Please Do Not Torture My Grieving Heart
Operatic Seclusion
I think I’m entering a period of what I could romantically call “writerly solitude.” This summer was a whirlwind both good and bad: new friends; drugs; long nights and afternoons in the pool of a beautiful Mulholland Drive home the owner of which, a boon companion, was in Paris for the season and so he’d given me the run of it; a protracted and somewhat traumatic move-of-house in 90-degree heat; dealing with extended illnesses both physical and mental… You know, the usual. But now that autumn (whatever that means in Los Angeles) is circling in, I find myself wanting to close ranks and focus on writing. I’m reminded of a Frank O’Hara stanza that frequently pops into my head:
I love you. I love you,
but I’m turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.
The “you” that I love in this case is everything I indulged in this summer. Friends, the world, decadence, even giving in to entering the parallel reality of being sick. But I feel the urge now to work, work, work. This doesn’t mean I won’t socialize. I’m sure you’ll see me in all the old familiar places now and then. We’ll see how it goes. Part of it is committing to getting this Substack out once a week. I’m two weeks for two so far. Oof.
Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, as staged by the L.A. Opera
I just noticed that the name “Amadeus” means “God’s love” or “loved by God.” It takes me ages to register these things; I am pun-blind, for example. Anyway, I went to a dress rehearsal of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the L.A. Opera this week with my friend DV (the aforementioned house-lender). Another friend, Dahlia, works in the costume department there, heading up dyeing and ageing to make the costumes stage-ready—an undeniably cool job—and she hooked up the tickets. I used to go the ballet a lot when I lived in New York, but this, at age 48, was my first live opera. It won’t be the last.
The first thing I think of when I think of Don Giovanni is a scene from Husbands and Wives, my favorite Woody Allen movie. Maybe set this aside to watch later. It’s one of Judy Davis’s best moments, and that's saying a lot. Sorry for the sub-VHS quality.
So, you probably know the story of Don Giovanni already, but here’s the headline: A nobleman treats everybody he encounters like shit. Various plots for a comeuppance are hatched. It is billed by the L.A. Opera, at their website, as a drama—but so much of it is played for laughs. Witness the show’s standout performance: Craig Colclough as Leporello, the Don’s increasingly reluctant lackey, which is brilliant both in its sensitive interpretation of the text and also in its almost slapsticky physicality. (The best performance in the show in terms of operatic heights comes from Guanqun Yu as the wronged Donna Anna. I’ve rarely heard such emotion coupled with such technically pyrotechnic singing.) But, anyway, let’s call this opera a tragicomedy1. Murder, misogyny, betrayal, ghosts, and literal Hell all figure into it. The staging for the production centers on a house-like structure that continually rotates, revealing new sides, throughout the opera’s two acts. Projection figures heavily into it, and it’s stronger in imagery in the second act than it is in the first act, which opens with a slow sequence of various female names, representing the Don’s conquests, being scrawled across the face of the set. I found this too literal and was made wary by it before the show even began. But the action of Act One, along with the magic of seeing opera live for the first time, assuaged any of that quickly. (To synopsize the first act: Don Giovanni beds a noblewoman and kills her father, then tries to fuck the bride at a wedding, and then finally finds aggrieved parties from both of these transgressions out for his head.)
Act Two, which at one point sees the entire stage-structure drenched in projected bloody scrawls and rivulets, was stronger than Act One. But this might have had something to do with the fact that, at the intermission, DV and I smoked an incredibly strong joint filled with weed that DV had acquired from—no kidding—a former Grateful Dead roadie and insider. Also, we’d spent Act One in relative sobriety in the nosebleeds, but as Act Two began we found ourselves situated in much better seats via Dahlia bravely sneaking us, two giggling, red-eyed adult men, through the doors to the orchestra section. We were now maybe 20 rows back from the stage. The sacred math of marijuana plus proximity to the surrealism of high-end opera seen up-close led to a truly revelatory experience. Not all of my revelations, however, were sophisticated. For instance: The humor in Don Giovanni is often sophomoric. There’s a lot of eavesdropping and mistaken identity at play here. Was Mozart, among other things, the Three’s Company of 18th-century Vienna?
A few other things from the past week:
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Why didn’t someone force me to read this book years ago? I’m about halfway through and not yet ready to put my own words up against it, but it’s one of the most moving, spooky, and beautifully written—my god, the language—books I’ve read in… my life?
Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD by Martin Aston
A 600-page book about the record label that most adhered to a consistent aesthetic not just in their roster choices but also in their art. You could always tell a 4AD record from the cover, whether it was Pixies or Dead Can Dance. I’m early in this one, and I’m mainly reading it for any juicy goss I can glean about the Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil.
Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles by Rosecrans Baldwin
Since moving to L.A. in late 2015, I’ve generally been reading an L.A. or Hollywood history book at any given time. City of Quartz by Mike Davis and City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s by Otto Friedrich have probably been my favorites so far. But this newer book, from 2021, is right up there too. This is actually my second time reading it within the span of a few months. The central question is whether Los Angeles, in all its sprawl, diversity, economy, commerce, and culture, can be seen as a place that exists in the classical tradition of the city-state. Through a truly esoteric range of references and experiences, Baldwin makes the case and asks all the right things. Baldwin, also a fairly recent transplant (2014) to L.A. surprises mightily with his choices of topics that, once cohered, form the most unique portrait of a city that I can remember reading.
An unexpected source of chuckles for DV and I came when we realized that the screen displaying the English translation of the opera’s text often resembled, in its accidentally gnomic pronouncements, pieces by the artist Barbara Kruger. The title of this week’s newsletter is one such snippet, which felt particularly poignant.