BEAUTY BY SURPRISE

By Mainly Unexpected Means—

Work from the Cubberley Studios

Curated by Theres Rohan

Meridian Gallery

535 Powell Street, San Francisco

Through December 21

While I was passing the Meridian Gallery down Nob Hill the other lazy day, I let my eyes wander over the sign outside and was promptly stopped in my tracks by the title of the gallery’s current show. I am, I admit, a sucker for group shows: they usually include at least one artist I’ve never heard of worth the visit; so, in I went. And, after a discreet welcome by the eager-eyed staff (I didn’t have the heart to tell them I’m as penniless as most artists: the best I could give them was only words), I let myself sink into an hour of completely unexpected charm.

“By Mainly Unexpected Means—,” as it happens, displays work by 20 artists who have been active at the heart of Silicon Valley, where digital is king and the virtual world is bidding to take over whatever is still left of “analog” culture. That the totalizing grasp of such revolutions always fails (history, like nature, never letting any one thing succeed for very long) is some consolation; that at the very heart of Digitaland the material world and its spiritual extensions are so subtly celebrated makes at least this art lover breathe with relief. Not that the digital world is by any means ignored or scorned here: it is, however, used to deepen our humanity, not to try to replace it.

The exhibit comprises work by artists who have been in residence at the Cubberley Community Center, in Palo Alto. In the Cubberley Visual Artists Studio Program, selected artists are provided with studio space and engage in classes, exhibitions and related activities that bring together the arts and the local community. The current exhibit provides a selection of work by these artists.

And there is some very choice work here. Julia Nelson-Gal’s “Greetings From Kalamazoo” are scrolls made up of found photos and thread, stitched together in rows of narrow bands and suggestive of collage friezes and ancient reading scrolls expressing private fantasies and half-forgotten memories. Inga Infante has a series of little, gray metal boxes, all called (with delicate irony) “Wired,” lined up with dignity on a wall, with tops ajar like doors to tiny closets and lots of white space around each; with décor on the “doors,” wires impishly turned from the boxes (making the viewer wonder what they are connected to); inside the boxes, half-hidden, are curious objects and pictures.

Lois Anderson has a single, small but memorable piece, called “The Knowledge Factory”: a diminutive book made up of a couple dozen paper quires, bound with string so it can’t be opened, with “Withdrawn” ominously stamped, in institutional lettering, on wraparound paste-ons and a title “The Knowledge Factory student power and academic politics in America” making a statement that is clear, provocative and profoundly witty.

Sharon Chinen has perhaps the most sheerly beautiful analog work in the exhibit, with a series of exquisitely delicate pieces in the exhibit’s first gallery: wall hangings made of the thinnest wire and worked into, in some cases, spiderweb-like, in other cases nest-like, in still others crown-like, forms; expressing a combination of hardness and gentleness, strength and fragility, the kind of power that is only revealed through this kind of tenderness and control.

There are two video installations, either of which alone would make a visit to the exhibit worthwhile. Michal Gavish’s “Untitled Frame” is a brief film in which a transparent cloth seems to be hanging in a woodland, swinging in a gentle breeze; printed on the cloth, or appearing and vanishing in multiple-exposure, in long-bygone styles of painting, drawing, and photography, are the faces of an apparently Latin American couple, an older balding man wearing glasses, a woman with sad eyes and unregarded hair, people perhaps from the artist’s past, or from an imaginary past; the only sounds (projected from small speakers above and behind the viewer, who sits in one of two old-fashioned dark wooden chairs that themselves call up memories from early in the last century) of bird calls and distant traffic and the conversations of passersby on an unseen street.

Nora Raggio’s “Geo Wideo” is easy to miss, as it’s placed, alone, in a small room off the gallery’s main lobby, horizontally on the top of a small table. But it would be a shame to pass it over: it’s an example of digital tablet art; the viewer looks down at it from above and watches the piece slowly unfold in silence, screen passing across screen in random sequence and various divisions, revealing forms from nature: dense gray clouds, puddles spotted with tiny bits of natural detritus like floating splinters of stars, indecipherable blurs and flowing streams, and moving lattices of shapes: flowers, leaves, water.

Other standouts in the show include two large-scale archival pigment prints by Peter Foley, densely saturated photographs of interior architectural spaces: “Untitled Red” a pink-tinted empty space almost perfectly symmetrical, with a wrinkled, wall-to-wall carpet in shock red; and “Untitled Blue” a corner of an industrial room in the midst of demolition, viewed from a low angle, with a majestic rip across a panel of sheetrock revealing what looks like an old unused elevator shaft and a car with a door of cobalt blue.

Other work of interest includes photographs of a land installation by Linda Gass, curious “tools” by Ken Edwards, oil paintings by Ann McMillan and watercolors by Marguerite Fletcher, and metal serving platters wittily engraved with common, humiliating commands from childhood (“stand up straight,” “look at me when I’m talking to you”) by Marianne Lettieri.

A performance piece by Lessa Bouchard that is part of the exhibit will be performed on Saturday, December 7, at 4 pm. The exhibition also includes a small catalogue that includes an index of the artists’ websites for the curious.

_____

Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, photographer and filmmaker living in San Francisco. He is author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins and the recent collection, The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs. He is also co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.

David Strathairn in Underneath the Lintel

UNDER THE SUBLIME

Underneath the Lintel

A play by Glen Berger

Starring David Strathairn

Directed by Carey Perloff

American Conservatory Theater

A review by Christopher Bernard

Underneath the Lintel, the one-man play by Glen Berger that is receiving its first ACT production in San Francisco this fall, is a detective story of sorts, though the victim of the crime is not exactly dead – indeed, he is, or at least seems to be, anything but, and the crime is not murder, at least not of the usual sort, though what the victim is a victim of, is certainly most foul. There is even some question whether the crime’s perpetrator even exists.

Nevertheless, the play’s sole performer is most insistent that, if this particular victim exists, the criminal must exist also, and one finds oneself in the end agreeing with him, even excitedly so- if there is this victim, then there must be this criminal. And for reasons that will become clear, many of us will in fact want, even hope for, this very criminal’s existence. So in order to find the criminal, we must first find the victim. And that is where the story begins. Does the victim exist? And if not, where do all those drops of blood lead? To underneath a certain lintel?

(A lintel is a piece of wood (usually) that forms the top of a doorway or window, so “underneath a lintel” is the equivalent of standing in a doorway or leaning out a window. More about this later.)

But, before I continue, let me get some necessary housekeeping out of the way. First, this is one of the most completely successful productions at ACT that I have seen in years. There is an unusually strong balance of acting, producing, directing and scriptwriting that I don’t often find in local theater. The direction is discreet and focused; the acting is skillful, honest and selfless; the set is ingenious but not self-conscious, a back wall cluttered with paraphernalia from productions past, the sort of stuff you would expect to find in a small-town lecture hall, complete with carousel projector and little pull down screen, and the kind of bulky stairs-on-wheels you’d stumble over in a large, public library. And the play offers that blend of entertainment and enigma, puzzlement and illumination, strong feeling, deep thoughtfulness and humane comedy – philosophical in the original sense of the all-involving, all-tormenting, all-hopeful, and sometimes entirely ridiculous, search for truth that is the soul of all great love affairs – that theater, in the wealth of its humanity, can provide more effectively than any other medium.

A graying, slightly befuddled, one-time librarian from Poland (played with the deftest of touches by David Strathairn) walks onstage to give, “for one afternoon only,” a talk – or rather, as the play is subtitled, “An Impressive Presentation of Lovely Evidences,” as he says in his slightly tarnished English. He opens a battered suitcase, in which he says he has collected “scraps” of a life, “evidences” that he hopes will “prove a life, and justify another,” namely, his own.

One day, in 1986, as the librarian was cataloguing books returned through the overnight book-return slot at the library of the small city in Poland where he has lived and worked all his life, one of the books – a much thumbed and annotated Baedeker – had been checked out, according to the last stamp on the inside book slip, 113 years before. The librarian is, naturally, dumbfounded, though also, like the small town functionary he is, indignant and his bureaucratic prowess being put to the test, decides to track down the offender and extract the fine the library, in all its dignity, is due. This, unwittingly for him, leads eventually to a worldwide search – from London to Bonn to Beijing, from New York to Sydney – in a tantalizing quest for the elusive borrower of the spectacularly belated volume; a quest that will cost him his job, his friends, his country, perhaps even his sanity, and may prove to be never-ending, even futile.

At each station of his progress, if that is what one can call it, he picks up a piece of the puzzle, a rag-end of “evidence” of the existence of the borrower, a person he grows to believe is none other than the mythical . . .

One cannot really discuss this play in any detail without being in danger of revealing too much – and yet, if one reveals nothing, one is left without the pleasure of demonstrating to the reader just how deep this artful, profoundly thoughtful and deeply felt play eventually goes, far more than one could possibly have guessed from the frayed bits of evidence and hardly sublimely promising opening – and yet sublime it becomes. So, if the presentation here stutters now and again, withdraws, shies coyly and bids fair to be just a bit too oblique, the writer can only plead extenuating circumstances and, if anything, a great, even perhaps too great, respect for author and players and public. But here we go anyway.

We’ll let it sit at “mythical,” shall we, and let the implications unfold in all their many, searching, reaching, even over-reaching and, yes, tantalizing directions. But I can’t drop it entirely without mentioning that it has something to do with an incident, perhaps apocryphal, during the passion of Jesus of Nazareth, as he dragged his cross among the Roman soldiers through the alleys of Jerusalem on the way to Golgotha, past the homes and shops of the locals, few of whom had any idea who this person might be – just one more troublemaker on his way to what was probably a well-deserved end – when the poor fellow dropped his cross, to rest briefly before the door of a cobbler, where the cobbler was taking a brief break from his labors under his lintel, and, frightened by the looks of the soldiers, the crowd, the other criminals on their way to execution, and the bloody face staring up at him under a nasty looking crown of thorns, the cobbler told the fellow to shove off, get off his stoop, and keep going, and Jesus said he would do so, but the man would have to tarry here until he came again. And, according to the story, the man did tarry, and is still tarrying, until the second coming, or forever: the Wandering Jew, the victim of the one certain “criminal,” God.

____

Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist, essayist, photographer and filmmaker living in San Francisco. He is author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins and the recent collection, The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs. He is also co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.

“Après moi, la revolution . . .”

After the Revolution

A play by Amy Herzog

Aurora Theatre Company

Berkeley, California

Extended through October 6

A review by Christopher Bernard

One of the lessons of the 20^th century was the delusory successes, and persistent failures, of our major political systems, including liberalism and capitalism, and the absolute horrors wrought by what seemed to be the only alternatives, the class collectivism of the left and the racial collectivism of the right.

Now we stand in the early 21^st century, the best of us confused, others stymied, the worst fanatical. We all seem to have been wrong, though some have the learned the “collectivist” lesson too well – “overlearned” it such that we have driven ourselves to a bloody-minded individualism with most of the blood on foreign shores, and, at home, ignorant brains and addicted bodies, bloated self-images, a raging sense of entitlement, a culture of self-deception, and spirits cynical and half-criminal; a spirit of “sinister giddiness” dancing drunkenly across the land.

We have forgotten the moral idealism, some of it deeply inspiring, even when based on shaky premises, of some of those movements we have turned against, in particular, the socialists and communists. It is still difficult for us Americans to speak sanely and rationally – well, about anything, really, but especially about communism, equating it, as we now usually do, with the worst depredations of Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and their ilk. And we are not entirely wrong to do so – except that we forget that the communists in this country, were among those who fought most strongly for the rights of the working man, and, ultimately, the middle class, during the Great Depression, and saw most clearly the dangers of fascism in Europe and at home.

Without the communists, the socialists, the trade unionists, and other members of the radical left of the ’30s and ’40s, we almost certainly would not have the New Deal safety net that the middle class takes for granted today – nor in all likelihood would we have a middle class, despite the neoconservatives’ attempt to destroy it over the last thirty years.

But now we have an opportunity to revisit those issues, and remind ourselves of what we have almost lost, thanks to this enlightening, honest, morally engaging, politically dynamic, intelligent and humane, and very satisfying, play by Amy Herzog, a playwright who is in serious danger of giving the battered and often disdained values of intelligence, good sense, humanism, and moral probity back their good names.

“After the Revolution” – a revolution that, pointedly, never happened – examines three generations of the sort of American family that is rarely shown in popular culture, vociferously political, outraged at the world’s evils and refusing the temptations of moral disengagement, steeped in Marxism and the traditions of the radical left. Emma (played admirably, and endearingly, by Jessica Bates), of the youngest generation, has created a fund, named after her admired dead grandfather, for left-wing causes. The grandfather, who has given his family a memory and legacy of moral integrity and political heroism, was an active communist in the ’30s and ’40s, and a martyr to the McCarthy hearings in the decade following. A series of revelations then ensue, that force the smart, idealistic, forthright and thoroughly likeable Emma to explore, excruciatingly, her family’s past, and the complex of truths, half-truths, and lies, on which she has based, not only her understanding of herself and her world, but of her past and her future.

This play does what the modern play, at its best, can do so well: confront the audience immediately, under a probing, sometimes stark, but never gratuitously harsh, lamp, with the moral, social, and political dilemmas of being a human being at our time, and in our place. The problem play invented by Ibsen lives on and shines.

The relationships in the play are developed with a fine acuity – in particular, between the grandmother (superbly performed by Ellen Ratner), who, like many of the Old Left, remains, at heart, something of a Stalinist, in denial of the revelations of what “Uncle Joe” did throughout his time in power. And the relationship between Emma and her sister, Jess, a drug addict constantly in and out of rehab, provides the play’s most endearingly bizarre laughs. (The druggy, uncensored sister is caught very well, with only a few over-the-top moments, by Sarah Mitchell.)

But the central relationship is between Emma and her father (performed by Rolf Saxon with just the right amount of flaming indignation and helpless bafflement at the moral bind he is caught in), and on this the drama mainly turns, like a door on a hinge. And this relationship – and it is refreshing to see a modern relationship between father and daughter depicted as based on genuine respect and love – shows how even the deepest love between people can trick us into the kindest, and yet most dangerous, temptation of all. Nothing threatens honesty, integrity, truth, so much as love – because love can seem at times, not only to condone, but to require, lying. And this is not only true in family politics, of course, but in politics at large. Because the lies of love of the left have remained with us so foul that, for some, they have fouled that love – a genuine love of humanity and pity for its sufferings – itself.

Someone else who must be mentioned is Peter Kybart, who plays one of the donors to Emma’s fund, a fellow-traveler from decades back, who does not quite understand the depth of Emma’s dilemma, and brushes it off with a breeziness that displays not so much cynicism, as a lack of understanding of the real issues involved (this is one of the play’s weaker moments, as Emma seems too easily persuaded). A further weakness is Emma’s romantic relationship, which unravels with implausible speed as Emma sinks deeper into despair, because of the moral dilemma she finds herself in. The somewhat thankless role of Emma’s lover is ably done by Adrian Anchondo. Emma’s apolitical uncle, a necessary counterweight to the sometimes hopelessly unrealistic political flights of the rest of the family, is played with staunch (but, unfortunately, unexplored in the play) good sense by Victor Talmadge. The fine direction is by Joy Carlin, and the clever, imaginative set by J. B. Wilson.

This play really should be seen by anyone involved in left-wing politics now, or in the last century. And indeed, by anyone who cares about the political prospects of compassion in the cold, bloody early decades of this one.

Christopher Bernard is a poet and novelist living in San Francisco. He is author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins and a book of poems and photographs, The Rose Shipwreck. He is also co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.

 Drone pilots in training

Citizen Taxpayer

By Christopher Bernard

Every April he paid his taxes

(by mail, years ago—today, by the ’net –

he was law-abiding, innocent,

responsible, dutiful, no slacker, not lax, is

our upstanding taxpayer)—

and a penny went

into the hand of a homeland spy

who collected his emails,

tapped his phone,

followed his clicks on the worldwide web,

and saved them forever on servers in a mountain

in the gut of the Rockies, to make him (he said)

safer from the enemies of the United States,

“even if they’re me” (faunlike, nerdlike, he grinned).

The taxpayer, uneasy, returned his grin.

He didn’t mind, no, he got it, the need

in a warlike time

for deeds like these:

security required less liberty.

He had nothing to hide—

oh no, not he!

He wasn’t guilty,

though he felt mildly terrified.

Then he thought, “But that’s what

they want us to be!

The terrorists, that is.

They want us to be horrified, scarified, terrified!”

And he felt properly edified, dutified, mollified.

A penny went

to a caterer in Livermore,

and another to a weapons maker’s part-time chauffeur,

a penny to a Homeland Security clerk,

another to a therapist of a faceless veteran

(his face had been blown off on a road near Najaf),

a penny sequestered

the winter before.

And the taxpayer nodded

shrugged, grunted, and sighed.

He grumbled, “There’s a war on,

it’s not played like canasta.

They want to kill us,

so let’s first kill them.

What would you do, huh?”

A penny went

into the pocket of a drone jockey

who showed his mojo in the snowy state

better than at the local bar,

where he was known to play none too shabby or shoddy darts,

by crashing wedding parties in the Yemen hills

8,000 miles away into a thousand body parts.

A penny went

to the pension of an enhanced interrogator

who, under W., tortured Khalid,

and persons of interest in Waziristan and Kut,

and lives, under Obama,

anonymous, retired,

on the farthest flung of the Florida Keys.

A penny went

to the SEAL who killed bin Laden,

a penny to his boss, his ace buddy, his driver,

to the helicopter pilot who dropped him at Abbottabad’s savage gate,

a penny to a special op at Lahore,

a turned jihadist in Somalia,

a janitor at a black site in Iraq.

A penny went

to a recruiter in Davenport,

Tracy, Laramie, Charlotte,

Peoria, Duluth,

Boise, Stockton, Detroit,

to collect young men and women

“to teach them to kill for me.

Because I pay them.

I pay them all.

I am their paymaster, their leader, their boss.

They do what I pay them to do.

I am Taxpayer.

And what I pay them to do is to kill.”

And he bravely clicked Send My Tax, next April.

_____

Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist, and essayist living in San Francisco. He is author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins (www.regentpress.net/spyintheruins) and co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org).

"Haymaking" by Jules Bastien-Lepage

Haymaking

by Christopher Bernard

It’s a big picture. It appears to be dead noon, under shrilling grasshoppers.

The heat looks as heavy as a vice.

Off center, a peasant, wearing a pair of
eloquently battered boots, dozes under his hat.
A metal pail that once held a mid-day meal
pewters dully in the weeds.

Straw-yellow grays ride up to a line of hay ricks,

low hills, a sky pocked with little clouds.

A woman sits by the peasant’s side, slouching forward,
half asleep, awkward, unaware of the observer,
for a moment lost in a wild country of thought
that fills her thick features,
her surprised and dismayed black eyes,
with . . . well, what might it be?
shock?
fear?
an unexpected, and unwelcome,
discovery? –
Whatever it is, it came to her as she drifted asleep,
and thrust her awake with astonished pain.

There’s no way to know: the painter has told us

only what we see.

We know nothing but this fragment,

nothing before and nothing after –

a quick snapshot in oil

on the magisterial canvas.

Then it’s gone.

You step back into the museum crowd,

and her blind, wondering face,
frozen on canvas for as long as the canvas will last,
disappears behind a wall of cloth and backs
into the gallery’s subdued glow,
and the sounds of shuffling feet,
and the bored, suspicious gaping of the museum guards,
and the scratching scratching scratching on paper pads of art students. . . .

It does not disappear:
it follows you out, into the sun,
nagging, futilely, yet with an odd sweetness –
you ponder the woman in the picture as you might
the most obscure philosophical questions,
the metaphysics of loss, the holiness of unknowing,
or a lover’s impenetrable enigma:

a strangely enchanting question that has no answer.

Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist and critic. He is author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins (http://www.regentpress.net/spyintheruins) and the founder and co-editor of Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org).

The Rose Shipwreck

By Christopher Bernard

Such a shipwreck of flowers – a petaled wreck
on an azure sea, of blood-red salmon 
stained with peach, with a steady clear
tolling of deep bells under a sheer blue sky
half-deafened in the gale – flowers staining 
the sea in disintegrating color, like the heads of children
drowning – and the magnificent ship slowly dissolves
in the whirlwind of its wreckage,
a dream of itself, a littering of its losses
to wind and tide, a fatal cry of roses
brimming its mouth – the thunder heaves a shout,
and the sea rumbles like a vast
train in a tunnel – a flare of lightning
disappears, silent as the shipwreck sinks,
spilling its wreckage across the white floor
of a seasick ballroom, bales of flowers
splitting till the petals cover the wastes,
like the Roman’s feasters, drowning them in roses.

The ghost of a sea swallows the ghost of a ship
under the ghost of a sky: listen, you can hear them,
the ancient sailors singing like the sirens,
calling you to sea – to sea – to sea –
steel gray, enamel blue, and white with foam,
to join the ships that blossom like so many roses
and scatter their petals as they perish, and drown, and sing,
like them, calling the next generation
to sea – to sea – like us – well? will you brave it?

will you build your ships of roses and brave the sea?
or is its storm a terror worse than childhood’s,
not to be escaped, the waves and wind
the white of a cage, the ice and snow cold bars
in a burning sky that seals the world and twists
down on our heads even as we heave
out into the open sea, our white sails out
like butterfly wings, our hopes so many hooks
the wild sea can catch and hold us with,
like love itself, a bark, a cage, a brand?

Shall we build our ships of roses and brave the sea,
that rose of fire, garden where winds take root 
and grow into forests?
Though night is coming, shall we aim our bow toward the dark,
though the storm is coming, shall we spot the thunderhead
and steel our sheets till they thrum in the underwind
and the water flails and hisses over the bulkheads
and churns and cries and crashes in our wakes
like an arrow thrusting us ahead, to sea,
to sea, far out, pushing us till we fly
into the storm? Shall we build our ships
of roses? Shall we flower over the whirlwind sea? 

Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist and critic living in San Francisco. His novel A Spy in the Ruins was published by Regent Press (http://www.regentpress.net/spyintheruins). He is also a co-editor of the literary and arts webzine Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org). “The Rose Shipwreck” was originally published in Caveat Lector.

Josette Day as “Belle” and Jean Marais as “the Beast” in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête.

GIVE ME BACK MY BEAST!

La Belle et la Bête

An Opera by Philip Glass

(based on the film by Jean Cocteau)

The Philip Glass Ensemble, with vocal soloists

Conducted by Michael Riesman

To celebrate Philip Glass’s 75^th birthday, the Philip Glass Ensemble came to San Francisco to perform the magisterial minimalist’s opera, La Belle et la Bête (“Beauty and the Beast,” based on Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve’s celebrated fairy tale).

What makes this work unique is not that Glass based his work on a film; he had already done so with the first of a trilogy of works based on work by the unforgivably talented, unapologetically gay, and compulsive appropriator of surrealist gestes, Jean Cocteau: the chamber opera Orphée.

Here he went a good deal further. He stripped out the entire original soundtrack (which took some gall, as it’s a very fine one, composed by Georges Auric, an original member of the bad boys of French modern music, “Les Six”) and replaced it with an original score, with singing parts for the original spoken ones, the entirety performed live as the film is screened overhead.

And he chose a nearly perfect source, as Cocteau’s 1946 film – with actors Jean Marais, Josette Day, and Raoul Marco, and handsome camera work by Henri Alaken – considered by many critics to be Cocteau’s masterpiece, is a work itself of near-operatic fantasy.

What might have turned out to be one more lamentable exercise in postmodern kitsch is a near-masterpiece, a posthumous collaboration that would probably have tickled the ever-experimenting Cocteau.

The story is almost too well known to recount, yet is told with a few fresh twists: Belle, a Cinderella-like figure, is scorned and exploited by her two wolfish sisters and ne’er-do-well brother, though doted on by a father oblivious to his daughter’s misery – Belle is an unwittingly willing victim, in which those who love her, and even she herself (through an ideology of self-denial that reinforces the victim’s weakness and the power of the dominant – sound familiar?), comply in her servitude. She has a lover, a companion of her irresponsible brother, whom she refuses to marry because she feels bound to take care of her oblivious father, who allows Belle to be bullied and exploited by her two older sisters, who intend to get married and out of the household as soon as they find victims – er, husbands.

The father goes off to the city after promising Belle he will bring her back the only thing she asks for: a rose. After a business venture goes badly awry, he rides back home through a forest at night, where he discovers a magic castle, magically alive, which he enters and is served a feast by magical servants. Later he visits the castle’s garden, where a rosebush blossoms. Remembering his promise, the old man plucks the loveliest rose for his daughter. Upon which the prince of the castle, a hideously deformed monster (in the film, he looks like a giant cat, with sensitive ears that telegraph his feelings, perking him up when he says a prey for his next meal in one of the film’s deftly humorous touches), appears and tells the old man he has committed the one crime that is unforgivable in that castle, and now must die. The old man pleads for his life, and the monster relents, telling him he can go home to give the rose to his daughter, but only if he promises to return.

Once the old man is home again and tells his children of his plight, Belle refuses to let him go back, and goes in his stead, to face death as punishment for her father’s crime. But the monster, upon seeing her, falls instantly in love and instead of killing her, imprisons her in his castle and begins to woo her, even though he is aware that his hideous ugliness makes it impossible for anyone to genuinely love him.

Some men feel a curious self-contempt when they become aware of the strong physical feelings they have for women they admire and love; this story works well as an allegory for this, in an age that likes to pretend it is beyond such callowness.

The film, while never losing its fairy-tale quality, never falls into camp or archness, satire or over-sweetness, even at the dangerous happy-ever-after ending: it has a darkness, a fadedness and grittiness, that gives it, for all its fantasticality, a hardness, an actuality – like any poem worth its salt. This helps make the film’s final transcendence peculiarly credible and moving. Never has wishful thinking had a kinder, more eloquent advocate. (Though the final transformation of the Beast into a prince has disappointed some; is fabled to have made even Marlene Dietrich cry out, “Give me back my Beast!”)

Cocteau, who had made only one film before this one, in 1930, the surrealist classic Blood of a Poet, had refined his cinematic technique so that he knew just how much magic he needed to create in his world: disembodied arms holding candelabra in darkened hallways, disembodied hands pouring wine into the old father’s goblet, the masklike heads carved into the fireplace mantel shifting their eyes in curious glances at the innocent human partaking of his magic fare without so much as a question, Belle moving down a long corridor wafted by curtains blowing from floor-length windows, on invisible wings, without stirring her dress or seeming to move a shoe.

Joining Cocteau’s magie, douceur et poésie is Philip Glass’s. The signature style of the master musical stylist of our time is much in evidence. The essentials are all there: a steady rain of eighth-note ostinati, with the occasional long arpeggio, broken unpredictably by stately static chords; a steady house-music like pace that rarely varies over the 90 minutes of the work; continuous harmonic variation; and a keen sense of orchestration, which his ensemble, which includes several keyboards that can produce a theoretically infinite number of different sounds, makes possible.

Glass does not always avoid the danger of monotony, though what is remarkable is that he fails so rarely. He does this by constantly varying the melodic shape of the rhythmic ostinati and rarely allowing the music to sink into a groove of exact repetition except where such figures work to create a feeling of oppression or suspense. The singing lines are not arias but quickly paced, almost conversational lyrical recitatives, which cut through the ostinati like shards of roughness through what is sometimes an excessive smoothness of musical texture.

One peculiarity (noted by Romancha Pralapa) is that the original film is 94 minutes long, but the opera is only 90 minutes, as Glass, when composing the score, seems to have used a version of the film projected at too fast a speed. The result is that the performers in the film act and speak at just slightly too brisk a tempo, which has the effect of making the film seem a little like old-fashioned screenings of silent films before modern projectors were able to project them at the originally intended speeds.

The Ensemble has this music in their blood and clearly love the score. The admirable singers were Gregory Purnhagen, Hai-Ting Chinn, Marie Mascari, and Peter Stewart.

The opera was performed, as part of San Francisco Performances, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Lam Research Theater.

Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist and critic living in San Francisco. His novel A Spy in the Ruins was published by Regent Press (http://www.regentpress.net/spyintheruins). He is also a co-editor of the literary and arts webzine Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org).