Theatrical Competition

Last night Robert, Lynn and I reprised our viewing of the Globe’s production of Henry IV Part 2. We first saw both parts live last year and I wrote about it then, (Witches, Saag Gosht, Hal and Falstaff, Air Fencing, Castles, Cliff Walks). This time we saw the HD broadcast performance of the same production in a movie theater. Two weeks ago we saw the broadcast of part 1.

What an extraordinary and amazing thing the Globe has done. Of course, something like it has been done before. For example, the Burton/Gielgud Hamlet was broadcast back in the early nineteen sixties (in black and white at much lower quality and resolution of course) and earlier this year, the Royal National broadcast their award winning production of Frankenstein. But I’ve never seen anything to equal what the Globe has achieved. Their cinematographic direction captures a level of experience not possible in any other way. In particular, for all the apparent visual tradition and conservatism of the productions, they are in fact a very edgy company. A perfect example is Hal’s meeting with his brothers after his father’s death. Usually, Hal is quite naturally somber and abashed. In contrast, Jamie Parker’s Hal is almost manically cheerful, conveying a realistic response to grief that could be easily misunderstood. The cinematography, in particular, the adroit use of close-ups captures the complexity of his performance, something it’s difficult to appreciate even if you’re sitting in the ground level galleries as we were last year.

I hope and expect the productions will find their way to DVD later this year and of course we will want them in our library. They are among the great productions of what now, justifiably, are being called England’s national epic. I feel honored and incredibly lucky to have seen them.

In contrast, there’s the lavish production of five of Shakespeare’s plays that the RSC has brought to New York. Two are reviewed in this week’s New Yorker by Hilton Als who calls them “dated and musty.” There was a time when I would have taken issue with such a scathing dismissal but unfortunately it’s consistent with my experience of the RSC productions I’ve seen while Michael Boyd has been director. I felt much the same way about their production of Hamlet with Toby Stephens and the Romeo and Juliet performed in the same season. It’s particularly sad for me, as more than a few years ago, they mounted a production of Henry V with Alan Howard, a play I wasn’t greatly fond of at time, which was life changing.

The two companies are competitors, of course, though I’ve never seen any statement from either company acknowledging that obvious fact. For decades the RSC had no competition and now that they do they’ve yet to figure out how to respond gracefully and successfully. Worse, they are uniquely disadvantaged: though they enjoy exceptional public support, their home is in Stratford whereas the Globe is in London which is much more accessible to a broader audience. Further, there is the immense advantage of the recreated Glove theatre, an experience in itself.
So what can the RSC do? Do what hi-tech companies do: steal their competitors good ideas, elaborate them, and innovate themselves, dramatically. It’s what Apple did and does.

Formal fencing begins for us next week in earnest. Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

Irrelevant Details

A couple of nights ago, Lynn and I watched “Marathon Man,” which neither of us had seen for years. Of course, I remembered and expected to enjoy all the classic set pieces, Olivier’s Nazi war criminal as dentist, the wonderfully horrific attack on Dustin Hoffman’s character , Babe, while he’s soaking in the tub. The film is a classic demonstration of the power of the horror that can be derived from everyday experience, particularly everyday pain, everyday vulnerability.

But something else stood out for me this time: the tone and brilliance of the direction and cinematography. John Schlesinger, the director, and Conrad L. Hall, the cinematographer, had the wit to find the surprising, sometimes even obtuse detail or point of view and used them to impart suspense, or heightened reality, sometimes as a result of finding a gritty note of absurdity that is always present in daily life. For example, the plot is set off by an automotive battle between an aged death camp survivor and an old Nazi on the streets of New York. The concept is almost farcical, and there are moments that are played for simple black humor. But often, the camera chooses to find and dwell on the faces of the onlookers, real New Yorkers of various ages who look on the developing incident as it hurtles by them, with amazement, and even horror as the incident moves to its inevitable, catastrophic conclusion.

These days, the final explosion as the two cars collide with a fuel oil truck would be filmed with much more attention to detail and much greater expense, all for a very slight return on investment. But it’s everything that comes before, such as the startled look from an old woman in a faded floral dress as she stares at them from a tenement window, that really counts, that makes the drama compelling.

In part, it was a 1970’s thing. In many current films, the creation of suspense, which sometimes requires giving attention to an apparently irrelevant detail, is often neglected or managed in a very ham-fisted way. Sometimes that lack of apparent subtlety is rationalized as necessary as we now all live in a social networking age of necessarily immediate gratification. We just don’t have time for the clever or the subtle. I don’t believe it, of course, and I think the movie industry’s declining revenues, properly understood and analyzed, support that. The success of the Swedish version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” which is molded from the clay of modern methods of communication, succeeded in part because of its ability to create suspense, often in very old-fashioned ways.

That use of the subtle detail, and teaching an audience to look for it, is socially healthy. Perspicacity and skepticism were never so useful as they are in a world as hyper-connected as ours is. As I’m writing this, the US House of Representatives and the US Senate are attempting to find a last minute compromise to raise the debt ceiling and avoid possibly catastrophic consequences in the global financial markets. I wonder what are the telling, possibly small, or apparently disconnected details that have brought our government to this pass. One might be that the Bush era tax cuts will expire at the end of the year unless the congress takes action and the Republicans lack the legislative strength to pass such legistlation. Are they not using perfunctory but critical legislation to blackmail the country into passing such ill advised legislation?

Fencing Summer Nationals - July 2011

I feel the way I feel after a long hike somewhere new. The world is refreshed, bigger, more interestingly complex. “Got to love it,” to use D.Z.’s expression. We’re back from fencing in the USFA Summer Nationals.

Lynn and I drove to Reno, Nevada on Thursday, July 7th. I hadn’t driven that road in years and had forgotten how wild and even mysterious some of the basin and range geography was. Along the way Lynn texted Robert and Kim, who were driving behind us, and we listened to a fine audio book of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. After we checked in at our hotel, the four of us went for dinner at the Pneumatic Diner, a vegan grill. A word here about the food in downtown Reno: some of it is excellent. My tacos at the Pneumatic Grill were really good, simply and perfectly because the fresh vegetables were so flavorful, and the dinner the next night, at La Vecchia, was some of the best Italian food I’ve had outside of Italy.

Of the four of us, I was the first to compete; check-in at the Reno Convention Center for mens Div III epee was the next morning at 7. I slept fitfully and dreamt my epee failed to pass a strange voltage test. Of course, there is no such thing. Kenny and Jenni, my coach and his wife arrived shortly after we did and I found them chipper and willing to hand-hold me through the formal details of national competition, even though they’d already been at it for seven days. As a result, I achieved a signal personal goal: not to embarrass myself or the club during the competition.

Though there were seven of us in the club fencing during the following three days I always had one of Kenny or Jenni strip side when I was fencing which was no small achievement. The best thing, though, was the warm-ups with Kenny. Not only did they serve to optimize my frame of mind for the competition, they were also compact, perfectly focused lessons, which have also helped me build a sharper set of priorities for the coming year. The prospect of competing in a national event focuses the mind wonderfully, to rephrase Johnson. In fact, that may be one of things I love most about fencing. The discipline tunes and strengthens perception.

I was lucky in my pool draws both for Div III and Veterans: everyone was better than I was and most, probably all, had been fencing longer than I had, in the case of Veterans, sometimes by decades. Even so, I won one pool bout, came very close in two others and there was no one I didn’t get at least a point on. Since a large part of my game involves going for hand touches, it’s a point of technique I need to give particular focus, especially aiming for where the target will be, not where it is. Similarly, my parry-ripostes need a lot of work: too often I try to counter attack in opposition and fail when a parry-riposte would be successful. In general, I found that I was seeing the weaknesses of my opponents and could discover their “emergency responses” but, having done so, was unable to take effective advantage of that knowledge. In general, my points often came early in the bouts: clearly my opponents were figuring me out as well, which is yet one more thing to work on.

Lynn had a similar experience in that regard and her results were similar to my own. One of my favorite moments of the entire competition was watching her veterans event. Suddenly, she started bouncing, which is something she normally never does. It was as if she’d suddenly discovered an infinite pool of energy. And she didn’t stop. After, I told her she reminded me of the Energizer Bunny. Her veterans bouts were as difficult and hard fought as mine as most of the women were competing for a place on the national team.

My major regret is that I was unable to see any complete bouts of some of the highly placed fencers competing, either in Nationals or in the Pan Am games in the hall next to ours. I also saw very little of Robert and Kim fencing. Afterwards, Robert told me that he’d felt that he’d never fenced better and that he’d made a kind of perceptual leap as well: there were times, he said, when he felt like a predator, keenly observing his opponent’s weaknesses. He certainly fenced exceptionally well against me in our warm-up bouts and both Kenny and Jenni commented that he had done very well against an accomplished fencer he’d drawn in his pool.

With a little encouragement from the four of us, Jenni had decided to fence and I was able to see a little of her bouts, albeit mostly from a distance. She seemed quick and formidable, significantly more so than when I’d last fenced against her in Idaho late last year. Her results were better than the those of the four of us and I found her skill and focus quietly inspirational.

So, “I’m back.” And already consider myself in training for next year.

If you’ll forgive the echo, I choose to fence not because it is easy, but because it is hard, because that goal serves to organize and measure the best of my energies and skills. It will be interesting to see how we do next year.

On Belonging

King Henry V: I wear it for a memorable honour; For I am Welsh, you know, good countryman.
Fluellen: All the water in Wye cannot wash your majesty's Welsh plood out of your pody, I can tell you that: God pless it and preserve it, as long as it please his grace, and his majesty too!
-Henry V, Shakespeare

In Branagh’s memorable film Henry’s line isn’t tossed away with an ironic grin as it usually was; rather it is delivered with conviction and tears of affection coming as it does at the end of the battle of Agincourt. Henry’s parentage was almost entirely Norman English but he was born in Monmouth, Wales. Did that make him Welsh or was it that he was distantly related to Llewelyn the Great through his mother making him 1/128thWelsh? My guess is that Shakespeare meant the former. Branagh’s original dramatic insight to use the line as a cue for emotional release(which is perfect for the dramatic shape of play) may also reveal Shakespeare’s vision of the character and possibly even reflect the personality of the historical Henry. Who knows? Was Henry Welsh? Does it matter?

What I find of greater interest is the audience’s response to that reading of the line. We accept it. No one takes umbrage, no one suggests it’s pretense.

Here’s a different context. I was born in the American Southwest but am of northern European decent. If I were to say to a member of the Acoma tribe of New Mexico, “I am Anasazi, you know, good countryman,” he or she would be offended, have a good laugh and perhaps even wonder if I was in need of a professional psychologist.

The thorny issue, of course, is cultural membership and ownership. When does someone have the right to claim membership in a culture. And what rights appertain to a cultural group? The problem is international and diverse. It dramatically affects how Archaeology is done in the southwestern US and politics in the Middle East to name just two examples. And it is far from sufficient to allow cultural groups to make decisions alone because of cultural conflict. Governments and global organizations are forced to arbitrate and we need them to do so.

This week I’m attending a fencing camp my club is holding. I’m looking forward to it in furtherance of my challenging goal of avoiding complete embarrassment at Nationals. The thoughts above derived from realizing that a fencing club is a kind of culture, too, with particular rules and values that differ, sometimes dramatically, from club to club. I’m particularly fond of the culture my club expresses.

And yet, isn’t every sense of belonging also haunted by a ghost of pretense? And is that such a bad thing? Pretense is sometimes the beginning of transformation, just as standing in front of a mirror with an epee repeating the same parries over and over is a kind of pretending, too.

The Reason for Time

“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once,” according to Albert Einstein. My spring has been like that, more and more everything seems to be happening at once. Also, the proportional acceleration of time due to age, (a simple lemma proceeding from the fact that one of the ways we perceive time is in proportion to the amount of time we’ve lived) contributes to that sense. Or maybe it’s just that didn’t ski enough this winter as a result of severity of the weather, especially the wind and cold.

Even so, we managed to find the single best week in May for an excursion to Chaco and Mesa Verde with Robert and Tyler. It deserves an entry of its own, obviously. What I will say now is that as a result I’m rereading Lekson’s History of the Southwest as well Marietta Wetherhill’s memoir. Both give me the sense that in spite of southwestern archaeology’s extraordinary best efforts, my view of what can be known of that time is veiled and skewed and a careful look at first sources is required to center myself again.

And, in that connection, a wicked cool video of Dr. Patricia Brown’s lecture at the Archaeology Café of the Center for Desert Archaeology is available online and well worth watching. Dr. Brown discusses the curious route that led to her discovery that a particular kind of pot found in Chaco was used for chocolate, Science and Serendipity: the Recovery of Cacao in Chaco Canyon. Warning: the tragic fate of fluffy, cute macaws also imported into the ancient southwest from Mesoamerica is also discussed in graphic detail ;-)

As of late, we’ve been fencing a lot. Besides our daily training regimen, we have three classes per week as well as two, sometimes three open fencing sessions. And, yet it’s clear from my bouts that it isn’t enough.

Three Arrows in the Ceiling of a Bologna Colonnade

Bologna, Italy is a city of colonnades which makes it pleasantly walkable in all but the most inclement weather.  In one of the ceilings are three crossbow arrows which presumably date from the 15^th or 16^th century.  When you stumble across them, or have them pointed out to you, as they were to me after a sumptuous business dinner at the Trattoria Battibecco, they’re startling.  History is suddenly immediate, continuous and palpable in the most ordinary way.  Yet the same three arrows in a museum might hardly warrant a second glance for all but the Renaissance warfare specialist.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, when the planes were slamming into the World Trade Center in New York, I was landing in Bologna, having taken off from Boston, as had many of the hijackers.  When I reached my office an hour later, I found my Italian colleagues not quietly at work at their computer screens, as they almost always were, but rather sitting rapt in front of an old black and white television watching that terrible history unfold.  I joined them and felt more than anything that I should be home in America.  History of the most horrific kind, the slaughter of innocents, was happening in my own country.

Very early the following Saturday, I went for a long walk, much of it beneath Bologna’s colonnades though it was a crisp sunny morning, and found the early Renaissance architecture and, eventually, the three arrows strangely comforting.  They reminded me that history isn’t a series of discrete dramatic, violent events, but a river, or rather a maze of rivers flowing constantly and just as the survival of that ancient city was testament to its resilience to such events, so was there the resilience and courage at home to face the events that had suddenly made the future so much more uncertain.

The three arrows and those events were brought to mind as I just finished  Craig Childs fine personal essay, Finders Keepers:  A Tale of Archaelogical Plunder and Obsession.  Through the lens of his own experience and research he explores the question of what is the right use of the remains of the past, an issue of immediate and continuing concern for those of us who live in the American southwest.  The answer is rarely easy and some choices are horrific.

One possible answer, which he doesn’t address, is to get the history and pre-history out of the museums and into the daily environment.  Of course, such a course of action is fraught with difficulties, least of which are security and proper preservation.  Nevertheless, nearly all of us live in places in which human habitation has been continual for sometimes thousands of years.  What if most of us had the experience of seeing some of that history or pre-history daily.  How would it inform our daily lives?  You can never tell what effect three old arrows in a ceiling might have.

The qualification tournament for nationals is next weekend; time for daily fencing practice.

Once More Unto The Breach...

So Henry V is bound for film once again. This time it’s going to be science fiction in a “post-apocalyptic” world which combines the stories of Shakespeare’s Henry IV part 1, Henry IV part 2 and Henry V into one screenplay. The cast includes Michael Caine, Derek Jacobi and Ray Winstone. Sigh. My expectations are less than high. The title is “Henry5.” At least it isn’t “Mad Henry Beyond the Thunder-Somme.”

For my part I’d deeply love to see a serious new film of any of those three plays set properly in the early 15th century when the events actually took place using Shakespeare’s text. As recent and not so recent theatrical productions at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre and the National in London have shown, exciting, original and provocative productions are possible within those generous constraints. Ray guns and Mohawk haircuts really aren’t necessary.

As Branagh showed way back in 1983, it’s possible to create an original and powerful version that speaks to the concerns of the times in which the film is made even though the setting is historical. Branagh wasn’t overwhelmed by the looming legacy of Olivier’s version. There was more than room for them both.

Branagh did good service when it came to the speeches and captured the feel of the sodden October of 1415.  Still, Olivier’s Agincourt speech remains my favorite on film.

But there is a version of the speech I like even better: Richard Burton’s. An audio version on a BBC CD entitled “All the World’s a Stage” can be found if you’re willing to look for it. What I particularly like about Burton’s reading is its dynamism. It isn’t all declamatory heroics. Rather, he takes the tone way down to begin. His Henry really is speaking intimately to a "band of brothers," perhaps around the remains of a campfire. It’s only when he reaches the line “Then shall our names…” that he allows the strength of his great Welsh voice to inflect the importance and greatness of the moment. Sometimes power is all about dynamics. (That’s true in fencing, too.)

Burton performed the role for RSC on stage. What a production it must have been.