Recently by Steve Marsh

It’s not an opinion that I’m very vocal about. Like love of our flag or love of our Lord, puppy love is something that’s simply unquestioned in this country. Recently, on the Jay Leno Show, Chris Rock delineated our newest piety when he joked about the modest level of outrage directed at Roman Polanski’s rape of a 13-year-old girl. Rock’s remarks provoked an electronic whiteout of moralizing invective—not for his joke comparing Roman Polanski to O.J. Simpson, but for his joke refusing to compare Polanski to Michael Vick. “Michael Vick must be wondering, ‘What the hell did I do?’" Rock said.

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There was a lot of guitar in my life last week. Between Shon Troth’s expert slide work at Rock the Garden, to Eric Clapton and Stevie Winwood trading licks at Xcel, and Johnny Swardson at the Stone Arch Festival, I’m all set. But the musical highlight of the week came from an old piano man: Allen Toussaint.

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Pardon the Yogi Berra-ism, but some classics really are classics. During the opening scene of the touring production of A Chorus Line, stopping at the Orpheum this week, I got the same jangly, overwhelmed-with-panic emotional feeling, in my stomach, in my throat, behind my eyes, that Spider Man must get when Dr. Octopus sneaks up on him.  In the opening scene, Zach, portrayed by Kevin McCready, is trying out a herd of dancers auditioning for his show. He singles a couple of performers out—“red headband, keep your head up!” But most of them go through in groups without any feedback at all. Maybe this is what was getting to me—I was having karate practice flashbacks or basketball practice flashbacks. Anybody who’s been at the back line of an aerobics or a ballroom dance class, or a soccer practice, or even a PowerPoint training seminar knows what it’s like to feel disoriented, flailing a little, a step behind the rest, struggling to tread water and remain unnoticed until you catch up, until you get it (hopefully).

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Last Sunday, I went to the Ritz Theater to talk to composer Chan Poling about his new musical, Venus, which tells the story of a middle-aged woman who gets transformed into a sexy pop-star/supermodel. You can tell it's Sunday because of my hair and because I mentioned that it's SUNDAY—HEY, IT'S SUNDAY, I'M WORKING ON A SUNDAY—about eleven times during the shoot. (Thank you to Kyong Ham, our cameraman and editor, for cutting most of them out.) 

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Maybe you’ve noticed—Facebook is freaking people out. And this anxiety of the new seems to be intensifying, because now—as every newspaper writer in the country has pointed out—mom is on Facebook. In this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Peggy Orenstein is the latest “oldster” (her term) to ask what it all means—these crazy solipsistic kids with their tagging and their status updates. More specifically, Orenstein seems to be concerned that things are different than when she came of age herself, in the “postage stamp era,” when you could go away to college without the scrutiny of high school buddies who knew that you used to have bangs, or were on the traveling math team, or that you loved Garth Brooks. She asks if it’s possible to reinvent yourself, to “get busy with the embarrassing, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity,” as she puts it, with your “450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?” It’s a rhetorical question, really, and she seems to think the answer is no.  

Well, come gather round people wherever you roam. Because on Friday night at the Walker, I saw Examined Life, a documentary by Astra Taylor that follows around eight of the most acclaimed and established contemporary philosophers—big time priests and priestesses of the mind, thinkers revered within the marble halls of academia, but whom most of us probably wouldn’t recognize if we flipped past them holding court on CSPAN. Philosophers like Cornel West, Peter Singer and Martha Nussbaum. Taylor gives each of them ten minutes to make their point (she spent twenty four weeks editing all her footage down, natch), and almost invariably the point is this: after 3000 years of philosophy, the times they are a’changin’.

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Excuse me while I take a Jim Walsh, romantic-rock-historian moment.

I was actually nervous for this interview. That doesn't happen much anymore (unless she's really hot) but this time, nostalgia was working against me. You can tell there's something weird going on—my mouth is hanging open for the first half of the video. And I'm not a mouth breather. (I swear.)

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I’ve always liked Samuel Beckett, but I’ve never seen him in person. Last night, at The Guthrie’s premiere of Happy Days, I finally did. Along with Krapp’s Last Tape and Waiting for Godot, Happy Days is another one of Beckett’s masterpieces of the absurd. The staging is as pomo as it gets: a seven-foot-high berm of sandy dirt rises from the Dowling Theater’s stage, and on top of the mound, Beckett’s heroine, Winnie, is buried “up to her bosom” (it looks like Jonah was jammed halfway down the whale’s blowhole rather than trapped in its mouth). Winnie is literally beached, with only a flimsy peach-colored nightie and a parasol to protect her from an overbearing sun. She rambles through a two-hour monologue, ostensibly addressing a husband living in a cave behind the berm. Willie, her husband, is a man who rarely speaks to her—he grunts a couple times, blows his nose once, interjects with two or three observations on his newspaper, and answers one of her questions in the affirmative. So Willie rarely speaks to Winnie, and he never touches her. Winnie’s only other accompaniment is a seemingly bottomless purse.

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Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine profiled post-feminist sexologists. One of them, Dr. Meredith Chivers, a scientist at the University of Toronto, studies sexual desire by showing film clips of copulating heterosexual couples, homosexual couples, and bonobo apes to men and women sitting in Lay-Z-Boys. The subjects’ genitals are hooked up to delicate instruments measuring blood flow in order to determine arousal, and they were asked to simultaneously type their subjective responses to the videos on a keypad while they watched.

The men in Dr. Chivers’ experiment demonstrated straightforward responses—the straight men responded…ahem, positively to the straight couples, and the gay men to the gay couples, while neither group was turned on by the apes. And the agreement between the genital measurements and the keyboard responses were consistent.

The women, on the other hand, were all over the place—some were turned on by the homosexual sex, some were turned on by the heterosexual sex, and yes, some were turned on by the apes. Not only that, but the agreement between genital measurement and keyboard response wasn’t consistent at all. The article quoted Freud, who said, 100 years ago, “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is What does a woman want?” It’s 2009, and Chivers’ answer, and the NYT’s, seems to be: "?!"

Last week, I saw two plays that also tried to make some sense, if perhaps not quite as empirically, out of desire and the desired. I saw Spring Awakening, an award winning musical that ran for a week at the Orpheum, and Hitchcock Blonde, an experimental play that opened at the Jungle on Friday. Now, I wasn’t hooked up to any machines with the ability to empirically measure biological data, but Spring Awakening didn’t do much for me, while Hitchcock Blonde—well, as Hitch himself might say, I found it…stimulating.

And I’m a dude, so I’m pretty sure of myself.

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As far as local nouveau-Puritanism entertainment goes, it’s hard to beat Jim Walsh’s songwriter showcase, The Hootenanny. A bunch of singer-songwriters line up on a coffeehouse stage (this season, The Beat Coffeehouse in Uptown), each seated with an acoustic guitar slung around their necks, the shiny blond instruments resting on their laps. In between songs, the musicians banter about the three Rs: reality, relationships, and writing. The hoots start at 6:30, and the wholesome environment encourages people to bring along their kids—the little people sit and color in their coloring books while the adults pay attention to what’s going on onstage. It’s like church.

So I say nouveau-Puritanism because this is entertainment filled with content that most people would consider to be good for you. A stage full of smart singer-songwriters singing sensitive, somewhat-literary songs, wherein they consider, either directly or obliquely, their own existence, in turn provoking the audience to (hopefully) consider their own. Plus, there’s not a lot of swearing. And last night, Jim was trying something new—he’d invited a couple local poets to read, alternating performances with the musicians.

Jim knew I was holding a poetry reading myself this weekend, so he dropped me a line yesterday afternoon inviting me up to read a John Berryman poem  and talk about the little reading we were holding Friday night. Onstage, Dan Wilson was sitting right next to me, and I remembered that Dan’s older brother Matt, who was an English major at Harvard, had written a song about Berryman’s suicide for Trip Shakespeare, “Washington Bridge.” Dan (who was an art major at Harvard himself), remembered it, and he played a snippet:

Red metal archway, the Washington Bridge,
Made rings in the water.
Rings in the water underneath a white sky
Made a cuckold a widow

He stopped. “Dark,” Dan said, as if it was just occurring to him.  

I had to split the hoot early to get to the Walker event I’m about to review (any minute now) and, luckily for me, an old friend was leaving at the same time—her friend's ten-year-old daughter was getting a little squirrelly with all the breaks for poetry.

On the car ride down the hill to the Walker, she complained about the hoot’s tone. “There just wasn’t that much HOOTENANNY to tonight’s hoot, with everybody up there talking about all that intellectual stuff.” She turned left on Vineland Place. “Especially if people are bringing their kids.”

She dropped me off at the door, and I ran up the stairs to the McGuire Theater, where a bunch of New York theater types calling themselves The National Theater of the United States of America had come to town to throw their own nouveau-Puritan program of entertainment, except instead of a Hootenanny, they were calling theirs a Chautauqua(!).

 At the beginning of the performance, walking out to a fanfare played by a brass band, a tall, slender dude in a white suit (think Mark Twain) was led to a podium decorated with cornstalks and threshed wheat. Summertime sound effects were pumped in—crickets and the low hum of flying insects, etc. Through thin, nearly pursed lips, Mr. Richard “Dick” Pricey, introduced himself in language befitting his period suit.   

He went on to explain that this Chautauqua was inspired by a late nineteenth -century lecture series that began on the shores of Lake Chautauqua in New York. By including artists, scientists, local historians, and other sober-ish thinkers on the bill, a Chautauqua tried to distinguish itself from the more popular big-tent Evangelical revivals of the same era. A projection screen was lowered, and Pricey flipped through some slides, outlining the program that us yokels would be exposed to—some local history, some singing, lectures on cartography and high vs. low culture, a selection of folk, modern, and po-mo dance, and a finale cryptically referred to as “Bright Lights.”

Now seems like the time to introduce a slide of my own. Actually, I'm borrowing it from a friend, local brain Dessa Darling. Dessa has devised a Venn diagram wherein she considers the potential points where art, entertainment and interesting subject matter intersect in order to engage an audience:





 

A = Interesting
B = Entertaining
C = Artful
A U B (all of A and all of B) = Engaging





                           Engaging                   

Well, last night’s Chautauqua! was all over Dessa’s map.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

From Aristotle to Ms. Darling, writers, philosophers and artists have theorized about whether to be, or not to be, entertaining, interesting, or artistic regarding the end goal of moving an audience. (Although where you should move them—to contemplation, action, tears, or just through the ticket line—has been just as heavily discussed.) Last night, this all-over-the-mapness was exactly the point. To their credit, the NTUSA—true avant garde New Yorkers—were intent on seeing how far they could take it in every direction.

Early on, Pricey brought Walker archivist Jill Vuchevich to the podium to talk about T.B. Walker, the 1920s lumber baron who founded the art center in which the Chautauqua was taking place. She droned through a seven-minute lecture as if she was reading it right off Wikipedia—so not really entertaining, but definitely interesting.

Later, when a pastiche of a modern ballet recital culminated in a pas de deux between a local roller derby team and a local women’s hockey team, all set to “Crazy on You” by Heart—definitely entertaining, and definitely interesting, but maybe not artful (their number was set to Heart). 

As the ringmaster of the show, the actor portraying Dick Pricey covered the most ground. When he was explaining the evolution of art from the Enlightenment through the Industrial Revolution to the Hyper-Consumerist era of today, he was interesting. When he was singing funny little country duets with another character, or running back to the podium sucking wind after leading a masked faux-Cossak dance, he was entertaining. But when he closed his prim mouth and stammered, or in the finale, when he anxiously stripped his clothes off and braved the-road-to-Wellville full-frontally, his uptight, intellectually haughty character seemed to be getting close to conveying the deep reservoir of intense embarrassment that comes along with entertaining a mob. This is the territory I wish he, and the entire troupe really, would’ve explored more deeply. That intersection of real human emotion through experience, together with the overarching theory of the show—that’s closest to where art's amorphous form resides. As it was, most of the time Pricey was just a goofy dude in a Mark Twain suit running through some critical artistic theory like a frosh who had just gotten a hold of Adorno’s Culture Industry for the first time. I mean, sure, you have to love the fact that he was asking, that he was pushing it—the fact that he wasn't at home playing Xbox 360 in the middle of a cloud of meth. But if you were a paying customer last night, you most likely went away thinking: entertaining, yes, and interesting, at times, but maybe not quite artful.

Now, in his new book of essays, Michael Chabon says, “I’d like to believe that…I write to entertain, period.” He says that the human brain is an “organ of entertainment, sensitive at any depth, and over a wide spectrum.” But after years of having video games, and movies based on video games, and reality TV, and game shows and if-it-bleeds-it-leads news programs, and parodies of said programs, all foisted on us under the broad label of “entertainment,” well, no doubt "entertainment" has become something of a dirty word, or at least something of a vacuous word.

Last night, both Jim Walsh with his Hootenanny and the NTUSA with their Chautauqua demonstrated that they are trying to change the game—that entertainment can be good for you (we can save the question of whether that’s as noble of a goal as it sounds for another review). As Chabon writes, “We have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve.”

Chautauqua continues at the Walker Art Center through Jan. 10, walkerartcenter.org

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If you think Wall Street is awash in blood, you should've seen First Avenue last night. At 7 p.m, a healthy hour and a half before Oasis was set to go on, my buddy scalped a pair of tickets in the fourth row--$68 face value--for thirty bucks apiece. Thirty bucks. Fourth row. Floor. Zero negotiation. That was the scalper's IPO.

It was a massacre out there.

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