The Suzman Cleopatra

I was telling the keeper of the Chez Buce Netflix queue that my favorite Antony and Cleopatra--indeed, the only good one I had ever seen before just now--was the Jonathan Miller BBC staging with Jane LaPotaire, which some would think of a the "alternative" A&C.  This is the one where Cleo is emphatically not a sex goddess: she is an aging ex-charmer playing out the last cards in her deck.  This has always seemed exactly right to me and I've been meaning for some time to seek it out and take another look.

This looked like it would be the occasion. But somehow (the fault may well have been mine) we got our wires crosses and came up with an entirely different production--the Royal Shakespeare Company presentation with Janet (not Jane) Suzman, which neither of us had ever seen before. A lucky accident: this is a thrilling production and I'm surprised and a bit sorry for myself that I had never seen it before. 

It's a bit of a surprise in one respect: watching, I assumed that the Suzman must be later than (and influenced by) the LaPotaire.  But no: the Suzman is from 1974 and the LaPotaire from 1981.  This is an eye-opener for me (at least) in that Suzman, too, plays Cleo as an aging charmer who has to work harder and harder with the resources she has on hand.   It's not so explicit as (I remember) the Potaire, but it's certainly not Elizabeth Taylor, nor any of the array of Cleopatras who seem to think they are covering for Brigitte Bardot.

I should say a word, too, about Richard Johnson as her Antony--again, not a toyboy but a weathered old soldier full of possibilities that will no longer be explored.  I thought he got off to a shaky start but in the middle, as his world begins to fall apart around him, he really soared.  I see by Dr. Google that LaPotaire's Antony was Colin Blakely who ought to  be up to the role.  But oddly enough, right now (i.e.,not having seen it for years) I can't even bring him to mind.

Must be an old guy thing: I find myself more and more attracted to the task of reviewing old favorites, even if in new guise, rather than tackling something completely new. Now, if we can scare up a copy of the Miller/LaPotaire. ...

More Munich

More loose change about Munich:

• I do love that public transport. Ain't cheap but what is these days?  And it is friction free.  You buy a ticket with a credit card, from the machine. It works first time, unlike Paris, where it never seemed to work at all.  You get a multi-day pass; you validate once and then Bob's your uncle: you hop on, hop off as convenient.  If you go bare you risk being tagged with a 40 Euro fine but in a week, I never saw an inspector.  I suspect the main risk is that someday you just forget to put the ticket in your pocket.

The whole system is well signed and it is hard to make a mistake but that's the beauty part: if you do make a mistake--get on the wrong trolley, get off at the wrong stop--you can just debark and try again.  No fumbling for change transfers, etc.

• But now, about bicycles.  Munich is flat and so bike-friendly (except, I suppose, in snow).  Like Amsterdam, but that's the interesting part: Amsterdam cyclists chug along on old clunkers at a crawl. Munich wheels are fancier (though not as fancy as you might expect from the town that invented the BMW).  More important, Munich cyclists like to go fast.  It's not as if they are trying to hit you; they just assume you know the rules and if not, why then it's your problem (and guess what: most pedestrians, not fancying death or mutilation, just get out of the way).

Bike lanes?  Strictly speaking, yes, and everywhere.  But this is the one part of the system that really does not work.  One, the markings can be really obscure, especially at corners or crossings.  And two, the cyclist's attitude is, ahem, casual. One would think the lanes sort into "bike" and "non-bike."  But for the cyclists, the choice seems to be "default" and "whenever convenient."

• One more--actually, two more--stories that confirm our prejudice about Germans.  One, a 70ish lady knocking back a coffee at the train station. At her elbow is a backpack--I'd guess 50 pounds.  She is carefully decked out in sensible travel togs and I'm betting the pack is sensibly decked out also.  Thing is, this is not a street person: she's just a citizen on walkabout.

And two--Mrs. B noted this one--couples on the transit. Elderly, which is to say a bit younger than ourselves. Both lean, and both tanned.  Well, it is July, so just back from holiday?

This is puzzling, particularly because of a third fact that comes to mind. That is: Munchkins (yes?) aren't as fat as I remember them. Ten years ago they had stereotypical beer bellies (at least the guys).  These days, a few.  And yet you still seem to see them kicking back with those industrial-strengh glasses (I'm betting the name is "medium").  Sometimes for breakfast.

• And now, two more gustatory insights, but more bewildering. The  subject is food.

One, dignified lady in her 50s in for a late lunch.  She ordered, and them demurely devoured (a) a piece of Sacher torte; (b) a cup of cocoa; and ( c) a glass of prosecco.

Two: another one of those dignified older couples--lean again and this time tall. They ordered giant iced coffees mit  schlag and, I think, a dollop of vanilla ice cream. She honors the treat's arrival by upending into it the sugar canister. Go figure.

• And a surprise.  Food's pretty good, actually.  Of course we were eating somewhat high end bit the stuff in the supermarket was at least acceptable, often much better than that.

• One puzzle: what's this about dressing up for the opera?  You see dressy people at the Met, but also tramps (that would be me, your honor).  San Francisco is mostly tramps.  Munich--well, I guess they don't throw you out if you show up in tee-shirt and jeans, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear someone in the lobby mutter the German equivalent of "you're not from around here, are you, buddy?" 

So, lovely place.  Pity about the Nazi past.  We did listen for a while to a tour guide--woman of 40 or so--who talked frankly about the evil years, pointed out the (beer hall?) where the party got its name, described the route of the comic-opera putsch.  She also showed us the site of the 72 Olympics and waxed lyrical about what a success they were. Yes, but.

Home Again (Munich)

Back again--this time from Munich, with a side trip to Bregenz in Austria, this last for a taste of the Bregenzer Festspiele, hitherto unknown to me. That would comprise--let me count here--ah, yes, six--operas in about ten days which is perhaps almost too much for any taste, but at least enough to justify such a trip.  In sum: inevitably the performances varied somewhat in quality although happily. there really wasn't a clinker in the lot.

The array did include on bona fide premier--something called Tales from Vienna Woods, but no, not that one, another one, on a script by (it says here) "the Austro- Hungarian writer Ödön von Horváth" (who?).  The program notes describe it as "a bitter satire about the mendacity and brutality of the petite-bourgeoisie," so no surprise that von Horváth tried to get a score out of Kurt Weill, he of The Threepenny Opera.  Evidently his efforts came to no avail and it lay dormant until this current production, with libretto by Michael Sturminger (who also directed) and music by HK Gruber. On that last you may well say "who?" again but evidently he has a certain celebrity in Austria (where he was born), both as a composer and as conductor of the BBC Philharmonic (local boy makes good). I hadn't done my homework and my German is zilch so the narrative was pretty much lost on me, but if you close your eyes (and stay awake) the music is listenable in its post-Schoenbergian BBC sort of way. Still, you'd better be warned: if you really want to hear it, you'd better hop on over to Bregenz right now, in time for the performance on August 3, its last in the current run, not likely to be repeated (I suspect) for a long while.

Far more memorable was the other Bregenz offering--The Magic Flute ,decked out as what may be the most expensive and dangerous opera performance I've ever seen (and yes, I did see Julie Taymor's giant puppet version (or giant-puppet version) at the Met back in 2006). Evidently Bregenz does this sort of thing: they've got am artificial island offshore but within earshot of an outdoor seating array; it just cries out for traditional spectacle crossbred with Cirque de Soleil.  At least one of my traveling companions thought Mozart would be offended by this travesty but I'm not so sure.  The music is glorious in any costume and the Masonic symbolism, if you care about that sort of thing, comes through just as well on the back of a giant plastic turtle as it does on Julie Taymor's massive jungle gym.  Now that I think of it, my first Magic Flute was the Ingemar Bergman's film version.  I saw that in Hartford, CN, around Christmas, 1975, where I was a little seasick-drunk on cheap sweet holiday sherry, and a script that could survive those limitations is surely ready for anything.

Back in Munich, perhaps a high point was that we got to here Anja Harteros twice--once in the title role of Tosca and later as Leonora in La Forza del Destino.  Here she is doing "Pace, Pace, Mio Dio," in the same staging and the same house a few months back:

I'll save a few more scattered thoughts about Munich and its opera for another day.

The Cartel Puzzle

Here's a homework assignment to occupy your minds while I'm away.*  In the winter/spring of 1901, J. P. Morgan and his minions assembled what became if not the first, then certainly one of the greatest, of industrial cartels.  The venture  made millionaires out of countless plodding managers who had surely never dreamt of wealth on anything like so grand a scale.  During its first year of operation (per Wiki) it comprised something like 67 percent of the nation's steel production.

It would be fascinating to look inside the mind of Morgan as he orchestrated this great edifice.  Money of course; Morgan clearly loved money.  Yet even more than money, he seems to have loved power, and together with power, good order.  Morgan clearly found competition anarchic and, worse, wasteful A part of him very likely believed that by creating US Steel, he had built an enterprise that would make a better life for it workers and its customers as well as its owners.

Perhaps he did.  Yet it is clear that he also created a virtual showcase for the economic vices of the cartel: a company almost Ottoman in its sluggish complacency--a company which, in after the miracle of its creation, seems never to have done anything innovative or ground-breaking in industrial history ever again.  You could see all this, if not before, then in the post-World-War-II period when the great behemoth painfully lurched towards irrelevance.  As upstarts around the world began to devise new ways to do an old business, USS (and, yes, its unions) slowly choked on a virtual edema of excuses and evasions.

Now compare US Steel with ATT, "the telephone company," another and even more explicit monopoly/cartel, created just six years later.  It's easy to forget in the mist of time that ATT did not begin life as the "natural monopoly" as so many people may age were long habituated to regard it.  No: it took unction  and guile and a lot of hard work to clothe  the original telephone idea with the garment of universality that gaze the system its sanctity.

But here's the fascinating parallel.  As I say, USS (would anybody argue with this?) never innovated anything.  Meanwhile ATT in 1925, still just at the beginning of its ascent to dominance, spun off what may well be the most enduringly creative research institution in the history of the United States, maybe the world.

For valuable prizes, why did one company become USS and the other become ATT?

--
*Oh, didn't I mention?   We're off to Europe for some summertime opera.  No, not Wagner, we don't do Wagner.

Ending the Great Stagnation: Some Practical Issues

I don't know if it's just happenstance or just me but the flavor du jour of a lot of my reading lately has been how we've just got to do something to dig ourselves out from under this debt mountain.   Public, maybe, okay, maybe not, but certainly private--the great ice cornice of mortgage debt that still hangs over our head from the aughts, and the.  Also maybe the fiery implacable demon of student loan debt whose menace is, I suspect, still only beginning to sink in on us.

Yes, well, right, sure.  But as to mortgage debt in particular--just exactly how would you do it?  As a matter of simple politics, we've  observed from the beginning  that there's large  and well-disciplined        view that any effort to assist these deadbeats  borrowers would be about as unpopular as it was to      succor the cigar-chomping gluttons perched atop the mountains of gold merde in the vaults of  Wall Street.

Yes well again.  But suppose we overrode the moral objections and soothed the instrumental fears, just exactly should we do?   Leave debtors in  possession of their homes with lower liabilities?    Write down a whole bunch of principal?  Have a jubilee?

I know the standard way to stick it to the man in creditor's rights is inflation: pay off the expensive debts with inflated confetti money.  Even if that were a good idea, it doesn't seem to be in the offing, so set it aside. I gather also that in the 30s, the Feds did engage in a kind of mortgage relief program where they bought up debt on the cheap, then refinanced with the magic of triple tax free, leaving the debtors in possession under a more tolerable burden (do I have this right?).   I know (this time I'm more sure) that the Supreme Court invalidated a farm bankruptcy law, only to to pirouette around and endorse an almost-indistinguishable statute a couple of years later. Good stories both, but do they matter to us now?

Oh, and there's that little matter of who takes the fall here--who owns those bond we want to write down?  I haven't seen or constructed a comprehensive flow of funds statement here, but I'm thinking of all those pension funds, grotesquely underfunded, scrambling for yield to meet their magical-thinking projections, happy to price as "safe" any borrower with a pulse. The pensions funds. Oh. Right. That would be me.

Kazan and the Conventions of Ethnic Casting

A bit of a followup on that last, only tangentially familial.  Main point: I'm amused to note that the family in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is named "Nolan," and  if I heard right, they are identified as "Irish."  I also I think I once heard mama say "dhrink," as in "the dhrink," supposed to kill so many Irishmen.  But if so, that was the only bit of Irish dialect among the main characters in the whole show. There was a bit of an Irish accent on the cop and the bartender--as in, I guess, how could a cop or a bartender in early-1900s New York not be Irish?

But meanwhile--if they are so Irish, how come Grandma has a German accent?  Did they bring the wrong person home from Eldercare?  I haven't any idea because, so far as I can tell, neither cast nor director ever troubled to wonder.

I know I know--we're going back to a world where, e.g., two white guys could surf through their careers  as the showpiece of a family comedy about black folks?  And Mrs. Nussbaum ("Pansy")  in "Allen's Alley" could regale her host with stories about  "meine husband Pierre"?  I loved Mrs. Nussbaum when I was young but as I guess I've said, and I had only the dimmest notion of what might be funny about such an absurdist name--heck, I scarcely knew what a Jew was.

Which brings me to another example from my mothers library.  My mother was a great fan of Angela Thirkell, the author (though I'll bet she preferred to be called "authoress") of half a dozen potboilers novels about life in her beloved Barsetshire--any comparison to Trollope's original is actionable.  In adulthood I read one, mainly because I was curious to get acquaint with my mother's taste and for all my smart mouth remarks, I suppose they are okay a what they are, but not to my taste.  Might just be a generational thing.

In the one I read--it must have been Cheerfulness Breaks In (1940)--our protagonist takes in a bunch of refugees from pre-war (or early-war) Europe.   The refugees turn out to be prickly, contentious, demanding, all round a damn nuisance.  In response to which our protagonist maintains a stoic British decorum.

The modern reader will be excused for saying "right, Jewish."  I mean, who else would have  irritated a proper Englishwoman at just this time in just this way?  Fine.  but the  question is: did Thirkell know and want to conceal her knowledge from the readers, and if so, for what reason?  Bad for business?  Active malice?  Just doesn't give a damn?  Or was Thirkell simply ignorant of what she was saying, as I suspect my mother, as one of Thirkell's readers, would have been ignorant herself?

Afterthought: I suppose this kind of blindness never ends.  In 1982, producer-director Wayne Wang served up the film Chan is Missing, supposed to provide a liberated view of San Francisco's Chinatown. The lead actor was Japanese.

My Mother and Betty Smith and Elia Kazan.

"You can skip this one if you like, that's fine."  So Mrs. Buce, the keeper of the Netflix queue.  The topic was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from 1945, Elia Kazan's first, which she remembers* as a favorite of her childhood.--"No, actually, I'd like to.  It was a favorite of my mother's.  I remember it myself."

Turns out my memory is a bit sideways here.  On careful examination, I don't think I ever did see the movie before, although I'm reasonably sure I read the book--the Betty Smith novel which I see was the a Book-of-the-Month club selection in 1943.  I doubt very much that I actually read it at the age of seven but those charmers did tend to hang around, and even though I wasn't that great a reader in those days, I can imagine I did idle away a few hours with it around, say maybe 1948.

Whatever.  It certainly is a watchable movie, put together, it seems, by a guy who knew from the beginning how to make things happen on the screen.  I suppose it's excusable to indulge in a furtive smirk at the sheer gauzy niceness of it all:  life on the ragged edge of nothing in a world where nobody--not even papa--is anything other than decent and honorable and brimming with good will.

I suppose this is the way my mother liked to remember her own childhood, but here we're getting to the interesting part: my mother's own childhood must have been, in its own way, pretty tough.   In the movie, Dorothy McGuire had only two, then three, children.  My own mother was one of eight, then seven.  McGuire's husband is a feckless charmer, fatally given to "the thrink," as they call it in one of the few perfunctory attempts at an Irish accent.   He dies, leaving mama to pick up after him.  My mother's father also died early.  I never heard a hint that he was subject to any comparable vice; indeed, I never heard anybody say an unkind word about him at all.

Yet it must be that he left a merry old mess behind him.   And however kind the memories, the word "feckless" might not be too far off the mark. I know he left Sweden to go to sea, and later fetched up in the United States--I suppose he just overstayed his liberty.  I know he farmed for a while--if you can call it farming, in Southern New Hampshire where the principal crop, then and now, would be rocks.  I have no reason to suppose he had any experience on the farm--or knack for it either, seeing as how he carted his family out there in 1901 and back in 1907 (my mother would have been born there, in 1902).     Beyond that, I don't know much.  I had had it in my mind that he worked as a milkman--a good job, I suppose, for a likable guy who knows how to get  up early.  Lately I was told that there's a death certificate saying that he was working in a tea room. Say again, a tea room?  The milkman who came and stayed?

Anyway, here we have the widow left with eight, then seven, children (the youngest died, so my memory tells me, the same week).  If I have my dates right, the oldest would have been 16.   My grandmother succeeded in holding this family together--a fact which astonishes me more with each passing year.

And here is where life and movie begin to merge in a puzzling way,  My mother never made the slightest effort to conceal her humble provenance.   She liked to tell the story, a least in outline as I  have done year.  Yet it can't have been that smooth.  It can't have been, like the movie,  a life in which the rough places are all made so smooth.   Was she kidding herself?   I doubt it not her style.  Was she concealing stuff?  Possibly--she did keep back a couple of gnarly stories until I was an adult, but not enough to break this thread.  My best guess is that she just preferred the gauzier version and let it be.

----
*Not to put too fine a point on it, if I was too young for the first showing, I can't imagine how she could have seen it at all. --"Are you holding back on me about this age thing?" I asked. You think after 35 years I'd know. --"No, no, I must have seen it in some kind of rerun."  Rerun?  Did we have reruns in those days?

Fun Fact:  I see a scriptwriting credit goes to Tess Slesinger, whose novel The Unposessed, about Greenwich Village, is witty and acerb, not gauzy in the least.

Bach Log: The Leper

Our sixth night on the Bach Cantatas, this one comprising BWVs 72, Alles nur nach Gottes Willen (Everything following God's will alone);  73, Herr, wie du willt, so schicks mit mir (Lord, do with me as You will);  111, Was mein Gott will, das g'scheh allzeit (What my God wants, may it always happen); and 156, Ich steh mit einem Fuß im Grabe (I am standing with one foot in the grave).*   The common theme here is submission and stoic (yes?) acceptance of some pretty grim stuff--a pervasive theme is the healing of the leper.  Makes you wonder what the audience had experienced during the week which they are now encouraged to interpret through music and Biblical text.   There is always, of course, the promise of succor from God; or more precisely, Jesus: he will remember you, he will provide.  Mrs. B, who grew up Catholic in a German-American household, remarks on how much the theology reminds her of her own beginnings and wonders whether the Lutherans and the Catholics were closer on points of doctrine than the Great and Good in her own life instructed her to believe.

But for solace, forget about Jesus and consider the oboe: so frequently we find it called into service to take the rough edges off the text.  I wonder did Bach invent this use of the oboe, or is he merely deploying a still devised by his predecessors?

The selection does include the  most dramatic and dynamic chorus we've heard so far--from BWV 72, "Alles nur nach Gottes Willen:"  Here's the whole of BWV 72, from the Bach Collegium Japan:

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*And yes, I see I really do need to standardize my form of citation. If I'm conscientious, I'll go back and try to make the earlier entries consistent this format.

Woll on Bank Bailouts

Props to Henry Farrell for putting me onto the imperfect-but-still-superb account by Cornelia Woll, offering a comparative analysis of bank bailouts.   It's the only thing that I know of that so much as tackles this ambitious line of inquiry and the fact that it might have been better is only a quibble.

Woll analyses six cases: USA, Britain, France, Germany, Ireland and Denmark (with some useful side comments on Iceland).  The takeaway: it's complicated.  Every case is different, thanks to chance and the alchemy of local circumstance.  Still, she offers a valuable framework: how far (and how) did any individual nation solve its problem through the collective action of bankers, how far via taxpayer intervention.   The "collective action" prize pretty clearly goes to France where a small gaggle of insiders who went to the same schools and built the same resumes (I'll bet they lunch at the same restaurant) were able to come up with a package that seems to have worked with efficiency and at relatively low cost.  Apparently some say the sovereign could have squeezed the bankers to pay a bit more but so far as I can tell, the political backlash has been only modest.  Oak leaf cluster to Denmark where a smaller country with an (apparently) tougher problem seemed to be able to deploy a tradition of collective effort and cut through problems that prove insoluble elsewhere (or wait a minute--maybe I just said that Denmark did better even than France).

On the "collective action: continuum, perhaps the extreme opposite may be the United States, where the possibility of solving the problem within the banking community seems never to have gotten much thought.  Odd, perhaps, when you recall that New York bankers did an impressive job of pulling together in the Long Term Capital Management fiasco just 21 years before.  Perhaps inevitably, the US wins also in terms of number of dollars pumped into the system--though in percentage terms, it seems to me they score fairly well (returns still aren't all in on how much it actually cost).    Germany and Britain seem to me to have performed in a somewhat similar manner: aggressive public intervention once it became clear that private collective action was going nowhere.  

Which leaves Ireland. By Wolls' account--and so far as I know, just about everybody else's, Ireland's response seems to have been the most amateurish and ham-handed: panicky response to individual crises with not so much as hint of an overall strategy.  Woll seems to sure the common view that Ireland's response proved costly to the state. She also argues for the less obvious proposition that it didn't help bankers much either: individual bankers may have come off worse in Ireland than in any of the others.

All this is wonderful but I can identify at least to respects in which she might have done better.  One, for all her superb general analysis, her individual narrative chronologies.   It's often quite unclear just why she is telling you what and when.  And I don't see any point at all to laundry-lists of individual names.  Perhaps the point is to show you just how individual each case is. Perhaps, but a lot gets lost in the shuffle. For example, I can believe the Irish case was an expensive shamble, although I'm not sure ever specifies just where the expense came about and how it could have been avoided.

A larger point: Woll presents her cases in the frame of a power play between banks and "government," perhaps better "the public."  She seems to take it as a given that a bailout/solution is good to the degree that it dumps costs on banks and not on the public.  My instincts tell me this is true. But as I read on, I realized that she never told me just why this is true: is there a clear moral or functional reason why banks instead of the public ought to be the payer-of-first-resort?  To my surprise, I realize that I am not so sure. I suppose the very fact that I am thinking about the issue is some testimony to her acuity in laying out the issues.  

The New Panhandlers

I'm not sure quite why, but I'm pretty sure we are experiencing an increase in the number of panhandlers on the streets of Palookaville this summer, walking the sidewalks or perhaps positioned with their dogs and tin cups,  holding up "Help Me!" signs outside (say) the supermarket.  And in particular, what I think is a novelty: the number who are  pretty,  or at least personable, young women.  

My guess is that these  are not actually hookers--no dimple-length short shorts, no garish lipstick, no Swedish-housemaid wigs.  And to be fair, I don't think they are getting much hooker traffic: we're talkin' full daylight here, in the ordinary humdrum shopping strip.  It would take a particular kind of raw  courage or blind lust to try to leverage this offer into an opportunity.  As to the girls themselves, I suspect the thought has never crossed their mind and that they would be shocked and horrified if did.  Indeed my next guess is that at least some of these are fairly ordinary middle class kids, temporarily short perhaps but not well schooled  in the exigencies of street survival.    And I hate to think of the crashing revelation that settles on them the first time some lizard rolls up and says "hi sweetie, $20 for a #$%@ &^$?"