Of Couture and Corn

The holiday weekend rolls on, with yesterday's highlight an outing to the Museum of Fine Arts, ostensibly to see their current exhibition of Goyas.  I found an unexpected treat, however, that very nearly outshone even the master's portrait of the Duchess of Alba (not, of course, the recently deceased edition thereof - she was old, but not that old...).

The God of Auspicious Beginnings

Lafayette, we are here!

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Mr. America

There is a sense in which it is correct to say: "It's too good to be Camp." ... 

Not only is Camp not necessarily bad art, but some art which can be 

approached as Camp merits the most serious admiration and study. 

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

Let's have this wonderful moment, from 1975, stand as a birthday tribute to the song's creator, dear Mr. Irving Berlin.  If, over his long life, he became something of an American institution, this lady is part of the reason why.  Ethel Merman sang the work of all the greats of her day, of course, and while she did proud by Gershwin and Porter, and later on the likes of Sondheim and Herman, something about an Irving Berlin song fits her like a glove.

And never more, really, than this song, both her trademark and, on its own, a monumental summing up of the show-biz culture that was passing even as the show it's from, Annie Get Your Gun, took the stage.  Seeing the Merm here, fronting a band that can really challenge her, is like watching a racehorse test its mettle.  Within a few bars, she's abandoned even the minimal concessions of scale and gesture she usually made for TV and lets us see, if in an autumnal way, the sheer unbridled staginess of her performing style, her stand-and-delivery way of putting over a song.  Some singers (Peggy Lee, Julie London) seduce you.  Some (Minnelli and her mother, Streisand) sell it to you.  Merman simply puts it out there, look at what I can do (and anything you can do, I can do better - that's more Berlin, actually).

What makes it Camp, though, isn't the song, or the singer - despite the chiffon muu-muu and the hair out to there, Merman is, I think, too good to be Camp.  It's the whole package - the Boston Pops, Arthur Fiedler, the countless genteel households tuning in across the country on PBS, the adoration of the audience, even the hushed tones of Miss Bernadette Peters setting the scene.  It's a tinsel setting for a voice of brass, but the voice cuts through the nonsense to deliver, once more, the goods: the costumes, the scenery, the makeup the props - all there, in front of you.  When she sings it, what Irving Berlin knew as a fact is conjured up again, and it really is like no business you know.

Elegy for April, 2013

Science, Bella Pratt, Boston Public Library.  Summer 2008.

I don't usually post poetry I've written here.  Today, I can think of nothing else to say.

Elegy for April, 2013 

There is evil in the world.

Ideas that poison minds, blight lives,

Twist whole nations in their circus-mirror

Non-reality.  Evil knows no borders.

There is evil in the world.

There is evil in the world.

It can be well-meaning, right-thinking

Just as easily as endlessly malign:

Impersonal and fixed on triumph,

There is evil in the world.

There is evil in the world:

The drone in the sky, the kettle-bomb;

The killing idea that I-am-more if

You-are-less; the notion, horrible,

That might trumps all.

This is the evil in the world.

This evil in the world

Ignores the least of us

Ignites the worst of us

Destroys the best of us

Demands the mind to shut

The heart to stop

The hand to slap and not

To touch the tender sleeping face

Of one who dreams of only love,

Tomorrow's breakfast, summer, joy, and not -

Not yet - this evil in the world.

The Consolations of Art

While we were in Boston, My Dear Sister took us to Mrs. Gardner's Museum.  It was very beautiful, of course, but they have a draconian no-photo policy, which means that I snapped only this enigmatic view of a statue and some orchids. 

It was the first time I'd visited the Gardner in more than 20 years - closer to 30, really.  Some things had changed, of course -  mostly the empty frames, left from the robbery not all that long after my last visit (and no, I was not involved - I would have taken the Sargents), showing where the Vermeer and the Rembrandt and the others had been (a nice, melancholy touch, to have left them there), but much had stayed blessedly the same. 

Although I'd dreaded seeing it (loathing change and all), I rather liked the new visitors' center, a surprisingly successful addition by Renzo Piano - respectful and separate from the main building, connected by a glass passage that acts as a sort of umbilical cord between old and new, adding such inevitable modern conveniences as a shop and a (painfully organic) café, as well as a handsome small concert hall, in which we heard a very earnest guide give a potted history of the place's admirably eccentric founder's life and times.  The whole thing looks just a tiny bit like an all-glass junior high school, but at least it appears to be both functional and unobtrusive.

Wandering through Mrs. Gardner's beautiful rooms - filled with everything from perfect Renaissance portraits to signed photos of Nellie Melba and notes from Henry James, masterpieces and ephemera - I relished the feeling of immersion a place like the Gardner gives.  It's a sensation something akin to what I imagine deep-sea divers feel, the rest of the world very far away, the strange feeling of finding another world at one's fingertips.  It was restful and yet at the same time somehow alarming.  In a place like that, one comes face to face with, for instance, Mor's portrait of Mary I, so familiar from biographies and texbooks, and she seems infinitely more present, in a way, than she would in an ordinary gallery.  Her glance, reproachful and oddly shy for so formidable a lady, seems personal, directed. She knows you don't care about her as much as you do her sister, that she's on the wrong side of history, even that her brown velvet gown is a touch dowdy.  What does she care?  She is, nonetheless, "Marye the Queene."  And you move on, but she remains, as do the letters and the portraits and the autographs and the odd bits of antiquity. 

In the courtyard around which the salons and galleries revolve, there is a small patch of lawn.  Laid casually on it, as if by chance, is an amphora, one of those utilitarian vessels used by the Greeks and Romans for transporting wine and olives and such.  It's the perfect touch, an object of the kind more usually in a glass case, nestled in the green grass, laughing at the passage of time.  In trying times to come, I think I'll aim for something of that amphora's calm insouciance, along with something of Mrs. Gardner's idomitability. 

Although I doubt I'll ever be up for anything as daunting as corresponding with Henry James...

Portrait Gallery: The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit

Mr. Sargent, again. His portraits astonish me, and the chance to see this one at the Boston MFA before we left was wonderful (as was, unusually for a museum restaurant, lunch - a Sunday jazz brunch with a nice glass of Champagne does wonders for the art-viewing exerience, not to mention Mr. Muscato's patience).

But back to the girls. There they are, four Victorian misses, captured by the painter somewhere between Alice in Wonderland and Wednesday Addams. They totally lack the cloying affectations of children of the era, and the three who are looking at us have stares that are unnervingly direct and appraising: Who are you, and why are you in our drawing room?

The dish queen in me was thrilled to see that the MFA displays the painting flanked by the Boit's rather distinguished blue-and-white vases. Mr. Sargent did them justice, but it's nice to see them in person, as it were.

The indispensable John Singer Sargent Virtual Gallery has an especially insightful dissection of the picture here. Apparently, the girls went on to fulfill, in various ways, the destinies he had painted for them. No surprise; that's what you get when you let a genius, of all things, into your drawing room.