BOOKS: Giovanni's Room

“People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”

In a train of thought that started with Zak Ové’s sculpture installation at LACMA, I recently got to thinking about James Baldwin, and how I’d never read him, and I really should. He’d been coming up over the past year, as we visited where he lived in St Paul de Vence, and I later saw the film adapted from his book If Beale Street Could Talk. Like his Civil Rights Era contemporary Bayard Rustin, Baldwin bore two crosses, being black and gay. Being such an outsider can certainly heighten one’s sense of social observation and personal introspection. Matching such a vantage point with his facility with language was bound to result in some great literature, and thus I picked up his novel Giovanni’s Room, arguably 35 years later than I ought to have.

“For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey’s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well—by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.”

Even though the world has changed immensely since Baldwin wrote this in 1956, and even since 1982 when I started coming out, so much in this landmark novel reaches incisively across all those decades. While it is very much embedded in a specific, vividly described time and place – 1950s Paris and its under-the-radar gay scene – its emotional insight still resonates today. The protagonist is an American ex-pat on the verge of being engaged to a woman, when he meets and falls in love with a man, and ultimately has to make a choice with devastating consequences. Yet that synopsis, while accurate, is about as true as saying that Les Misérables is a jail-break story. With Baldwin, that plot is just the frame in which he paints a dead-on psychological portrait of subconsciously intentional self-unawareness and avoidance. He describes with such beautiful language that if you’re the sort to turn down the corner of a page when a passage really grabs you, you’ll have folded more than half the pages by the end. (I’ve pulled out just a couple of my favorite quotes here.) Giovanni, who knows exactly who he is and what he wants, is such a foil for David, even as his older acquaintance Jacques, whom David half-despises, tries to show him his possible future. In the final morning, David is left trying to study his reflection in the window as the daybreak makes his reflection fade, a haunting image that will stay with me a long time.

ART: Second Home Serpentine Pavilion at the La Brea Tar Pits

If you’ve driven down Wilshire in recent months, you may have noticed a colorful amorphous installation occupying a large lawn at the La Brea Tar Pits. It’s called the Second Home Serpentine Pavilion, and this piece of art/architecture beckons you to come inside, to follow its non-linear corridors while enjoying the colorful play of light. The structure uses the principles of a tent, with sheets of material stretched out between lightweight poles that define the form. That form is more like a hermit crab’s shell than a normal tent. The sheets are mostly translucent, some in iridescent silver, others bold primary colors. Occasionally, a “panel” is just open air cross-hatched by brightly colored streamers. The reflections, refractions, and stained glass-like illuminations compound the visual fiesta. If you ever wondered what the view of a birthday party might be like from inside one of the mylar balloons, this is it. Where did this come from? Apparently, the Serpentine Gallery in London’s Hyde Park has hosted an annual event where a creative architect is given the opportunity design and install some kind of pavilion to showcase their creativity in a summer-long installation. This was the 2015 Serpentine Pavilion, by the Madrid-based architects SelgasCano. Now it’s visiting LA through Nov 24.

STAGE: Skintight

We were very glad to have caught the last night of Joshua Harmon’s Skintight at the Geffen Playhouse. It was funny, clever, and leaves you with things to ponder that stay with you after you’ve stopped laughing. Of course it was a treat to see Idina Menzel, who has been with the show since even before the off-Broadway run. (At this point in her career, this is something she would only be doing for the love of it.) Skintight is a very modern family drama. Menzel plays Jodi, whose freshly ex-husband has just married the half-his-age aerobics instructor that he left Jodi for. The play opens with Jodi dropping in on her father, Elliot (Harry Groener), a long-widowed-and-now-gay billionaire fashion designer (a Calvin Klein or Tommy Hilfiger type), ostensibly to surprise him for his birthday, but really just looking for some support. Her studying-abroad son Ben (Eli Gelb), also gay, is coming in for the weekend as well. Elliot lives a very ordered life and doesn’t care for surprises, but Jodi’s about to get a surprise herself. Her father’s latest “partner” Trey (Will Brittain) is 20 years old, the same age as her son. That set-up is a rich vein to mine for both drama and laughs, and this play runs with both. Can one love beauty, or is that just lust? Are relationships all transactional at bottom? What do parents owe children, and what do children owe parents? These are just some of the questions that Harmon smuggles in with the comedy, along with a funny observation about the Ten Commandments, and why tens of thousands of Hungarians might have a Jewish name embossed on their skin. Skin turns out to be a running theme, appearing throughout the play figuratively, metaphorically, and literally: Skin as in the depth of beauty, skin as the beauty of youth and betrayer of age (botox notwithstanding), the skin that Trey unreservedly shows off. Skin as a symbol of kinship, the relationships you’re born with and cannot shed. It’s all there in two acts and a great ensemble performance.

ART: The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness (Zak Ové , 2016) at LACMA

British visual artist Zak Ové has created a small army of life-size black figures which have been touring around America before heading to their permanent home in a new sculpture park in Berkshire, England. Recently, the figures have invaded the Cantor Sculpture Garden at LACMA, to striking effect. The figures’ faces are African tribal masks, inscrutable and enigmatic. Their hands are raised at their sides, in a gesture of surrender, or perhaps “no offense”. Their abstract torsos have four large buttons suggesting a military jacket, but their abstract private bits are hanging out and their feet are bare. The form looks ancient but with subtle modern lines. The material is graphite, an intentional choice by the artist not to use traditional ebony, instead using a “future world black” material. And there’s something magic about the multiplicity. One of these figures would be interesting, but seeing forty of them in formation makes a substantial impression. The placement in the sculpture garden is brilliant. The figures are in an organized formation, in linear rows and columns, standing side by side, all facing the same direction, with a forward guard advancing out of the entry gate and a rear guard descending the stairs from the upper plaza. The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness”, referencing two cultural bookends of the black experience in the New World. (The Masque of Blackness was a 1605 Jacobean court drama done in black-face extoling he inferiority of black-skinned people. Invisible Man is a 1952 novel by Ralph Ellison illuminating the black experience in early 20th century America.) This work’s previous installations have been in open spaces on its own, but I think its intriguing insertion here into the existing sculpture garden adds another layer of meaning to this thought-provoking work. And yet this parade is not all standing cohesively together, rather they are all interleaved among the permanent residents of the garden – the Rodin sculptures and the palm trees. The comparison is really intriguing. The Rodin bronzes are also dark life-size figures, but where Ové’s figures are firmly vertical and stationary, Rodin’s figures twist and sweep with flowing movement. Where the Rodins are arranged “conversationally”, facing each other and facing the central walkway, the masked figures face forward, eyes forward, like soldiers at attention trained not to look at those who are looking at them. The occupying force mixes with the resident sculptures, close enough to each other to seem to be in dialogue, and yet they are oblivious to each other, as if they occupy different dimensions in the same space. The title of the work is “The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness”, referencing two cultural bookends of the black experience in the New World. (The Masque of Blackness was a 1605 Jacobean court drama done in black-face extoling he inferiority of black-skinned people. Invisible Man is a 1952 novel by Ralph Ellison illuminating the black experience in early 20th century America.) This work’s previous installations have been in open spaces on its own, but I think its intriguing insertion here into the existing sculpture garden adds another layer of meaning to this thought-provoking work.

BOOKS: If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home By Now

There’s a small irony in my using my daily commute time to listen to Christopher Ingraham’s If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now, a charming memoir of a young family, overwhelmed by the expense and commuting toll of living in metro-DC, who gave up everything they knew and moved to a remote community in northwest Minnesota. There’s a large irony just in the story of how they got there. Ingraham is a data analyst journalist for the Washington Post, and several years back, looking for a light summer click bait story, he found a data set that had been produced by the Dept of Agriculture ranking US counties by “attractiveness”, which was quantified by weather data (mild temps, days of sunshine being good) and a survey of geographic features (more mountains, valleys, and shorelines are better). At the top was Ventura County, California. At the bottom, Red Lake County, Minnesota. Needless to say, the 4000 good people who inhabit Red Lake County were hurt to read of their home being declared the “ugliest county in the US”. Ingraham got an earful in his inbox and Twitter feed. But Minnesotans earn their reputation of being scrupulously nice, and rather than invective-filled hate mail, he got photos from beautiful back porch views ironically captioned “view from the ugliest county”, and he even got an invitation to visit. This improbable start lead to Ingraham, his wife, an executive in the Social Security Administration, and their twin toddlers moving to Red Lake Falls. This book tells the story of their decision to give it a try, and why they’re now all in. Much of the book are the engaging foibles of big city folk learning the intricacies of small town life, and the colorful characters they meet there. If you’re imagining A Year in Provence as it might have been written by Garrison Keillor, you’re not far off. There are the expected amusing stories of first time deer hunting and ice fishing, and an assessment of Minnesota cuisine. And while it’s said that eskimos have over a hundred different words for snow, now so too does Ingraham. Being a data analyst, the author peppers his book with interesting statistics to illuminate or bolster many of his observations. But he ends with the lesson that begins the story, that data can’t always tell the whole story, and he offers some thoughtful observations about the value and forms of social fabric, about small town politics and why “dispatches from the red states” are often misleading, and ultimately why his family has found unexpected reward in trading urban life for prairie life.