Rolling Stones Concert

HP Pavilion, San Jose, California

May 8, 2013

 

 

This was my second Rolling Stones concert.  The first was in November of 2005 at SBC Park in San Francisco, part of the Stones Bigger Bang tour.  I would rate them as two of the best concerts of my life.  The Stones really know how to put on a show.  They have this down and it just feels like a class act from beginning to end.

They’re definitely older than they used to be (but who isn’t?), but they can still keep a full house enthralled for two solid hours without a break.  The show lasted about two hours and fifteen minutes without an intermission and it was the same in the 2005 concert at SBC Park.  That’s something I like about them.  I hate intermissions.  The Stones just keep the momentum going nonstop.  The HP Pavilion seats 17,496, and they were probably close to capacity.  About a quarter of the seats in the auditorium behind the stage were purposely left vacant, but they made up for it with seating and standing room on the main floor.  I didn’t see any vacant seats.

I had some good fortune in getting these tickets.  I had heard about the upcoming concert probably on the radio.  I checked into getting tickets and somehow found out that the day they were to go on sale there would be about 1000 tickets available at a drastically reduced price of $85.  A friend who wanted to go urged me to try for them, so when they went on sale on a Monday morning I went online at that time and managed to score two tickets at $85.  I believe the next highest price was about double that.

So I had the tickets, but they were will-call tickets.  They would not send them out.  They didn’t want any scalping of these low priced tickets.  We had no idea where we were sitting.  I figured it would be some sort of standing room, but it was actually a seat after all.  On morning of the concert I received the following message from them:

TICKET PICK-UP INSTRUCTIONS

Pick-up your tickets at the check-in table located at N. Autumn St. (under stairwell) adjacent to the South Ticket Window.

The line forms starting at 6:15pm – do not arrive early. Seating locations are pulled at random. Doors open at 6:45pm.

We will be using strict anti-scalper measures to ensure that these $85 tickets go to Stones fans and don’t end up on the resale market with wildly inflated prices. We appreciate your attention to the following, so that you have the best experience possible:

• Your picture ID, confirmation number, and the      credit card used to make the purchase are required for pick-up. You will      not be permitted to pick up your tickets without these three (3) items.
• You must pick up your tickets in person, along      with your guest.
• Once you have the tickets in hand, you will be      escorted into the arena. There will not be an opportunity to leave with      your tickets before going into the show.
• If we suspect any reselling or transfer of      these tickets they will be immediately voided and you will not be entitled      to any refund.

 

It was my first time in the HP Pavilion.  It is an indoor facility and an excellent venue for a concert of this type.  Our seats were near the top of the upper level about 90 degrees to the stage.  As far as seats go in that arena, they were probably some of the least desirable, but I didn’t mind at all.  The auditorium is small enough that just about any seat is good, and we could see and hear quite well.  Large projection screens were set up that provided a closer look at the performance.  The image quality was excellent as well as the camera work.  The Stones are a class act.  They really know how to take care of an audience and present a performance everyone is sure to like and feel very satisfied with.

The concert was scheduled for 8pm, but it actually started around 9.  There was no warm up band.  Keith Richards seemed to be having a good time.  He was smiling and really seemed to be enjoying being out there performing.  Mick’s voice is still strong.  He still struts and prances the whole time, but he doesn’t run as much as he did the previous time I saw him.  He and Keith will both turn 70 this year.  They all look thin and wiry.  There is no obesity epidemic with them.  They keep themselves in pretty good shape.  Their sound is still strong and vibrant, although I felt it did not have quite the same riveting energy and raw power that it did in their earlier years.  But then, how many of you have the same energy and vigor that you had in your twenties and thirties?  But let’s leave off with how old they are.  Let’s just consider them on the merits.

This concert was fabulous.  It was a greatest hits parade from beginning to end.  I’ll list the set, but admit at the outset that it is incomplete, but most of it is here.  They opened with

Get off of My Cloud followed by

Gimme Shelter featuring Lisa Fisher, who also sang backup throughout

Paint It Black was a very poignant choice, I thought

John Fogerty was brought out to share the lead on It’s All Over Now, which I would judge one of the highlights of the evening

Bonnie Raitt sang Let It Bleed with Mick, which worked very well.

Keith did Before They Make Me Run, and Happy

Midnight Rambler, Jumpin Jack Flash, and Brown Sugar were probably my merit badge choices for the evening, but everything was good.

They also did Bitch, Miss You, Start Me Up, Sympathy for the Devil, Emotional Rescue, Honky Tonk Woman, and they brought out a chorus for You Can’t Always Get What You Want.  They closed with Satisfaction, with Mick Taylor making an appearance on guitar, as well as on several other numbers.

I am sure there are a couple of other songs that I have left out.  I didn’t keep strict track as I went along.  I especially enjoyed the local guests they brought in to share in a few of the numbers.  John Fogerty stands out in my mind.  It was a totally satisfying presentation.  The Stones are consummate performers.  The music is great as it has always been, and they went full bore all the way to the end.  Hard not to like a concert like that.

Brighton Theatre presents…..

 BLACK VENUS
by
Jonathan Cash

 

“Josephine Baker subverted racial stereotypes and had a huge influence on black performers,” said Faynia Williams, director of a showcase trailer of this production designed by Romany Mark Bruce.  BLACK VENUS brings Baker, the first jazz superstar, face to face with Hermann Goering over dinner in occupied Paris.  The action combines music, dance and dialogue with Brechtian style flashbacks and promises to mesmerize the audience by intertwining themes of love, food, sex and racism.

Baker grew up in St Louis, Missouri, living hand to mouth in the streets when she was 12, living in cardboard boxes and scavaging for food in garbage cans.  Her street corner dancing attracted attention when she was 15 and her career expanded across the ocean to Paris.  Indeed, she always said she had two loves: Paris and America.  Her famous Banana Dance combined the rhythms of African Dance and contemporary jazz to create modern Continental Break Dancing. She was an activist on many fronts and worked for the French Resistance because of her many contacts in the world of the Axis.  It was because of her undercover activities that Hermann Goering invited her to dinner.  This play recaptures that momentous evening when the two met face to face.

BLACK VENUS was shortlisted for the 2013 Best New Play Award and given funding by the Arts Council of England.   It will be presented for one night only,  Josephine Baker Day, May 20 at 7pm and 9pm, at Concorde2, Madeira Drive, Brighton BN2 1EN . It will feature Anna Maria Nabirye as Josephine, Ross Gurney Randall as Goering with musical direction by Tom Phelan.

For more information: www.brightonfringe.org; 01273 917272

 

Deceptive Practice:  The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay

Directed by Molly Edelstein

 

This is a fascinating documentary featuring sleight of hand artist, Ricky Jay.  He is a master of card tricks and anything related to magic.  I love magic shows, but have never had any desire to do it myself.  This man is very different.  He started doing magic at age four and has been immersed in it ever since.  The film is not a systematic biography, although it does contain much information about Ricky Jay and his life as a magician.  It is full of intriguing displays of magic tricks and a wealth of information about the history of the practice of sleight of hand and many of its early practitioners.  Ricky Jay has been a collector of historical materials and writings on the history of magic, and has written a number of books himself on the subject.  The film drew heavily on these resources to offer a full bodied overview of many of the precursors and mentors to Ricky Jay going back into the nineteenth century.  The practitioners seem to be predominantly Jewish and they form a tight subculture wherein the craft is passed down from mentors to students.  The film did not explore how the magic tricks are done.  You will not go behind the scenes and see how the illusions are created, but what interested me is that it is very much an artform of individual practitioners.  Magicians tend keep their methods secret, not only from the public, but also from each other.  It is a craft that one has to learn through mentoring and ultimately through creative exploration on one’s own.  I was also impressed with the virtuosity that many magicians achieve.  They are akin to top level musicians or athletes who spend many years in total dedication to mastering the technique of their art.

The film does not attempt an in depth personal exploration of Ricky Jay.  It tends to avoid delving into his personal life, although we do learn that he left home at an early age and has had little contact with his family since.  He has also been married for seven years and seems pleased with his wife, although she is not interviewed in the film.  There are many interviews with people who know Ricky Jay and have worked with him, including playwright and director, David Mamet.  Jay is reputed to be difficult and abrasive, but in the film he comes off as low key, engaging and very personable.  He is obviously highly intelligent and the absolute master of his craft.  I didn’t get any profound insight into his character or into the psychology of magic from this film.  The film is not thought provoking in that respect.  It is a compendium of facts on the history of magic, some of its more notable practitioners, and lots of sensational tricks that will dazzle you.  One cannot help but be drawn into this film by the skill of the practitioners, the illusions one is doomed to fall for, and the eccentric, anomalous individuals who made this art form their life’s obsession.  Seen at the San Francisco International Film Festival, May 6, 2013.

Cinderella

San Francisco Ballet Performance

May 4, 2013

 

 

There are many versions and variants of the Cinderella story.  The most popular in recent times are the French version written by Charles Perrault in 1697 and the German version(s) of the Grimm Brothers from the early 1800s.  The Disney animated movie version, which was released in 1950, is heavily influenced by Perrault and is probably the most familiar version of the story in America.  The American Cinderella has been forcefully criticized by Jane Yolen (1982) as being

“a sorry excuse for a heroine, pitiable and useless.  She cannot perform even a simple action to save herself . . . Cinderella begs, she whimpers, and at last has to be rescued by — guess who — the mice! (p. 302)  “The mass-market books have brought forward a good, malleable, forgiving little girl and put her in Cinderella’s slippers.  However, in most of the Cinderella tales there is no forgiveness in the heroine’s heart.  No mercy.  Just justice.” (p. 301)  “Hardy, helpful, inventive, that was the Cinderella of the old tales, but not of the mass market in the nineteenth century.  Today’s mass market books are worse.” (p. 300)  “The mass market American “Cinderellas” have presented the majority of American children with the wrong dream.  They offer the passive princess, the ‘insipid beauty waiting . . . for Prince Charming’ . . . But it is the wrong Cinderella and the magic of the old tales has been falsified, the true meaning lost, perhaps forever.”  (p. 302-03)

I concur with this assessment, and so it was with great expectancy that I attended the San Francisco Ballet’s performance this weekend in the high hope that they would do something interesting and inventive with this ancient tale and its endless possibilities.  Boy, did they ever deliver!  The performance was magnificent.  It fulfilled the highest and best potential of dance as an art form.  It perfectly realized my own aesthetic and conception of what dance should be.  Of all the dance performances I have seen, I would say this was the best one.  It had everything.  The dancers, of course, were superb, as always at the San Francisco Ballet, but this production was well thought out with great intelligence.  It is a big concept.  It has a broad narrative line with numerous subplots.  The story is told in nonverbal language that can be easily followed by a viewer.  The ballet was not about athleticism, or a celebration of the physical beauty and grace of the body for its own sake, but rather the body and its capacity for movement and communication are employed to tell a story and create relationships between characters that evolve and change throughout the drama.  It was dynamic as well as emotionally and intellectually challenging.  The music was perfectly suited to the dancing and to the action on stage, which I always notice and appreciate.  The lighting, the sets, the staging, and the costumes were highly imaginative, and beautifully done.  It is a visually enchanting spectacle.  Large bouquets to Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, Librettist Craig Lucas, Scene and Costume designer Julian Crouch, and Lighting Designer Natasha Katz, Tree and Carriage Designer Basil Twist, and Projection Designer Daniel Brodie, and the entire staff.  This show is a first rate accomplishment.

The production draws more from the Grimm tradition rather than from Perrault, but it incorporates creative, original innovations that give it a uniqueness and individuality that in my opinion is superior to the older versions of the tale.  The San Francisco Ballet version has complexity.  The characters have depth in contrast to the fairy tale characters, which tend to be simplified and cartoonish.

Following the Grimm version, the story centers around a tree growing out of Cinderella’s mother’s grave.  There is no fairy god mother in this story.  Instead four Fates shadow Cinderella throughout the performance, watching over her, encouraging her, and guiding her in the right direction at crucial times.  There are a variety of wonderfully costumed fairies and animal characters who support Cinderella.  Cinderella’s father remains a player throughout the story, sometimes protecting her from the harshness and excess of the stepmother.  In the fairy tale versions the father seems to disappear and abandons Cinderella to her fate at the hands of her stepfamily.  This tends to gut the story of its emotional sense.  It makes it seem as if stepmothers and stepsisters are inherently evil or hostile toward their stepsiblings, and this is not necessary the case nor inevitable, particularly if the father is absent or dead.  It also leaves one wondering how the father could simply abandon his natural daughter from his first wife to the cruelty of his new family.  However, once it is realized that the hostility between Cinderella and her stepfamily is rooted in a sexual rivalry for the father, then the whole story makes perfect sense — but most versions of the story will not deal with this.  Cinderella becomes sanitized and desexualized.

I liked the San Francisco Ballet’s concept because it moves in the direction of keeping the story emotionally and sexually alive by retaining the father as an involved player throughout the story.  He is at the ball with everyone else and dances with all three of his daughters.  It would have helped if this had been a little more overtly sexual, but it worked.  The conflict and the implications could be discerned.

When the father remarries and the stepmother and her two daughters are brought to meet Cinderella for the first time, they offer her a bouquet of flowers which Cinderella contemptuously throws on the ground.  This action seems to set up the antagonism between Cinderella and her stepfamily.  On the other hand, was the bouquet a genuine gesture, or a cynical act of hypocrisy?  This was an interesting twist that contrasted with the usual the versions of the fairy tale where the animosity between the stepfamily and Cinderella is attributed to the inherent cruelty of the stepsisters and their mother, which is rather simpleminded.  In the San Francisco Ballet’s conception the arriving stepfamily appears to reach out to Cinderella and she rejects them.  Why?  Obviously, because she had her father all to herself and their arrival brings her exclusive possession of his attention and affection to an end.  This involves Cinderella in creating her own predicament.

If anything, I think Cinderella should have been even more of a bitch.  This is a nasty, ugly sexual rivalry and should not be cast as a struggle between Good and Evil, as it traditionally is.  The San Francisco Ballet moves a long step in the right direction, but I think it could be emphasized even more.  I liked that in this performance the sexual attraction between the father and the step sisters as well as Cinderella was evident, and Cinderella’s relationship with the Prince has palpable sexual overtones.  During the ball they disappear several times from the stage as if going off for a tryst and then return for more dancing.  This Cinderella was not a sanitized, innocent, passive player being helplessly pushed around.  She had some character and some strength of her own.  Nor are the stepsisters and their mother uniformly evil and cruel.  Cinderella is able to form a somewhat friendly rapport with the younger sister, Clementine.  The Prince also becomes more interesting in this retelling.  He is not an idealized Prince Charming devoid of personality, but is something of a rogue who causes his parents, the King and Queen, consternation.  He has a companion, Benjamin, who takes a fancy to the step sister, Clementine, and in the end, they, too, marry in a sort of double wedding.

At the end of the first act when the animals dress Cinderella in her gown for the ball there was no pumpkin carriage (that comes from Perrault).  Instead Cinderella disappears into an opening in the trunk of the tree — which looks remarkably like a vulva — and shortly emerges transformed by the forest animals into a princess in a splendid carriage being whisked off to the ball. It is a very powerful, effective scene.

In the final scene the reconciliation between Cinderella and her stepmother is very modest.  She plants a small kiss on her stepmother’s cheek, but it shows considerable restraint.  It is almost perfunctory.  However, it is less grotesque than having the birds peck out their eyes as in the Grimm version.

Altogether the San Francisco Ballet’s recasting of Cinderella goes several steps beyond the Grimm Brothers in quality and emotional sophistication.  I hope it replaces the Disney version in the popular consciousness.  It was truly a privilege to see it.  As far as dance performances go, this is as good as it gets.  It makes me grateful to be living San Francisco where it is possible to go out in the evening and see a performance of this high quality.  If you can go out in the evening and see something of this caliber and imaginative power, you know you are in one of the best places in all the world to be.  This is why we live here.

 

 

 

 

Yolen, Jane (1982)  America’s Cinderella.  In Cinderella: A Casebook.  Edited by Alan Dundes.  Madison, WI:  University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 294-306.