Captain Ahab Does Not Need Your God-damned GPS

Previously, William Wordsworth shared his thoughts on those who cannot tear their eyes away from their "smart" phones. And now Captain Ahab discusses the pros and cons of using a GPS, or Global Positioning System:

Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered: "Foolish toy! babies' plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores, and Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man's eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth's horizon are the glances of man's eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!" dashing it to the deck, "no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship's compass, and the level dead-reckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and show me my place on the sea. Aye," lighting from the boat to the deck, "thus I trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!"

Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter CXVIII, The Quadrant

Though personally, speaking as a passenger, I have found such systems to be quite useful.

Shotgun's Woyzeck

Last Thursday I finally made it to the Shotgun Players production of Woyzeck, with music and lyrics by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, directed by Mark Jackson, based on a concept by Robert Wilson. Originally I was supposed to go the first week of January, but I got sick, which was not how I wanted to start the new year. Luckily for me the run had been extended and the box office was able to  switch my reservation to another day. The Shotgun Box Office folks are always extremely helpful.

I had really been looking forward to this show. First of all: Woyzeck! Also, I had really enjoyed the previous Tom Waits/Robert Wilson work I had seen, The Black Rider, which ACT presented a few years ago (like Woyzeck, that was also based on a work better known as a German opera; in that case, Weber's Der Freischutz). I thought it was a cool bold choice for a relatively small theater. Its appearance on the schedule was one of the reasons I became a subscriber.

So sadly I have to say I just didn't connect with the show. I can't say I disliked it; in fact there were many things to like. But, as with their production of Sondheim's Assassins, the show was brutally, inexplicably amplified. Why? Why, in a theater as small as the Ashby Stage, would you need to do that? The advantages of a space like that are intimacy and immediacy and a sense of involvement: why would you sacrifice all that for a pointless wall of aggressive sound that pushes you back from the performance rather than draws you in? At times the amplification blurred the words. All the performers had those ugly little wires taped to their faces with what I guess is the power source bulging out of their back waistbands, which doesn't exactly help the illusion that these people I'm watching are anything but contemporary performers. I guess that's fine if you're going for that Brechtian distancing effect, but it really pushed me back from any emotional involvement with the characters.

It doesn't help that the ending is changed: in this version the child of Marie and Woyzeck is still a babe in arms, and so there is no heart-breaking ending when the little boy goes out to play with the other children and it turns out what they're doing is looking at his mother's dead body. She still dies - in fact, I realized that this is the third Mark Jackson show I've seen in the past few years in which the female lead has her throat slit, though in the other two (Miss Julie and Faust, Part One) she does it herself. The night I saw the play the Marie, Madeline H.D. Brown, was sick. Her understudy was fine, but I've really liked Brown in the other things I've seen her in recently, so I was disappointed not to see her. (I'm afraid I don't know the understudy's name; the substitution must have been a last-minute thing, since Jackson announced they would need to delay the start of the show by a few minutes so she could get ready, and there was no paper slip in the program or any announcement that gave her name.)

Tom Waits is a great songwriter, and a very distinctive one, conjuring up a very specific world and worldview in his songs, but it did cross my mind that maybe that world is just a shade too wistful and picturesque, just a shade too scruffy low-life colorful, for the harsh cruelty and caustic absurdity of Buchner's play. I thought Kevin Clarke as the Doctor and Anthony Nemirovsky as  the Captain were the best at capturing the cruelty and the comedy. The rest of the cast was also strong (Andy Alabran as Karl, an Idiot; Alex Crowther as Woyzeck; Joe Estlack as the Drum Major; Josh Pollock as the Carnival Announcer;  Kenny Toll as Andres; Beth Wilmurt as Margaret). But I just couldn't get past the awful fake sound.

William Wordsworth analyzes the smart phone phenomenon

Here's something else to file under "the more things change":

On Seeing Some Tourists of the Lakes Pass by Reading; a Practice Very Common

What waste in the labour of Chariot and Steed!
For this came ye hither? is this your delight?
There are twenty-four letters, and those ye can read;
But Nature's ten thousand are Blanks in your sight.
Then throw by your Books, and the study begin;
Or sleep, and be blameless, and wake at Your Inn!

-- William Wordsworth

Very elegant and witty, and pointed, but I'll probably just continue snarling "Watch where you're going" to those clueless idiots who walk down the sidewalk staring at their stupid toys, assuming everyone else will leap out of their way. If it's so awful to be where you are, maybe you should think about why it's so awful, and what you're doing there.

The poem is on page 432 of the Penguin Classics edition of The Poems of William Wordsworth, Volume 1.

Speak Low

A few weeks ago I heard Ute Lemper and Dawn Upshaw on successive days. I have heard both performers live before and I like them both very much. But the two recitals were contrasting illustrations of how technology can work against and for a performance.

Lemper performed with the Vogler Quartet (Tim Vogler and Frank Reinecke on violin, Stefan Fehlandt on viola, and Stephan Frock on cello) and with Stefan Malzew (on clarinet, accordion, and piano). The program looked inviting: songs and instrumental works from and influenced by Weimar-era Germany, including Schulhoff, Edith Piaf, Weill, Eisler, Piazolla, and Jacques Brel. Lemper has a striking presence (she looks like John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X) and a louche glamour perfectly suited to her repertoire. So far so good. Now we come to the amplification.

Someone said to me later, “But you must have expected that she would be amplified.” Yes, I went in knowing that she’s a cabaret singer and they generally use microphones. I read something recently about the microphone enabling a singer to sound as if she’s whispering in your ear. That’s great, but they can also make a singer sound as if she's shouting in your ear. And all of the instrumentalists were amplified as well, which I really wasn’t expecting. Maybe that wouldn’t have been a problem if the sound mix hadn’t been so awful. During the second half, after making various gestures to the sound man indicating what she wanted modified, Lemper just started speaking to him from the stage, which kind of broke the mood. I think she ended up happy with the sound, though I did not. I really tried to get past it. It wasn’t a problem for me last time I heard her (but that time I had been sitting halfway back in very large Davies Hall, not up front in very intimate Herbst Theater). Far from increasing the intimacy, the bludgeoning volume made me feel I was being shouted at for a couple of hours, which is exhausting.

To further increase the alienation, the songs were in French, German, Russian, Yiddish, and Spanish, and there were no texts or translations provided (there was a little English thrown in there as well, in the Brecht/Weill songs). I’m touched by her mostly unwarranted faith in our linguistic versatility. Lemper spoke before or after each song, but only occasionally did she give us some idea of what the song was saying, and frankly after a while it all started blending together. That was partly intentional; she was pointing out cross-currents and similarities in wide-ranging cultures, but if you’re going to do that for two hours you need to differentiate and vary the moods. Mostly the inter-song segments were vaguely atmospheric spiels about plucky refugees wandering from city to city with their one little valise of songs, or jaunty denizens of the demimonde disappearing with the dawn, laughing at the loss of their last centime – a smile, a shrug, another bottle of wine you can’t afford, to forget another love you can’t afford to remember. That’s all very well, and appealing in small doses, but with repetition such poses can seem increasingly sentimental and evasive, ignoring the grinding exhausting wearing-down caused by poverty, exile, and drug abuse.

Sadly, despite her efforts and mine, she lost me long before the end. For an encore we had the Kurt Weill/Ogden Nash song Speak Low, stretched out with a glittering display of scat-singing that was both dazzlingly virtuosic and interminably self-indulgent, completely missing the tender heart of the song.

I was back at Herbst the next night to hear Dawn Upshaw with Stephen Prutsman on piano. Before the performance Ruth Felt, head of San Francisco Performances, came out to announce they were trying something new, and she hoped we would all let them know what we thought of it: they were using surtitles for the recital. She sounded a bit uncertain and hesitant during the announcement, as if this were some bizarre experiment and not a long overdue and very welcome change to the recital format. I’ve been saying for years that they should use surtitles during recitals, and Upshaw’s performance proved how right I was. (I have to mention this to make up for the times I'm very wrong.) For once we didn’t have endless rustling, folding, turning, and creasing of pages during the songs; we could watch the singer (and the words behind her) rather than the program on our laps; the houselights didn’t need to be up so we could read, and the darkened room helped create an intimate, concentrated bond with the singer. Finally, a use of technology that enhances rather than undercuts live performance!

Of course Upshaw had much to do with setting the mood and creating the bond. But the overdue use of surtitles helped remove the barriers between us and her. This recital had been rescheduled from January, and it’s well known that Upshaw has had some serious health issues, so I’m happy to say she was in beautiful voice, much better actually than the last time I heard her, about a year ago. The song selection was also innovative; instead of sets, there was a continuous series of dreamy, moody songs, gentle and sad and lovely and loving, by composers ranging from Monteverdi, Purcell, and Dowland to Schubert and Schumann to Berg and Messiaen to Golijov, Weill, and Vernon Duke (though the songs were arranged by emotional rather than chronological order).

I’m sure someone in the audience had some silly objection to the surtitles but I can’t imagine what it would be, and I don’t much care. Some people will object to any change. My only suggestion would be prefacing the words with the title of the song and the composer, so that there’s no need to check the program. There were no surtitles for the English-language songs; I was fine with that though I can see that some might prefer them. I hope recital surtitles catch on; I keep hearing that the vocal recital is a hard sell and a dying form, but surtitles heighten the form’s unparalleled intimacy and directness of communication. Why shouldn’t surtitles expand the audience for recitals the way they have for opera?