LA en vie

Tristan und Isolde in Los Angeles

On Saturday night I went to see the Los Angeles opera production of Tristan und Isolde. It was the first time I'd ever seen a Wagner opera, and I was quite excited. Wagner is like a final exam of whether or not you love opera. I thought I did-- wasn't I very fond of the Flying Dutchman?

I'm still a new opera-goer. I didn't think to listen to the music first, find out about the singers, or use any of the usual techniques for getting more out of it. And if the opera company hadn't sent me an email, I would have missed the whole first act-- the opera had to start early to make up for its being four and a half hours long. It takes an hour and a half to get there, too, even though the opera is less than 20 miles away. Los Angeles traffic is inexorable.

I got to my seat in the nick of time and sat down to look at the program. The sets were by David Hockney. Oh no, I thought. The swimming-pool guy. Then the curtain went up. The sets were amazing-- here is the one for the first act. It was like a living fairy tale. I think they are the best sets I've ever seen, and the lighting was fantastic too.

But the first act was so very disappointing, it reminded me of when I was eight years old and my parents took me to see La Bohème-- and Mimi, the starving beauty, was played by a fat 40-year-old. Here, the fair maiden Isolde looked very much like my overweight blonde sister-in-law who is at least in her mid-40s. And Tristan, the handsome warrior, must have been sixty! All Isolde did was shriek in bad German all the way through the first act-- all she needed was the breastplate and spear to fulfill every cliché of screeching Wagner heroines.

"Feel like leaving after this act?" said D in my ear as we sat back down. All around me people were rustling. Lots of dressed-up men looking uncomfortable and gorgeous glamorous women.

But the second act was glorious. In the next intermission we had a glass of champagne and went out on the terrace. Below us was a sea of trees entwined with lights, and a lit-up fountain. "I love L.A.!" I said.

"Why?" said D. "You thought you would hate it."

I thought about it for a minute. "Well, there's the weather, of course," I said. "Then, everyone here is ambitious-- there's none of that Paris morosité. Even the poorest people haven't given up, they're not resigned, they all seem to be working hard for a better life.  I thought people out here would be shallow and provincial. But it's actually the least provincial city I know."

We went back in, and the last act was sublime. David Hockney, the brilliant lighting designer, and the director James Conlon came onstage at the end. As always, there was a standing ovation.

The wonderful subconscious

The subconscious mind works in weird ways!

C spilled the cranberry sauce and it went flying across the kitchen and splattered an unbelievable number of surfaces, including the curtains. Surprisingly, the cranberry-sauce bowl did not shatter. But everything in the kitchen was now flecked or dyed red.

As I was cleaning it up, I started humming a Chinese song I used to hear on the radio when I was studying in Taiwan, long ago. I hadn't even thought of it for ten years or more. Suddenly I realized that the words I was singing, 只是朱顏改, meant, "Everything turned crimson."

The Christmas burrito

The Los Angeles Times did an article about Don Cheto, the grouchy Mexican co-anchor of a Spanish-language radio show, and I decided to tune in to hear him. Instead I heard a catchy jingle called El Burrito de Belén, "the little donkey of Bethlehem," sung by a Colombian named Juanes. (At first I thought he was a little boy-- but he's 32.)

Listening to the radio is so much fun here. And you do it all day in your car. I've been exposed to so many kinds of music just driving around. Somehow in France I just got got stuck on my couple of stations, and I didn't find the French mix of French (obligatoire, not that I blame them) and English songs inspiring. Here the music seems fresher, newer, younger. Maybe it's just that I didn't give the French stations a chance.

Now I find myself changing lanes singing, "Si me ven, si me ven, voy camino de Belén!"

Mexico; the standing ovations

We have been in Mexico, where we luckily missed the Los Angeles hot spell (one week long! as if) but managed to be rained on by the edges of two hurricanes-- Felix to the southeast, and Henriette to the northwest. Two bridges washed out and the streets of small villages were streaming with water. I was glad to get back to nice dry L.A.

Today we went to the Verdi Requiem at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown L.A. (in the distance, above). It's the first time I have been downtown, and I was excited to see that the Pavilion is right next to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, an exotic creation of silver curves that I had snatched glimpses of from the freeway. But we didn't have time to look, and went in to see the Requiem. It's a piece I love, of course especially the part where the orchestra and choir crash out the Dies Irae:

            Day of wrath! On that day
            the world will dissolve in ashes
            as David and the Sibyl warned!

That was always really fun to sing.

"Did you know they had to invent special drumsticks for Dies Irae?" said D.

At the end of the concert, which seemed to be sold out, the man behind me leaped to his feet and started yelling "Bravi! Bravi!" The people in the orchestra and most of the people in the balconies stood up, applauding with all their might.

I might have been impressed, except that, in fact, every single stage performance of any kind that I have seen since returning to the States has also received a standing ovation.

Listen to the ra-a-di-o

It was a bit hard hearing the latest Country & Western songs in France-- a taste I acquired over many years of cross-country trips. If you've ever driven across the U.S., you know that there are long, long stretches of highway where if you don't have your own CDs, you are listening to Country and Western. My favorite song is "You're the reason God made Oklahoma."

It's fun to listen to the radio in Los Angeles, and most of the stations are in English. I enjoy scanning through them sometimes and listening to the brief snippets of Bible-thumping (how it reminds me of West Virginia!); rap; Spanish-language ballads sung with a choke in the voice; the news on NPR (pretty much only Iraq, Israel/Palestine and the United States), finishing with the unmistakable nasal whine of Jim Svejda on KUSC, an excellent classical station. Every morning, filmmaker David Lynch gives a weather report on indie station 103.1 from his balcony. But when I need to just get through a traffic jam, there's nothing like Go Country 105, the Country & Western station that in Darwinian fashion bumped a classical station off to AM radio shortly after I moved here. Right now there's a catchy  song by Carrie Underwood that must make a lot of men nervous:

I   dug my keys into the side of his pretty little souped-up four wheel drive--
carved my name into his leather seeeeeats--
I took a Louisville slugger* to both headlights--   
slashed a hole in all four tires--
maybe next time he’ll think before he cheats!

It's no doubt my gloomy outlook on life (which few people outside my family realize, I am relieved to say) but the fact that you can listen to the radio in the car all day, every day, and not learn anything about the rest of the world alarms me. This is an epoch in which Al Qaeda is striving to find a way to attack Los Angeles and Melbourne (why Melbourne?) with a nuclear bomb, and Lindsay Lohan is in the headlines again.

*Note to non-Americans: A Louisville slugger is a baseball bat.

On the American planet

When I was a little girl, smothered in the all-encompassing American culture, I assumed that in other countries, people were just as self-centered. In France, people would be listening to French music; in Thailand, people would be watching Thai movies; in Japan, people would wear Japanese clothes. The exotic globe beckoned.

It was a shock when I first went overseas, and did not find the variety I had been longing for. Everywhere, people were listening to American music, wearing American t-shirts, watching American television and movies. It was deeply disappointing to me to discover that the monolithic American popular culture was popular everywhere. Even in France! But outside the U.S., it at least serves the function of constantly reminding people in other countries that they are not alone on the planet.

Now that I've come back to the U.S., it's home to the monolith. On the radio here (which you need when you spend all day in the car), you can listen for hours without being reminded that the rest of the world exists, except in a daily nod to the number of people blown up in Iraq (where's that?). The trouble is that while Americans obliviously listen to traffic reports and the latest news on Anna Nicole Smith and the astronaut love triangle, the rest of the world is still out there, watching us, judging us on our television shows and on what we do outside U.S. borders. I hope I can keep this in mind-- it's already getting harder.