STAGE: America Adjacent

Being the home of “the industry” and thanks to actor’s union rules, LA is blessed with a bounty of 99-seat theatres, often providing high quality productions. I was treated to some of that on Sunday at the Skylight Theatre in Los Feliz. America Adjacent is set in a small one-bedroom apartment somewhere near Hollywood, packed with six Filipino women and a couple of babies, all confined to the apartment. The women are all pregnant or recently delivered, coming to America so their children will have the advantage of US citizenship. While such a play could have easily verged into polemic, this script (by Boni Alvarez) focuses on the very human stories of these women, why they came, what they hope, and how they cope with being confined in such close quarters. Their backgrounds and situations vary. One is rural and naïve, one is religious, one is more educated, some are conformists and peacemakers while others are risk takers and rule breakers, but all share sacrificing for the sake of their children. It is engaging and moving, and I am glad I saw it.

On Sundays, Skylight Theatre presents a conversation series immediately after the show, and this Sunday’s guest was none other than Jose Antonio Vargas, whose book Dear America I had just read. Being a Filipino undocumented immigrant, he clearly had much to relate to in this play, and talked about the experience of being “TNT”. The Tagalog phrase tago ng tago, which means being in constant hiding (literally “hiding and hiding”), abbreviated TNT, is slang for an undocumented person. Until you hear stories like these women or Vargas being TNT, you don’t appreciate the psychological toll it can take. In the conversation, several people also spoke of how powerful it was for them to see a play with Filipino actors playing Filipino characters, not something often seen. (As a gay man of a certain age, I can relate to that.)

FOOD: Redbird

We enjoyed a marvelous dinner at Redbird with some friends, which is the best way to do it, as sharing plate meals work well here, and the staff will deftly time them into nice rounds of courses. Our starter round began with a salad of little gems with avocado wedges, smoked bacon, and a buttermilk blue cheese vinaigrette. It’s a great salad, similar to a classic steakhouse wedge salad in its crisp body, but with more interesting lettuce, more interesting dressing, and the avocado and smoked bacon to amp up the flavor and texture complexity. Roasted baby red beets were served chilled with chèvre, citrus, pistachios, again taking a standard and adding something special. Likewise with the seared shishito peppers, with a dusting of toasted quinoa for crunch and bottarga (an Italian cured fish roe) for salty zing. A superbly fresh hamachi crudo was seasoned with hijiki (a dried sea herb), minced Asian pear, minced ginger, and a housemade ponzu balancing salt with a bit of sweet. As a bonus, with a group of six, there will likely be someone else who wants to share that one thing that doesn’t appeal to most, and so two of us enjoyed a large halved marrow bone topped with snails in a rich brown bordelaise sauce and served with grilled sourdough toast. In the second round of courses, we enjoyed scallops perfectly browned in brown butter on celery root purée with sunchokes. Lobster risotto with fines herbes was distinguished with a Meyer lemon cream. Small garnet yams were roasted and then made extraordinary with tart pomegranate arils, dukkah (a middle Eastern nut-and-spice blend), and honey. A 24-ounce bone-in Red Wattle (heirloom breed) pork chop made a dramatic presentation, pre-sliced but still with the bone and bits, along with taleggio polenta, and arugula with hazelnuts. Gemelli (loosely twisted hand-rolled pasta ropes) was spicily sauced with braised goat, rapini, fresno chili to add heat, and breadcrumbs and poached egg to mellow it out. Brussels sprouts came with a red curry aioli and chicharrones. And the sommelier steered us to a 2014 Lutum Santa Rita Hills pinot noir that beautifully complimented this feast. Finally, for dessert we share a couple of sweet bites. A flourless chocolate cake was rich but not heavy, and punctuated by pomegranate arils. A light crustless cheesecake was brightened by passionfruit and topped with pistachio brittle. (See all the pics here.)

FILM: Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts 2019

In recent years, we’ve discovered the pleasure of seeing the Oscar-nominated short films when the Academy Awards are coming around. Usually we’ll catch the live action and the animated shorts, but this year we didn’t have time to catch both, and some friends tipped us off that the live actions were brutally heavy this year. So animation is it was, and what a great crop this year! The first two shorts both, in the span of 10 minutes each, moved me to warm sweet tears. Bao, the Pixar entry, draws a poignant and humorous sketch of a Chinese mother who raises a son and then is reluctant to let him go when he’s grown up. Using food as a metaphor, it includes some beautifully rendered images of food and cooking. Late Afternoon (from Ireland), in simple hand-drawn lines and colors, shows the experience of an old woman whose memories are becoming slippery as she slides down memory holes like falling into water. Animal Behaviour wasn’t high art, but was an amusing gag about a counseling support group spanning the animal kingdom from a slug who can’t let go of a co-dependent relationship to an ape in denial about anger management issues. Then came the lushly painted Weekends, the subjective experience of a young boy being shuttled back and forth between separated parents, with gorgeous imagery that wordlessly brought emotions to life. One Small Step sweetly tells the story of a girl raised by a single father finding the determination to follow her dreams to the stars. Those were the five official nominees, but they usually throw in a couple of bonus shorts to fill out a feature-length program. Wishing Box was another gag offering stronger on amusement than artistry but certainly a good laugh. Tweet-Tweet, on the other hand, was more deserving of nomination – a CGI offering that entranced me with its simplicity and beautiful imagery, showing the cycle of life as a dance along a tightrope lead by a small bird.

BOOKS: Dear America

Jose Antonio Vargas’s memoir Dear America is a very timely and compelling coming out story. Growing up, he just assumed he was like everyone else, and at age 16 when he discovered the truth about himself, it really unmoored him and he wondered what his future could be like. He buried himself in being a top student and extracurricular overachiever, hoping to hide his secret. (Many gay men will recognize “best little boy in the world” syndrome.) Staying in the closet would take a big emotional toll on him, even as he went on to an impressive career as a journalist, including winning a Pulitzer. Vargas happens to be gay, but that’s not the crux of his story. His life has been shaped by discovering that he was an undocumented immigrant. This book should be essential reading for all engaged Americans. So often our current debates about immigration are based in abstractions and stereotypes, without knowing the actual people affected by our policies. Vargas opens a window onto the life of an undocumented person in America by telling his own story. It is illuminating, and at times moving and surprising. This book is not a political essay, it is a personal memoir. But as we gay people have learned, sharing your own story can be the most compelling argument of all.

FOOD: Botanica in Silver Lake

Botanica in Silver Lake is another great example of the vegetable-forward cuisine going on in LA. It’s not pure vegetarian – meat and fish is on offer for those who want it – but you could make a great hearty meal without it, especially if you came with friends and did sharing plates. It's also extremely gluten-free friendly. Market-fresh ingredients are paired here with Middle Eastern notes like tahini, za’atar, and sumac. We went with a neighbor and had this great meal. The fresh market vegetables started with the cocktails: mezcal was paired with beet juice, lime, and cilantro; Spanish vermouth was splashed with blood orange juice and soda. Little gem lettuce was complimented with pistachios, smoked California cheddar, and a balsamic vinaigrette. Avocado and citrus was sliced and served with mint leaves on a light smear of hummus. Broccoli di cicco was prepared with Calabrian peppers and fresno chilies, fresh basil and mint, and miso. Chicken is seasoned with za’atar (a middle Eastern herb blend) and served with wilted greens and caramelized carrots on a carrot purée. Roasted cauliflower is fragrant with turmeric yogurt and punctuated with crunchy candied pepitas. Lamb kofte kebabs (grilled seasoned ground meat) are covered in an herb salad and served on a smear of dill-sumac yogurt. Fort dessert we enjoyed the wine-roasted apples in sweet vermouth with cashew-date purée, and a rich tahini dark chocolate mousse brownie topped with sesame-whiskey caramel whipped cream and cocoa nibs. We left very satisfied with all these delightfully intriguing flavors. (See complete set of photos here.)

ART: Ai Weiwei and Yayoi Kusama at the MAF

After lunch in Koreatown, in another of my off-Friday pairings of food and art explorations, I got to see a couple of impressive art installations at the Marciano Art Foundation. (If you haven’t yet been to the MAF, it’s a fantastic recent addition to the LA modern art scene, completely free including parking, but you need to make online reservations, and it’s currently booked out about a month out.) The first was a set of massive installations by Ai Weiwei. I’ve gotten to know this artist in the last year, not only through a previous exhibition, but also through his impressive documentary film Human Flow, about refugees and mass migrations, and it’s interesting to see the themes that connect his works. He is fascinated with scale and replication, and one of the things he likes to do is create large installations comprised of large numbers of the same kind of object, inviting you to look at an overall mass, contemplating vastness and large numbers, but at the same time to look closely at individuals and see what appear to be replicas actually have individual differences and characteristics. In the previous exhibit, he did that with antique Chinese stools filling a large open gallery. The Marciano offered an even bigger space to fill, and he’s filled it with two installations of this sort. One, called Spouts, is a nearly 2000-square foot rectangle filled with the spouts of antique porcelain teapots. These are broken fragments of pottery from various Chinese dynasties, some as much as 1000 years old. The shapes and colors vary, though they’re mostly shades of white and ivory. Given that the artist has spent time in Chinese prison and under house arrest, one can imagine this mass of teapot “mouths” to be a comment on the freedom of speech for all the people in China. The other, called Sunflower Seeds, is an even bigger square, over 4000 square feet, filled with sunflower seeds. Not real ones, but lifesize porcelain replicas. There are about 50 million of them, made by over 1600 artisans in Jingdezhen, a town with a long tradition of porcelain craftswork. Thinking about the fact that each of these seeds was handmade by an artisan, and looking at this vast field of millions of them, makes you think about the value of handicraft and the price of labor in China.

The large field in fore are the 50 million porcelain sunflower seeds. The ivory rectangle beyond that are the antique teapot spouts.

Beyond these two fields is another space that houses a bunch more works by Ai Weiwei, these works all made of bamboo and silk, using the techniques of traditional Chinese kite-making. In the center of the space is the featured Life Cycle, a lifesize large inflatable Zodiac-style boat filled with human figures, made entirely of slender bamboo sticks. If you’ve seen his film, or if you’ve seen any documentary footage of refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach Europe, you will recognize the scene immediately. These are the sort of boats refugees often use, filled to dangerous overcapacity. Sometimes they even capsize. The figures in this boat are all facing inward, and you can see that the center is filled with figures too. A child peers over the front. The transparent bamboo construction of the figures makes them ghostly, just outlines of people, hard to make out. These boats often make their desperate runs at night. After a while you notice that while most of the figures are human, every so often the artist has topped a human body with the head of animals from the Chinese zodiac, an ox here, a rooster there. Perhaps that’s a play on Zodiac, the most common maker of these inflatable boats. Perhaps it suggests the hope that there might be some guiding spirits or angels traveling with these desperate boats. In any case, it’s a powerful piece.

Surrounding the Life Cycle, on the walls around it, and suspended in the rafters above it, are a myriad of bamboo-and-silk kite-like works. The ones flying above are all fantastic mythical creatues drawn from an ancient Chinese mythological text called the Shanhaijing. These creatures have arms and wings, fins and tails, some have multiple heads. The white silk creatures lit up against very high rafters that disappear into darkness create a fantastic effect, like constellations floating in a night sky. The works along the wall draw on myth, on modern art, and on themes from the artist’s life and work. In one section I smiled to recognize the three-legged stools echoing another work I had seen last fall.

This alone would have been treat enough, but on another floor, MAF was hosting another large scale installation by a fascinating artist. Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist whose amazing Infinity Room has been such a hit at The Broad, has another immersive installation here. This one is entitled With All My Love For The Tulips, I Pray Forever. The title gives you a hint of the playful fantasy to expect. This work comprises several monumental potted tulips in a large room, where the tulips themselves, along with the entire room – walls, ceiling, floor – have been painted bright white with large bright red polka dots. It is a fantastic effect, and as you don shoe coverings to be able to walk into this joyful artwork, I think it is impossible not to smile. With absolutely everything in your field of view the same bright colored pattern, Kusama plays with your sense of depth and dimension, while the fancifully shaped oversize tulips create a Wonderland effect. Just how big are those tulips? Wait, have I shrunk? With nothing around you but bright dots, fantastic flowers, and smiling spectators, this exhibit most definitely sparks joy.

Beyond this, there was still more to explore. The MAF has a large permanent collection that they rotate through exhibition, and judging by the very recent dates on some of the works I saw today, they are actively continuing to expand their collection. Mimi Lauter has a gorgeous 8-panel abstract painting in brilliant peacock hues. A wall full of different colored mirrored windows forms the “clockwork for oracles” by Ugo Rondinone. Photographer Catherine Opie has a fascinating series of intimate photos from inside Elizabeth Taylor’s home (not of Ms. Taylor, just of her home and her stuff). Urs Fischer has created a series of intriguing self-portraits spliced onto scenery, using cuts and color washes and creative construction. These are just some of the highlights. This museum is really such a treat.

FOOD: Galbi at Sun Nong Dan in Koreatown

Today I lunched at the famous Sun Nong Dan in Koreatown. It lies in a strip mall at 6th and Alexandria, amdist a handful of restaurants, each with distinct specialty dishes. I tried the oo guh ji galbi tang, a bubbling pot of hot chili broth with some beef short rib and “dried cabbage” (seemed more like collard greens). It came with some nice banchan -- chili scallions, kimchi, chili turnips. I’d heard that the galbi jjim is the thing to get, but I need to bring friends next time, cause the smaller serving size feeds three or more. It was pretty awesome seeing it at other tables when they topped it with cheese and melted it with a blowtorch.

FILM: The Wife

We had missed this last fall, but with Oscar nominations out, it's back on the big screen, and I'm glad we got the chance to see it. Everyone has been buzzing about Glenn Close's performance in The Wife, and rightly so. Jonathan Pryce is also brilliant as her husband, the Nobel-winning writer, but even if the title hadn't clued us in that we should be watching her, Close's character Joan, tautly rendered and slowly revealed, would command our attention. This fascinating character story examines what it takes to be a great writer, but examines it by showing us this moment of winning the Nobel, and the life that lead up to it. One of the scenes, where Joan spontaneously agrees to have a drink with a persistent would-be biographer (Christian Bale) who is trying to wheedle dirt out of her, reminded me of a similar scene from years ago of Olympia Dukakis in Moonstruck, where she rebuffs a proposed affair, "because I know who I am."  Likewise, Joan knows who she is. There's a writerly line from James Joyce that crops up a few times in this film, "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."  The film culminates in Stockholm in December for the Nobel ceremony, and there are just enough graceful set shots of the stark beauty of that city in winter. In a shot near the end, there is a close-up of Joan's face, and through the window behind her, we see the snow falling faintly, just the way Joyce said it would. I haven't read the book that this film came from, but I'm sure it must have been quite a job to adapt such inherently literary, non-cinematic material. Yet it is deftly done, with fine acting conveying much beyond the words.