satyrica

went to the see the El Greco exhibition with Maggie and Kat wednesday which was actually pretty cool: my relationship with classical (i.e: non-modern not graeco-roman) art is decidedly ambivalent at best: ever since Matt H. took me around the Wallace Collection explaining the socio-political significance of all the shifts in style and imagery I've had a lot more respect for depth of the artform (i.e: it's more than just "Oooo pretty") but I've likewise felt more excluded from it because I don't have the right knowledge or analytic capability to unlock the meaning that I know is there. On the other hand, the vivid intelligence with which some of the portraits had captured their sitters, the vibrancy of the colours and Munchian distortions of perspective and composition in the religious works and the mastery of such a range of styles made it visually arresting and well worth the visit. I also now uderstand where Jarman got his whole St. Sebastian thing from: intersting that an image that looks so clearly eroticised to modern perception can have had no such contemporary intention/association to it.
Afterwards we met up in the Chandos for the London version of cheap beer with a few people who'd been to see Chomsky talk which for no discernbile reason became one of those soon-to-be nostalgia-hazed evenings in the pub where everone was interesting and witty and sparkled with the carefree flush of youth and a thirst for new ideas. Or something. I particularly liked Kat's unintentional summation of twenty-first century intellectualism with her unself-conscious interjection: "Sorry, what did you conclude about the dichotomy of liberalism and fundamentalism? I got distracted by a conversation about ratatouille." and the assertion that the humanities as an academic field are justified on the strength alone of the fact that someone we know has done a thesis on post-modern subversion in Dr. Seuss.

And then last night was the trip to see the Black Rider which Ralph had arranged. As the Metro put it: "Music by Tom Waits; Words by William Burroughs; Starring Marianne Faithfull; what more do you need to know?" There were quibbles (Ms. Faithfull was okay but more a distraction than an asset and there were a couple of bits of staging that hadn't quite gained the fluidity of confidence yet) but generally I loved it: it was, as you might expect from anything Tom Waits was involved in, a riot of surreal grotesquerie, a visual and aural cacophany of oddity that managed to make its self-consciously derivative plot and hackneyed sentiment engaging, comedic and even occasionally affecting, although never in a way that ventured beyond the bounds of burlesque.
Having gained such pleasure from an experience that was, as one guy put it, 'like subjecting yourself to a german expressionist nightmare' it did make me wonder (in the way that David Lynch films do as I sit there watching them with a grin on my face) *what is it* I'm actually enjoying about this? It's not the emotional resonance of well-drawn characters or the powerful realism of great acting or the engaging originality of cleverly-devised plots- I guess it's the triumph of style over substance in both cases, but what style ;-) I also wondered whether one of the reason burlesque does work is because its cliche-laden expressions of cheap sentiment are actually a more realistic representation of a life characterised by the mundane scope of petty, unoriginal griefs, loves and yearnings than the grand passions and higher purposes portrayed elsewhere, but by treating it all with such irony manages to get away with the dramatic equivalent of adolescent poetry- expressing feelings in cloying and cliched terms that are utterly heartfelt and engulfing.