Holmes and homage

I saw the new Sherlock Holmes movie yesterday. As one who watched the Basil Rathbone films long ago, and read the Conan Doyle stories even longer ago than that, I wondered whether I might object to the liberties this one takes with the iconic fiction of Holmes and Watson. A lot of ink and talk had already been spilled about how unfaithful this film is.

Robert Downey, Jr., doesn't much resemble the Holmes of popular memory, and --oh, dear -- Holmes and Watson (Jude Law) seem to have a thing going for each other, which would have been improbable for Rathbone and his Watson of old (Nigel Bruce).

Who cares? Not I: if I want fidelity, I'll read the stories. Which I may do, again, now. Nothing is so boring to me as a movie that plods piece by piece, scene by scene, through a novel (like the dreary Merchant/Ivory Howards End of some years ago). Some call it "paying homage" to a book to treat it faithfully: I'd say we ought rather to pay bail to get it out of the prison of fidelity.

(WARNING: Spoilers may follow!) This version, directed by the little-known Guy Ritchie, is fortunately free of tasteful homage (in academia, we like the French version of words like this). Rather than trying for fidelity to some consistent view of the past (whether to the original stories, say, or to the settings, habits, and costumes of nineteenth-century London), Ritchie's film shamelessly borrows. It borrows from all over:  shots of St. Paul's cathedral in the smoke, reminiscent of wartime photos, jostle with a boxing match echoing the grittiness of Scorsese's Gangs of New York (featured last night on the Golden Globes); restaurants and interiors have a certain plush Western-brothel-Miss-Kitty look; the scientific apparatus seems to be drawn directly from Branagh's bizarre Frankenstein rather than any effort to echo Victorian actuality.

Robert Downey handcuffed to a bed is more Sade than Sherlock. And, as you can tell from the image even if you haven't seen the movie, it's funny. Just as Downey himself is amused by his own appearance, so is the film.

One example: a big scene involves a shipyard, with the hull of a gigantic ship being built. Holmes and Watson are trying to escape a hammer-wielding seven-foot French-speaking bruiser (why French-speaking? who knows? he's more like a thug from a Bond film--mabye Dr. No?) who knocks out all the poles supporting the ship one by one, and breaks the big chains holding her on land. Why she doesn't fall over, don't ask. In a massive, noisy, exciting scene, she rumbles down the slip into the river. The funniest part is the end of the sequence: we watch a great distance, from inside the shipyard, as this massive hull -- now a tiny model in the center of a CGI river -- settles slowly into the river, tips up its bow, and sinks. It's James Cameron's Titanic, of course, but this time without an orchestra and in the muddy waters of the Thames, and totally unpopulated and without consequence.

The movie's effects, of course, are computer-generated-imagery (CGI). London streets, the House of Lords, an ambassador in flames leaping through a stained-glass window -- they all have the excitement and the curious unreality of CGI effects. As the Batman movies have a hard-edged, armor-like quality to the surfaces of Gotham, this one has a stage-set, scrim-like intangibility to its London. Its settings are not so much gestures to reality or history as allusions to other representations, to theater, art, and film in particular.

And its plot -- though plot is not why you go to see this movie -- acknowledges that appropriation and allusion are at its heart. (Again, spoilers follow!) The plot hangs on (literally, since hanging is central) a Da Vinci code ripoff. Conan Doyle purists rightly scoff at the implausibility and the cheap coat-tail allusion to a twenty-first century potboiler. But the film actually knows what it's doing. The rituals turn out to be a sham, the invention (or rather, appropriation!) of none other than Holmes' arch-rival, Professor Moriarty.

All the hoodoo (crosses and pentagrams and ancient books of curses) has been produced by Moriarty. It's he, the shadowy presence whose face is never seen (and whose name, like Voldemort, is evil itself) who has seen Dan Brown films (how? go figure) and Batman films, and Dracula (the villain of the movie is an English lord who looks strangely like a certain Transylvanian). The evil Moriarty has studied, not old curses, but contemporary culture, and he uses his dastardly knowledge to generate a scenario of world domination. No wonder he's a professor: not a Harvard symbologist like the Tom Hanks character in Da Vinci Code, but maybe an English/Cinema Studies/Cultural Studies professor at a small liberal arts college somewhere in the midwest. Uh oh: worse than that, he has also invented that dreaded device of evil, the TV remote!

Stop the clocks...

We went to the movies Saturday afternoon to watch Der Rosenkavalier on HD Live from the Met in New York. It's a bit like one of those banquets you read about in novels -- four and half hours of very delicious and rich delicacies.

The plot -- like most -- is impossible to recount; the very existence of such a ridiculous plot is just one of the many wonderful artifices that make opera, like good cooking, a cultural activity worthy of writing about. Things don't happen this way in real life, we might well say. And a good thing, too. It's the differences from reality that matter. One of those differences is in the magical way opera has of stopping time: those freeze-time moments when nothing happens while everything (under the surface) sorts and re-sorts itself.

One utterly ridiculous man, Baron Ochs von Lerchenau, is the nominal center; at least, he likes to think he is. It's a great bass part, comic, lyrical, abusive, egotistical. At the end of Act Two, exhausted, he stops chasing the chambermaid and bossing the bourgoisie long enough to have a moment of quiet. An old song pops into his head, and, it being opera, he sings it. "Ohne mich..." -- "without me." It's ego, but sweet, a country-type waltz that is the right place for this bumpkin to be. For a little while, time stops.



Romantic music always stops time when people fall in love. Here (again, the plot is absurd), a young aristocrat, Octavian, presents a young woman, Sophie, a rose on behalf of his boorish cousin Ochs. Never mind why. What matters is: first, Octavian is a boy, but he is sung by a woman, and dresses as a woman twice in the opera; and second, the two fall in love during the presentation of the rose. Here's a concert performance of the scene; at about 2:00, you'll catch what I'm talking about. Notice the beautiful high chords in the orchestra, like stars twinkling on a New Year's night. And the incredibly beautiful high notes of the two women, holding time away...



The opera not only stops time at these key moments, it embeds the stopping of time in the fabric of the story, the characters, and the music. At the real center of the opera --  Baron Ochs only thinks he's the center --  is a beautiful and privileged woman (the Marschallin), for whom time is running out. "You have made me an old woman," she says to her hairdresser; she knows, though, it's not he who has aged her. It is she who most articulates the theme of the opera: while we can make moments of beauty and love, time will always win out.

(In tragedy, we can't get to the end soon enough: death is better than life; but in comedy, the happy endings are often saddened by the difficulty of maintaining equilibrium: "The rain, it raineth every day.")

At the end of Act One, the Marschallin sings, "Time is a strange thing," and recounts to her young lover how sometimes she wakes in the middle of the night and goes about the house stopping all the clocks. You'll hear the clocks striking (13 times). . .


Strauss's Vienna in the Rosenkavalier is of the ancien regime, with wigs and lace. But it is also the Vienna of Freud: "If youth knew; if age could."

Fires beneath the surface

Just before Christmas, we went to Bellevue, WA, where the Bellevue Arts Museum had an exhibition of Robert Sperry's ceramics. Sperry taught for decades at the University of Washington, and evolved from a fairly standard ceramicist (teapots and vases) to a funky and then a profound abstract expressionist. He died in 1998.

Ceramics are hard for me to appreciate, but I'm trying to learn. How to appreciate randomness, for example? Some of Sperry's transitional works were raku, I think: at any rate, they had that rough texture and almost random coloration that wood ash gives to Japanese pots. As you can tell from this blog, I tend to like order in art -- I think I might actually be still living in the Enlightenment period -- but here I started to see why the randomness matters.

For me, the connection is fire. I love watching, tending, feeding fires. . . .  the smoke, the swirl of flame, the transformation of neat logs to ash that clings to surfaces. So now when I see the finished pots that come out of such fires, I try to re-imagine the flames. The cold pot starts to glow with a fantasy heat; the museum (God forbid!) starts to fill with eye-watering smoke. And ceramic, I realize, becomes a liminal thing, a threshold piece, between our safe world and the dangerous fires beyond.

In Sperry's last pieces, the fire matters, too, but with a different aesthetic. These are abstract plates, big in scale, useless as household objects. They are massively crinkled, the glaze and the slip broken in deep gullies. There are blobs of clay, often at the center, sticking up from the plate surface. The upshooting blobs eat into the space of air and coolness around these plates, dangerous vestiges (or sacred orifices) of fire. They ooze with a deep pigmented blob around them, as if lava or blood were coming up out of the center. There is a pent-up energy in these pieces that is belied by their cool abstraction, the neatness of their circular outline and the coolness of their white glaze. Like manuscripts overwritten, they hold vestiges of the energies that have both created and wiped out, that have written, erased, rewritten, torn, and poked through the surface of meaning.

Gerard Manley Hopkins knew about fires beneath the surface: the end of his wonderful sonnet on "The Windhover" -- a bird of prey, turning from calm soaring to a steep dive, like a coal in the fire suddenly falling open:

. . . and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Or, in a more elegiac vein, Shakespeare, in his sonnet about growing old:

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie. . .

(Interesting that in both poems, the verbs for these fires are "g" words: "gall," "gash," and "glow." Does anybody know what that might mean about language?)

More on space in music

Music needs space to live and breathe. Last night, I was singing Messiah in the choir loft at First Church in Oberlin. This historic meeting house is a big rectangle; the choir is at one end, about two thirds of the way up to the ceiling. A lecture I heard cornettist Bruce Dickey give last week talked about his experience playing in Italian churches, often from the organ loft: the sound makes sense when it's played from up there, he said.

This seemed true at First Church, too: the church gave back to us from that wonderfully mostly empty space in which the sound does its wonderful movements.

Too many concerts put the performers in only one place, I think. Last week I was in Trinity Cathedral in Cleveland for the Apollo's Fire Christmas concert -- they were performing a mostly Praetorius concert. Great variety, energy, and color in the music: but disappointingly, very little use of the space. I know it's hard to keep space-separated groups in sync, and precision is what you gain by keeping the performers on one stage. But for one final number, they spread out around this mid-size Gothic hall, and the music started to expand.

When the choir and instruments are together in one space, I as a listener am focused right there, intent on where they are and what they are doing together (at least, I try to be). When they use the space differently -- an offstage brass choir in Mahler; trumpets at the rear of the cathedral; cornetti in the organ loft -- I too have to open up as a listener, darting with ears and mind around the hall. The myth of focus -- which is of course an illusion, as you can't pay attention to all things at once, even when the performers are close together -- the myth is shattered, and for good effect.

I was playing Bach's Magnificat last week, too. The text comes from the gospel account of Mary's response to the incredible shattering of her life in the angel's announcement of her pregnancy. The hymn she sings is all about the changing of space that the birth meant for her and the world. "My soul doth magnify the Lord" -- magnificat:  her soul and body have together become a space that "magnifies" -- resonates -- with God. Through this birth, the hierarchical spaces of power are going to be overthrown, since, in her prophecy, "He hath cast down the mighty from their thrones" -- Deposuit potentes. And again the spaces of the body itself: the womb, the stomach: "He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away." Bach sets that radical emptiness -- the Latin word is inanes -- by ending that part of the piece with a single, low pluck in the cellos; a pluck that resounds through the hall.

To end with, here's a link to an incredible example of music in space: horn player Willie Ruff playing Gregorian chant alone in St. Mark's in Venice.