No Tattoos, You Don't Stand Out
To begin with a couple of pronouncement-type-things:
1) Subversion is essentially a local action. It requires an appraisal of terms and context which inevitably limits the realm of interaction. Therefore (the usual parenthetical statement of awareness for my own lack of evidencing this claim), if you think you’re being subversive on some global scale, you’re not. At this point in the post, I’m not exactly sure why I’m stating this, but it’s been popping up in my brain a lot recently, for reasons generally unknown to me – though I think it’s related somehow to my “cultural” experience in Berlin. This post is as much about me figuring out why I’m thinking this than explaining it to you.
2) Some things are good for good reasons. Subversion, due to its inability to grasp at anything approaching universality, tends to fail at being “good for good reasons.” Which is not to say that I think universality is culturally approachable in the first place (if there is an Operatic, for instance, X-bar, who knows what it is or might be). This is part of the enjoyment-enjoying that I’ve been having (until the Philharmonie caught on fire, there has been a noticeable lack of meta-enjoyment since Tuesday in aforementioned brain-that-notices-things part of my brain (and, incidentally, I was trying to explain the other day to a classmate of mine (who is from Idaho and in University in Utah) what my “cultural” experience is like – in terms, mainly, of going so often to concerts, and specifically in reference to the concert that this post will eventually get to mentioning, and he expressed some amount of surprise that I think as much as I do about any given concert – that concert-going and/or music-hearing is or can be a cognitive experience (this, actually, paints something of an incomplete picture, of course, since as I’ve mentioned already earlier this month, there are aspects of all of these concerts which I think are explicitly not cognitive)).
Yesterday I was walking to school, listening to Stravinsky’s Symphony in C (one of the recordings I’m addicted to – the MTT/LSO disc of the Symphonies of Psalms, in C, and Three Movements), and I ran into a friend of mine, so pulled the headphones off my ears. It happened to be at a loud part, so my friend could hear that I was listening to raucous “classical” music, and immediately made some conductorly hand gestures and vocalizations as a way of commenting on the music. It’s interesting to find oneself living up to type – there is certainly nothing performative in intention at work when I decide to listen to “classical” music while going from one place to another, but as soon as my listening went from being private to public, suddenly there it was: I was, in fact, listening to such music, and had probably either to a concert the night before or going to a concert that night. Nerd alarm.
The concert in question (and this is the least real-time (as Jack put it) of my concert blog posts), was Tuesday evening’s performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin by the Deutsche Oper Berlin. It is my stance that most Wagner is not good – or rather, there are generally things that are good, but his work as a whole, and in its quest for that very same wholeness is bad. Some things are bad for good reasons. Or rather, there are plenty of things that I think are bad and feel my reasons for thinking so are sound (“good”). The problem with Parsifal, for instance, is that it actually is good, despite the fact that it would be best for all of Wagner to be bad.
Watching opera is something like watching baseball – it has a pace all of its own, and generally for optimal experiencing thereof requires viewers to align themselves with that pacing. Wagner, then, is the American League of opera – through various inventions intended to beef up the offense, instead what we get is an overly long often excruciatingly boring outcome. Though I didn’t fall asleep – I definitely zoned out a bit during the first act, but once I got used to the thing I was actually more awake/attentive then I even wanted to be for the second and third acts. Several of the singers were really quite good, no stand-outs for me though, and the band, as usual, was pretty well astounding (though I admit that the level of astonishment is related to the fact that the Deutsche Oper is the “second” opera in Berlin, and the depth of insanely high-quality musicians in Berlin is probably second only to London in the world (though I’m not expert on that matter)).
Getting back to subversion, then, it seems to me that there are aspects of Lohengrin that are probably rife for the subverting, and this staging struck me as mostly conservative. Especially when you have a German king singing heroically about the power of Germans, and the need to re-crush the Hungarians (Lebensraum, anybody?) and the giant stage-large chorus singing “Sieg! Sieg! Sieg! Heil! Heil! Heil!” The military costumes were just sort of ambiguous 19th century outfits, and the set itself was a lazy quasi-expressionistic sort of thing. Though, of course, there’s no need, as such, for subversion, just opportunity. So, if this was a “serious” staging, then fine…
Except for the Lohengrin himself. In what is easily the strangest costuming decision I have ever seen, Lohengrin appeared in the first act (the libretto calls for him to show up in brilliantly shining metallic armor) wearing what I think might best be described as astronaut pajamas. He was in silver moon boots (recalling, for me, terribly specifically, the white army surplus winter boots of a certain particularly hickish member (“What’s the difference between [him] and a popular camping snack?’) of our Boy Scout Troop (is that public knowledge, that we were Boy Scouts? I guess it is)), silver stretch pants, and close-fitting amateurish-looking cardboard chest armor. And carrying a giant sword with both hands. Absolutely foolish looking.
To me, there’s no way that they could have been doing anything here but been trying to subvert the uebermensch character. This, of course, fails to do so, because even in astronaut pajamas, the way the man sings and what he sings doesn’t change, and that still carries the majority of the impression. And, again, I’m leaving plenty of blanks here, but the abject goofiness of Lohengrin’s external appearance ended up just leaving me confused and I guess a bit angry. I guess, when I think of subversive actions, I think of actions intended to raise questions, and this particular event (especially given that it could have simply been a bad choice and not a political comment) failed to raise any questions other than “What the hell were/are they thinking?”
1) Subversion is essentially a local action. It requires an appraisal of terms and context which inevitably limits the realm of interaction. Therefore (the usual parenthetical statement of awareness for my own lack of evidencing this claim), if you think you’re being subversive on some global scale, you’re not. At this point in the post, I’m not exactly sure why I’m stating this, but it’s been popping up in my brain a lot recently, for reasons generally unknown to me – though I think it’s related somehow to my “cultural” experience in Berlin. This post is as much about me figuring out why I’m thinking this than explaining it to you.
2) Some things are good for good reasons. Subversion, due to its inability to grasp at anything approaching universality, tends to fail at being “good for good reasons.” Which is not to say that I think universality is culturally approachable in the first place (if there is an Operatic, for instance, X-bar, who knows what it is or might be). This is part of the enjoyment-enjoying that I’ve been having (until the Philharmonie caught on fire, there has been a noticeable lack of meta-enjoyment since Tuesday in aforementioned brain-that-notices-things part of my brain (and, incidentally, I was trying to explain the other day to a classmate of mine (who is from Idaho and in University in Utah) what my “cultural” experience is like – in terms, mainly, of going so often to concerts, and specifically in reference to the concert that this post will eventually get to mentioning, and he expressed some amount of surprise that I think as much as I do about any given concert – that concert-going and/or music-hearing is or can be a cognitive experience (this, actually, paints something of an incomplete picture, of course, since as I’ve mentioned already earlier this month, there are aspects of all of these concerts which I think are explicitly not cognitive)).
Yesterday I was walking to school, listening to Stravinsky’s Symphony in C (one of the recordings I’m addicted to – the MTT/LSO disc of the Symphonies of Psalms, in C, and Three Movements), and I ran into a friend of mine, so pulled the headphones off my ears. It happened to be at a loud part, so my friend could hear that I was listening to raucous “classical” music, and immediately made some conductorly hand gestures and vocalizations as a way of commenting on the music. It’s interesting to find oneself living up to type – there is certainly nothing performative in intention at work when I decide to listen to “classical” music while going from one place to another, but as soon as my listening went from being private to public, suddenly there it was: I was, in fact, listening to such music, and had probably either to a concert the night before or going to a concert that night. Nerd alarm.
The concert in question (and this is the least real-time (as Jack put it) of my concert blog posts), was Tuesday evening’s performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin by the Deutsche Oper Berlin. It is my stance that most Wagner is not good – or rather, there are generally things that are good, but his work as a whole, and in its quest for that very same wholeness is bad. Some things are bad for good reasons. Or rather, there are plenty of things that I think are bad and feel my reasons for thinking so are sound (“good”). The problem with Parsifal, for instance, is that it actually is good, despite the fact that it would be best for all of Wagner to be bad.
Watching opera is something like watching baseball – it has a pace all of its own, and generally for optimal experiencing thereof requires viewers to align themselves with that pacing. Wagner, then, is the American League of opera – through various inventions intended to beef up the offense, instead what we get is an overly long often excruciatingly boring outcome. Though I didn’t fall asleep – I definitely zoned out a bit during the first act, but once I got used to the thing I was actually more awake/attentive then I even wanted to be for the second and third acts. Several of the singers were really quite good, no stand-outs for me though, and the band, as usual, was pretty well astounding (though I admit that the level of astonishment is related to the fact that the Deutsche Oper is the “second” opera in Berlin, and the depth of insanely high-quality musicians in Berlin is probably second only to London in the world (though I’m not expert on that matter)).
Getting back to subversion, then, it seems to me that there are aspects of Lohengrin that are probably rife for the subverting, and this staging struck me as mostly conservative. Especially when you have a German king singing heroically about the power of Germans, and the need to re-crush the Hungarians (Lebensraum, anybody?) and the giant stage-large chorus singing “Sieg! Sieg! Sieg! Heil! Heil! Heil!” The military costumes were just sort of ambiguous 19th century outfits, and the set itself was a lazy quasi-expressionistic sort of thing. Though, of course, there’s no need, as such, for subversion, just opportunity. So, if this was a “serious” staging, then fine…
Except for the Lohengrin himself. In what is easily the strangest costuming decision I have ever seen, Lohengrin appeared in the first act (the libretto calls for him to show up in brilliantly shining metallic armor) wearing what I think might best be described as astronaut pajamas. He was in silver moon boots (recalling, for me, terribly specifically, the white army surplus winter boots of a certain particularly hickish member (“What’s the difference between [him] and a popular camping snack?’) of our Boy Scout Troop (is that public knowledge, that we were Boy Scouts? I guess it is)), silver stretch pants, and close-fitting amateurish-looking cardboard chest armor. And carrying a giant sword with both hands. Absolutely foolish looking.
To me, there’s no way that they could have been doing anything here but been trying to subvert the uebermensch character. This, of course, fails to do so, because even in astronaut pajamas, the way the man sings and what he sings doesn’t change, and that still carries the majority of the impression. And, again, I’m leaving plenty of blanks here, but the abject goofiness of Lohengrin’s external appearance ended up just leaving me confused and I guess a bit angry. I guess, when I think of subversive actions, I think of actions intended to raise questions, and this particular event (especially given that it could have simply been a bad choice and not a political comment) failed to raise any questions other than “What the hell were/are they thinking?”
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