Michael Ferguson

Program 6

San Francisco Ballet Performance

April 15, 2014

 

 

Program 6 is three distinct ballets:  Maelstrom, Caprice, and The Rite of Spring.  Maelstrom was conceived and choreographed by Mark Morris, a sometime collaborator with the San Francisco Ballet, to Beethoven’s “Ghost” Trio, Op. 70, No. 1.  I don’t know why they called this “Maelstrom.”  There is nothing of a maelstrom in it.  It is a rather tame ballet.  The most interesting movement was the second, to the “Ghost” movement of the Beethoven Trio.  The name “Ghost” doesn’t apply very well to this music either.  The music is somber, even melancholy, but I don’t know what that has to do with a ghost.  My experience with ghosts is limited, but encountering a ghost is almost always a disturbing experience, or at best, enigmatic.  A ghost is usually sinister, foreboding, even malevolent.  But the music in Beethoven’s trio does not feel that way, nor does Morris’s dance.  I got the feeling that this Beethoven Trio does not lend itself well to dance, and maybe that is why this ballet never got off the ground.  The third movement is energetic and relatively light hearted.  The dance throughout this movement consisted of brief segments of dancers in twos and threes.  They would make a very brief appearance on stage, dance a brief vignette, and then exit to be replaced by another small group for another very short interlude, then exiting similarly, and so forth, through the entire movement.  This structure of brief episodes strung together gave the movement a very choppy feel.  It must have been intended for people with short attention spans.  The dance was furthermore not very interesting.  It had a sameness to it that became monotonous after a while.  The dancers did the best they could with it, but I didn’t think it was a very good concept.

Caprice is a world premier by San Francisco Ballet director Helgi Tomasson, set to music by Camille Saint-Seans.  This ballet was very well conceived, beautifully executed, imaginatively staged, and very interesting to watch.  I had the feeling that I was watching a master craftsman showing us what he’s got.  The movements were strong and decisive showing a lot of variety and imagination.  The highlight was the second of two adagio movements with two long male-female duets followed by the two couples sharing the stage.  The music was adagio, that is, a rather slow tempo, but it was not sad, somber, melancholy, or nostalgic.  It had a rather positive spirit, and underlying sense of well being and optimism.  The dance reflected that, which I was very pleased to see.  It was a male-female duet that was close, if not intimate, but at the same time, not overly emotional.  It was not restrained either; it was stalwart and sedate.  Tomasson hit it just right.  He had superb dancers to work with.  Luke Ingham is a magnificent specimen of masculine humanity who performed several impressive solos as well as the duets.  Caprice is an excellent ballet, and a pleasure to watch.

The Rite of Spring, set to music by Igor Stravinsky and choreographed by Yuri Possokhov, was the dramatic climax to the evening.  This ballet is visually captivating against a rich and varied musical score.  The dance perfectly mirrored the mood and temper of the music.  When a dance performance does this, it intensifies the emotional impact on the viewer.  The dancing underlines the emotional tone set by the music and realizes the musical mood in a visual experience.  But the dance also interprets the music and imparts a sense and a meaning to it that it might not have simply as a listening experience.  This ballet makes that point to the hilt.

There is a strong erotic feeling throughout the ballet that at times becomes downright lewd.  Movements are bold and forceful.  There is strong connection between the sexes.  Males and females strongly interact with one another with clear erotic intent.  But what happens?  The strong eroticism is decisively repudiated, in a similar vein to Wagner’s opera, Tannhäuser.  In Tannhäuser, after a brazenly erotic opening where Venus is unabashedly worshipped, Tannhäuser decides to forsake her for Mary, the mother of God.  The rest of the opera is the unfolding of this conflict in Tannhäuser, and in the end Venus and erotic love is spurned.  In this ballet one of the girls in the group of dancers is singled out and ritualistically killed as a sacrifice.  And that is how the ballet ends, with a girl being executed for reasons we are not given.  It is bleak and rather abrupt and comes across as a negative judgment on the manifested eroticism of the girls throughout the ballet.

What is the nature of this sacrifice and why was it done?  In the program we are told that the ballet reflects a practice of “primitive” people.  “Primitive” people kill one of their daughters as a ritual sacrifice.  Oh, really?  It’s too bad the primitive people are not here to mock and deride this ridiculous depiction of themselves.  Possokhov says that he believes it is abnormal people among the primitives who decide who should be killed.  That is why we have the two males with their bodies painted to represent a sort of shaman, who dance in a shared skirt throughout the ballet.  I guess that passes for abnormality.  But in a primitive tribe leaders are chosen by consensus.  One becomes a leader naturally by strength of personality and by displaying leadership skills that are crucial to survival of the entire group.  A leader cannot effect anything without the backing of many if not most of the group.  So an action of this magnitude that would deeply affect the entire group must be the responsibility of the entire group and not just a few aberrant leaders.  In other words, Possokhov’s conception of this ballet is based on nonsense.

The oldest man-made figures are nude females.  They go back some 25-30,000 years.  Primitive people worshipped females.  They exalted female sexuality.  In the Old Testament one of the greatest disgraces for a woman was to be barren.  Women were brought up to have sex and to have babies.  It was necessary.  It was vital to the survival of the tribe.  Fertility of the flocks, the game animals, and especially fertility of the young girls, were the highest values in primitive societies.

As Robert Graves observed in his study of Greek mythology,¹

The whole of neolithic Europe, to judge from surviving artifacts and myths, had a remarkably homogenous system of religious ideas, based on the worship of the many-titled Mother-goddess . . . Ancient Europe had no gods.  The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless, and omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought.  She took lovers, but for pleasure, not to provide her children with a father.  (p. 13)

It is civilization that seeks to kill the sexuality of women.  Once it began to matter who the father of a child was, then necessarily female sexual behavior had to be curtailed.  This began with the development of private property and inheritance.  Once there was an estate to divide up after a man died, it became imperative to know which kids belonged to which man.  In a society that lived off the land by hunting and gathering this was not necessary.   The invention of private property and the acquisition of durable wealth meant that females had to become monogamous — which they had never been prior.

So this ritual sacrifice that we see in The Rite of Spring is a sacrifice demanded of young women by civilization, not by so-called “primitive” people.  There is a lie being told here, an arrogant misconception, that we, the civilized ones, are superior to the “primitive” people of long ago who supposedly sacrificed their young women — for what?  It doesn’t make any sense.  It is we who sacrifice young women; it is we who crucify them; we destroy them in order to maintain a society based on wealth, inequality, and inheritance.  That is why their natural eroticism has to be stifled.  We modern people are the abnormal ones, not the primitive tribes who are no longer here to answer for themselves.

The Rite of Spring is a bold, imaginative ballet with a confused, distorted message, but it is nevertheless a mesmerizing spectacle.  I would say it is one of the best ballets I have seen, really a masterpiece.  Unfortunately, it displaces the carnage that we wreak upon the psyches of women, and blames it on a false conception of the long lost past, when the real villains are here and now.

 

 

 

 

1.  Robert Graves (1955 [1992]) The Greek Myths: Complete Edition.  London:  Penguin Books.

Shostakovich Trilogy

San Francisco Ballet Performance

April 8, 2014

 

 

The Shostakovich Trilogy is a well conceived, expertly performed dance by the San Francisco Ballet.  It is divided into three segments all set against music by Shostakovich and separated by two intermissions.  The dancers’ movements are smooth, fluid, and graceful throughout this ballet.  Both men and women participate in all three ballets.  The men and women interact.  They touch each other, pick each other up, carry each other.  There is good interaction between the sexes throughout the three ballets.  The sets and costumes are simple, if not minimal.  In the first segment there is a plain gray floor against a gray backdrop.  In the second segment there is a backdrop with some painted imagery, and in the third there are bright red geometric objects suspended above the stage.  This show is not about visual imagery and special effects.  It is all about movement and the dance, and the dancers really show us what they can do.   When you’ve got dancers like these, you don’t need too much else.

The first segment, Symphony #9, is lighthearted and energetic.  As it goes along it turns darker, but generally remains upbeat.  The program notes allude to an atmosphere of dread or angst that is supposed to underlie this superficial gaiety, but I didn’t get it.  Maybe you have to have lived in Stalinist Russia for that to come across.  I noticed the change in mood, but it felt to me more like a sense of tragedy rather than foreboding or fear.  I need to see it again.  One time is not enough to really absorb this ballet.  There is a lot of substance here and the relationship between the dance and the music is rather sophisticated.  A lot of thought went into this, and I think two or three viewings might yield a better sense of it.

The second segment, Chamber Symphony, features three women against one man with small troops of women and men as backups.  The music is profoundly tragic and pervaded by an atmosphere of abysmal despair.   The nature of the relationships between the women and the man is not clear, but you get the feeling that this is not a happy campsite.  The women dance in triplicate much of the time with the lead male, but they do not seem to interact among themselves.  There are interludes where each woman dances in a pair with the man, and these seem problematic.  These dances are emotionally inconclusive, but the whole thing takes place in a pervasive atmosphere of abysmal despair provided by the underlying music.  There is one section where the music is almost funereal, but the couple is still dancing with animation and energy that seems out of sync with the music.  Normally I would think there was something wrong with this.  I like the dancing and the music to complement one another and not create an emotional clash.  But in this case, as explained in the program, part of the import of Shostakovich’s music, and this ballet in particular, reflects a superficial presentation of upbeat optimism and well being in Russian society under Stalin, but the underlying reality is dark, sinister and pervaded with fear.  Therefore the music carries the “real” message while the dancers reflect the pretense of well being.  I would not get this without having it explained to me.  The Russian audiences who lived out their lives in that kind of duality probably did get it.  I think in America, although we do have a lot of hypocrisy and sinister undercurrents in our society, it is not so pervasive and dark and unrelenting as it was under Stalin.  So I don’t think Americans will grasp this spontaneously unless it is explained to them.  The ballet ends enigmatically, but the overarching mood of the piece is one of unmitigated tragedy and despair.

The third ballet, Piano Concerto #1, is a more positive, forceful, high energy display of dance virtuosity.   The principal ballerinas are sexy in their bright red satin bodices that show off their perfect legs to excellent effect.  It is rather abstract in content.  There are no discernible relationships or story line being depicted.  This is a dancers’ ballet and you could feel the dancers’ thrill and pleasure to be performing it, and it was a visual treat to watch.

I wouldn’t mind seeing this Trilogy again.  It was a bit of a challenge, but an enjoyable spectacle that drew upon the capabilities of the high quality dancers and tasteful, imaginative choreography set against interesting, powerful music.  It coursed through a variety of moods and presented an interesting counterpoint between the music and the dance.  I wish I could say more about it, but I don’t think I absorbed everything that was important about this ballet on the first viewing.  I feel like I need another look to really get it, but I give this one a very favorable recommendation.

 

Labèque Sisters Duo Piano Performance

Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco

April 7, 2014

 

 

I don’t usually review musical performances, but I have to say something about the Labèque sisters’ two piano concert last night at Davies Symphony Hall.  They were electrifying.  I have seen Vladimir Horowitz three times in concert, and many of the great contemporary pianists:  Richard Goode, Garrick Ohlsson, Martha Argerich, Murray Perahia, Andras Schiff, Zoltan Koscis, Krystian Zimerman, Paul Lewis, Pierre Aimard, Jeremy Denk, and many others, and I would have to place this performance last night among the most memorable and outstanding of all that I have seen and heard.  The Labèques, Katia and Marielle, play with great energy and vivaciousness.  They can range from bombastic to touchingly thoughtful and sensitive.

They played a lively program that I didn’t expect to like, but they quickly won me over to riveting enthusiasm.  The program was interesting and well thought out.  The selections complemented each other very well and gave the whole concert a feeling of unity and balance.  Gershwin’s Three Preludes (which I have played myself) were arranged very imaginatively and tastefully for two pianos by Irwin Kostal.  But what really grabbed hold of me were the Four Movements for Two Pianos by Philip Glass.  Until last night I had never heard anything by Philip Glass that I really liked, but this piece for two pianos is interesting, imaginative, and substantial.  I would like to hear it again, and it opened my mind to reconsider Philip Glass and to extend to him another chance.  The Labèques really understand the piece and are able to get it across in a way that draws the listener in to its varied moods and textures.  The Four Movements makes good use of the two pianos.  You really need both pianos to make the piece work and the Labèques understand that and their seamless integration gives the performance body and vitality that cannot help but engage the listener.

The second half of the program was a rare treat in a classical concert:  a bold departure from conventional norms that was pulled off magnificently.  Selections from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story were arranged for two pianos and percussion, once again by Irwin Kostal.  I was skeptical when I saw two sets of drums out on the stage with two grand pianos, and was ready for failure.  Boy, was I wrong!  It was a marvelous showpiece that was tempestuous, interesting, somber, cute, and above all, energetic and full of life.  The two percussionists, Gonzalo Grau and Raphael Séguinier, were superb virtuosos in their own right.  I think they all owe a lot to their arranger, Irwin Kostal, who was not even written up in the program.  This was a very imaginative, interesting arrangement of these pieces that worked very well for the Labèques and for the percussionists.  It had to have been arranged by someone who knew these performers well and drew upon their capabilities to the best effect.  The choice of percussion with two pianos was a bold move that required the percussion to hold its own as a complementary partner to two strong pianos.  The percussion was not simply used as accompaniment, but as a full participant and an integral part of the composition.  This rather tricky challenge was pulled off tastefully, even masterfully.  Both the piano and percussion have a tendency to dominate a musical passage and keeping these strong instruments in a pleasing balance was quite a respectable achievement by all of these performers.  It was a powerfully effective effort all the way through and justly brought the audience to its feet.  I hope they come back soon.  The Labèques are top flight performers, showpersons, virtuosos, and masters of taste and style.  I am definitely a confirmed fan from henceforth.

Remarks on Adam Lanza and the Sandy Hook School shooting

 

The Reckoning:  The father of the Sandy Hook killer searches for answers.  By Andrew Solomon.  The New Yorker, March 17, 2014, pp. 36-45.

 

 

This article, in the March 17, 2014 issue of The New Yorker, is the outcome of six interviews Andrew Solomon conducted with Peter Lanza, the father of Adam Lanza, last fall, some lasting as long as seven hours.  It is Peter Lanza’s first public statement since the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012.  The Sandy Hook massacre has been portrayed in the media and by law enforcement as “incomprehensible,”  however, I think this summary of Solomon’s interviews with Peter provides a basis for some insight and interpretation that has not heretofore been considered.

Solomon describes Peter’s state of mind regarding the incident as one of “sustained incomprehension.”  Peter tells us, “I want people to be afraid of the fact that this could happen to them.” (p. 37)  Solomon himself accepts this admonition and says so explicitly in his NPR interview with Terry Gross.¹   However, this warning reflects Peter’s lack of insight and understanding of his own family.   It is not an uncommon position for an American father to find himself in, but we need not fear that this can happen to just anyone, that any kid can become a mass murderer.  It can certainly happen again, and probably will, given conditions within American society.  The New York Daily News (December 12, 2014) recently reported a total of 44 school shootings that have occurred since Sandy Hook.²  But these are not random events.  They are not lightning strikes.  They reflect widespread conditions of psychological and social disintegration in American society.   We will see what those conditions are in the case of Adam Lanza.  At the same time, it would have been difficult for anyone to have foreseen what was coming in Newtown — except, perhaps, for Nancy, Adam’s mother and first victim.

Solomon’s article is spare in what I would most like to know about, namely, Adam’s earliest years and a close examination of his relationship with his mother, Nancy.  Apparently there is a treasure trove of e-mails between Adam and Nancy in the last years before the event that are under seal with the Connecticut State Police, and which Solomon did not have access to.  He tells us of this in his NPR Fresh Air interview.  If those e-mails could be examined it might shed a great light on the final trajectory of this tragedy and on the plausibility or implausibility of the interpretation being offered here.

Solomon tells us in the article that

he [Adam] didn’t speak until he was three, and he always understood many more words that he could muster.  He showed such hypersensitivity to physical touch that tags had to be removed from his clothing.  In preschool and at Sandy Hook, where he was a pupil till the beginning of sixth grade, he sometimes smelled things that weren’t there and washed his hands excessively.”  A doctor diagnosed sensory integration disorder, and Adam underwent speech therapy and occupational therapy in kindergarten and first grade.   Teachers were told to watch for seizures.  (p. 37)

This might have been an early indicator of the autism that was later diagnosed.  Autism is a vast concept that encompasses a broad array of behavioral anomalies, learning disabilities, and social difficulties.  A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine linked it to prenatal abnormalities in cerebral cortex development.³  The cerebral cortex has many disparate areas and governs many aspects of sensory processing, motor skills, and language skills.  Depending on the area and extent of developmental abnormalities, the resulting manifestations, what is called “autism,” could differ markedly.  From what I could glean from Solomon’s article, Adam did show indicators of autism, in respect to the hypersensitivity to sounds and touch.

Sensory overload affected his ability to concentrate; his mother xeroxed his textbooks in black and white, because he found color graphics unbearable.  He quit playing the saxophone, stopped climbing trees, avoided eye contact, and developed a stiff, lumbering gait.  He said that he hated birthdays and holidays, which he had previously loved; special occasions unsettled his increasingly sclerotic orderliness.  He had “episodes,” panic attacks that necessitated his mother coming to school . . . (p. 38)

All of the above enumerated behaviors have to do with mitigating stimuli that can evoke emotional response:  color, music, eye contact, birthdays, holidays, and the panic attacks were probably situations where his anxiety got out of control.

My personal experience with autism is limited to one person, whom I knew rather closely.  My observation of this woman was that her emotions appeared to be hooked up to an amplifier with the volume turned up too loud.  She reacted with great intensity, particularly to anything negative, often going to the extreme.  Her reactions were not inappropriate, as in schizophrenia, but disproportionate.  She didn’t seem to have any ability to modulate her feelings.  She took everything to the ultimate.  She was a woman of extremes.  Once she started careening out of control,  it was very hard to rein her in.  She could be violent.  She could be explosive.  Whenever she came to visit, I always made sure that any knives, scissors, pencils, letter openers, or anything with a blade or a sharp point were put away inside drawers and cabinets rather than lying around on tables, desks, and countertops, where they could be grabbed quickly.  And I certainly wouldn’t have taught her how to use a gun.

This intensity of emotional response in autism is echoed in an account by Tara Kaberry.⁴  Kaberry’s observations of her son are very similar to what I saw in the woman I knew.   Kaberry also described a tendency of her son’s to shut down in response to overstimulation.  The autistic person, having limited or no ability to regulate emotional intensity, shuts down emotionally in order to avoid getting out of control.  It is a defensive move.

Adam’s showed many similar behaviors and his ability to regulate his own emotions seemed to deteriorate as he got older.  Was this a progression of the autism, or was it a response to changes in his human relations and social environment filtered through the autism?  It is hard for me to say.  There was a lot of emotional hardship going on in the family throughout Adam’s years growing up.  His parents separated in 2001, when he was 9, and no doubt their relationship had been strained for some time before that.  They divorced in 2009 when he was in his teens.  His father remarried within a year or two.  This affected his mother, may have intensified her loneliness and depression, and she seemed to distance herself from his father after that.  This negative progressive development in his parents’ relationship could represent quite an intense overload for a boy who couldn’t bear color in his textbooks.  It could explain his progressive shutting down and withdrawal from human contact.  Suicide would represent the ultimate withdrawal and shutting down.  But this should not be seen as a natural progression of autism.  It is a response to changes in the human environment, albeit to an extreme.  It seems that the human environment can be an exacerbating or mitigating factor in the type and degree of the manifestations of autism.

It is also true that some autistic people can be aggressive and violent, especially as they approach young adulthood.  However, when autistic children are violent it tends to have a history and a pattern of circumstances that triggers it.⁵  But apparently Adam had no history of violent or troubling behavior (p. 40) — unless Nancy was not revealing all that she knew.    Because the Newtown rampage was such a singular outburst that was focused on well chosen targets, that took careful planning and good functionality to execute, I discount autism as a determining factor, although it may have played a role in laying the foundation as an emotional intensifier.  The causes of Adam Lanza’s debacle were primarily interpersonal, social, and psychological, as I see it.  There is some evidence that suicide ideation is significantly higher in autistic children than in the rest of the population, except for depressed children.⁶  But the suicidal tendencies seem to be related to social factors more than to the autism itself, i.e., to the brain abnormalities.  This agrees with my assessment of the Sandy Hook case.  If there is anything that Adam Lanza’s case teaches us, it is that autism should never be mixed with guns.

The presence of autism complicates any attempt at psychological analysis.  It is difficult to separate the impact of autism, that is, the abnormalities in the structure of the brain, and the resultant distortions in the processing of emotional stimuli, from the environmental impacts of the human and social relations on both personality structure and emotional responses to particular situations.

Solomon presents a rather disconnected, confused discussion of empathy in relation to Adam. (p. 40-41)  On the one hand he seems to want to say that Adam lacked empathy, which he sees as a manifestation of autism, but on the other he enumerates plenty of evidence that Adam had excellent empathy.  Adam understood the people around him well enough to know exactly how to hurt them with the most brutal effect.  Kaberry also points out how the emotional shut down which autistic people use as a defense against overstimulation and a lack of emotional control is often misread as a lack of empathy.

Empathy is the ability to read another person’s mental state: to grasp what they are thinking and feeling, to anticipate their subjective, internal responses.   Empathy is strictly informative; it is not prescriptive.  Some people confuse empathy with sympathy, but they are not the same.  Empathy is neutral in the way that vision and hearing are neutral.  It gives you information, but it does not tell you what to do with it.  An autistic person’s hypersensitivity to emotional stimuli may interfere with his ability to empathize, but it also may be selective in the quality of feelings that are impeded.  In other words, autism may create empathic blind spots — which could be situational — rather than a general degradation in the ability to empathize.  The defensive shutting down (refusing to make eye contact, to shake hands, speaking in a flat monotone, etc.) does not necessarily imply a lack of understanding of the feelings and intentions of another person.  It implies rather a refusal to allow a response, and an unwillingness to engage in the unpredictable give and take of a human interaction.  Adam’s atrocity was informed by the most astute empathy for its impact on the whole society.  In respect to his crime, Adam was not unempathic, he was evil.

From his earliest years Adam’s experience of school was interventionist and “therapeutic.”  But apparently his relationship with Nancy was not examined in any depth nor was his relationship with his parents connected in any way to the symptoms he presented.  It was a very inauspicious omission.  This was the point where an appropriate intervention might have made a meaningful difference.  Doing the wrong thing  and evincing  gross misunderstanding of the young boy was probably the kindling point of what later became the blazing rage that was turned on the school.

Another important lacuna in Solomon’s account is Nancy’s preoccupation with guns and her frequent trips with Adam to the shooting range to see that he was well trained in the use of firearms.  Peter also participated in these shooting range trips, but apparently less often.  It was a very important part of Adam’s relationship with his parents, particularly with his mother, right up to the very end, and Solomon barely mentions it.  Solomon emphasizes psychiatrists and schools.  His article becomes so sanitized it is almost disingenuous.  In contrast,  The New York Times reported that

Inside the rambling, pale-yellow Colonial-style home in a Connecticut suburb, Adam Lanza lived amid a stockpile of disparate weaponry and macabre keepsakes:  several firearms, more than 1,600 rounds of ammunition, 11 knives, a starter pistol, a bayonet, 3 samurai swords.  He saved photographs of what appeared to be a corpse smeared in blood and covered in plastic, as well as a newspaper clipping that chronicled a vicious shooting at Northern Illinois University.⁷

This house was ready for serious combat.  But the real enemy was within.  Nancy complained that she couldn’t get Adam to go to a tutor, but she never mentions having trouble getting him to go to the shooting range.

When Adam was thirteen he was taken to Paul J. Fox, a psychiatrist who first gave Adam the Asberger’s syndrome diagnosis and recommended that Nancy homeschool Adam, arguing that isolating him from his peers would be better than the many difficulties Adam was having in school.  (p. 39)  When I saw that I thought, “Oh, no!”  Isolating this troubled boy with his overinvolved mother in an emotional hothouse.  Wrong move.  This was an unfortunate, and I think, fateful turning point.  Fox also prescribed a psychotropic drug called Lexapro, which caused immediate, severe side effects and was promptly discontinued — by Adam himself, not the adults.

Robert King, the psychiatrist at Yale’s Child Study Center, who examined Adam, “was concerned that Adam’s parents seemed to worry primarily about his schooling, and said that it was more urgent to address ‘how to accommodate Adam’s severe social disabilities in a way that would permit him to be around peers.’  King saw, ‘significant risks to Adam in creating, even with the best of intentions, a prosthetic environment which spares him having to encounter other students or to work to overcome his social difficulties.'” (p. 39-40)  In my opinion, this doctor got it right.  But they don’t seem to have followed his advice.

I am deeply mistrustful of psychiatric diagnoses.  Their purpose is to develop a uniform approach for treating all with the same label, but when dealing with people and their inner lives a customized individual approach is what is necessary.  In our time psychiatric diagnoses are being used to market a host of drugs designed to modify and control behavior, so there is a vast and powerful industry invested in them.  This case calls into question with the utmost poignancy the faith we place in these diagnostic concepts.

Once you have one of these labels pinned on you, it affects the way you are regarded and treated in school.  It affects the way your peers perceive you.  It affects expectations others have of you.  It might affect opportunities that are available to you.  Everything you do becomes interpreted in terms of your diagnostic category.  Your diagnosis becomes your identity as a person.  And these labels are extremely persistent.  Once they get stuck on you, it is very hard to peel them off.

In his interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air program (March 13, 2014), Solomon remarked at how the dispensation of a psychiatric diagnosis can be a profound relief to parents of a troubled child or to an individual who is suffering.  At last, one has a definition of the problem.  One is not alone in ones troubles, but becomes part of a community of those similarly afflicted.  The case of Adam Lanza illustrates how perilous such comfort and relief can be, how misleading conceptualizations and misguided treatments can easily result.   One must treat each case as an individual, look closely at the peculiarities of each situation and understand what is going on in the human relationships of that person before presuming to make active interventions, particularly in altering the chemistry of the brain in order to manipulate behavior or numb emotions that are a natural response to the human and social environment.

Adam rejected with some vehemence the diagnoses that were made of him (Asberger’s syndrome, autism, obsessive compulsive disorder, etc.), and insisted that the problems were external, i.e., between him and his parents, especially his mother.  But no one listened.  In fact, from the sound of Solomon’s interview and the article, they completely failed to examine the relationship between Nancy and Adam as having any bearing on Adam’s problems.  The problem was always with Adam.  There was something wrong with him, we have to find out what it is.  We have to treat Adam.  This can be understandably enraging to a young boy, when he knew very well that the basic problem was his mom, and that rage, being reinforced and intensified in countless small interactions day by day, can build up over time to a feverish intensity.  The basic problem in understanding this case, as I see it, is the lack of attention that has been paid to Nancy and her relationship with Adam as a determinative factor in the outcome.

The Connecticut State Attorney’s report⁸ also fails to examine Adam’s relationship with his mother in any great detail, offering only a few conflicting generalities.  In fact, it ignores Adam as a human being altogether, referring to him throughout as ‘the shooter.’  The State Attorney can’t even bear to use his name.  They were not interested in Adam Lanza as a person, but only as ‘the shooter.’  It is not surprising that this police report sheds no light on Adam’s motivation for the rampage.

Solomon tells us that Peter “maintains a nearly fanatical insistence on facts, and nothing annoyed him more in our conversations that speculation — by me, the media, or anyone else.” (p. 37)  However, Peter indulges in numerous speculations himself throughout the article that I very much question.  For example, “With hindsight, I know Adam would have killed me in a heartbeat, if he’d had the chance.  I don’t question that for a minute.” (p. 43)  I question it very much.  Peter’s relationship with Adam seems to have been the most positive, constructive, nurturing one that Adam had in his life.  Throughout his life up to the very end, Peter reached out to Adam in very positive, supportive, helpful ways, playing with Lego blocks, taking him on hikes, shopping for Christmas presents to donate to needy children (at Adam’s initiative), buying him a car, teaching him to drive, offering to buy him a new computer.  There is a very touching picture in the Connecticut Attorney General’s report of a birthday card Peter sent to Adam in the last year of his life inviting him to send an e-mail if he would like to go hiking or shooting.  The best times of Adam’s life appear to be the times he spent with his dad.  If Peter had been around to act as a buffer between Adam and Nancy, Adam might not have killed anybody.  That is my counter speculation.

“I was doing everything I could, ”  Peter said.  “She was doing way more.  I just feel sad for her.”  Peter is convinced that Nancy had no idea how dangerous their son had become.  “She never confided to her sister or best friend about being afraid of him.  She slept with her bedroom door unlocked, and she kept guns in the house, which she would not have done if she were frightened.”  (p. 43)

Of course she wasn’t frightened.  But for reasons that Peter had no capability to fathom.  I have a very different conception of Nancy and her role in this tragedy.  I see her as the driving force that impelled Adam toward a violent consummation.  In my view Peter was a man of limited insight into emotional issues and woefully incapable of perceiving the emotional needs of his family, first of all of his wife, and more pertinently of his son.   But it is certainly true as well that Nancy was not up to being an effective wife and mother, and this resulted in Peter turning away from the family fairly early on and divesting himself to a large extent of this tangled emotional morass of Adam and Nancy, leaving them to more or less fend for themselves.  “I took a back seat,” he tells us. (p. 39)  By his own admission he wasn’t around that much, even when he was married to Nancy and living with the family.  “I’d work ridiculous hours during the week and Nancy would take care of the kids.  Then, on weekends, she’d do errands and I’d spend time with the kids.” (p. 38)  It doesn’t appear that they spent a lot of time together with their children, so Peter would not have observed much of the day to day interactions between Nancy and Adam.  He was a man who did not know what was going on in his own house, and he seems to have had a limited emotional connection to his wife.

Nancy, quite naturally, being socially isolated and profoundly insecure, turned to Adam with her tremendous neediness, monumental anxieties, loneliness, sense of futility, and tendency to control and manipulate.  Adam, being a child and having the limitations of his autism, was not equipped to deal with this overwhelming onslaught, and began to withdraw in various ways, incorporating many of Nancy’s anxieties, showing various asocial symptoms, while at the same time steadily building up a volcanic rage that he could not express directly.  But he was given explicit encouragement in the use of guns and implicit permission for an interest in violence and murder.  So his anger became channeled in this direction and coalesced around the condensation points of mass shootings, and, especially, shootings at schools, since schools were the places he could best relate to, and which were the bane of his life and the perpetual measuring stick against which he was always coming up short.

It was after Peter’s marriage to Shelly Cudiner that things seem to careen toward their final demise.

Nancy wanted to take him to a tutor, but, she wrote, ‘Even ten minutes before we should leave he was getting ready to go, but then had a meltdown and began to cry and couldn’t go.  He said things like it’s pointless, and he doesn’t even know what he doesn’t know.’  In early 2010, when Nancy told Peter that Adam had been crying hysterically on the bathroom floor, Peter responded with uncharacteristic vehemence:  ‘Adam needs to communicate the source of his sorrow.  We have less than three months to help him before he is eighteen.  I am convinced that when he is eighteen he will either try to enlist or just leave the house to become homeless.’ (p. 42)

My feeling is at this point Adam should have been hospitalized.  Clearly the situation was getting worse and worse and Nancy was not managing it.  This is where an intervention that would have altered this downward spiraling dyad of Nancy and Adam should have been imposed.  Peter was completely blind to the problem and its seriousness.  He was only looking at Adam and not at the relationship between Adam and Nancy.  It was a fateful and fatal misperception.

Shelley Cudiner had apparently been living in the Sandy Hook community for at least ten years, and had been previously married.  I was not able to find out the date of her marriage to Peter, but it had to have been in late 2010 or 2011, nor was I able to find out the history of their relationship, and if it played any role in Peter’s divorce from Nancy in 2009.  It is pretty clear that the divorce of his parents had a negative effect on Adam, contrary to Peter’s assessment. (p. 38)  It took Peter even further out of the life of the family than he already was, and left Adam indelibly fixed in the orbit of his mother.  The marriage of Peter to Shelley some time in late 2010 or 2011 was probably what set things on their final course.  Adam decided (perhaps in error) that his father was of no further use, and began to withdraw from him.  Nancy also distanced herself from Peter and began to impede his access to Adam while maintaining a pretense as a helpful intermediary, offering misleading signals that Adam’s condition might be improving.  At some point after his father’s remarriage Adam made up his mind that he would have to deal with this himself in his own way, and his mother was giving him plenty of clues as to how to go about it.

“A word document called ‘Selfish,’ which was found on Adam’s computer, gives an explanation of why females are inherently selfish, written while one of them was accommodating him in every possible way.” (p. 43)

This comment illustrates how effective Nancy’s dissimulation was in misleading Peter, Solomon, the community, and the media.  But she didn’t fool Adam.  Adam was closer to her than anyone else and knew her best.

The portrayal of Nancy as the hapless, longsuffering victim of a monster child increasingly out of control due to mysterious internal forces is not credible.   What follows is a speculative reconstruction, with no apologies, Peter — and I don’t regard you as the most authoritative commentator.  I do welcome concrete evidence that would refute or confirm it.  I believe such evidence exists and that it is possible to definitively understand what happened in this tragedy.  But it requires a close examination of Nancy, who she was, and her impact on Adam’s psychological development.

As I see it, at some point Nancy must have decided that death was an increasingly appealing alternative to the deteriorating life she had.  There is simply not enough information to determine at what point this occurred.   Whether it was after her separation from Peter in 2001, after her divorce in 2009, or after Peter’s remarriage in 2010 or 11, or perhaps even way before at some time during her marriage when Peter was nominally living with her.  But Nancy seems to have become increasingly depressed and very likely suicidal.  She did not have the inner resolve to kill herself, so she chose Adam for the role of her executioner, and she made sure he had the means at his disposal, and gave him plenty of training for the task.  Some people commit suicide by provoking others to kill them.  Nancy was using Adam as her instrument.   There was an implicit understanding between them.  Adam may well have realized where his mother was driving them both, and it could explain his attempts to wall himself off from her and isolate himself in the last months before the killings.  Just before the shootings, Nancy wrote Adam a Christmas check for the purpose of buying a CZ 83 semiautomatic pistol. (CT State Attorney’s Report, p. 26)  It may have been Nancy’s Christmas wish for herself to Adam.  And Adam got the message.  Of course Nancy wasn’t frightened.  She had a pretty good idea what was coming and was resigned to it, even encouraging of it.  In committing a murder-suicide Adam may have been carrying out his mother’s final wishes.

Anyone who does not accept this or some similar reconstruction of Nancy must account for one overpowering fact that transcends all diagnosis:  Adam Lanza killed his mother.  If there was nothing terribly wrong in the relationship between Adam and Nancy, and she was just a well meaning parent doing everything she could for her troubled child, then you have no choice but to see Adam as in inexplicable demon who randomly snapped and lashed out blindly at anyone who happened to be around.  It is an untenable view that goes against common sense and everything we know about psychology.

What Nancy probably did not count on was the conflagration at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  That was most likely Adam’s own twist on the matter.  Nancy was probably visualizing her own murder, or perhaps murder-suicide — and was quite prepared for it.  Adam, through his study of mass shootings, particularly the one at Columbine High School in Colorado, visualized a more dramatic exit.  He did not want to just die a mediocre death of a murder-suicide that would be swept under the rug and quickly forgotten.  He wanted lasting infamy.  It also served as a final assertion of independence from his mother.  Blasting the school away was a final comment on his parents’ values and expectations.  It was Adam’s verdict on everything that they tried to impose on him throughout his entire life.  It makes perfect sense.

The massacre of young children at Sandy Hook was a further stab in the eye of society and of life itself.  It is one thing to say, “My life is not worth living.  Therefore I will kill myself and end it.  You may see things differently, so you will choose to continue to live.  Very well, but I will say good-bye.”  That is the simple suicide.  Murder-suicide is suicide coupled with the murder of one (or perhaps others) with whom one feels inextricably bound and who is the partner in a consummating sense of despair and rage.  When the suicide is accompanied with murders of strangers who are not chosen at random, but share some characteristics, such as children at a school, then the act represents an attack on the society, and reflects a perception on the part of the killer that society is in some way to blame for his demise and for the destructive retribution that he is meting out.  The school killings at Columbine, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois, and many others around the world are acts of vengeance.  They are retribution on the part of the shooter for perceived injuries and insults that have intolerably afflicted his life.  The perceptions may be accurate or inaccurate, justified or delusional, but the killer is lashing out at specific targets that represent an inchoate enemy.  Children represent the hopes and dreams of a society.  They represent the future, its continuation and growth.  Killing children is the most vicious, categorical attack on any society, because it aims at the destruction of that society’s future.  Adam’s attack on the Sandy Hook Elementary School represents his complete alienation, not only from his own family, but from his community and his entire society.  He wanted to destroy not only himself and his mother, but everything.

This is what people find so difficult to comprehend.  How is such complete, thoroughgoing alienation possible?  It occurs when all the roads forward seem blocked or unappealing to the point of being unacceptable.  This has a great deal to do with schooling, because school is where one comes into contact with society and its values, and where one begins to formulate a vision for one’s personal future in that society.  One meets peers in one’s age group and begins to form friendships and associations.  Patterns become established in how one interacts with other people and one’s expectations of oneself and for the future.  This is sometimes called “socialization.”  When this process doesn’t work out, alienation is the result, and manifests itself many ways, the most common in American society are drug and alcohol abuse, which are passive and withdrawing, and criminality, which is assertive and defiant.  American schools are virtual factories of alienation.  The medical establishment is another.  Adam Lanza experienced both to an inordinate degree from early in his life.  When he reached the point of unleashing a terrible vengeance, he chose the most appropriate target.

I divide this case into two parts:  I see the murder of his mother together with Adam’s suicide as an outgrowth of the pathology in the relationship between Nancy and Adam superimposed on the autism.  The massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary had less to do with autism and more to do with Adam’s personal psychopathology.  It consisted of his essentially depleted, empty inner self, his estrangement from his father, which was related to his parents’ divorce and his father’s remarriage, the compensatory identification he made with the mass murderers who had attacked schools, which was made possible by his negative experiences with schools throughout his life, and the excessive value his parents placed on school achievement and the iatrogenic effect this had on their relationship with Adam.  Adam also had encouragement and training in violence and the use of weapons.  Violence and the use of guns was egosyntonic in the atmosphere of his home.  Furthermore, Adam desired significance.  He wanted greatness and a lasting legacy, and he found plenty of role models in the examples of previous mass shooters at schools.

Peter told Solomon that he wished Adam had never been born.  But to wish Adam had never been born is to wish Peter’s entire adult life had never happened: his marriage to Nancy, the many good times spent with Adam, his divorce and remarriage.  It is an indication that he is not dealing with the matter well.  He wants to distance himself and obliterate it rather than look at it closely and understand exactly what happened and why.   It is once again his characteristic unwillingness to look at human problems in any depth.

The media and the police portray Adam as a monster.  But he was only a monster on the last day of his life.  If we subtract the last day of his life, Adam Lanza was a rather inconsequential person, except to his immediate family.  If he had just killed himself, or even just himself and Nancy, it would have been tragic, but it is unlikely that he would be demonized to the degree that he has been.   It was the murder of the children at Sandy Hook that transformed the mediocre Adam Lanza into a larger than life immortal monster.

This murder of the children, I must stress, should not be seen as a manifestation of hatred or rage toward the children themselves.  There has been some suggestion that Adam was bullied during his school days, and that this contributed to his motivation for the rampage at the school.  I discount that.  If there was any bullying, it was not a major factor.  There is lots of bullying among kids, but few mass murderers.  What bullying he might have experienced at school paled in comparison to what he faced at home with his mother.  And the children he killed were not the children who had bullied him.  They were much younger and strangers to him.  So the idea that this was vengeance for bullying that had taken place years ago is facile to the point of being farfetched.  Adam’s outburst was rage against the school as an institutional force in children’s lives, and in his in particular, against the society that places inordinate emphasis on school achievement, against his parents who placed such importance school and children’s performance therein, and against the medical community that misdiagnosed him and therefore failed to understand him and provide appropriate interventions.  It was also an immature desire for infamy through massive destruction.  Grandiosity run amok.

There were several psychological factors that propelled Adam toward the conflagration at Sandy Hook Elementary.  First of all and most fundamentally was his inner sense of emptiness, isolation, and a lack of self definition.  Adam had no firm sense of who he was, or what his values were, or his purpose and significance in life.  This is all related to inadequacies in his relationship with his mother, the details of which are unavailable, and a turning away from his father as a viable role model, probably in response to his father’s remarriage.  He also had his rage and his alienation from school and from society.  He also had permission and even encouragement from his parents to use guns.  Into this psychological void and hunger for self definition and significance stepped Dylan Clebold and Eric Harris, Steven Kazmierczak, Seung-Hui Cho, Anders Brevik, and other mass shooters he had studied in some detail, who used the school as a stage for macabre theatrics.   Adam saw in these mass killers a kinship.  Identification with them solved a psychological problem in how he should define himself as a person, and it incorporated the important raw materials he had available, namely, the weapons, the rage, the hatred of school, and his contempt for society.   When you look at it closely, it is almost overdetermined.

Of course Nancy bears a lot of the responsibility for the outcome, as does Peter.  Parents matter.  But their responsibility is not total.  Nancy set the course toward murder-suicide certainly within the last few years of their lives, and possibly long before.  But ultimately Adam made a choice and took an action that defined himself independent of his parents.  It may have been the first time in his life that he was able to take such a self defining step.  Being a mother is a weighty responsibility that goes unrecognized in American society.  It is even despised by many women and men.  But when it is handled badly, the cost can be great, both for the children and the family, and also for society.  The important lessons from the Sandy Hook massacre are the value of motherhood, the social significance of alienation, and the perils of the ready availability of guns.  These three factors, built on a substrate of autism, caused this event.  It is not at all incomprehensible.  It is very clear, and these conditions are not uncommon in American society.  More such atrocities are likely brewing.  Not every situation that could develop toward this outcome does.  Many, many factors can derail, divert, or mitigate such an person from carrying forward to the most extreme outcome.  Thankfully, it should be a rarity, but the prevalence of the right soil conditions is bound to produce some malignant fruit.

The realization of this whole episode and many others like it of lesser import are made possible by the ready availability of guns in American society.  There are lots of troubled people; there are lots of crazy people; there are lots of people with evil hearts who desire to destroy themselves and others.  Giving them effective means to carry out their worst intentions and encouraging their use is the worst possible thing a society can do.  Yet this is what America does.  So we as a society also bear a large part of the responsibility for the demise of Adam Lanza and the calamity at Sandy Hook Elementary.  Adam may have been supremely evil on the last day of his life, but Nancy was evil and malevolent for a very long time, molding and shaping Adam into the explosive time bomb he became, and America is sinister and evil in providing the conditions that enable and promote the most extreme outcomes of psychopathology and emotional disintegration.

Depending on whom you ask, there were twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight victims in Newtown.  It’s twenty-six if you count only those who were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School, twenty-seven if you include Nancy Lanza; twenty-eight if you judge Adam’s suicide as a loss.  There are twenty-six stars on the local firehouse roof.  On the anniversary of the shootings, President Obama referred to ‘six dedicated school workers and twenty beautiful children’ who had been killed, and the governor of Connecticut asked churches to ring their bells twenty-six times.  Some churches in Newtown had previously commemorated the victims by ringing twenty-eight times . . . (p. 37)

Society wishes to exclude Adam and Nancy in death as they had been in life: ignoring them, misunderstanding them, wishing, like Peter, that they had never existed.  We are not learning the lessons that their lives and deaths should teach us.

 

 

 

Notes

 

1.  Fresh Air with Terry Gross.  National Public Radio broadcast. March 13, 2014.

2.   New York Daily News, February 12, 2014

3.  New England Journal of Medicine

4. Kaberry, Tara. Can Emotional Overload Look Like a Lack of Empathy?  Yes.  Autism and Empathy.  October 28, 2011.   http://www.autismandempathy.com/?p=713

5. Washington Post, March 13, 2011.  Also

http://www.ageofautism.com/2013/10/lost-afraid-where-to-turn-when-autism-turns-violent.html

6.  Mayes, Susan Dickerson; Gorman, Angela A.; Hillwig-Garcia, Jolene; Syed Ehsan (2013)  Suicide ideation and attempts in children with autism.  Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 109-119.

7.  New York Times  March 28, 2013.

8.  Report of the State’s Attorney for the Judicial District of Danbury on the Shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School and 36 Yogananda Street,

Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012.  OFFICE OF THE STATE’S ATTORNEY JUDICIAL DISTRICT OF DANBURY, Stephen J. Sedensky III, State’s Attorney.  November 25, 2013

 

Nymphomania (Volume 1)

Directed by Lars von Trier

 

 

This movie goes on my all time Ten Worst List.  It is one of the most awful movies I have ever seen.  I went with a friend and I tried to get him to leave after half an hour, but he insisted on sitting it out to the bitter end.  I think in part he was punishing me because it was my idea to go see this.

The title is an outright lie.  This is not about nymphomania.  The girl portrayed in this film is depressed, detached, and probably suicidal.  If she can be labeled as anything she is probably what they call a ‘borderline’ personality.  But she is definitely not a nymphomaniac.  Furthermore, the character of the girl is not at all convincing or realistic. She comes across as some man’s fantasy of a woman, rather than a real woman.  It is, furthermore, a hostile, derogatory fantasy.  It is a negative conceptualization of female sexuality by a man who seems to know very little about women or sex.

‘Nymphomania’ is not a formal psychiatric category.  It is not in the DSM-V.  It is an informal term that refers to an unusually strong sex drive in a woman.  I dislike this term and never use it.  It has a clinical ring to it and a derogatory cast.  More generally, the practice of categorizing people according to their sexual behavior is completely wrongheaded and leads to all sorts of misunderstanding, distortions, and bigotry.  This film is a very good illustration of that.

The friend that I attended this film with is a joyously married man of many years.  He was skeptical that such a thing as a ‘nymphomaniac’ even existed.  He thought it was something like Bigfoot, where you only see the footprints, but never encounter the beast itself.  He asked me if I have ever encountered such a woman.  I have encountered at least five women that I can think of, and have heard tell of others, who could qualify for this label.  They are a rarity in American society, and our culture does everything possible to discourage this outcome of female sexual development.  I think there would be many more such women if the culture fostered them.  I don’t call them ‘nymphomaniacs,’ I call them ‘volcanoes,’ or ‘furnaces.’  It is less abstract and more evocative of the awe and wonder that such women inspire.

This filmmaker confuses promiscuity with ‘nymphomania.’  Promiscuity can be motivated by many things, and the kind of promiscuity portrayed here is driven by depression, emptiness, low self esteem, anxiety, and loneliness — and possibly, at an unconscious level, rage.  ‘Nymphomania,’ as I understand it, is an unusually strong sexual appetite coupled with a ready and strong responsiveness to sexual stimulation.  It is anything but disengaged and detached, as represented here.  It is not necessarily promiscuous, in fact, such women tend to create stable relationships with one or more partners of both sexes.  Having multiple, ongoing sexual relationships is also not the same as promiscuity.   Promiscuity is shallow and anxious.  Nymphomania tends not to be.  So the filmmaker has chosen an inappropriate title for his film, because he doesn’t understand the woman he is trying to portray and clearly does not know anything about women with exceptionally strong sexual capabilities.

You can tell right away that this film was not made in America or by Americans.  A man goes out after dark to buy something at a convenience store in his neighborhood and on his way home notices a woman lying on the sidewalk bruised and bleeding.  He helps her to her feet, takes her to his apartment and proceeds to nurse her.  This is something that would never happen in an American city.  An urban American man would never pick up a bruised, bleeding, semiconscious woman off the sidewalk and take her to his apartment.  It is unthinkable.  So right away the story takes on a fantastic quality to an American audience.

It is never explained how she came to be battered and bleeding and semiconscious on the sidewalk.  She sits there through the entire movie with her face all beaten up relating the story of her life and carrying on a wide ranging philosophical discussion with this stranger she just met, when her entire life, as she retells, it is a series of encounters with an endless parade of men of the utmost superficiality and minimal emotional connection.  Why she would suddenly open up and begin to philosophically muse over her life with this stranger under these extraordinary circumstances is hard to fathom.  The movie consists of long philosophical discussions punctuated by simulated sex scenes.  The sex is not very good and neither is the philosophy.  If you want to see pornography, don’t go to this.  There is nothing erotic about this film at all.  It is actually a downer.

The film amounts to an attack on this woman’s character and behavior led by the woman herself.  I think this is the reason she is allowed to sit there on camera with her face all beaten up through the whole movie.  The filmmaker wants to make sure she is made as unattractive and unappealing as possible.  He hates this woman.  He wants to drive it home that this beaten up, uglified face is the well deserved outcome of her character and behavior.  This film is a very conservative affirmation of marriage and monogamy.

Things get increasingly ridiculous as we go along.  There is a long highly improbable scene of a ditched wife coming to Jo’s apartment with her three kids and bitterly berating Jo at length in the presence of her husband, who has just left her, for destroying her life and wrecking her marriage.  By the time she went away bawling I couldn’t blame her husband for leaving her.  There is a discussion of the differences in polyphony between Palestrina and J.S. Bach.  There is a sequence of a chorus doing a Palestrina chorale.  There is an explanation of the Fibonacci sequence and its relationship to the Pythagorean theorem.  We see a jaguar with a young fawn in its mouth.  Sex scenes are accompanied by chorale preludes from Bach’s Little Organ Book.  All of this is supposed to have something to do with nymphomania.  It’s totally crazy.

If you fail to listen to me and make the mistake of going to see this, keep in mind that what you are seeing is not nymphomania.  ‘Nymphomania’ is a lurid title to draw you in, but this ambiguous term does not describe the character of the woman portrayed.  Jo is, in fact, at the other end of the spectrum.

I couldn’t see any redeeming qualities in this film.  There is nothing good I can say about it.  Stacy Martin’s nude body is good.  You can hardly go wrong with a good looking naked girl, but that is not enough to sustain a full length movie in this day and age.  It is not that hard to see a naked girl any more.  And the movie is rather long, or at least it seems to be.  Sorry, but this one is a total loss.

Particle Fever

Directed by Mark Levinson

 

 

This is a documentation of science as a media circus.  It is a public relations infomercial for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research that operates the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.  I was disappointed in it to the point of loathing.  I was expecting something akin to the old NOVA programs on PBS, where they seriously examine the scientific issues and provide in depth biographical portraits of the scientists involved.  It wasn’t anything like that at all.  This was superficial and childish.  It was a cross between the Oscars and a cheerleading section at a basketball game.  But this is a game that no one understands or knows how to play.  So it is hard to understand why anyone is cheering or what they are cheering for. 

They showed a graphic with an H in the center of it and told us that’s the Higgs Boson; that’s what we’re looking for.  It’s the key to the universe.  It’s the long sought Holy Grail of particle physics.  Well, . . . OK.  But no attempt was made to explain what it is and why it is so important, or why you need this gargantuan apparatus to find it.  Maybe they decided that we are all just too dumb to get it, so they would try to create some phony drama that would hop us up and entertain us.  But it didn’t work on me.  I have too much curiosity — which was the main justification they gave for building this behemoth in the first place.  The film should have pandered to that curiosity that is driving the scientists.  The scientific issues should be engaging and interesting enough in their own right to hold the interest of the audience.  But the filmmakers simply didn’t believe in it.  They opted to make something like late night television.  I’m getting more annoyed the more I think about it.

A hundred years ago a lone, eccentric scientist, driven by little more than his own peculiar interests, could build an apparatus in his basement that was capable of making important discoveries.  That is no longer the case.  It costs a lot of money to build and operate a mother bear like the Large Hadron Collider, and for that they need a lot of support from political leaders and the public, since it admittedly does not produce anything of immediate economic value.  Perhaps the debacle in the United States of the Superconducting Super Collider struck fear in their hearts, when the U.S. Congress, in 1993, canceled the project to build the world’s largest and most energetic particle accelerator after it was well under way.  Perhaps the thinking is that the way to garner public support is through propaganda, public relations gimmicks, and advertising, rather than trying to educate people about the subtleties of particle physics and the deep structure of the universe.  I disagree, but I am certainly no expert on public relations.  My opinion is that this attitude is mistaken and this film is misguided in its fundamental approach to the subject.  It is an unfortunate missed opportunity both to educate the public about recent developments in particle physics and to broaden the base of public support for large scale scientific enterprises of the type done in the Large Hadron Collider.  I don’t think this film is going to be popular, and I don’t think is serves the scientists well who participated in it and who care about pushing back the frontiers of human knowledge and understanding the origins and structure of the universe.  Even if you are suckered by the light entertainment this film offers, you won’t know very much more about the Higgs boson when you leave than you did when you went in.  

Program 3 — Firebird — San Francisco Ballet Performance

February 28, 2014

 

 

Three ballets make up Program 3:  The Kingdom of the Shades, which comes from Act II of a ballet called La Bayadére, by Ludwig Minkus and Natalia Makarova; Ghosts, by Kip Winger and Christopher Wheeldon; and Firebird, by Igor Stravinsky and Yuri Possokhov.  They all have to do with male idealizations and conflicts about women.  They are psychological in that they deal with the internal, psychic representations of women in the male imagination rather than with stories, events, or women who might be real.  Firebird is by far and away the superior of the three.

The Kingdom of the Shades is a sublime display of dance technique at the highest level and great visual beauty.  According to the program notes, “The scene is the opium-induced hallucination of Solor, who grieves for his love, the murdered temple dancere (bayadére) Nikiya.”  However, you would never guess this upon watching the ballet.  There is no suggestion of opium influencing Solor (Denis Matvienko), who presents several impressive solos that show him perfectly sharp and at the top of his game.  There is also no suggestion that Nikiya (Maria Kochetkova) has been murdered, or that she is even dead.  What you get is the sense that Solor is dealing with an illusion about a woman, not any woman in particular, but an abstraction of woman, a phantasm.  Nikiya is not a woman who actually exists or ever did exist except in Solor’s imagination.  It is a naive, idealized conception of a woman by someone who doesn’t really know women very well.  The music starts out somber, nostalgic and conflicted, but morphs into a series of waltzes that grow progressively cheesier as they go along.  What saves the ballet is the technical brilliance of the dancers, which we have become spoiled into taking for granted at the San Francisco Ballet, and the visual beauty of the staging and choreography.  Once again the San Francisco Ballet has taken something that is short on substance and turned it into a pleasing visual spectacle.

Ghosts is a more interesting performance in my eyes and ears.  The music is more interesting and the choreography and staging have a greater sense of freedom and imagination.  The ballet is abstract.  The theme is Ghosts.  Well, what is that?   What you see are pairs of male-female couples, that stay pretty much in those pairs throughout the performance.  There are a couple of triangles with two men and a woman, but there is a strong sense of the male-female couple throughout this ballet.  And the couples are strongly interactive.  They look at each other and touch each other and are quite involved with one another physically and emotionally all the way through.

My understanding of a ghost is that it has to do with the past and with the imagination.  A ghost haunts one by intruding into ones consciousness unbidden and unsolicited.  An experience or person of some significance, but long past, continues to disrupt and influence ones present emotional balance and cannot be easily dismissed.  One does not get that sense from this ballet.  There is no sense of the past that I could discern.  And these ghosts were benign, whereas I think a ghost suggests something ominous.  A ghost is an unwelcome presence in my understanding.  This ballet has no such overtones.   One does not get a strong emotional fix on this ballet, but it is visually interesting and danced with a high degree of skill.

The highlight of the evening was Firebird, with music by Igor Stravinsky and choreography by Yuri Possokhov.  This ballet has an interesting concept and is beautifully staged and danced to high quality music.  The dance and the music complement one another very effectively, which is something I especially like to see in a dance performance.  This is one I would like to see again, because I don’t feel like I got it all on the first viewing.  It is a complex, ambiguous story that allows for a wide range of interpretation.  I might have to study this one some before I come to a clearer conception.

The Firebird is a mythical figure (female) who seems to fall in love with a prince.  They part on good terms for reasons that are not clear and the prince then takes up with a princess.  The relationship between the Firebird and the Princess is not clear, and I am wondering if they are the same in some sense?  A devil-like character, Kaschei, appears and brings discord to the romantic couple.  The nature of the discord is not clear, but the Firebird reappears to dispel Kaschei and restore the couple’s harmony and equilibrium.  The story ends with an apparent wedding and a happily ever after sequel.  According to the program notes it is supposed to represent the ultimate triumph of good over evil, something I am finding it increasingly hard to believe in the older I get, but the story is very positive and uplifting and danced and staged at a superb level of skill and taste.

What I can say now is that this story, like the previous two ballets, has to do with male psychology, with male conflicts and idealizations of women, and it represents them in much more depth and interest than the previous two ballets.  The Firebird seems to represent the sensual, sexualized woman of the male imagination.  It is she who rescues the beleaguered young couple beset by turmoil sown by Kaschei, the disruptive, dissatisfied, restless aspect of the young male.  It is the Princess’s ability to tap the sexual energy of the Firebird, the hidden Firebird within herself, that enables her tame Kaschei, to hold the male’s interest, and create a lasting, stable bond.  It is not exactly a triumph of good over evil, but rather a triumph of human connection through sexual bonding over disappointment and dissolution.  This is one you should go see, if you have a chance.  It is both mentally challenging and aesthetically satisfying.

Tim’s Vermeer

Directed by Teller

 

 

This is a film that is going to appeal mainly to people who have a special interest in art history or painting.  It may have some appeal to the museum-going general public, but the audience on the night I attended was sparse.  There is not a lot of action — no, that’s not right.  There is not any action, except the slow process of creating a painting stroke by stroke — sort of like watching ice melt, for those of you on the East Coast.  But that can be very interesting, and it is, but you have to be interested in painting.  If you have ever tried to paint anything with any kind of realistic likeness, you’ll understand what I mean.

This film is slow moving and cerebral.  It is a documentation, a realization, of a theory advanced by artist David Hockney and physicist Charles Falco in 2001 that Renaissance masters like Van Eyck and Vermeer and others across Europe used optical techniques incorporating lenses and mirrors to create their stunningly accurate realistic images.  They did not just eyeball their subjects to realize the kind of microscopic accuracy that characterizes the Dutch Masters style on a painted canvas.  Tim Jenison, an inventor from Texas with no particular ability in art or painting, became familiar with Hockney’s theory and hatched the crazy idea to replicate Jan Vermeer’s studio, materials, and techniques from scratch and recreate one of Vermeer’s masterpieces, The Music Lesson, himself, using the techniques suggested by Hockney and Falco.  The film documents this process with attention to all the minutiae one might find in one of Vermeer’s paintings.

I saw this when I was rather tired after a long, busy weekend, and I started feeling a sense of tedium even though the subject and the process were very interesting.  We get to see shots of mixing paint from pigments, grinding a lens, carving a table leg on a lathe, building a studio, and gradually watching the painting take shape a few strokes at a time over a period of, I think, 213 days.  The result is a flawless replica of a Vermeer masterpiece.  Jenison takes it to David Hockney, who grades it favorably, and there is a discussion of the process and the significance of Jenison’s experiment.

Jenison did not prove that Vermeer used lenses and mirrors in order to paint.  Jenison’s experiment is akin to Thor Heyerdahl’s sailing of Kon-tiki from the shores of Peru to Polynesia.  Heyerdahl’s experiment refuted skeptics who said such a voyage was not possible.  It did not prove that anyone ever did sail such a route in such a vessel, but it opened an avenue of interpretation of other evidence that might have been closed off by dismissal or the presumption of fantastical improbability.  Jenison showed that using only materials and techniques available during Vermeer’s time, he could indeed replicate Vermeer’s achievement as an untrained painter.  This does not show that Vermeer painted this way, because there is no documentation of how Vermeer worked, but coupled with the fact that there is no documentation of Vermeer ever having been trained as an artist, the absence of a drawing beneath the painting that would have served as a guide and which was customary in the work of other artists of that time, and, most tellingly, I think, that some small “mistakes” can be discerned in Vermeer’s image that reflect distortions created by the use of a lens, all give the argument weight and strengthened plausibility.

It is a very interesting film that should be noted by painters, historians, and art students.  It presents a compelling case, but not a final conclusion, and I think it indicates a fruitful direction for further historical research.

 

 

Giselle

San Francisco Ballet Performance

January 27, 2014

 

 

This is a very strange story that ultimately doesn’t make sense.  Maybe I just don’t understand it.  A prince disguises himself as a peasant and moves to a village to court a peasant girl of irresistible charm.  It would be like Jamie Dimon disguising himself as a bus boy to court a waitress in a restaurant.  A rather odd concept, don’t you think?  Especially since the prince is already engaged to another woman — but we don’t find that out until later. 

It is a narrative, and I do like ballets that attempt to create a narrative line simply through dance without verbal support.  But the narrative here is convoluted and rather bizarre.  Without first reading the synopsis in the program, a viewer would be lost trying to figure out what is going on.

The first act, after doing a passable job of establishing the story gives way to a long cadenza-like display of dancing virtuosity.  I had trouble grasping what all this athleticism had to do with the story.  There is nothing wrong with virtuosic dance.  This is, after all, the San Francisco Ballet.  But virtuosity for its own sake, is self indulgent and risks becoming dull if it is overworked.  I think this ballet, since it had so little substance in the story line, relied a little too much on dazzle.

I don’t like scenes where one or a small group of dancers perform while a multitude of bystanders sits idle on the stage just watching.  This technique is employed to excess in this ballet.  My feeling is that if someone is on the stage they should be doing something besides being part of the scenery.  I don’t like spearholders.  If they are doing nothing, then they should be doing nothing for a good reason.  Inertness should speak.  But in this ballet it doesn’t, and you’ve got these vast stationary multitudes on stage serving as an adjunct to the audience of paid ticket holders while a few dancers hold court.

The prince’s rival is Hilarion, a “woodsman,” or hunter from the village.  He is a known quantity to Giselle and she finds him much less appealing than the disguised prince.  Hilarion exposes the prince’s disguise, reveals his true identity, and the fact that he is already engaged to Bathilde, a woman of his own class.  This puts the kibosh on Giselle, and instead of taking it in stride and chalking it up to experience (or taking up with Hilarion), she runs herself through with the prince’s sword and dies.  You can always tell a vacuous story by the need for phony melodrama to pump some life into it — in this case, killing off the heroine at the end of the first act.

The music is undistinguished and tends toward the banal and the schmaltzy. Visually, however, it is very beautiful.  The sets, costumes, configurations and choreography are interesting and make a pleasing impression.  The dancers are outstanding, as usual.  The San Francisco Ballet has done a superb job with mediocre material.  Apparently it is enough to seduce the audience.  The house was full and seemed to give a good response to this vapid nonsense.

The second act was way too long.  It could have been cut in half to a much more pleasing effect.  It takes place at midnight in a forest where Giselle’s grave is located.  Giselle returns as a ghost accompanied by a cohort of Wilis, forest spirits all decked out in pure white wedding dresses, to comport with the prince who has come to visit her grave — in the middle of the night.  The tenor of the whole second act seems to imply no hard feelings on the part of Giselle toward the prince, even though she was upset with him enough to kill herself with his sword at the end of the first act.  Now that she is dead, all is forgiven and they dance like they are freshly love struck.  It’s idiotic and extremely repetitious.  I was getting so tired of it, just waiting for it to end, and it went on and on.  The curtain call seemed overdone as well, but then, I didn’t feel much like applauding and wanted to get out of there.

The moral of the story seems to be: you should not look for love outside your own social class, and if you are a woman, you are bound to get the worst of any such liaison — a reassuring, conservative, message for all the stodgy Republicans in the San Francisco audience.

Wayne McGregor/ Random Dance

Dance Performance

Lam Research Center at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco

January 19, 2014

 

 

This is an abstract study in movement and agility.  It starts out with a male/female couple in a rather contentious vignette against a beautiful vocal sound track.  The opening segment was intriguing, however, the rest of the performance seemed to be a repudiation of this promising outset.  It was as if this opening represented something from the past that had given way to something much harsher, with less human connection and less emotional content.  Perhaps it is an oblique comment on modern life.  In any case the subsequent segments were set against  clashing, percussive electronic soundtracks that incorporated sounds like the din of a factory, passing trains, jet airplanes on an airport runway, cars with stereos thumping full blast.  Intrusive, noisy, discordant sounds.  Blaring strobe lights add to this grating atmosphere of unpleasantness in an aggressive frontal assault on the audience.  The dance that was set in front of all this was active, if not frenetic.  Movements are fluid, but staccato, disjointed, contorted and sometimes grotesque.  There is interaction between the dancers, but emotional connection seems shallow.  Bodies are emphasized by the almost nude costuming, but there is little eroticism.  The eroticism is fleeting and subdued.  There is a feeling of detachment and narcissism throughout, like the activity on the streets of a large city where people are busily and anxiously active, but completely self absorbed and indifferent to others with whom they might be sharing the street and even casually interacting.  This performance seemed determined to minimize emotional interaction.  The dancers did an admirable job with a physically demanding program.  It lasted one hour without an intermission — which I appreciated.  The length was just about right, because this strident, relentless cacophony gets to be taxing.  It was not exactly to my taste, but it did have interest.