusted with diamonds and platinum. It is titled "For the love of God" presumambly because that is what everyone says as soon as they hear about the $99million price tag. While I have seen some of his work that I quite like, much of it leaves me cold. It doesn't feel as twee and contrived as many of Koons art does but there is a gimmicky quality. There is a very nice analysis in Prospect Magazine.
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And on a more personal note, work has gone completely insane. Just as we pass the middle of the long Norwegian vacation season, it seems that we suddenly have several new and high profile projects landing on us, dozens of new resumes to review, some interesting opportunities to completely re-write things so they will work with new feature requests coming in. Busy is good but it doesn't rain that it pours.

Moving next week should be fun. We are very much looking forward to being settled in the new home, H starting school, and shifting our schedule to look more like something you might find in a "normal" family. At the moment we keep the hours of a mad Spaniard; dinner after 9:30, stories close to midnight, sleep sometime later. All this will change and our eccentricities will find another outlet.

I'm not sure exactly what my take on this is yet but a coworker said he was going to a play this evening and thought I might enjoy it. Something a little offbeat. Not to worry about the language as it's mostly movement and dance, any spoken words won't be essential to the understanding. And to be fair he sent me a link to the theater: Grusomhetens Teater (Theater of Cruelty). This was the manifesto of Antonin Artaud, surrealist poet/playwright/director/drug addict/electroshock therapy recipient/long time sanitorium resident.

I know a little about Artaud. Not as much as my wife. But I had a feeling I knew what I was in for.

The venue was great. It was the sort of place that when you see in movies (mostly from the '80s) you aren't sure really exist. Imagine an old building that appears to have been completely abandoned and is absolutely covered in layers upon layers of spray paint. Inside, down heavily tagged corridors and through two imrovised plywood doors is a rather pleasant vegan cafe. If you hadn't been shown by someone, you'd never find it. Around the building in tha back where construction workers are driling into concrete and look like they might be setting up some sort of bigger job, there is the theater entrance. Only it's not. It's just the room where you buy tickets and hang out until show time.

And so we hung out and gossiped about a local celeb whose nude pictures of himself were on his cell phone when it was stolen and the images made it to all the papers. And we talked about the company director's commitment to the Theater of Cruelty manifesto; he'd been known to be relunctant to rent the space to other companies because it might subvert their brand, fool an audience into thinking he might do something traditional, narrative, easy. When it came time for the show, they led us back out into the drizzle and around even further to the back and then inside and down the steepest darkest stairs in Oslo to the theater.

The show was performed by 9 actors who essentailly laid out a series of intercut fairy tale references. But that's not the point of the show. The point of this kind of theater is to jar the audience, confront their desensitization and bring them to a state of awareness and engagement -- kicking and screaming if necessary. There were two women with violins, an accompaniest whose piano and vocal style semed more Weimar era than anything else, and lots of interludes that evoked classic Bedlam style mental asylums. But it wasn't all madness ... in one segment the cast is all running amok searching for something or someone and over time it becomes clear that each person has a clearly choreographed pattern and after an interruption, several of them have swapped choreographies. In another segment a woman wears a Marie Antoinette style outfit, complete with a meter tall wig and moves in a mannered and sad way. There is nudity without sexuality, there is staring directly at audience members and addressing them right to their face, there is a lot of somewhat dangerous ladder climbing.

At various times I was bored, intrigued, confused, genuinely interested, and convinced I had latched onto an underlying narrative thread only to lose it again. And although the philosophy of such a production is about the audience, I couldn't help wondering if the "cruelty" was to the actors who had to crawl, climb, push themselves around on their back, strip, meet the gaze of their audience, and remember complicated blocking not necessarily tied to any interaction between characters and without dialogue to anchor it to.

One of the actors is a bit famous. He's been in at least 16 movies or TV shows. I recognised him from the previews to Junk Mail, a Norwegian film that got some play on the art house circuit in the States. And I can see why an actor would be drawn to this sort of company. It is difficult and challenging and may not bring the audience with you - you are alone with your craft and your colleagues participating in a genuine art backed by the poetic theories of a cruel, mad, genius.

But it's the sort of theater you can only recommend to a very very few.

Last night I went to see a contemporary dance performance called: I Have a Secret to Tell You (Please) Leave with Me

The performers, with Zero Visibility Corp., were incredible. They are a professional troupe who have premiered their work as far away as New York and Portugal. They were all amazing athletes and dancers but it was a very challenging work. The program describes it thusly:
In this performance a woman stands alone amongst the men. Who is she and in what way is she viewed? Is she a feminine object that pleases the on lookers, a lonely, melancholy figure, or an equal human being – similar and dissimilar both at the same time?

But the music alone was clearly difficult for some as it was mostly static and feedback with heavy beats and high pitched electronic noises throughout. The visual voacabulary that choreographer Ina Christel Johannessen created was jerky and filled with sublimated rage and pain that would escalate into scenes of apparent combat, sickness, desperate panic. There was a large pommel horse like prop and a map that various characters refered to but generally this performance was more abstract and less sexual than many modern dance pieces.

There was no simple story line or easy to interpret scenes but I found myself, despite the description above, seeing the horse as a metaphor for drugs and addiction and the various fights and combats as both interventions and enablements. It was interesting to look for the patterns of when the dancers seemed to be aware of each other ... this came and went throughout the piece and was clearly intentional: were they isolated because each was in a different place or because these people weren't able to see each other - emotionally isolated, or something else. Was the map a sign of people who've lost their way, in more than one sense, or of people making a plan, or was the map just a map? Despite being a continuous 90 minutes plus, the performance had a clear conscious evolution and natural divisions into scenes and acts.

The audience was mostly regulars and probably mostly attended the college where the the performance was held, many people seemed to know each other. But there were also parents with their 10 year old son, a mother and college aged daughter, and so on. The house was packed. The only odd thing to me about the venue was that the 8:00 start time meant opening the doors after 8:00 and starting around 8:20 rather than opening the doors at 20 to and starting at 8:00. The performers seemed surprised when I walked in and tried to sit down before 8:00 while they were stretching and working out small details.

I'm very glad I went.

BTW: This was part of a trilogy of dances and the pictures here are from the brochure and are scenes from I Have a Secret to Tell You (Please) Leave with Me.

Spent much of Sunday at the National Gallery. It was lovely. This was a beautifully curated museum with a central area organized by theme with art from all times included and then a series of galleries that moved forward through time, each one focussing on a particular movement or trend in the art of the day. One thing that was particularly nice, in addition to the bilingual plaques, was that they would include reference pieces. For example, several Norwegian women went to study at Ferdinand Léger's Académie Moderne in Paris and brought back works heavily influenced by his abstract and mechanical paintings. So the small gallery of their work included a Léger as well. The Norwegian impressionists were accompanied by a Monet, and so on.

While Munch has his own museum a few miles away, the National Gallery also has quite a few. They are striking. A lot of his larger paintings have an improvisational, almost hurried quality that gives them an urgency and a sensuality but without being sloppy or amateur, he clearly has a well trained technique that is especially evident in a striking portrait of his sister (whose face appears throughout his work). Some of the paintings were so moving that I didn't notice the Scream until I walked right up to it. The breadth of his work is certainly under appreciated outside of Norway.

I heard an interesting theory about the recently returned Munchs that has been stolen. Apparently a few years ago there was a massive bank robbery, the largest in the nations history and every available investigator was hot on the trail of the thieves who needed a big distraction. Cue one art heist. This high-profile theft would surely pull police manpower off the bank case and give the thieves a couple of hostages they could use to bargain with if they did get caught. Curiously, in support of this highly unofficial theory, the paintings were recovered during the sentencing phase of the bank robbers trial.

Later, I went to St. Hanshaugen park and watched the ducks and the children. It is a beautiful park that is a hill, from the center you can see down to the harbor and across to the Nessoden peninsula. Gorgeous day. Yellow and red leaves formed perfect circles on the ground around the trees and young people walked their dogs or pushed prams along the paths. I even saw a man with a ferret riding in his sweater hood.

After dinner I read for a bit. I'm reading the Booker Prize winning "The God of Small Things". (Thank you, CMFM). It's a difficult book. She dances around in time slowly uncovering little bits of information until you start to see what the plot might look like. And the language is mostly beautiful and evocative but often crosses the line into that high school technique of random specificity, "somewhere a dog barks, a trash can falls". The story is fairly unrelentingly depressing and that makes for a slower read but now that the plot is showing itself, should go more quickly.

Had a long chat today with our American friend who lives in Paris (hi, Kory) about how much stuff to ship.

In short, he votes for almost nothing. Put it in storage and buy new, he says. There is an appeal to this approach.

And, to be sure, we will do some of that. But our relo package isn't really something we want to have to use once we're not here (stateside) to coordinate. Some fragile heirloom furniture and larger pieces that we may not have room for will go into cold storage and the rest we'll divide between bringing and selling. Someday we'll have to bring over the mirror and chrome console, or dresser, that looks to us like it would fit perfectly Nick and Nora's apartment but was probably made during a 1970s bit of deco revival; aside from the breakable mirrors, it's so heavy that a friend and I moved it about 20 feet, my knees hurt for three weeks.

For me though, I would want my books and art and antique chairs if we moved to Seattle or New York, why wouldn't I want them in Oslo. I know it's just stuff but we're at a point where much of it has a story and reflects who we are and what pleases us... and then there's just so much with a long family history that one hates to simply push into a closet for the next generation to sort out.

Speaking of heirlooms though ...

S found a gallery selling a "restored" painting of my great grandfather's (that he painted, not that he owned). It is the earliest sitting of his wife and first daughter, my grandmother, that we have seen; Oma was 1 and sitting on her mother's lap. CP, the artist, was a Russian Jewish immigrant to America who was working and studying in Paris with his Opera singer wife when my grandmother was born around 1907. Some of his work bears a resemblance to that of Marie Cassat, whom he apparently had met. Despite having a painting in the London Portrait Gallery (not on display at the moment), the paintings we've seen of his at auction seem pretty affordable. So S sent a query to this gallery and it was listed more than 300 times anything else of his we'd seen ... cheeky bastards, holding the earliest picture of my Oma hostage behind that crazy price tag. At least we got to see a picture of my great grandmother smiling, she looks stoic to grim in all the paintings that are still in the family.

CP's style seemed to drift from Rembrandt-esque self portraits to somewhat forced attempts at impressionism. In his later years, he lived in New Mexico and painted close-up portraits, in a realistic style, of Native Americans. Although these are my least favorite of his, he seems most at home where the emphasis is on the subject and not the technique - even though he was certainly a man of a talent as immense as the temper his first wife would recall many decades after their divorce.