See to believe

I just read Anton Chekhov's play Ivanov, more than partly because Kenneth Branagh will be playing the title role at the Donmar Warehouse this fall (and then directing Jude Law as Hamlet later in the season; I can hear the critics sharpening their knives now, though they mostly respect Branagh's theatrical skills). I... couldn't get into it. Or out of it. A very odd play about a rather despicable central character with an ailing Jewish wife and failing estate he ignores, and an over-earnest doctor and other characters of varying degrees of virtue, trying to make him wake up again. At the end, after his wife dies and a year passes between acts 3 and 4, it's his wedding day as he is going to marry the neighbor's beautiful young daughter. And he apparently can't bring himself to wreck her life when his is so obviously a wreck already, so he shoots himself. Curtain.

I was driven to read the preface of the edition I was reading, and the author suggests the obvious, that Ivanov, for all his awfulness, is the hero, and the doctor, Lvov, the one whose steps to hell are paved with good intentions. Such an anti-hero is perfect for Branagh, who seems drawn to those lately; he had quite a triumph onstage a few years ago as Edmond in David Mamet's play of the same name. Rumor was that he was working up to Macbeth, but financing has fallen through (and given the level of success of As You Like It, I'm not surprised).

Chekhov is one of those 'great' playwrights who I just can't get into on the very talky page. I really need to see something of his staged sometime, or at least rent a video. Never had this problem with Shakespeare, but it does happen sometimes with plays. Pinter's not that easy to read. Some of Stoppard just looks insane--and it's not that it doesn't also sound insane when you see it, but that the staging can draw it together in interesting ways.

I Love the '80s

YouTube has everything. I don't know if I could sit through all of Music & Lyrics again, but the hilarious faux-'80s video starring Hugh Grant as half of a group called Pop! (a not so subtle takeoff on Wham!) is available here and does not fail to please me.

Hugh Grant said on Leno that he was, in some ways, the proudest of this movie of out all his movies, and I think I can see why, because it must have taken a fair amount of work for him to do all the singing and choreography. Aside from that, it is an intermittently charming film about a forgotten pop star trying to put his life back together. I actually think it could have been quite good if it had focused on Grant's character and kept the female character supporting; it would have been another About a Boy. Unfortunately, Drew Barrymore's character was insipid and had a somewhat contrived self-loathing plotline about having had an affair with a professor who wrote it up in a bestselling novel. But the supporting character, a teenage pop star named Cora, was a great mishmash of Britney-Jessica-Christina, so it was really a fun musical parody film.

I was thinking about this recently because I also youtubed George Michael singing "Somebody to Love" with Queen at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert, which I think is one of his best performances ever. I remember when it was on the Top 40 countdown with Kasey Kasem, and I recorded it off the radio onto a cassette tape and listened to it over and over, as preteens do.

Kasem, according to Wikipedia, refused to say "I Want Your Sex" when that particular hit of Michael's made the charts, and would only refer to it as "the new single by George Michael." I don't remember this, but I believe it. How nice for DJs that Nas solved that little problem by not giving the album the name he wanted to. The only way to refer to it IS as "the new album by Nas."

Brass band fun

Been busy here, but last weekend took some time to watch the Boban i Marko Markovic Orkestar (Boban and Marko Markovic Orchestra) close the Ethnic Arts Festival here. They also opened the Pitchfork festival earlier in the day. This might make you think that they're indie rock, but not even close -- it's a Serbian brass band that plays gypsy music. I don't know if they're assimilated Roma, or ethnic Serbians who play gypsy music, or some combo of the two, but a tremendously fun bunch. Boban and his son Marko both play the trumpet, and Boban also sings quite a lot, backed by four other brass players, a snare drummer, and another drummer who was obviously a local stand-in and had, as my friend put it, Keith Moon aspirations that did not chime with gypsy music so well. I wanted to take one of his cymbals away. The Reader had called the group "acrobatic," and maybe they'd have moved around more on a larger stage, but plenty of fun was provided by Serbian audience members who got up and started dancing. Good times.

Is that an island made of cantaloupe, or...

Listening to the Best of Herbie Hancock right now, and mildly bemused at how familiar some of these big hits are to me. So familiar that I never really thought about who must have originated them: Watermelon Man, Cantaloupe Island. Pretty mellow stuff, but I can see how he experimented and changed over the years. It was a big surprise, I remember, when he won the Grammy for Best Album last year. Now I'm kind of curious to listen to it.

The Dom

Another blast from the trip: I went to Cologne after the seminar in Dortmund, and the most famous tourist attraction (justly) is Cologne's huge cathedral, the Dom. It was damaged in the WWII bombing, but the Allies supposedly avoided targeting it directly (the bridge leading to it was broken, however).

The Dom is immense, and with all its heavy carving and decoration around the base, as well as the tapered spires and the blackened surfaces, looks heavy and imposing. A totally different effect from Chartres, say, or Notre Dame, which is also because the Dom is not that easy to see except right from the plaza surrounding it. You just can't stand back and get a good look at it. Not that easy to get a good picture, either.

Of course, we climbed the 500+ steps to the top, or rather I did while my friend succumbed to vertigo when the tiny spiral staircase inside the tower widens out and changes to an openwork metal staircase for the last 100 steps. However, the view from the top, while good, isn't that enjoyable. You walk around inside the tower, peering out through narrow window after narrow window. Beautiful, but not like walking around a more or less open balcony, even if it's covered with a wire cage.

We also stopped to see the huge set of bells on the way down, which are suitably imposing. The descent was quick but you have to squeeze past other tourists on their panting way up the tower, which makes for some rather hazardous navigation.

Inside, the cathedral is rather plain, with very diverse stained glass and very ornate chapels all around. One woman was vacuuming a carved wooden triptych with a little paintbrush and the hose attachment. When I went back the next day, she was there again and had barely moved.
The cathedral also houses the golden reliquary of the Three Wise Men. What exactly is supposed to be in there, I don't know. Nothing I read specified (bones, clothing, possessions?
Probably bones). Down in the treasury are huge quantities of other treasures, medieval croziers and the like. All in all, you can spend a lot of time around the Dom, fueled by the nearest Doner Kebap.

View from the Bridge

It's not an unknown device to tell a history or story around an object, whether it be a chair, an old chipped pot that once held melted cheese, or the wall of a school (if you can get all those references, you must live inside my head). But Nobel laureate Ivo Andric's book Bridge on the Drina (1945) is probably the longest and most complex of them all. This beautifully built bridge is ostensibly the legacy of a Bosnian boy taken to become a janissary who became a vizier and ordered the bridge built to erase the memory of his kidnapping. Generations thrive on its sturdy platforms, and it acts as the stage for many a small drama during all the changes of regime that wash over the region from the 1500s to the 1900s. It's not exactly a novel, more like a series of short stories or vignettes (Andric liked to call these chronicles). If you manage to read this very long book, you will learn a lot about the history of this conflicted region and also gain an appreciation for the everyday small-town culture that Andric lovingly describes.

If you don't quite have the stamina for this one, try his novella The Vizier's Elephant, which is excellent.

The greatest two weeks in sport

I won't write about it separately, but you can read about my trip to Wimbledon as a mere groundling on the TennisWorld blog here and here. TennisWorld is Peter Bodo's blog on tennis.com, the website of Tennis Magazine (the USA's main tennis mag, I think it's safe to say). I read Pete's blog for a while before I started commenting, gradually commented some more, and then took on this once-a-week "social" post about a year ago. Quite a few of the posts have to do with art that features tennis in some way; I might link to some of those good old posts here on days when I don't have time to post.