Upper bodies as carved as cuirasses
Between Greece’s Bronze and Golden Ages.
I watched some more of The Greeks last night, the first 20 minutes of Part Two (“Out of Strife”) [sic], which goes from the collapse of the Bronze Age through the Greek Dark Ages to the rise, or resurrection, of Golden Age Greece. Parallels are drawn to Greece in 2010s, in the wake of the financial crisis that who would imagine this is the same country and people that yielded all that greatness. But the documentary says that when there’s a societal collapse, and by association, before there’s a resurgence, the life of most people doesn’t change much. If society is like a pyramid, it’s the top of the pyramid that gets lopped off, the part that makes the most sophisticated culture. This is the part that from 1100-800 BC or so became absent. But most Greeks were still living their lives, drinking wine, singing songs. (There’s a sequence in the National Geographic doc of ordinary Greeks in a taverna drinking and listening to men singing and playing traditional guitars. Ah! we think. So maybe these people will rise yet again!) Interesting is that Homer composed, or transmuted to writing, his epic poems at the end the Greek Dark Age, just as the first city-states were beginning to arise. The epics themselves were circulating orally through the Greek Dark Age, memories—mixed with myth—of what had come before.
Homoeroticism in classical art.
I turned off the documentary to go to bed just as it was about to start the bit on the Greek gods. Of course that will be one of the best parts. I think it’s a homosexual thing: the images of the Greek gods, and of their heroes were so strikingly physically real, and often nude. I get excited just as I type that. We had those art books in the living room, in the bottom of the chrome and glass wall unit. My favorite was the one of Rome and the Vatican Museums, but there was also one of the Louvre with some exciting images. And Johnny had that book of Greek gods and heroes that I think was part of his Dungeons & Dragons collection of items. I would sit in the study with that book and study my favorite male gods and their pictures. They were all so muscular! With upper bodies as carved as cuirasses.
Sondheim’s 90th birthday: a review.
I also watched some more of the Stephen Sondheim 90th birthday fundraiser that had aired live, more or less, the night before via Youtube and Broadway dot com. I was telling Mom about it, that a lot of the singers were quite good, and initially it was very intimate seeing them in their homes and their day-to-day wear. But then there were some unusual choices, like the woman who had draped a New Mexican type blanket with thin horizontal stripes of varying width, mostly red, across some other furniture item behind her. The blanket wasn’t even flat! One could see it was hung over something else. And she sat right in front of it. It was like everyone studied their online how-tos on “how to look professional, or at least not make a visual fool of yourself, during a video interview or a Zoom meeting.” Whereas they all thought, “This is the closest you get to a neutral background in my apartment,” we think, “You’re backed into a corner, and you’ve taken us, the audience, there with you. It’s too close.” Of those I watched on Monday night, there was the woman who had draped two pieces of fabric behind her—perhaps to improve sound quality?—both white, that looked strangely like squares of quilted toilet paper blown up to human height. Was this a joke? And Melissa Errico who sat in her cozy corner—literally, a corner—full of pillows, and kept rearranging her body upon the pillows while singing; next to her were shelves full of books that I of course inspected. Most were travel books (“Italy” “Ireland”), but there was one, “Irish Erotic Art,” in a fairly central location. And then when she concluded her song, after wishing “Stephen” a happy birthday, she said, “Well, time to make dinner.”
You get a feel for how these people are in real life, off the stage, and it’s not particularly compelling. Mandy Patinkin sang in the endlessly spacious yard of what is probably his Hudson Valley farm. He must have thought it was a good idea to be out in the open air like that, but the microphone didn’t: his singing voice was nearly lost into the air. And there was a rippling brook running along the side of the shot that we could hear the whole time he was singing.
Last night’s batch included a singer who sang in her bathroom. She was crouched on the floor, with tiles behind her, and the edge of a bathtub beside her. She must have thought, “Well this where I always sound my best when I’m singing at home.” She was too loud and the audio kept peaking and clipping.
But there’s still Donna Murphy up ahead, whom I want to hear. Surely she’ll have a tasteful house. And Bernadette Peters, of course. They probably drove in a truck full of pro audio gear for her bit.
When I was telling Mom about it, at first I was being humorous and sardonic and poking fun at it all. But then as I spoke about it, and as I looked down the list of all the performers (one of the commenters on the video, surely a musical theater nerd himself, had gone to the trouble of listing all the performers, with the timecode of when their song starts, linking the timecode directly to the video queued to the beginning of the song), I thought, “Well, Donna Murphy. Patti Lupone. Meryl Streep. Bernadette Peters. Chip Zien, who played the baker in Into the Woods.
“Maybe I will watch some more,” I said to her.