The Kingdom of Not

THE GOOD, THE MAD AND THE MARVELOUS

A review by Christopher Bernard

Occupy Fringe Theatre 2012

San Francisco Fringe Festival at EXIT Theatre

September 5 – 16

In what must be the most varied, if not richest, theatrical feast this year in the Bay

Area, the 21st San Francisco Fringe Festival, under the tireless direction of Christine Augello,

presented 46 shows from some of the most adventurous, small, hungry and fearless theatrical

companies from geographies local, material, and crazily virtual, when not virtually crazy.

What theater fanatic could resist a list of performance titles that included “The Apeman

Cometh,” “Cheesecake and Demerol,” “Crazytown: My First Psychopath,” “The Revolution

Will Not Be Circumcised,” “You Killed Hamlet, or Guilty Creatures Sitting at a Play,” or “The

Wounded Stag and Other Cloven Tales of Enchantment”?

Alas, out of nearly four dozen shows, I could catch only a handful over the festival’s two

weekends, but those never failed to stimulate, entertain, provoke, irritate, inspire, elevate, enrage,

engage, in part or in whole, at once or alternating, in one degree or another, like a slap in the

face, a caress at a party or a cocktail of gin, gasoline and ecstasy, as unexpected as a hand

grenade in a urinal and winning as a romantic dance in the dark – and they always hooked me for

more. And what better can one sincerely ask for?

“Legacy of the Tiger Mother” is a sturdy, highly polished musical by Angela Chan and

Michael Manly (Chan did the music, Chan and Manly the book and lyrics) about the demands

an immigrant Chinese mother makes on her daughter to win a piano competition, the resulting

resentments and incomprehension between the two women, and the eventual, somewhat too tidy

results – including the curious case of repetition syndrome, when the daughter grows up to inflict

the same demands, with similar though not always clearly stated goals, and with similar results,

on her own daughter.

For anyone who secretly applauds tiger mothers everywhere (what today’s kids need is

more discipline and less iPhone, iPod, iPad – less “I,” period), this is both a cautionary tale and

an object lesson: discipline yes, but it needs to have a clear reason and a desirable aim, otherwise

it merely prepares for a rebellion that will be as gratuitous, irrational and destructive as the

insensate, compulsive whip. Though the musical ends before telling us what the granddaughter

will grow up to be, I suspect she’ll belong to the generation to finally throw off the piano scales,

the legacy and the past, and learn the some of the darker lessons of freedom. And why discipline

actually might be a good idea after all.

The story, clichéd as it is, is sometimes cloying, a pitfall in any portrayal of mother-

daughter conflicts and reconciliations – and one wonders what happened to the fathers, uncles,

sons, brothers – the male of the species, who is too conveniently dispatched for plausibility.

The musical is nevertheless saved by a clever book, witty lyrics and charming music, to say

nothing of the performances. Satomi Hoffman and Lynn Craig create the sense of a far larger

cast, a thronging and fascinating presence. Composer/author Angela Chan was the wonderful

accompanist.

“Weird Romance,” which I caught on the same afternoon, presented two interesting one-

acts written by Nick and Lisa Gentile. The first, “Russian Roulette for Lovers,” tells the tale of a

series of bets made by a couple who are about to be married, that lead, through a contrived plot,

to a financial choke-hold between them that is likely to either poison or guarantee their marriage

to a degree that mere love couldn’t hope to match. The cleverness of the writing can’t quite

hide the implausibility of the story, but it was gamely performed by Cassie Powell and William

Leschber.

The second one-act was “Metamorphosize, Mon Amour,” an absurd if not quite

absurdist meeting in a Starbucks for lepidoptera where three maggots in transition between their

larval and butterfly stages gather to discuss the philosophy of biological determinism and free

will in a Darwinian universe. This is another game attempt at being clever and intellectual that

does not quite come off, partly because the philosophy is sometimes annoyingly wrong: the

discussion of Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch was inaccurate – there is no relationship

between it and Darwinian’s theory of natural selection, and Nietzsche was at pains to say so; and

yes, he did have an explicit description of what constitutes the Übermensch, though Chuck, the

sophomoric half-literate maggot, claims he did not: according to Nietzsche, the Übermensch is

able to accept the concept of the Eternal Recurrence of all of life, indeed of all of existence

(including all of human, and animal, suffering from the beginning to the end of history) and

affirm it with a smile on his face and joy in his heart – a difficult thing to do, unless one is either

a sociopath or a moral monster, in our post-Auschwitz world. Nietzsche believed that no human

being could make such an affirmation honestly – we are too “compassionate,” we are

too “sensitive” to the suffering of others and therefore, according to Nietzsche, human beings

end up denigrating the value of life: we can never really accept the world as it is, with all its

enormous, endless and pointless suffering and cruelty and our inevitable mortality. Only a

superhuman might. One may disagree with these ideas, and vigorously so, but one should at least

get them right before submitting them to debate.

I next caught the wonderfully titled but partly disappointing “The Wounded Stag and

Other Cloven Tales of Enchantment,” presented by the Kingdom of Not, which comprises Buddd

[sic] Underwood and The Slow Poisoner. This was a combination live music acts and video

projections with dancing, a kind of nightclub butoh spazzed with satirical relish and a craziness

that dares you to look away – which, given the smallness of the space, I couldn’t easily do.

About midway through the show, there is an extraordinarily powerful sequence in which Buddd

dons a seemingly innocuous mask that, through simple but ingenious lighting, combined with

a darkly demented text and a maze of slow, wild contortions, becomes the very face of evil, a

voodoo of death dancing with obsessive, joyless glee across the world. It was unforgettable and a

sign of a formidable talent. Unfortunately, the numbers flanking the central, grimly entertaining

dance of death felt like fillers and were more abrasive than inspired.

The best is almost always saved for last: the final show I was able to catch before the

crocodile deadline caught me in its jaws was the awkwardly titled “The Good, the Bad and

the Stupid” by the physical comedy troupe Pi. Unfettered by either intellectual or political

pretensions, these highly talented comic acrobats put on a show that was a little mad marvel from

beginning to end. Based loosely on the spaghetti westerns of the 60s (as the title warned), the

troupe found its mojo in one bit of happy lunacy after another. I won’t try to describe what they

did (half the rewards are in their surprises), but you must drop whatever you’re doing when you

hear they’re performing near you, and go. Happiness is more than just a right, after all; it’s a gift

– and they could make you happy for an afternoon, if not Eternally. Really.

Christopher Bernard is a novelist (A Spy in the Ruins) and the founder and coeditor of the

webzine Caveat Lector. Examples of his poetry can be found on the internet at “The Bog of St.

Philinte.”

THE VERTIGO OF IDENTITY

Cindy Sherman

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Through October 8

A review by Christopher Bernard

The largest show of this influential photographer’s work to appear in San Francisco opened recently after appearing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York to a complex response by East Coast critics, with a few questioners, if not quite dissidents, providing leavening to the otherwise universal praise. But a complex response never seemed more appropriate than here.Sherman’s work – often charming and witty, beautifully crafted, and slyly probing – is nearly impossible to dislike. And yet, it seems equally impossible, or even desirable, to fully embrace. Which may be the definition of contemporary artistic greatness.

We on the West Coast can now survey the career (up to now) of this popular, fascinating and troubling artist who has shown, with an almost unfailing sureness of touch, how to combine work of great lightness and skill with penetrating, even disturbing, questions, not least of which is “What is this baffling aberration in a seemingly heartless and mindless universe, a human being?”

The greater part of Sherman’s work is made up of photographs of herself, usually taken in her studio, in costumes, wigs and makeup, depicting imaginary examples of well-known types, from characters in movies to figures from the history of art to eastern seaboard grandes dames. She works in series, her first, and still best known, being the “Untitled Film Stills” from the late 1970s: black-and-white, deliberately cheap-looking but highly evocative fictional stills from imaginary art, noir and B-movies from the ’50s and ’60s; her latest major series is of big, garishly full-color blow-ups of herself made-up as ageing doyennes of high-society. And in the great majority of the pictures,Sherman, like a great actress, a Meryl Streep of the black box, a Shakespeare of a thousand discarded selves, both appears, and disappears, in an imaginary space that recedes infinitely behind the photograph’s slick surface.

In the early ’80s Sherman created a so-called “centerfold” series, large color photos, based  on the centerfolds seen in men’s magazines, of reclining young women, fully clothed but in moments of great emotional vulnerability; examples, not of erotic, but of emotional voyeurism. In these pictures, curiously enough,Shermanis most readily identifiable as herself (as one can see from the occasional candid shots taken of her by other photographers at unguarded moments), with minimal use of costume and makeup, and little more defense than the mask of an expression.

Appearing in the show are also Sherman’s “fairy tale,” “disaster” and “sex pictures” (a peculiarly ugly series, though not surprising: how many artists have ever had a healthy, happy relationship with their own sexuality, candid yet discreet and kind, to themselves, their lovers, and their audience?), a “clown series” (perhaps the only weak images here; creating an artificial identity from an already artificial identity provides the show’s only shruggable moment), grand, booming large-scale photos based on old-master paintings (the so-called “History Portraits”),  a “headshot series” of “ordinary” women (and some males) hiding, so to speak, in full view, and a “fashion” series that sends up the very fashions and designers the pictures ostensibly advertise.

And all of these (except for the relatively few disaster and sex pictures) are of the photographer herself in a myriad masks, this woman of a thousand faces who would put Lon Chaney to shame: the opposite of self-portraits, these are pictures of an artist in full flight, apparently, from the self.

But are they?

It’s impossible to discuss Sherman’s photographs without immediately bringing up the issues of “identity” and selfhood, its continuity or lack thereof, its relation to image, its sabotaging by image, its relation to the construction, and deconstruction, of femininity, sexuality, gender roles, and other biosocial categories, its possible nonexistence outside the funhouse of psychosocial illusion, and so forth.

The very variety of her images – and the peculiar vulnerability that often peeks out through the impasto of costume and mask – suggests something else: the hiddenness of the self, the ego absconditus, behind its image; the image as protective covering, as camouflage, as shield, as tool and, when necessary, as weapon.

I had the unpleasant feeling, after looking hard at Sherman’s photographs for two hours while preparing to write this review, that everyone I passed in the streets outside the museum was wearing a costume. The whole world suddenly looked like a Halloween party. Was it even possible to decipher people based on how they appeared? If their image was so constructed, so contrived, how could I possibly get past it to their “real” thoughts, feelings, selves? Even when they spoke, how could I trust what they were saying? Not if course that they would deliberately lie – but then, how could they help it? Are we all just actors playing out a theatrical illusion of who we think we are, want to be, are afraid we might be?

If you leave the show a little shaken in your certainties about yourself and the world around you (I told myself), you’ve probably had the right reaction. Not thatShermanintends to shake us up. She just likes to dress up, according to her interviews, and always has.

The ultimate photograph in this retrospective, the one that lingers more pertinaciously than any other, was one of the disaster series. At first it just looks like a big picture of a strip of dark red soil, soaked with movie blood or red paint. But then, as I looked at it, I saw it resolve into its actual subject: a crushed, skinned unrecognizable face.

Christopher Bernard is a writer, poet, and critic living in San Francisco. He is author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins and co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.

THE VICTORIANS’ BLISS

The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde, 1860-1900

The Legion of Honor, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Through June 17

A review by Christopher Bernard

For a shining moment in the savage tale called history, pleasure was held as the highest good rather than as the road to damnation for a weak and sinful humanity. Happiness was seen, not only as a legitimate aim, but as the sole aim of human life. What was virtue without pleasure; what indeed is goodness without happiness?

We’re still not sure: our meaner impulses insist on what some may see as a preposterously heroic view of life in the pursuit of money, power, celebrity – if you’re not training for the Olympics, what’s wrong with you? “No pain, no gain” is many a person’s mantra; though to gain what, they don’t always say, or perhaps know. The pursuit of mere pleasure, the right to a happiness made of the sweetness of life, we darkly suspect are signs of laziness and a lack of courage, a romantic withdrawal from the Darwinian struggle, rather than the civilized repudiation of the mindless callousness of nature, of evolution and its economic incarnation, capitalism.
So it’s quite a revelation to be reminded of something many may remember from their art-history classes: in the middle of the era of those old, dull Victorians, the Aesthetic movement flowered for almost two generations, and pleasure, happiness, love, and their objective correlative, beauty, were honored, pursued, worshipped, even adored.

The very success of the movement led to its own repudiation by the early modernists, and much of the art and criticism of the last century dismissed many of its products as kitsch. Yet, as often happens, the impulses behind the repudiated style went underground, and continued to nourish arts less susceptible to public ridicule; in this case, the crafts, home decorations, fabric design – the domestic arts in general. In fact, the very idea of a beautifully designed home, of the “house beautiful,” with stylish but not costly furnishings, that people might actually be able to afford – an idea most of us now take for granted – originated during that time.

And now we have an ambitious exhibit of work from the Aesthetic movement and the sister movements that followed – from the Pre-Raphaelites to art nouveau – now at the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco, that succeeds wonderfully, even spectacularly, in bringing back to the center of our attention this often-dismissed but enormously fecund movement in the arts. Not only is it about “the cult of beauty,” it is itself a feast of beauty and offers revelations around almost every corner.

The exhibit, a model in how to be richly informative and enlightening without condescension or dry academicism, unfolds historically, establishing immediately the harrowing social conditions and the peculiar circumstances that inspired, and made possible, the movement. For Aestheticism was a reaction to the industrialism of mid-Victorianism, to its ugliness and social carnage, and was one of the roots of the various progressive movements, from feminism to the trade union movement to socialism, that germinated in the rich humus of Victorian society.

One of the causes of the movement was sheer embarrassment and shame when, during the international exposition of industrial products presented at the Crystal Palace in 1851, English goods appeared shabby and poorly designed when compared to similar products from France and Germany. Well, the intensely competitive English would not put up with that. And there was, as it were, a national decision to make up for lost time.

In the following decade, such designers as Owen Jones, Edward William Godwin and Christopher Dresser were hard at work creating designs for the home meant to appeal to the eye as much as the pocketbook: wallpaper, cabinets, sideboards, chairs, tea services (regarding the last: some of Dresser’s are so remarkably sleek and functional they remind one of the height of the Bauhaus several generations in the future, and others are so avant-garde they wouldn’t see their like again until a century later, in the studios of Italian designers in the 1970s).

The early years also saw the paintings and poetry of Dante Gabriel Rosetti, the poetry of his sister Christina, the paintings of Edward Burne-Jones and Frederick Leighton, the domestic designs of William Morris (several spectacular examples of which are show highlights) and Frederick Hollyer, Thomas Jeckyll, Philip Webb, and Lewis F. Day, and later on the flowering of the greatest artist of the lot, James McNeill Whistler, two of whose “Symphonies in White” are on display along with a satisfying offering of work by artists and artisans already mentioned, as well as Whistler’s etchings (a deliciously sensual sleeping Venus rests permanently in the mind), and several of the famous Nocturne, Harmony and Arrangement series, not least the famous portrait of Thomas Carlyle.

One gallery is devoted to the influence of the newly discovered Japanese aesthetic and the ancient influence of classicism, now more frankly hedonistic than the usual nod to Roman virtue and Greek grace. Elsewhere there are small gatherings of photographs from the period, in particular the romantic portraits of Julia Margaret Cameron.

Some of the furniture deserves special mention, including “The Seasons” cabinet, by Godwin, of mahogany, satinwood, brass and ivory, with painted and gilt panels (of medieval peasants in seasonal poses of sowing and reaping, possibly painted by Godwin’s wife, Beatrice); the masterly “Ladies and Animals” sideboard by Burne-Jones in trompe-Renaissance style; a tall folding screen, decorated with images of cherry blossoms and birds, by William Nesfield; and another piéce de resistance of pre-emptive modernism, a grand, black Mondriaanesque sideboard by Godwin.

In fact, the most satisfying artwork in the show tends to be in the domestic crafts: a pair of cast copper candlesticks by Philip Webb, of a kind of stout elegance, colored like honeyed gold, and originally designed for William Morris’s Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent; a black wall clock of ebonized mahogany and pained en grisaille; Morris’s big, shimmery, almost statuesque tile panel for Membrand Hall, Devon, richly colored in dark and light greens with pale-brown branches woven among them; a hanging fabric by Lewis Day of faded yellowish narcissi (a favorite flower, emblem and motif of the Aesthetes) against an almost-black background; a nobly subdued study of lilies by Hollyer; simple but elegant, and reportedly comfortable and affordable chairs by Webb and Morris, and a throne-like armchair by Alma-Tadema; and swatchbooks and “grammars of ornament” and books of designs for wallpapers and other domestic uses.

Not that the “high arts” are neglected: besides the Whistlers, there are some fine paintings, including Rosetti’s “Bocca Baciata”; a nude by George F. Watts that presents an Eros frank among the Victorians; Leighton’s study in serene sensualism, “The Bath of Psyche”; and John William Waterhouse’s sweet, if a little overly elaborated, masterpiece, “Saint Cecilia,” where two angels kneel, poised over their viols, wondering whether they should continue playing for the saint sitting in a chair across from them, asleep.

This wonderful exhibit is curated Dr. Lynn Federle Orr, of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and Stephen Calloway, of the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London (the exhibit was seen at the latter museum and at the Musée d’Orsay before coming to San Francisco, its sole U.S. venue).

After spending some time here, you may find yourselves agreeing wholeheartedly with the quote from Richard Jeffries: “The hours when the mind is absorbed in beauty are the only hours we live.”

Christopher Bernard is a San Francisco poet, critic and novelist (A Spy in the Ruins) and co-editor of Caveat Lector magazine (www.caveat-lector.org).

[Article by Christopher Bernard]

What Do the Occupiers Want?

The news media seem confused about what the Occupiers of Wall Street, San Francisco and other cities around America, and now the world, have been demanding. The Occupiers are mad – they’re mad at Wall Street, and mad at the rich, and mad at Republicans and Democrats who have coddled the rich for decades. The pundits and reporters say the protests are all wonderful and signs of a vital and energized democracy – but what in the heck do these people really want?

Jeffery Sachs recently published a new book called “The Price of Civilization.”

Well, the answer is simple: They want the top 1% to pay their fair share of the price of civilization.

For the last thirty years the richest Americans, whether individuals or corporations, have taken for themselves everything they can get their hands on. They have not shared the spectacular gains our economy has made either with the people who work for them, or to pay for the collective actions that make up government, the services we all use, including police protection, transportation systems and the military.

This has resulted from the hyper-individualistic Reaganism that has dominated our national life since the 1980s. But Americans are not merely a collection of individuals seeking to maximize their returns. America is a society, not just an economy, and a society functions well only when everyone pitches in to make it work. The middle class has been doing its part from the very beginning, and over the last few decades has borne the brunt of the costs of our deepening economic and political dysfunctions.

Christopher Bernard is a novelist, poet, and co-founder Caveat Lector magazine. He is an active supporter of Occupy San Francisco.

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Bike Angel

I fly down the hill on my black bike.
I know what I love, I know what I like.
I conquer the slopes on my bike’s back
like a wild black angel, the way I like.

She’s a Raleigh ten-speed, phat and sleek,
titanium light and chrome with slick,
quick to the touch and smooth on the road,
hot and fast and rad and black.

We cut close capers, free and all,
skid on concrete and never fall,
we weave a spell as I ride tall.
The girls smile deeply, all the girls, all.

With her, I’m my own man, we weave and spin
between the traffic, and always win.
Trucks and us, we’re real close kin:
they win with big, we win with spin.

I know all the looks, I know all the moves
as I race my own shadow, the way it grooves
just ahead like a ghost, the way it proves
it’s always beyond me, like storming horse hooves.

I dream as I ride of Larissa and me,
She rode me and rode me like a demon of love.
Then one day . . . the silence went dead like the wind.
Bike and me are now steel heart in a chrome glove.

I learned how to fly the other night.
I put on my shades against the light,
and rode my angel so out of sight
I didn’t need love, I didn’t need light.

I’ve been riding for days now, for months, for years
it feels like; nobody sees me, the tears
in my eyes are like spirits, I remember the day
I left for a long ride – to forget, let’s say.

The sun in my eyes, the wind in my face,
the shadows beside me kept pace, kept pace,
till the turn at hill’s bottom and I came face to face
with a dark car. That was the end of my race.

I conquer the hill on my bike’s back
like a wild black angel, the way I like.
I know what I lost, I know what I like.
I fly down the hill on my black bike.

Christopher Bernard is a widely published writer, critic, playwright and poet, co-founder of the literary and arts magazine, Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org), and author of the novel, A Spy in the Ruins. Contact Bernard at christopherwb@msn.com.

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Rag Elite

Ah, it’s hard to be an elitist,
and not be a defeatist,
in this populist purgato-ry.

You’ve got to feel swell
even as you go to hell,
and remember most of literary
his-to-ry:

there was Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky,
Flaubert, Balzac, Chernychevsky,
Baudelaire and Mallarmé,
frenzied, tragic, or blasé;

there was Thackeray, there was Dickens,
Eliot, George, and no slim pickin’s,
all those Brontes and Jane Austen,
witty, goth, and little costin’,

Lord Tennyson paired with Browning,
Lord Byron and Grace Abounding,
and, not taking up the rear,
the one and only Will Shakespeare,

raving Homer about that roamer
and the burning of Ilium,
Virgil, Dante, Poe, Cervantes,
Aeschylus and Sophocles,
and that ancient Grecian tease
we all know as Euripides,

there was Faulkner, there was Joyce,
there was Hemingway and Stein,
and no writer worth his voice
could refuse the heady wine

of Spencer, Milton, Shelley, Keats,
young Rimbaud and old man Yeats,
and even though the fates
were or-ne-ry,

they’re now Famous and Admired
by librarians and graduate students and professors and junior high school English
teachers and the lame and the retired,
and will be for Eter-ni-ty.

Christopher Bernard is a widely published writer, critic, playwright and poet, co-founder of the literary and arts magazine, Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org), and author of the novel, A Spy in the Ruins. Contact Bernard at christopherwb@msn.com.