Unearth the whole offense /

Two years ago this week, on a still June night -- not unlike tonight, the chestnuts blooming with spoiled sweetness, the midsummer darkness that somehow keeps falling, finding ever-deepening shades of blue, a darkness that never bottoms out -- Adrian and I poured ourselves drinks, flicked open a laptop, and watched, blinking in the blue light, another descent. I remember laughing at first. I couldn't contain myself: the gold-gilt escalator, the down escalator, the nervous chatter of shutter clicks, the double-takes from the up escalator. But my laughter dried up and died in my throat. "He could win." In an angry time, he was the angriest man in the room. 

You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history - led by some very bad and conflicted people! #MAGA

Whatever the charge: #MAGA. But what 

​is

 mean

​t​

 by 

​'​

great,

​'​

 or 

​'​

again

​'​

? Who's making it, and whose America is it? Ever since the election, I've had W. H. Auden's September 1, 1939 on a loop in my head

​ (

​

The enlightenment driven away, 

​/ ​

The habit-forming pain, 

​/ 

Mismanagement and grief: 

​/​ 

We must suffer them all again

)​

. Today, I am thinking about the Whitney exhibit spun out from that poem: a vivid display of the past -- the pasts, really -- that American exceptionalism won't let in: gay men on the Jersey shore, mid-century; the Negro woman, of any period and place; Birth of a Sharecropper (the title an image itself); the immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island and looked back; the broken curve of a black mother's grief over a son killed in war, fighting for rights he doesn't have at home; the Armenian refugee who painted his dead mother from a fading photograph, over and over again, as his memory rubbed her out from too much handling; Jasper Johns' three flags, not one; the corpse-like baptizer at a Kansas revival; the employment agency; Mount Vernon, bisected, a surface that

​,​

 when scratched

​,​

 only reveals more surface; the loneliness and anomie that creep through Hopper's urban paintings of an uprooted and uprooting people.

​ ​

T

​he desire for a simple story is strong. ​Subject, object. Villain, hero. Cause, effect. Reality is more complicated. Are we forgetting how to live in a shared reality? Something is slipping away (/ The enlightenment driven away /). But then, did we ever know how? So much went unsaid, or unheard. 

It's 4:30 Central, 5:30 Eastern, roughly the time of day that crazy news bulletins tend to snap the day in two. What crazy shit will drop today? Or will the morphine drip run dry? It worries me, this drip-drip of intermittent reinforcement. It hooks us, makes us obsessive. It's like our brains have been hacked, such that we all hang here waiting for the next hit. May it be bigger than the last one; the old dose won't do. What does it do to our politics to live this way, stringing ourselves along, conspiracy theories blooming in the dark crevices between what we know and what we don't like mold.

Life was a dying. Being born was starting to die.

More to say about NYC, but Mourning Becomes Electra is as good a place to start as any. Friday, we saw by far the worst theatrical production I have ever encountered or can frankly imagine. How do you turn an O'Neill update of the Oresteia into something where the poor, beleaguered audience laughs uncomfortably at every emotional crisis point as though watching a drunk repeatedly try and fail to mount a bicycle over the course of five hours? Ask David Herskovits. This whole production was a clear problem of the director saying to himself too many times, "What if... [terrible idea he tells himself is 'high concept']?" and answering with "Yes, and..."

Of all the playwrights I can think of, no one left behind such detailed staging directions as Eugene O'Neill. And it was probably to guard against exactly this scenario. He knew that someday, some compulsive personality would want to wrench Mourning Becomes Electra into this particular trainwreck, and he was screaming from his grave: NO. DON'T DO IT. JUST LEAVE IT THE FUCK ALONE [(emphatically, with dread)].

The set design was minimal overall, and would have been the only thing that actually worked, had the set designer not thrown in a piece of cardboard covered in pink and purple paper fans with "lilac bush" printed on it in a gigantic typeface. The lilac bush sat on stage through every serious moment, grinning stupidly like a frat boy's full moon pressed to the window of a funeral home.

The acting was painfully overwrought, the director's interpretation of a Greek-by-way-of-the-Baroque-pastoral-comedy acting style that had characters blocking out each word with hand gestures, at which the actress playing Christine was particularly egregious: "What. A. Fraud. You. Are. With. Your. Talk. Of. Your. ~Father~. And. Your. ~Duty~." The stylization made everything uncomfortably funny, or just uncomfortable and the human temptation is to laugh, down through all the murders and suicides and renunciations. And then there were the many odd, misbegotten musical cues. And the nonsensical costuming (Lavinia/Electra, Ezra/Agamemnon, and Orin/Orestes in Civil War-era garb, Christine/Clytemnestra, hulking in stilettos and a green sequined evening gown, the love interests for the brother and sister in 1950s rockabilly, the servant in lumberjack plaid).

The director also moved the audience around the theater six times in 15 acts, which meant that if you had managed -- with great effort - to mentally subtract the hopelessly overstylized production to appreciate the text itself, you were interrupted repeatedly by ushers bringing up the lights and saying, "OK, everybody, now take all your belongings with you and leave those cellphones off! We're heading up to the balcony! Watch your step! OK, sit down, everybody, there are enough seats for everybody..."

For David Herskovits, the founder and artistic director of Target Margin Theater, this mystery is part of O’Neill’s greatness. “The repetitions, the overstatement, the thematic transparency: all that stuff achieves a kind of grandeur by very virtue of its clumsiness and its obviousness,” he says. “Think about The Iceman Cometh, the most obvious example to me. It’s all about pipe dreams. All you hear is speech after speech about how people have pipe dreams and have to let go of their pipe dreams, with scene after scene where somebody has a pipe dream, and they tell you the story of their pipe dream, and you know they’ll never realize it. And it’s like, ‘We get it! Why are we doing this for four hours?’ Yet it really is a great journey; it’s more than just an overwritten, repetitious, theme-driven play. And why is that—how is that? That’s interesting to me. That’s magic.”

... so, I can see how he got off on the wrong foot, though I fail to see how he managed to hop on the wrong foot for eight-hundred miles in the wrong direction. When the mother kills the father, and the son kills the mother's lover, and the mother kills herself, and then the son belatedly takes his own life within earshot of his sister and her lover, who runs out to check on him but in fact runs way past him and out the back of the theater, and the audience laughs, pained, it's really not working. Isn't this what previews are for?

Westward

​It's been a year since I've been to Los Angeles. I forgot how much I love the second leg of the flight, from Denver to Los Angeles, over the moonscape of the desert West; ancient river valleys cut like aneurysms into sun-roasted red rock; lonely lakes like inkstains, spreading; mountains and rivers of sand; and then the San Gabriels, abrupt, shocking green after years of drought; all traded, finally, for the grids and transects of LA County, speckled with swimming pools like so many turquoise pendants. 

You will search, but you will never find it.

"Your hand is halfway between emotion and intellect," she said, "divided between them. You are able to see yourself coldly, even in periods when you are ruled by emotion, but at the same time you are a romantic, you would like to give yourself completely, without thinking. Your intellect is strong."

"It's the emotion I'm worried about."
"That there isn't enough?"

"Yes."

"There's enough. There's more than enough. Oh, yes."

They were both looking at her small, bare palm.

"But you know that already," Nedra murmured. She was creating truth, devising it. The brightness of plants and sunlight was behind her, the air was filled with panels of light in which floated a luminous dust. She did not answer, as she might have, "No, the truth is, you are a woman who will never be satisfied. You will search, but you will never  find it."

-- James Salter, Light Years

Love is complex. To be faithful to one lover is to be cruel to all the others.

​The Florentine Opera debuted a new ending to Don Giovanni. As the moralizing chorus praises the otherwordly act that delivers justice impossible to find on earth, or at least impossible to find within the earthly bounds designed and enforced by other Don Giovannis...

This is the end which befalls evildoers.

And in this life scoundrels

always receive their just deserts!

... the mouth of hell suddenly reopens, ejecting a briefcase, which lands on the stage with a heavy thud, followed by Don Giovanni himself, done up in fresh duds: an ill-fitting business suit, baggy trousers, a too-long tie. As the curtain comes down on the singers -- Leporello, Donna Elvira, Don Ottavio, Donna Anna, Zerlina, Masetto, and their promises of justice delivered -- Don Giovanni scoops up his briefcase and saunters to the front of the stage, where he's greeted and caressed by two simpering Ivanka lookalikes, Kellyanne-blonde in skin-tight dresses and stilettos.

I'd wondered during the opening scene if they'd take it in a Trump direction. I'm glad they did, especially this week, on the heels of a budget request that would defund the NEA.

My mom and I sat next to somewhat of an opera snob, who at intermission pronounced the production, its soaring singers, its stunning set design, "passable," better than he expected, comparing it to the many other times he'd seen Don Giovanni staged by more illustrious companies. He reminded me of his polar opposite, the little old man sitting in the very last row, up against the right wall, of the San Francisco War Memorial Opera when I went to see Aida. It was the only seat I could afford, and after sitting so often in the very front row with Matt, I couldn't help but notice how very far away the stage was. But as soon as I sat down, the old man turned to me with bright eyes and said, "You know, these are the very best seats in the whole house to listen to the music. Believe me, I've checked." He'd seen Aida more times than he could count, as well as every other production SF Opera had staged over the past 30-some years, and said, "It doesn't matter how many times I've seen something. I'll be right back here in this seat." Joy versus stinginess.

Budgets are moral documents, and I think you can see where this is going.

Pulling together the media digest I write every week... and we still haven't put a floor underneath how heartbreaking each week's developments are. Each week manages to find a new low. This is just about (some areas of) the budget:

The proposed budget unveiled by the Trump administration this week would eliminate or slash many safety net programs, cutting funding for WIC (nutrition assistance for mothers and young children) by $200 million over the budget period, ending all federal funding for civil legal assistance, cut job training programs, zeroing out the Community Services Block Grant that funds community-level anti-poverty efforts (e.g., Meals on Wheels, which feeds home-bound seniors), cutting heating assistance for poor families, eliminating several affordable housing programs as well as the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, defunding AmeriCorps, and eliminating the Economic Development Administration, which provides grants to low-income communities. The Education budget cuts $3.7 billion that currently funds teacher training, after-school and summer school programs, and programs that assist low-income and immigrant students (such as ending the 21st Century Community Learning Centers that funds academic and cultural enrichment opportunities for students in high-poverty schools); and reduces financial aid to low-income college students. ThinkProgress reportsthat the Environmental Protection Agency faces a  $26 billion cut (31 percent lower budget than 2016) and that "more than 50 EPA programs will be cut entirely... The budget discontinues funding for the Clean Power Plan, international climate change programs, climate change research and partnership programs, and related efforts ." The proposed EPA budget also cuts funding for enforcement of environmental regulations and clean up of Superfund and brownfield sites. The Department of Health and Human Services faces a 17% cut. Vox reports that this includes a $5.8 billion cut to the National Institutes of Health (20% of its budget), which will “decimate the basic and clinical scientific infrastructure in the United States. A CDC block grant to fund state-level public health activities like disease monitoring may mean deep cuts – but it’s too early to tell. The budget eliminates existing rants to help nonprofits and public agencies train employees on health and safety. The budget adds $1.5 million to speed up immigrant deportation proceedings (including detention facilities and transportation) and $2.6 billion to fund construction of a border wall. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts would all be eliminated entirely. The budget would affect global health by eliminating several climate change prevention programs and slashing funds for programs related to climate change mitigation, peacekeeping, health, and development. Colorlines combed through the budget department-by-department to highlight the budget’s likely impacts on communities of color (e.g., the role of school choice programs in hurting academic achievement of students of color and exacerbating school segregation, or and a provision that would “reduce funding and services that support tribal governments by unspecified amount, which the budget says will support “tribal sovereignty and self-determination across Indian Country”).