The Post-Postmodernist Cane Shop

Nine years ago in London, Mrs. Buce declared herself in need of a cane walking stick. I consulted my friend Richard who hied us off to James Smith & Son Umbrellas Ltd Est Since (sic?) 1830, at the shag end of New Oxford Street, just before it morphs into Theobald's Road.  It certainly was the very essence of what would want out of a Victorian London retail establishment solid and respectable enough that you could easily picture Prime Minister Gladstone showing up for his periodic umbrella fix (Neville Chamberlain to, I suppose, though perhaps they don't talk about this so much).

Last week in London, Mrs. B. declared herself in need of a replacement cane walking sticthe nine-year-old item having earned, so she felt, an honorable retirement (or at least "senior status" with limited caseload, like the Federal judiciary) and I am pleased to report that James Smith is still doing business in the old-fashioned way,  not one jot iota having been altered in the meantime (save and except some evidently scrupulous dusting and polishing).

This is all wonderful and no doubt the hope of this frisson of satisfaction is part of what drew us back to our former haunts, or haunt.  But all of this urges the question: after 180 years of sedulously exemplifying a particular tradition, can there be anything--anything--that remains of their original unselfconscious self? Mustn't it be true that at this point, just every fragment of the array must be understood as a form of marketing designed perhaps primarily for wide-eyed foreigners who loved to believe--even as they do not really believe--that There'll Always be an England, as long as there is James Smith?

I do not wish to be understood as complaining here.  I will take all this unironized irony with all the grace I can muster and salute them for not falling headlong over into the bin of self-parody.  But I remember another trip to England a few years ago when we spent Christmas Eve at Canterbury Cathedral.  The music was gorgeous (the weather outside was awful, which helped).  And the Canon--the Canon looked for all the world like he ought to be in the cast of a Victorian soaper (probably a Trollope) on Mawsterpiece Theatre.  I found myself wondering: did Mawsterpiece Theatre copy this guy, or did he get to be Canon because he looked like he ought to be on Mawsterpiece Theatre.  I think I  need a pick-me-up.  No thanks, not sherry.

The Tate Boils it Down

The Tate Britain on the North Bank of the Thames in London is a pleasant place to spend an afternoon although I don't suppose anybody would put it at the top of the list of London museums.  A lot of the stuff (the Turners, the Constables, some of the grand portraits) are first-rate but there is a second cut that could easily disappear into storage.

But I think they win the prize in one category--clever, pithy, informative picture captions (or whatever you call those informational notes that hang beside the pictures).  Plenty of places settle for the artist's name, perhaps dates, and leave at that.  But here is a Tate comment, selected more or less at random.  The subject is a self-portrait by William Hogarth:

Hogarth first began this self-portrait in the mid-1730s. X-rays have revealed that at this stage, it showed the artist in a formal coat and wig.  Later, however, he changed these into the more informal cap and clothes seen here.  The oval  canvas containing Hogarth's self-portrait appears propped up on volumes of Shakespeare, Swift and Milton, authors who inspired Hogarth's own commitment to drama, satire and epic poetry.  Hovering above the surface of his palette is the "Line of Beauty and Grace". which underpinned Hogarth's own theories of art.  Hogarth's pug dog, Trump, whose features resemble his, serves as an emblem of the artist's own pugnacious character.

Now I ask you--is it possible to be any more pithy than that?  For a slightly expanded version of same, go here.

The Best Li'l Music Hall in--Anywhere

I made my first trip to Wigmore Hall in London in 1976, to see an early-music rendition of Handel's Messiah.   God only knows why, but I insisted on taking the 12-year-old.  He agreed to go quietly on condition that he could take a book.  This made perfect sense to me, so he settled into Ray Bradbury while I settled into about the best Messiah I' ve ever heard.  At the interval, he raised his head from the printed page and said, "you know, this is pretty good music."

You better believe it, kid.  The performance was fine in itself, but Wigmore Hall--I declare, Wigmore Hall is the single most listenable music venue I've ever set foot in.

Mrs. Buce would agree.  She says she used to hope that when death came to take her, he would find her peacefully asleep in her own bed.  One trip to my favorite venue was enough to convince her to revise her opinion: she now hopes that the inevitable will descend during a Wigmore Hall Sunday morning.

We've been to three performances there in the past two weeks--we were schedule for four but the fourth was cancelled when the performer got sick.   And it never fails.    To my untutored ear, the acoustics are impeccable.  It's a small house and every seat is a good seat (I've tried a lot).  And, not least, the audience: unlike the opera, there is nobody in this house for show.  These are the true music lovers.  They're modest dressers--lots of pullover cardigans and zippered jacket. Some of them come with scores.  There are always a few in wheelchairs.  I wonder how many (okay,  not the wheelchairs) arrive by bicycle.  My guess is that you probably have more semi-pro musicians, more middle school music teachers than any other audience on earth.

There's something on here virtually every night, but Sunday mornings are the best: tickets cost a crummy 12 pounds and they throw in a glass of sherry (not great sherry, but nobody said you had to drink it).  I'm sorry I'm leaving and won't be able to go again soon.  And as I think of it, Wigmore Hall just might be the reason we came to London in the first place.

Brave Coward

Nothing new here except perhaps to me but I want to make note of the Noel Coward revival here in London st the Old Vic.  It's Design for Living, and it' about a threesome, a threeway, a ménage à trois.  Except it isn't really: the point, clearly, was to say as much as the author could get away with about a male romance.  And strictly speaking, he couldn't away with it.  It was banned in London in 1932, though it had a succesful run in New York the next year; it didn't open on its home turf until 1939.

In many way it's classic Coward: nearly three hour of breathlessly witty dialogue, somewhat shambolic plotting,  characterization no more than necessary for the moment,. But the real centerpiece is a long encounter scene at the end of the second act where the two guys get slowly more direct with each other.  Coward gets away with it in probably the only way he could devise for  time when homosexuality was still a serious crime in Britain--he gets them slowly more drunk, as if to give them an excuse for anything important they might say.  A third act is often hilarious in itself but with reference to the larger structure, it is pretty much tacked on--my pal Hal actually thought it was over at the end of the second act and couldn't understand why there weren't any curtain calls or applause.

I suppose a possible lesson here is that if you were going to speak frankly about homosexuality in Britain in 1932, you'd better do it Coward-style: with wit and charm.  There probably isn't any deeper meaning that.  Setting aside the theme, it is good fun, perhaps a bit padded, an easy evening out.  But you've got to admire the courage of somebody who would so much as have tried it in 1932, saying nothing of the grace to make it work.

Two More

I think I'll add two more items to my list of items worth saving from London's National Gallery.

One ought to be a no-brainer.  That would be Rembrandt's Woman Bathing in as Stream, probably Hendrickje Stoffels, his companion for 24 years after his wife died, and the mother of his daughter.  Is it a stretch to say that this might be the sexiest painting in the building.  Granted that you've got nothing like the acres of pink flesh you find in the Rokeby Venus or even the Tiepolo Venus.  But for vibrancy and immediacy this one is hard to beat: it has the kind of electricity that you find in that grand speech of Mistress Quickly's that I was quoting the other day.

The other is perhaps more eccentric.   It is the Portrait of Lord Ribblesdale by John Singer Sargent.  At first blush it strikes you as the very essence of British aristocratic arrogance and presumption.    But maybe not.  Sargent was, after all, an American, however much time he spent abroad.  And it was he who asked His Lordship for a sitting, rather than the other way round.  And the costume is all wrong: apparently his Lordship himself felt queasy about hunting duds, and what is it with the cape?  What we may have, then, is the esssence of British aristocratic arrogance and presumption as seen by an American who really doesn't know what he was talking about.  Mrs.  Buce passes on an anecdote that may through light on the subject: she tells me how the Sargents apparently carted around with them, at some inconvenience and expense, a cherished Chinese porcelain vase--except that it wasn't a Chinese porcelain vase, it was a fake.  Could it be that  Sargent was just not the sort of guy to spot a fake when it was in front of his eyes.

Maybe, maybe not.  Arguing against my case, the Museum blurb reports that the London Times published a copy of the painting with his Lordship's obituary notice rather than the more conventional photo.  Finally--maybe it is my imagination, but could swear that when I was last here nine years ago, Lord Ribblesdale graced the main foyer, where he greeted visitors as they entered.  These days he occupies a more discreet, though hardly obscure post in the interior.  Could it be that the trustees too decided that it was all a misunderstanding?  Or could it be that they decided such a display of Britishness was just carrying a good joker too far?

I Am Getting Tired of Jeanne

In the bathroom of our comfy little rental unit, there's a print portrait, surely a Modigliani.   I think it must be one (of many) of "Jeanne," though I haven't been able to pull it out of the Google catalogue.  She's got the classic Modigliani look--vaguely Egyptian head set on a Botticelli body (though this one is fully clothed).  She's got a little crinkle in her nose and her underlip is turned out.  She seems to be saying "I never saw one that small  before."

I am getting tired of this.

Two Favorites

If I had to single out two paintings to save from destruction at London's National Gallery, I suppose I would say Tiepolo's Allegory of Venus and Time, and Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus.  I won't for a moment pretend that they are "the best" in this collection or any other; they are just the two I want to sit and stare at, or to go back to time after time.

Superficially, they're not at all alike, although there are more similarities than you might notice at first glance.  They're both Italian, for one thing, and within a century of each other.  They both take conventional, often stylized, themes and give them a startling immediacy. 

Tiepolo did his best and most characteristic work in fresco on ceilings--he seems to have spent most of his life thirty feet off the floor.  Venus is not a frescoed ceiling, but it is more like a Tiepolo ceiling than any non-ceiling I know.  You get the startling blue sky, almost infinite in expanse.  You get the figures that seem to float--really, genuinely float--in space (can any other painter achieve that effect, ever?).  And you get the subtly arresting female face--yes, face--that seems to harbor agency and an independent sensibility amid all the apparent grandeur.  I wonder, do people understand how good Tiepolo is with women--how often they seem to be, if not entirely modern, still an advance in individuality over almost everything that his gone before.

The Venus is wonderfully set off by several other Tiepolos, and by items from Giovanni Battista's son Gian Domenico Tiepolo--perhaps not as grand as his father, but a daring and original painter in his own right.  Some have said that Papa Tiepolo is a looser, more relaxed advance on Veronese; if so maybe the son is a comparably looser, more relaxed advance on the father.

The Caravaggio, however different in detail, offers the same startling immediacy at the center--Jesus looking is human and indeed ordinary as any Jesus you've ever seen (how often in life do we meet The Great Man and find that he looks pretty much like anyone else?).  He is flanked by three of those figures who seem to have come right off the Roman street-perhaps because they did come right off the human street, to help Caravaggio establish the human particularity of the moment.

The guidebooks say that the Supper is a transitional item, on the cusp between the early Caravaggios like the androgynous Boy with the Lizard just beside the Supper--a group which, as a whole, I've always found discomfiting--and the later Caravaggio, all "religious" but religious in a manner achieved by nobody before or since.

Those are my keepers, and I'm not at all sure which, if any, I would assign to third place (well, the Rokeby Venus certainly deserves a thought).  For a moment I was going to say I wanted to take them home with me, but no; I think they are well suited to their environment, and I'd rather leave them there to share with the rest of you.  I'm just happy to entertain the thought that I might get to come back and see them again and again.

Empty the Jordan: a Scholarly Enquiry

In Act II, Scene 4 of Shakespeare's Henry IV Part II, at the Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap, Falstaff enters:

[Singing] 'When Arthur first in court,'

And then says:

--Empty the jordan.

Jordan?  The online dictionary gives:

n:   1350–1400;  ME jurdan  urinal, perh. after Jordan,  the river, by coarse jesting.

 In last week's London Globe performance--the nearest  I have ever see, I  suspect, to a Shakespearean original, Shakespeare precedes his mandate and his song with a 45-second episode of epic disencumbrance.  It is all in the best of taste, done from under a flowing blouse with no dangly parts on display. But there can be little doubt that the "jordan"--here a dun-colored clay pot--is well and truly filled.  Fallstaff's  boy dutifully executes his master's command; he attempts first to dump it all back into the wine cask, but Mistress Quickly administers a hearty smack and he scampers offstage.

But here's the thing: the command is right there in the Shakespearean script.  The stage business which precedes it is nowhere to be seen.  Which inspires the question--really, two questions:

• Who was the first Shakespearean scholar, director or dramaturge who first grasped that a jordan, in order to be emptied, must once have been full; or

• Can we assume that this bit of merriment goes right back to the 1590s?

Lazy Day

Lazy Day  in London (perfect weather didn't help) spent mostly at the LRB Bookshop or among the Impressionists at the Courtauld. In the evening, to hear the American novelist Marilynne Robinson chat with a Guardian journalist.  The interviewer was awful, stilted and wooden--I think shy in front of a live audience.  Robinson either shy or self-contained.  A woman of unhesitant opinions but hey, she has spent a lifetime thinking about stuff.  Fun in its way but I'd still rather read the novels, especially this one.

Catching up on a couple of restaurant notes:

• Gascon Cellar next to the Smithfield Market--good wine, good small plates, although I saw the sausage come out of a can.

• Great Queen Street in Covent Garden--actually better than its (favorable) reviews.   Queen not quite as heavy, and they've added a couple of veggie entries.

• Oh, and perhaps the best of them--Barrica on Goodge Street.  Nice tapas, but loud; a two-hour conversation with an old friend, all shouted.

Business didn't seem great at either place, though.

Janet's Dating Service

My friend Janet has a worthwhile proposal for a ladies' dating service. Make the guys send dirty tee-shirt.  Guys are visual but for women it is all about pheremones, might as well cut to the chase.  I guess there'll have to be some sort of disclaimer so the guy doesn't expect the tee-shirt to be returned laundered.

This strikes me as a pendant to the fabric-softener theory of territory-marking. I.e., no man thinks to use fabric softener on his own, so if he smells of the stuff that means he is taken.

Sir Christopher Wren ...

Went to dine with some men
He said, "If anyone calls,
Say I'm designing Saint Paul's."

Clerihew.  To the left is the marvelous Millennium bridge.
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Shakepeare Note: Falstaff at the Globe

I know I tend to natter on too much about Shakespeare, but here's a story that needs to be told.  It involves the Globe Theatre in London--Shakespeare's Globe as it is known to publicists everywhere.   Up to now I've steered clear of the place because it seemed to  me just too sacerdotal, in the sense of a mandatory waystation on the Shakespeare tourist pilgrimage trail.  But here's the thing: space matters.  Whatever else it may be, it is the nearest replica we are ever likely to have of Shakespeare's own performance space.  And now I can testify from experience: I've just seen a production--no, two productions--that certainly come as close as anything ever seen to what original 1590s-Shakespeare ever looked like.

The particular case is Henry IV parts and II which might just as well be called Falstaff  because these are the plays dominated by the fat knight.  And I've really never seen anything like it, or them.  We know that Falstaff is "funny" in some sense, and that Shakespeare had a knack for comedy and drama.  But these two were pure foot-stomping theatre--funny in the sense that music hall is funny, or vaudeville, or comedia dell'arte, or a Punch and Judy show: coarse and vulgar, loud and unsubtle, high energy and full of high spirits.

And like I say, space matters: the actors had to be loud to fill the three-story roofless arena (though I assume Richard Burbage never had to cope with a passing helicopter).  And the audience: the regular folks sat on backless wooden benches, so everybody was squirmy.  And there were groundlings--honest-to-god people (mostly, but not all, young) who stood through the whole show.  A crowd like that comes with attitude; they are ready to be entertained but in specific, preferably noisy and vulgar, ways.

The fulcrum of it all was, as it had to be, Falstaff--here, Roger Allam, well known to London audience as Inspector Javert from Les Miz.   I can't say he was a perfect Falstaff--he isn't even fat,  not really.  But he knew how to play it for laughs, and that is what he did.  As I think back on it, just about every Falstaff I ever saw before now was too solemn: stomping on his own best effects with an air of marmorial splendor.  Here was a Falstaff who didn't mind milking it for every laugh he could get

Mrs. Buce offered a useful insight here: she said that Falstaff actually says a lot of things that are wise, but he can't say them as if they were wise.  They have to come from the gut, as this tun of man defines himself.  And this is what he was able to do.

With a really good Falstaff not a lot can go wrong, and a number of other things did go right here. There was generally great ensemble work in the loud and noisy comedy.  Barbara Marten was a superb Mistress Quickly--tall and thin for once, not short and stout. Jade Williams played Doll Tearsheet with enough  verismo that she kept vomiting into the audience.   And for once, you could tell the difference between the two: some directors seem not to notice.

For Prince Hal, the point is to play not merely the young roisterer but also to harbor the  heart of steel that will make you able to repudiate your best friend in the end.  Jamie Parker got it mostly, not hindered by the fact that he looks a lot like the new Prime Minister, David Cameron.  But for the other not-so-comic parts--well here is a puzzle.  The fact is there are some longuers in thee plays--long passages of narrative description in pretty good verse, but underneath it all pretty tiresome,  In a really good production, you don't notice.  Here, you noticed: when Oliver Parker rolled on as the King, you found yourself looking at your watch.  You had to wonder: how far is this the fault of the actors, how far the director, how far the peculiar constraints of the outdoor stage?  My guess is that a good part of the problem is that they had to cast for people whose voices would carry--who could be understood uttering a Shakespeare line across the acreage even if it wasn't rich in dramatic nuance.

But I'm willing to let that be.  This was still the kind of performance I've been waiting for over a good bit of a lifetime, and that I expect to remember for the rest of it.  Maybe Globe-goers knew this kind of thing all along; I'm just glad that I figured it out eventually.  And meanwhile:

Canst thou deny it? Did not goodwife
Keech, the butcher's wife, come in then and call me
gossip Quickly? coming in to borrow a mess of
vinegar; telling us she had a good dish of prawns;
whereby thou didst desire to eat some; whereby I
told thee they were ill for a green wound? And
didst thou not, when she was gone down stairs,
desire me to be no more so familiarity with such
poor people; saying that ere long they should call
me madam? And didst thou not kiss me and bid me
fetch thee thirty shillings? I put thee now to thy
book-oath: deny it, if thou canst.

 That's Mistress Quickly, berating Sir John for breaking his promise of marriage, and it reduces me to butter

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The Tate Ex-Modern

Popped in for a call at the Tate Modern on the South Bank here in London yesterday and was reminded again at just how quaint and old-fashioned the very idea of "modern" has become.  Not shopworn exactly: this is a pleasant space to be in and it's hugely popular; one hears talk of twice the number of visitors they expected, and there at work on a new wing.

But the conventional centerpiece here is a nicely-laid-out set of galleries offering a (ahem) history of what happened in the art world after World War II.  Indeed the centerpiece of the centerpiece is an instructive pairing of a Claude Monet--i.e. pre-1926--with a Jackson Pollock, so as to illustrate the birth of abstract. expressionism.  For an audience for whom Picasso is about as dead as Leonardo, this is certainly helpful but at the end of the day it is the presentation of a received tradition.  Which is not a complaint; the point, rather, is--how could it be anything else?  Indeed the stuff two rooms down makes the point one better.  What we have here is a multimedia presentation from Joan Jonas--she's my age, frevvins sakes--of which the motive force is a carousel slide projector.   Faithful fans of Mad Men will recognize the carousel as a piece of technology whose very existence needs to be explained.

[There are, of course, temporary exhibits.  The current showpiece is something on "Voyeurism" which, in a city that no doubt leads the world for CCTV cameras, strikes me as a pretty good joke.]

Of course I don't see how it could be any other way.  Once you've designated a space and opened it to the public for presentations you've settled all the relevant questions.  But it's still, as I say a pleasant space to be in.  Indeed one of the gems of London is the cafe/bar on the seventh floor.  The baristas (sic, not bartenders?) up there could I suppose give you a bit of helpful instruction on the matter of why Damien Hirst is so passé.  But the real draw is the north-facing patio with its view of the Millennium Bridge and the dome of  St. Paul's.  For my money that dome is one of the most perfect pieces of architecture in the world and so I am happy to pay museum prices to kill off a bottle of fizzy water up there. But it is a good joke that the best thing about the Tate Modern is the view of something built before 1700.