logbook

9 sep '99
4 sep '99
22 aug '99
13 aug '99
12 aug '99

9 sep '99

The First World War, by John Keegan

Since my formal education in world history is limited to a high-school senior-year class taught by one of the basketball coaches, most of what I know about World War I comes from a biography of General "Black Jack" Pershing that I read in the fourth grade. So the story told by John Keegan's book is an eye-opener: America shows up late to the party, in the last chapter of ten. Pershing and his Americans arrive in 1917 to a Western Front where each side is utterly exhausted. In the East, the war is already effectively over.

John Keegan's strength has always been his ability to elucidate the underlying technologies used in battle, and their effects on the human combatants. In this book, he has the opportunity to explain several of these that developed in the course of the war: the artillery barrage; poison gas in its various forms, phosgene, chlorine, and lachrymatory; on the seas, the big-gun dreadnought ships; the gradual emergence of tanks. The war was the high-water mark in the use of entrenchment and barbed wire, and this technology, in all its variations, takes center stage in Chapter 6, "Stalemate."

None compared in length, depth, or elaboration with Europe's new frontier of 1915. Measured from Memel on the Baltic to Czernowitz in the Carpathians and from Nieuport in Belgium to the Swiss border near Freiburg, the line of earthworks stretched for nearly 1,300 miles.... [The] new frontier was a ditch, dug deep enough to shelter a man, narrow enough to present a difficult target to plunging artillery fire and kinked at intervals into "traverses," to diffuse blast, splinters or shrapnel and prevent attackers who entered a trench from commanding more than a short stretch with rifle fire.

He cites first-person accounts cogently:

"Artillery was the great leveller," wrote Private T. Jacobs of the 1st West Yorkshire Regiment.... "Nobody could stand more than three hours of sustained shelling before they started feeling sleepy and numb. You're hammered after three hours and you're there for the picking when he comes over."

Keegan briefly touches on the development of airplanes and pilots in the war, and perhaps their romantic mythology outweighed their practical importance. Anticipations of World War II developments, like the blitzkrieg, are described more fully.

All the well-known figures make an appearance in the book, from Gavrilo Princip to Lawrence of Arabia. Keegan's analysis of the warring powers' strategies is measured, but chastening: one draws the conclusion that Germany squandered the chance at victory twice, both in 1914 and in 1918. If his prose style becomes a bit contorted at times, he proves that he can write movingly, with clarity and simplicity, when he counts the war's final toll of casualties.

The book has a number of maps, not all of them clearly designed. This is a fault that has plagued earlier books by Keegan.

4 sep '99

Cabaret, book by Joe Masteroff, music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb, directed by Sam Mendes, co-directed and choreographed by Rob Marshall, Warner Theatre, Washington

This is a touring version of the revival production still running in New York. The plan to use the first rows of the house as cafe seating was compromised by the show's attenuated run in D.C., and was reduced to four tables. Nevertheless, this seating comes into important play, especially during the entr'acte.

This production breathes new life into the material, doing a more thorough job of evoking the bruised, sordid desperation of Weimar Germany, at the expense of some anachronistic-seeming piercings and tattoos. The Emcee's smirk is gone: we are welcome to join him in the joke, but the punch line is now a fist in the mouth. Cliff's homosexuality is less latent in this show; the creeping influence of the Nazis is stylized without becoming too stagey.

The show is spectacularly lit from a design by Peggy Eisenhauer and Mike Baldassari. Pure white appears in the superlative opening image, the Emcee looking through a door's speakeasy peepsight, and in the blinding closing tableau. The otherwise lurid design incorporates a tawdry chase strip run along the house's balcony. On the downside, all this effect means an evil-looking cable run, masking-taped down the center of the house. Overreliance on body mikes leads to awkward blocking, with actors' reactions aimed upstage.

Jackboots in 'Mein Herr' are effective, the casting of a man to play one of the 'Two Ladies' is inspired, and Teri Hatcher's reading of the title song raised the prickles on the back of my neck. Her coked-out, skunk-striped-coifed, death's-head of a Sally Bowles is left waving a broken flag of dubious triumph.

Late summer movie roundup:

• The Matrix, glossy technopiffle for white-collar wage slaves. The opening fight put me in mind of a Gap khakis commercial. Good consonants from Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith.
• The Sixth Sense, a beautiful, smart, emotionally-powerful ghost story, told with fade-ins, nuance, glints, and shadows. Haley Joel Osment is Oscar bait; the reversals in his last scene with Toni Collette had my eyes leaking. Scarier than The Blair Witch Project. A candidate for my ten-best list for the year.
• The Thomas Crown Affair: annoying tacky score; annoying spell-it-out-for-you dialogue; annoying gabby people in the audience; annoying product placements; annoying "museum" that is so not the Metropolitan. Maybe is was worth it to hear Pierce Brosnan mispronounce the name of a small city in Ohio as if it were the capital of Peru.
• La Grande Illusion, in a newly-struck print, an entertaining picaresque hymn to honor from the days of nearly square aspect ratios (1937). A haunted Erich von Stroheim in a weird neck brace. A picture that produces the seeds of Stalag 17, the Hope and Crosby Road pictures, and La cage aux folles.
• Western, from 1998, which appeared in the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Rose Cinemas second-chance series. The Rose Cinemas are gorgeous (even the cupholders don't bang into your knees) and the scheduled repertory is mouth-watering. It makes it easy to ignore the seedy neighborhood and the Salvation Army facility that you pass on the way from the 4 train. Oh, the picture? A diverting buddy pic that largely focuses on picking up girls in Brittany, it uses some puzzling framing and runs out of gas at the end.

22 aug '99

The Tesseract, a novel by Alex Garland

Alex Garland does not stumble over the obstacle of his second novel, a follow-up to The Beach (to be released this winter as a Leo DiCaprio vehicle). The Tesseract shares some elements with the first book: an exotic location, closely observed (in this case, contemporary Manila), and a shady Anglo-American probably involved with drug traffic (in this case, Sean).

Sean is at the bloody center of the first of three linked stories that comprise the novel. An underworld deal has gone wrong, or is about to go wrong -- the details are never specified -- and spectacular violence ensues.

But with the second story, that of Rosa, the book unfolds into explorations of more varied relationships. Rosa comes from a fishing village; now in the city, she is solidly middle-class, but still holds a place in her heart for Lito, whom she left behind.

Lito has a congenital atrophy of the pectoral muscles, and in some respect, each character has a chunk of himself missing, and becomes a little deranged because of it.

That's clearly the case with the third story's Vincente, a street kid whose father disappeared one day, and wealthy Alfredo, whose wife leapt to her death from their 30th-floor balcony. Alfredo's collecting of street kids' dreams, and his unfinished doctoral dissertation, suggest him as an authorial presence in the book.

The final section of the book is more or less effective at weaving these stories together, as all the characters collide in a fatal shootout. More interesting, I think, are the digressionary threads earlier in the book, like the stories of Jojo and Bubot. Likewise the legend of the murderous machete-swinging sugar cane worker, overcome by a dubious red mist, which finds its way into two of the main stories.

The book's design, by Chris Welch, is excellent.

The best that can be said about Brokedown Palace is that co-stars Claire Danes and Kate Beckinsale look really good in their short-bobbed prison haircuts.

Twin Falls Idaho is a sensitive treatment of a special sort of relationship between two people, a pair of conjoined ("Siamese") twins, and a girl who tries to come between them. The movie sets out into blue-tinged David Lynch territory but soon retreats to more conventional ground. The effect of the closing sequences is a mite mawkish and heavy-handed. Nice cameos, however, from Garrett Morris and Lesley Ann Warren.

At the Twin Falls screening, I saw a trailer for Alan Rudolph's Breakfast of Champions, with Bruce Willis, Albert Finney, and Nick Nolte. I'm excited: this picture could be really, really good. Or it could be really, really bad.

13 aug '99

Ballet Tech, Joyce Theatre, New York

The exposed brick walls of the Joyce Theatre are well-suited to this gymnastic-flavored company, who want to make sure that we understand the tech and technique behind a dance performance. At these performances, the grand drape is not dropped during intermissions, which means we can watch the technicians re-gelling the lighting instruments. In most cases, dancers take their final warm-ups onstage, so we get a fascinating, jumbled preview of the movement vocabulary we'll see in performance. The effect is not unlike listening to a symphony orchestra warm up.

This program comprises four of founder Eliot Feld's pieces of gymnastic-flavored choreography. The movement preview is helpful with the first piece, "Play Bach" (1981), a playful, very legible dance, set to J. S. Bach's keyboard Partitas Nos. 1 and 5. The first section features a version of the rub-your-tummy-pat-your-head paired with big, slow grands rondes de jambes. Later sections find lyricism in the old bicycle-wheel calisthenic exercise; Feld turns this into a lift, with the dancer supported by the wheeler's feet. This is a nice bit, but it needs to be executed more lightly. The dancers wear bike shorts, sports bras, and knee pads, and the feeling of the piece is "let's make a fun machine with our bodies."

The highlight of the evening is a sublime solo for Patricia Tuthill, "Kore" (1988). The dancing is by turns liquid and sprouting, then a glorification of a single step, then a long section of impossible-looking floor work: with legs crossed and pulled in, the dancer rolls backward in lazy somersaults. This is from the program description:

Kore (maiden) is a name of ... Persephone, whose light step upon the dry brown hillside was enough to make it fresh and blooming. The Greek poet Sappho writes, "I heard the footfall of the flower spring."

The dance is all that and a bag of chips. Steve Reich provides the score.

"Danzon Cubano" (1978) is a muscular, ethnic thingy that doesn't impress.

The technicians drop the electric pipes so we can see the lighting instruments for "Paper Tiger" (1996). A humorous piece, it suggests Paul Taylor's recent "Oh, You Kid!", especially in its satire of racial stereotypes. It is set to popular songs of the 20's and 30's, sung by "hot licks" master Leon Redbone. The best sections are "Shine on Harvest Moon," in which a duet on the floor explores more of Feld's pretzel logic while a hapless suitor sails above four lifting partners (a Pilobolus sort of effect); and "I Hate a Man Like You," a dance for two that explores the possibilities of being partnered by a man more inert than a sack of potatoes.

You do get some wackos in the back row of the Joyce. My fault for booking tickets on short notice.

12 aug '99

"I have a bad feeling about this."

-- Ewan McGregor's first words as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace

So, let me get this straight: Anakin Skywalker is the Chosen One because his cells have a lot of mitochondria?!

The Blair Witch Project is a victory for low-tech, and Heather Donahue's apology monologue (her face lit from below by a single lamp) is quite excellent, but the flick is only a bit scary.

I giggled incessantly at Dick, but hardly anyone else in the youngish audience did -- I guess you had to be there. Dan Hedaya is spot on as Nixon, without the hunched shoulders done so well by Edward Gero in Nixon's Nixon. Some bits in the movie fall flat, as I suppose must be the case in all satires. Woodstein are lampooned mercilessly, and I liked the cheap-looking digital effects. As for the girls, they discover that when you're in trouble, the best thing to do is scream and run out the front door. Advice for us all to follow.

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