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not quite a concert review
May. 16th, 2011 10:44 pmBe thankful I didn't ask you to be my companion in attending this thing. I did run down a list of possible fellow-travelers in my mind, and then I said nah, why bother. You never can tell, of course. A piece of unique performance art thrown together like this by a man hailed by some as a genius could turn out to be brilliant, or it could turn out to be meh. This one was meh.
In a sincere attempt to better understand what I was getting into by having been assigned to review it, I attended three different talks by Trimpin, the presiding genius, during the week of the performance. And at all three of them, he told the same stories about his inspirations and what he intended to convey during the piece, all of them delivered in a ... slow ... German ... accent.
And then when some of them reappeared, retold in the narration during the piece itself, that's when I knew we were sunk. As I wrote in the review, "an artistic work shouldn't include a commentary on its own significance." I know that T.S. Eliot put footnotes in The Waste Land, but even that was more subtle.
I'm sure that Trimpin was deeply gobsmacked by the way the concentration camp at Gurs kept reappearing indirectly in his own life, and if he were sufficiently brilliant, he might be able to make great art out of that. But he had nothing to say other than, "Isn't this weird?" He's not an artistic genius, even though he's won a MacArthur grant: he's a tinkerer. A technically competent tinkerer, but I have the feeling that if Don Simpson (the one some of us know) had been commissioned to create a piece like this, he could have come up with something more interesting and more fun.
I just wish I could have made the review funnier. Or shorter. It does have one nasty comment secretly embedded in it, in the form of the kind of literary reference I'm addicted to. I write: While this was going on, the five performers were pulling at, examining, and piling up a roll of brown paper. What the thinking was behind this action, I couldn't say. The second sentence, with just the tense changed and a comma added, is directly copied - stolen, some might say - from one of my favorite essays, the writer Will Stanton's take-down of "Little Red Riding Hood." You need the context. Stanton writes,
In a sincere attempt to better understand what I was getting into by having been assigned to review it, I attended three different talks by Trimpin, the presiding genius, during the week of the performance. And at all three of them, he told the same stories about his inspirations and what he intended to convey during the piece, all of them delivered in a ... slow ... German ... accent.
And then when some of them reappeared, retold in the narration during the piece itself, that's when I knew we were sunk. As I wrote in the review, "an artistic work shouldn't include a commentary on its own significance." I know that T.S. Eliot put footnotes in The Waste Land, but even that was more subtle.
I'm sure that Trimpin was deeply gobsmacked by the way the concentration camp at Gurs kept reappearing indirectly in his own life, and if he were sufficiently brilliant, he might be able to make great art out of that. But he had nothing to say other than, "Isn't this weird?" He's not an artistic genius, even though he's won a MacArthur grant: he's a tinkerer. A technically competent tinkerer, but I have the feeling that if Don Simpson (the one some of us know) had been commissioned to create a piece like this, he could have come up with something more interesting and more fun.
I just wish I could have made the review funnier. Or shorter. It does have one nasty comment secretly embedded in it, in the form of the kind of literary reference I'm addicted to. I write: While this was going on, the five performers were pulling at, examining, and piling up a roll of brown paper. What the thinking was behind this action, I couldn't say. The second sentence, with just the tense changed and a comma added, is directly copied - stolen, some might say - from one of my favorite essays, the writer Will Stanton's take-down of "Little Red Riding Hood." You need the context. Stanton writes,
Then the grandmother comes out, hardly able to breathe, but still alive. The wolf, you may recall, is still wearing her nightgown, so presumably she doesn't have anything on. Neither Red Riding Hood nor the huntsman, however, appears to notice that the old lady is topless. They are busy gathering big stones with which they fill up the wolf. What the thinking is behind this action I couldn't say. I think we must simply accept the fact that none of these people are what you could call normal.In my review, Stanton's last sentence is to be left unspoken.
