OK, that's not the real Stonehenge; it's Banksy's portaloo-henge at Glastonbury. It's a hilarious (in my opinion) sendup of the Glastonbury Festival, which is known for having great bands, too many jugglers and other Ren faire weirdos, a sea of mud, and never enough toilets. In fact, there has long been a connection between Stonehenge and the festival: in the 1960s, people started coming to the site two weeks before Glastonbury to get mystical before they rocked out.
Going to Stonehenge, though, I wasn't thinking about hippies and Oasis; I had Spinal Tap running in my head. Bring on the model! Let's have some Morris-dancing little people! We'll go back in time to that mystic land where the dewdrops cry and the cats meow. Meow.
Well, Stonehenge: as Eddie Izzard says, "one of the biggest henges in the world," not to mention ancient. Around 5000 BC, the end of the ice age, England split from the European continent. At 4000 BC, the island was inhabited by nomadic hunter-gatherers, and then by 3000 BC people were settling, raising livestock, planting crops. On this site, around 3050 BC, there was a ditch, a six-foot bank of chalky earth, and timber stakes set in holes, and later a wooden building was added to the center (Izzard jokes that before Stonehenge there was a Woodhenge and a Strawhenge, but there really was a wooden henge!). The site was used for about 500 years, then abandoned.
Around 2500 BC, the site was rediscovered and new construction began. Stonehenge is actually four rings, which is easy to see from overhead photos but takes a while to figure out from horizontal views. At the very center is an altar stone, and the innermost ring around that is a series of bluestone pillars--once there were 19--from the Preseli Hills in western Wales, 150 miles away. Around the pillars is a horseshoe of trilithons (this shape: ∏) made of sarsen stones (a type of hard sandstone) from Marlborough Downs, about 19 miles away. The open side of the horseshoe faces a heel stone outside the circle. Three trilithons remain of the original five, and these are the largest stones at the site: some weigh 40 tons, and one is the tallest standing stone in England, more than 24 feet high. The third ring, around the trilithon horseshoe, is another band of bluestones, which are smaller than the sarsens. Finally, the outer ring is a circle--once complete--of sarsen stones with lintels, of which 17 of 30 standing stones remain.
Prehistoric stonemasons used stone hammers to smooth the rocks and dug holes with animal antlers and shoulder blades to set the stones in--we're seeing just half to two-thirds of each stone. Also, the wheel didn't exist yet, so stones had to be dragged in with ropes or floated on a raft. It would have taken 200 men 12 days to pull one sarsen stone 19 miles to the site. Incidentally, it's carbon dating on those bone tools that has enabled archeologists to date the site's various phases.
And how on earth did they haul those massive lintel stones atop the upright slabs? They may have dragged the stones up an earthen ramp. Or they may have built a low platform around all four sides of the vertical stone, levered the lintel onto the platform by wedging tree trunks under each side, and slipped more timbers under the lintel, gradually increasing the height of the platform. Eventually the top of the platform would have been as high as the vertical stone and the lintel could simply be slid over. To secure the lintels, these bronze age stonemasons used mortise-and-tenon joints, more commonly used in woodworking: these are knobs on top of the vertical stones, which fit into holes in the lintels. Another woodworking technique, tongue and groove, was used on the ends of each lintel, so that they fit flush together. Consider this, though: it's one thing to fit a straight wooden floor, but imagine making these techniques work with stones that are not set in straight lines but curve in a circle. And geometrically speaking, the circle is true.
Even before the stones, when the site was wood and earthworks, this was a place of worship. As you probably know, Stonehenge was also a kind of calendar. For example, there were four station stones (two remain) that formed a precise rectangle around the circle--the center of the circle was also the center point of the rectangle, and that center is where the sun and moon crossed paths. On the longest day of the year, the summer solstice, the sun rises behind the heel stone and cuts the circle in half, and on the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice, the sun sets on the other side, sinking in what used to be the gap between the two sarsens of the Great Trilithon (now one of the stones is gone). We visited Stonehenge shortly afer the vernal equinox, when night and day are equal in length. The people here worshiped Eosta, from which we get Easter, a Christian holiday with a pagan schedule: it falls the Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. That's why Easter's on a different date every year.
Who built Stonehenge? Not the druids. The people were called the Beakers and came from what's now Germany, and in addition to henges, they built barrows, tombs for prestigious leaders. The burial mounds, like Egyptian tombs, included artifacts and sometimes other people if the dead man was especially important. Among the artifacts were drinking vessels that look like beakers, which is why archeologists named the people Beakers. Once the mound was built up, it was covered in a layer of chalk. There's one mound on the Stonehenge site, which is not a burial barrow, but you can see several in the hills surrounding, and in fact there were more than 300 in a two-mile radius.
The druid mix-up came about in part because they wanted to take credit for the site. The druids were here at Stonehenge at least as early as the Romans, perhaps circa 43 BC--we know because Roman scribes wrote about them; it's even possible that Julius Caesar was one. But as I noted above, Stonehenge construction began much, much earlier, around 2500 BC. In the 17th and 18th centuries, antiquarians studying the site rightly realized that it was pre-Roman, and also that it must have been used by priests of some ancient Briton tribe. The only priests they knew of were the druids, and so the misapprehension took hold. The druids we know today are a 19th-century reinvention of those Iron Age priests from the last years BC. (Fun fact: My brother's biology teacher in Alaska claimed to be a druid. Whether he actually was one or just said so in order to get extra holidays at solstice and equinox, I don't know, but either way--brilliant!)
In the 1300s, when Salisbury Cathedral's tower and spire were being built, more people started coming to Stonehenge for a look around, which meant more people taking stone for building and souvenirs. The problem multiplied in the 1800s, when the railroad came through, with a station just 1.5 miles away. A local blacksmith rented out pickaxes to tourists, which caused such degradation that some of the stones fell over and others later had to be shored up with cement at their bottoms.
In the 1960s, as I noted at the beginning, Glastonbury Festival-goers started coming to Stonehenge two weeks before the shows. To stop squabbling among groups competing for access, administrators shut down visits entirely for eight years. While they waited for the law to change, the time also let the site partially restore itself--there were no kids jumping on stones, no graffiti, no food scraps causing odd mold growths. Now the path around the site changes periodically, and you can only enter the center of the stones after hours, about 40 days per year.
Outside the main circle are some other important stones: the heel stone, which marks the summer solstice, also the point where most photos taken. Beyond the heel stone is the Avenue, a long ceremonial road that starts 1.5 miles to the southeast at the River Avon. Nearby is the slaughter stone, so named because its pitted surface collects water, which turns red from iron in the stone--Victorians mistook these rusty streaks for blood. For a long time, archeologists thought there were no sacrifices here, but then excavators found the body of a 26-year-old man buried by he slaughter stone. He was killed by a blow to the back of his neck around 600 AD. However, there are no written records from that time, so it's unclear why he was killed. Also, archeologists recently discovered the village where the builders lived, so we may get information about that soon.
Stonehenge is a fascinating place to visit, and I would recommend going with a guide, because there are no explanatory signs disturbing the site. I would also recommend to the gift shop staff that they contact Christopher Guest about partnering up on some merchandise, because come on, who wouldn't want a Spinal Tap version of the Stonehenge guidebook, with bonus umlauts?
Recently I booked a flight to London through Virgin Atlantic and was happy to discover that the airline now offers carbon offsets as part of the checkout procedure. More surprising, I then bought a ticket from London to Vienna on EasyJet, the budget carrier that's the UK's answer to Southwest, and it also lets you purchase offsets.
That's great news for us guilty travelers. According to the FAA, aviation is responsible for only 3 percent of carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S., but the same organization expects aircraft emissions to increase 60 percent by 2025. Opinions vary about the impact of air travel on climate change, as well as on issues like whether flying is worse than driving, but pretty much any form of fuel-based travel is not friendly to the environment. And let's face it, most of us fly because we want to, not because we must.
You won't be shocked to hear that European aviators are ahead of us Yankee wastrels when it comes to adopting offset policies. The United Nations has, of course, been pushing for implementation of the Kyoto Protocol and other climate-change initiatives. Over at the European Union, members recognize that the EU is responsible for about half the CO2 emissions generated by flights between developed countries, and that overall, two-thirds of aircraft emissions are from international flights. Thus, the EU Parliament drafted a proposal last month that would compel airlines flying in or into the EU to reduce emissions by 10 percent or to purchase carbon credits. The plan, if ratified, would go into effect in 2011. Naturally, the U.S. government and the airline industry oppose the draft legislation, complaining that it would cost too much, and swearing that they'll give up their planes and SUVs only when they've drained all the oil, torched all the charcoal, and tried to extract fuel from polar bear tears and penguin bonfires. Then we can pry the keys out of their hot, dead hands. OK, I made that last part up, but you know what I mean. (If denial could be harnessed as an energy source, we Americans would finally produce more than we consume.)
Several European airlines have begun offering carbon offsets. While I haven't done a comprehensive survey, as I already mentioned, there's Virgin Atlantic, which is also testing jet biofuel, and low-cost airline EasyJet, which has a handy emissions calculator on its site. (On the demerit side, fellow budget carrier Ryanair is owned by wacko Michael O'Leary, who has trumpeted his intention to increase emissions, though his company has already been declared the biggest carbon offender among Irish businesses. So if you're looking for cheap flights in Europe, you know which airline not to fly.) SAS partnered with offset providers this year, and British Airways not only offers offsets, it has a nice section on its Web site detailing all of its environmental initiatives. This summer, the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee declared BA's efforts inadequate, but it seems a bit churlish to blame BA when the offsets are voluntary--it's up to customers to buy them. The only carrier that seems to get universal green praise is Silverjet, which makes offsets mandatory by embedding them in the ticket price, though customers can choose which project gets their money. However, Silverjet is entirely business class, so it's expensive, and at the moment it flies only to London, New York, and Dubai.
And the home team? Our domestic airlines have a lousy track record with carbon offsets, which isn't so surprising, given that they can't get their act together on basics like in-flight meals, on-time schedules, and pilot sobriety. Recently, five states and several environmental groups united to petition the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate airplane emissions; if such an effort ever leads to legislation, you can bet the airlines will pony up some offset options in a hurry--they do like passing costs along to the customer whenever possible. Anyway, to get a quick sampling of airline policies, I checked some of the carriers that serve SFO: American, United, Northwest, Alaska, Frontier, Southwest, US Airways, JetBlue, and Virgin America. None of these appears to have an offset program (surprising, in the case of Virgin America); when I searched for "carbon" on their sites, all I discovered was restrictions on carrying carbon dioxide gas onboard. As far as I've seen, only Continental and Delta let you purchase offsets, and the former gives you a selection to choose among.
And that brings me to another point: Not all offset programs are created equal. Do your homework on what sorts of projects get funding, where they're located, and (an important question for any charity) how much of your donation will be productive, as opposed to getting spent on administration or marketing. Grist has a very good analysis of the issues with this nascent market, as well as a breakdown on five carbon-offset providers.
If your preferred airline doesn't offer offsets, you have other options: (1) Travelocity, Expedia, and Orbitz (which has an interface on eco-friendly travel at eco.orbitz.com) let you buy an offset with any flight or vacation, or (2) you can purchase offsets on your own, independent of the booking procedure. Again, check Grist's article for some recommendations, and make sure you're getting what you want.
And if you're on a do-gooder roll, go calculate your overall carbon footprint at the Inconvenient Truth site.
Fact: Sheep lead to art. That was one of the lessons of my March vacation, weirdly enough. First I learned that Florence became rich through the wool and cloth trade, which led to merchants commissioning art, thus fueling the Renaissance. Then in the UK, touring Salisbury, I found that the town became prosperous through exporting wool, so much so that by about 1400, it was the eighth wealthiest town in England. (Further to my argument, I also later saw that Andy Goldsworthy literally made art from sheep, but that's subject for a future post.)
But Salisbury's history goes much further back, as I discovered on a day tour with the ever-excellent London Walks. We started at the hill outside the city center (thus afflicting me with the earworm of Peter Gabriel's "Salisbury Hill"...you're welcome), formerly home to an Iron Age fort (circa 600 BC) called Sarum meaning "dry and desolate"--it was hard to haul water up the hill. Sarum was constructed to protect travelers on the trade route that went past. About 600 years later, the Romans made Sarum a crossroads and their own fort.
In 1066, having successfully invaded England, William the Conqueror disbanded his Norman army on Salisbury plain. The troops rebuilt Sarum as keep, with barracks and houses, and created a wall around the city. William's nephew Osmund, a cleric, got permission to build the first cathedral here.
After 100 years, however, the clergy and soldiers were at each other's throats, as the latter liked getting liquored up and catapulting rocks through the cathedral windows. Thus, by 1200, it seemed a good idea to separate fort and cathedral, and Bishop Richard Poore designated his 86 acres of land for a new church, a graveyard, and homes for clerics. Salisbury Cathedral took 38 years to build and was completed in 1258.
Later, by 1320, Salisbury Cathedral got a tower and a spire--the latter, at 404 feet, is still the tallest in England. That's especially amazing because the original cathedral was not constructed to bear that much more weight, a whopping 6,500 tons. Moreover, the cathedral rests on a shelf of granite chippings that are stable only when damp, so now water is pumped down to keep the foundation secure. In the 1600s, Salisbury invited Christopher Wren to examine the church, and he discovered that the foundation was fine but the spire was one meter off true.
The Crane Bridge, the first bridge in town, dates to the 1200s and crosses a river that's a tributary of the Avon (as in Bard of). Once there was a wall around the close--the close comprising cathedral plus clerics' houses--but most of it was pulled down so that houses would have a view of the river. The cathedral's tower and spire were built of stones from the wall and from the old Sarum church. Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope had friends in the cathedral close, and while crossing this bridge to visit them, he conceived the idea for The Warden, first of his Barchester trilogy. Here's a snippet:
"[Hiram's Hospital] stands on the banks of the little river, which flows nearly round the cathedral close, being on the side furthest from the town. The London road crosses the river by a pretty one-arched bridge, and, looking from this bridge, the stranger will see the windows separated by small buttresses."
Those windows, which you can see in the Crane Bridge photo, belong to what was once a cloth merchant's house--again, the combination of sheep and river made the industry possible and the town wealthy. In the 1600s, this home was owned by the Audley family, at least until Lord Audley was executed in Tower for sodomy. Salisbury then confiscated the house and made it a workhouse, and later the church took it over. It's constructed of flint and limestone with stone mullion windows.
Just inside and to the left of the gate is this widows' house. Around 1600, a man named Ward fell in love with a girl, a love that was unrequited--she married a clergyman and moved to Exeter. Ward became a priest himself, and some 60 years later, he found that she was now a widow and destitute. So, he set up this house for widows of clergy of Salisbury and Exeter. Our guide, Richard, said that he had a nice tea with some of the current tenants, and one of the vicars' widows told him that the rules are quite strict: they have a 10 o'clock curfew, even though the pubs don't close until 11.
Across the cathedral green is a military museum, formerly the Bishop's Wardrobe. Bishops were often independently wealthy and thus could afford their own houses, like this, which was used for storing important vestments.
Next to it is the King's House, parts of which go back to the 1200s, and so called because James I liked to stay there--perhaps because it was too small to accommodate his wife and children, who stayed in the Bishop's Wardrobe. Later, the King's House was Sarum and St. Michael's, a ladies' teaching college. Novelist and poet Thomas Hardy's two sisters attended. Once, on a visit, Hardy struck up a conversation with a stonemason working there, and that workman's story became Jude the Obscure (and the Salisbury/Exeter connection was not enough to stop the Bishop of Exeter from burning the book). Another writer has Salisbury connections: William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, taught at Bishop Wordsworth's School in the close.
Pass along the south side of the nave, and you'll find an old mechanical clock, 14th century, operated by weights. It was dismantled long ago, but in the 1920s some of its pieces were discovered, and the missing bits were reconstructed.
Standing in the center of the church, you can see a hole in the ceiling, evidence of more medieval technology. All the building materials for the tower and spire were winched through that hole, powered by a windlass--kind of like a hamster wheel with two or three men inside.
Surprisingly, ceiling paintings are still visible--surprising because during the Reformation, most were whitewashed, as they were considered Catholic iconography. Here, though, restorers were able to see the paintings through infrared and repainted them, albeit more dully than the original colors, to simulate age.
On the north side of the nave is the tomb of Longespee, illegitimate son of Henry II and half-brother to King John, who was forced to sign the Magna Carta. Longespee was married to Eleanor, Countess of Salisbury, and went to fight in the Crusades for a year. However, he didn't return, and after more than a year had passed, he was presumed dead. Eleanor, as a wealthy widow and a countess, was a hot prospect, and the Chancellor of England wanted her to marry his nephew. So, he arranged a banquet for her, but (the story goes) on the eve, Longespee returned, having been shipwrecked and lost on an island. One week later, though, he died--perhaps poisoned at that banquet. Eleanor joined a nunnery. In recent years, archeologists opened the tomb to make sure it was stable, and in it they discovered a rat, which had eaten part of Longespee's brain and died (tests showed) of arsenic poisoning. So, centuries later, the mystery was solved.
After visiting the cathedral, we hopped back on the bus to see Stonehenge, which I'll write about in a separate post.
At the end of the day, we were back in Salisbury for a free hour to visit the market and anything else we wished, and I headed for another church, St. Thomas à Becket. It was built in 1220 to serve men working on the cathedral, though most of what one sees today is 15th century construction. Now that's a big construction project: you have to build a church while you're building a church.
Walking in, you're immediately faced with a large, impressive "doom" painting (depicting the last judgement) on the chancel arch. The mural was created around 1475, commissioned in thanks for the safe return of a pilgrim.
As you can see, Christ is in the center, separating the saved (left) and the damned (right). The mural was whitewashed in 1593 (post-Henry VIII but I expect part of the anti-Catholic, Reformation sentiment) and rediscovered in 1819, restored in 1881.
Next: Stonehenge.
Apparently Edward Albee has been to some catastrophically bad parties. In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a husband and wife initially welcome a new couple but then can't resist playing "Get the Guests," hazing them with head games. In The Lady from Dubuque, the game is 20 Questions, played by two couples with hosts Jo and Sam in their Connecticut home. You can't quite tell why the guests are there: nobody seems to get along, or as one person says, "Where else can you come for ridicule and contempt?"
Jo (the affecting Catherine McCormack), in serious mental and physical pain from terminal illness, is taking her anguish out on others, or perhaps she simply can't stand bullshit anymore, or perhaps she's cutting ties before death does the job--whatever the reasons, she's verbally eviscerating her guests. I have to say, it's liberating not to see another brave, noble dying person onstage, dropping words of wisdom as she coughs meaningfully, but rather a real, pained, cantankerous human being who's not willing to play anyone's idea of how a sick person should act. On the other hand, it's exhausting watching that much contention, and this conversational shooting gallery lasts nearly the full length of the first act. "Don't you just hate party games?" Jo asks the audience.
Then Jo takes a bad turn and Sam carries her upstairs to bed. Sam (Robert Sella) is in denial, alternately acknowledging that theirs is a death house, then insisting that he can heal Jo. "Who am I?" he has been asking in 20 Questions, and naturally the question is meant to resonate philosophically beyond the game.
Seconds before the intermission, a new couple walks in, a distinguished older lady, Elizabeth (Maggie Smith) and her suave, karate-practicing African-American companion Oscar (Peter Francis James). "Are we in time?" she asks. "Is this the place?" The questions have changed, from the self-involved "Who am I?" to concrete matters of time and place. This is a signal that the real issue is not identity but connection--not "I think therefore I am" but "here I am."
In the second act, the mystery woman says that she's here for Jo, and that she's Jo's mother, but Sam knows that Jo's real mother is "pink-haired," bearing no physical resemblance. Thus begins a new game/argument, as everyone tries to figure out who on earth this lady from Dubuque can be. Maggie Smith, an Albee veteran, is in her element as the lady, lacking the patrician causticity with which she's sometimes cast (see Gosford Park) but projecting dignity, caring, a bit of drollness. Like her suit--which some critics called black but which was actually navy blue--she's off-black, somber out of respect but not mournful. Though enigmatic about her identity, the lady turns out to be the only character besides Jo who's not engaging in any games or self-deception. Jo seems to see this immediately, because when she comes back downstairs, she wraps her arms around the stranger without hesitation.
The lady and Oscar appear to be the angel of mercy and the angel of death, come to comfort Jo in her last hour (I was also interested to read that Albee, in his history of odd jobs, once delivered death notices). In this play full of questions, this couple may not provide any answers about "Who am I?", but they do provide The Answer with their compassion. In its final moments, the play is lovely in its tenderness, though you could equally call it bleak and lonely: after all, it's not husband, real mother, friends, or deity who are able to comfort the dying woman, but total strangers. That's an anguishing truth, that we can't always give the people we love what they need. For that reason, this isn't an easy play to warm to, and though this production made the most of its materials, I can't call the play deep, either; it has a couple ideas stretched for two hours.
The Lady from Dubuque has a patchy history. Originally, it opened on Broadway in 1980, with Frances Conroy (Ruth Fisher in Six Feet Under) as Jo and Irene Worth as the lady, but the show closed after only 12 performances. There don't seem to have been many revivals in the meantime.
I can't quite explain the title, which seems thematically unrelated to the play--perhaps Albee just liked the sound of it. The phrase comes from a mission statement for the New Yorker by Harold Ross:
The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about. This is not meant in disrespect, but The New Yorker is a magazine avowedly published for a metropolitan audience and thereby will escape an influence which hampers most national publications. It expects a considerable national circulation, but this will come from persons who have a metropolitan interest.
Now, you may be thinking "Ross, snob!", but let me insert an aside about when a dollop of snobbery is in order. When I reached my front-row seat at the elegant Theatre Royal Haymarket, I found myself neighbor not to two old ladies from Dubuque but two middle-aged women from the south in jeans and sneakers. They were pretty avid theatergoers, it seemed from their conversation--seemed, until one of them noted that the last time she was in this theater, the show was Brand starring Ralph Fiennes, which she pronounced "ralf" (it's "rafe"). The chatter got louder, shriller, and dumber from there, culminating at the intermission, when that same woman made toddler-like grabby hands at the stage and screeched, "Eeeeee, we want more Maggie!"
What a shame that the land of Williams and Faulkner and Welty should be represented by such twits. It's enough to make a person wish Lincoln had let the south secede. I can only say, at least the Brits are doing justice to America through our playwrights. In my experience, British actors are rather hit-or-miss with Williams, Miller, and O'Neill, but they seem to have a kindred spirit in Albee.
Long ago, I saw a terrible production of The Tempest at an Anchorage community college, led by a twiggy, tousle-haired,19-year-old Prospero who, come to think of it, was a ringer for Napoleon Dynamite. Midplay, he mounted a hillock for a speech but forgot the words and stood there, choking, so freakin' not sweet, for nearly five minutes. This presented a conundrum for the audience: the silence was painful, but so were the line readings. (The same school also did a highly misguided production of The Comedy of Errors with a Star Wars theme, in case any devotees of Thalia were dying to know what servant Dromio would look like as Wookiee.)
Well, I have finally seen a London production of The Tempest to banish bad Alaskan memories, and fittingly this new version has an arctic setting. That's unusual, of course: The Tempest is set on a tropical island "uninhabited," according to the stage directions, though actually home to Caliban and his mother. But the polar scene is equally remote, threatening, and primitive, and to my mind, the setting was perfect.
Often, I think, productions of The Tempest seem to view it as a sister play to A Midsummer Night's Dream, because of its magic and strange creatures and romance, but truly it's sibling to another late play, The Winter's Tale. Shakespeare's earlier plays are never pure expressions of their ostensible genres: the comedies contain real pain and the possibility of a tragic ending (see Much Ado About Nothing), and the tragedies include jokes and even slapstick comedy (see the Porter in Macbeth). Late plays The Tempest and The Winter's Tale (both probably 1610-1611) are something else again, tales of madness, jealousy, exile, and revenge, with no guarantee of a happy ending, and final redemption is won not through bloodletting or deus ex machina but through the potent regaining their sanity, humanity, and compassion and rejoining their families and communities.
That's one of the reasons the arctic setting works in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Tempest: Prospero has been banished from hearth and home by his usurping brother, and he and daughter Miranda have been shipwrecked on this icy shore and must cling to each other to survive. As the curtain rises, we see a second shipwreck, engineered by Prospero, as if through a porthole, a rolling deck that looks like the Titanic going down. Then the backdrop raises to reveal Prospero's rustic cabin in the snowy wastes--the set gives off a palpable chill--and we see Miranda (Mariah Gale), parka'd like an Inuit, an intelligent and educated but unsocialized nature's child, and Prospero (Patrick Stewart) looking like a native shaman with animal hides, tribal tattoos, and a bony headdress. (See a video.)
Of course, Prospero opened the door for his own exile: he acknowledges to Miranda that he turned over duties of state so that he could pursue his "secret studies," and then his brother promoted himself from acting duke to actual. On the icy island Prospero has continued his magical education and become a ruler, adding two creatures to his realm: Caliban (John Light), son of the native witch Prospero conquered, and Ariel (Julian Bleach), formerly servant to that witch and now to Prospero.
As you can probably already tell, this is not a pixie-dust Tempest but rough magic. And this is not your grandmother's Ariel, a dainty, mischievous, free-spirited sprite. No, when this goth Ariel first appeared onstage, my first thought was Shockheaded Peter, and indeed after consulting the program, I saw that Bleach was the macabre MC in that excellent show, and here he is likewise painted a ghastly white and is wearing a cassock-like robe that makes him look like the haint of a Lutheran pastor. Bleach plays Ariel as otherworldly but serious, and there are echoes of Beckett as he rises from an oil drum like Nagg in Endgame.
That's not the only echo of Beckett: Caliban tows a thick rope like Lucky in Waiting for Godot, and he is similarly bullied, forced to serve, burdened with language that's no help to him. As Prospero notes, he taught Caliban religion and speech, but Caliban retorts, "You taught me language, and my profit on't/Is, I know how to curse." The point--which Prospero does not yet understand--is that learning isn't necessarily equivalent to virtue, and like Caliban, Prospero is using his learning to curse, practicing magic to punish and to exact revenge. While the play is clear that Caliban is a bad seed, this production doesn't shirk the context: like the magician, Caliban feels that he has been betrayed by family (Prospero, his surrogate father) and had his kingdom usurped. There's a nice contrast here between Prospero's sweet father/daughter relationship with Miranda and his cruel father/son relationship with Caliban. And the production doesn't pull any punches in showing how petty and vicious Prospero can be: at one point, he spits in Caliban's food. Appropriately, since 2007 is the 200th anniversary of Britain's abolition of the slave trade, the production also emphasizes slavery in The Tempest: Prospero as the colonial lord and slavedriver; Caliban bound, caged, and tortured throughout; mentions of plantations and Bermuda (actually in the text); even in the scene where Ferdinand woos Miranda, the courtly language of service has been expanded to talk of being her slave, in bondage. (To see a scene with Caliban, check out the RSC's video.)
The supporting players are marvelous, but of course it was Stewart many of us had come to see, and really, who better to give you a Prospero who's both a man of thought and a man of action, capable of becoming a brute, but ultimately too wise and humane to let power corrupt him--as one critic pointed out, a Faustus with a happy ending. This is not Stewart's first outing as Prospero; he played in the New York Shakespeare Festival's Tempest in '95, and while I did not see that version, I expect that the experience and the additional dozen years (and I can't help but note that's the same amount of time Prospero has been on the island) gave breadth and depth to his portrayal. And it is a full-figured Prospero, cruel and tender, intimidating but also whimsical--when he puts a sleep spell on Miranda, Stewart abracadabras her by popping his cheek with a finger. For me, though, the magic moment was when Ariel returns from terrifying Prospero's enemies (in this staging, he does so by bursting out of a seal, like a bloody, blubber-flecked Jonah):
Ariel: Your charm so strongly works 'em,/That if you now beheld them, your affections/Would become tender.
Prospero: Dost thou think so, spirit?
Ariel: Mine would, sir, were I human.
Prospero: And mine shall./Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling/Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,/One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,/Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?/Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,/Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury/Do I take part. The rarer action is/In virtue than in vengeance.
Before that last speech, Stewart lets a lengthy pause hang, and you can practically see Prospero's mind working, the realization dawning that his arts have grown dark, that bitter feelings have obscured his better nature. In this play of conjurings and transfigurations, this is the most remarkable one: the human heart discovering and recovering itself. It's the magic of good acting and stagecraft, too, when you can see the character changing before a word's uttered.
After that moment, Prospero moves toward mercy, acknowledging (if gruffly) his scorned and disinherited "son," Caliban: "this thing of darkness I/Acknowledge mine." He frees his slaves; he forgives his enemies and says he'll tell them the tale of his island years; he vows to break and bury his staff and drown his book of magic, these last promises seeming like acts of castration and death but actually, in this context, seeming like the most powerful, life-affirming deeds of all. Because then another remarkable thing happens: he steps forward to address the audience and asks us to free him with our applause. This speech escaped me when I've read and seen the play in the past--it's common, at the end of Shakespeare's plays, for an actor to address the crowd directly and sometimes to ask for approval. But here I finally saw the greater significance: as one of Prospero's enemies says earlier, "what's past is prologue," and that's what we're witnessing, Prospero beginning a new life and becoming a different type of magician, a storyteller, abandoning the solitude of private study for the communal act of performance. Having reenacted his own usurping on Caliban, his own debasement on his servants, his own shipwreck on his enemies, he has rejected that ugly role and, as his brother went from acting duke to actual, has actualized himself, become a devoted father, a member of a family and of a community, now expanded to this theatergoing community. He has ended his exile.
As you can tell, this production fired on all cylinders for me; it's the stuff theatrical dreams are made of. Besides the impressive cast, I have to credit Rupert Goold, the director, who at the advanced age of 35 has been making a splash in the UK as part of Headlong Theatre and in his freelance gigs. Now I see why: anyone who can dust off an old, done-to-death play and make it seem simultaneously brand new and as potent as myth, and who can make a mashup of Beckett, Faust, Shakespeare, the gothic, and the arctic, and make it all not only make sense but feel revelatory--well, that's magic. Perhaps that kind of agility comes naturally to a man who acted Pinter with composer Thomas Adès* and Marlowe with Sacha Baron Cohen (a.k.a. Borat). I was, needless to say, anxious to see what he and Stewart would do with Macbeth, but that's subject for another blog. Meanwhile, do check out the RSC's excellent A/V resources on The Tempest, where you can see video clips, photo galleries, production notes, and more.
*Coincidentally, the following evening I was in Clerkenwell for a late-night Adès concert at St. Luke's. The night began with Adès's Traced Overhead, followed by several pieces by the late Conlon Nancarrow for player piano. Nancarrow turned to the instrument because he wanted to compose works that were too fast and too rhythmically complex for human hands, but computerized music didn't exist yet, so he learned how to punch his own player piano rolls. The results sound like three pieces playing at once, in different time signatures, as if math had a sound, weird and giddy but somehow working. For us audience members, it also raised a philosophical question: If a piano plays in the forest and there's no one there playing it, how many hands should clap? Thus we had awkward pauses at the end of pieces, finally followed by applause and laughter. Anyway, to hear some audio samples of Nancarrow works, go here.
Guidebooks are full of restaurant recommendations, but perhaps you've noticed that the fine dining is rarely in tourist-friendly locations, while the well-worn paths are lined with eateries of the tacky and overpriced variety. And then there are the odd hours, which was the problem on my last night in Florence: most restaurants don't open until 7 and close around 11, a problem for those of us with concert tickets and early flights the next morning. So, I wandered down toward the Ognissanti district and entered Il Profuto almost at random--and kismet, it was perhaps the best meal I had in Florence.
As I settled in with a quartino of Chianti, the waiter--a friendly young man with near-perfect English, thanks to a stay in Michigan--took my order for ribollita and recommended the boar. The ribollita ("reboiled") soup is a Florentine specialty, stick-to-your-ribs stuff thick with beans, kale, and bread, in this case big croutons of bread instead of the boiled-down dough I had in Trattoria ZaZa's version.
It was delicious, but the money course was definitely the papardelle with wild boar ragu, thick, inch-wide ribbons of handmade pasta, sauced with hunks of lean, flavorful boar slow-cooked until it fell apart at the touch of a fork, plus black olives adding briny contrast. The waiter had said the dish was something special, and unlike when our American servers say that ad nauseum, it was quite true.
I think that will be one of my winter missions: trying to replicate that sauce. If you'd care to attempt the recipe, too, you can find boar at the Golden Gate Meat Company at the Ferry Plaza Market. While you're there, invest in some of their excellent chicken, duck, or veal stock, which will make your favorite soup recipes taste so much better.
(March vacation, continued.) The Pitti Palace has a history of one-upping itself. It was originally begun in 1458 by Luca Pitti, a Florentine banker and a rival to the Medici, who made sure each domed window was bigger than the front door of the Medici palace. However, Pitti went broke before the job was done, and the palace was bought by, who else, the Medici, who doubled its size and hired Vasari to build a corridor connecting the palace to the Uffizi via the Ponte Vecchio. When the Medici line died out in the 18th century, the Pitti Palace became home to successive rulers: the House of Lorraine (Austria), Napoleon, the House of Savoy, the Kingdom of Italy. In 1919, the palace became a museum.
Or rather, in the spirit of one-upsmanship, the palace became several museums--costume, carriage, porcelain, silverworks, modern art, Palatine Gallery (premodern art)--with some 140 rooms open to the public. It's vast: not even a full day would be adequate to viewing the entirety, unless you walked through without pause. So, after visiting the Boboli Gardens and Porcelain Museum, I decided to limit myself to two galleries, the Silver Museum and the Palatine.
Now, I went to the Museo degli Argenti, sometimes called the Medici Treasury, to see loot, but it turns out that the coolest thing to see are the ground floor rooms themselves. These were originally part of the summer apartments of the grand dukes and are decorated lavishly with 17th century frescoes, as you can see in the photo of the Room of Giovanni di San Giovanni, the artist who in 1635 designed most of the paintings in this chamber. As the Florentines were fond of doing, he emphasized the city's (often invented) connections to antiquity. Here he gets even more broadly historical, depicting the advent of Islam, the citizens of Constantinople fleeing the Turks, Greek poets and philosphers being kicked off Mount Parnassus, until finally (ta da!) these same Greek worthies arrive in Florence. In another panel, Lorenzo de Medici, that great patron of the arts, meets Apollo and the muses. Not overendowed with modesty, the Florentines.
Visitors to the grand dukes passed through a series of waiting rooms, including the Public Hearing Room, which offers advice to petitioners in a mural: "Rado tu parla e sii breve et arguto"--speak seldom and be brief and witty. Perhaps to keep these visitors amused, the room has optical illusions galore: galleries that appear to be 3D, bearing coutiers and a boy with a monkey, and a circular staircase, a structure that had not yet been built in actuality.
The hearing rooms are sparsely but richly furnished with pietra dura tables, stone vases, and other precious objects, including (in one) a massive ebony cabinet for gems. In the rooms beyond are more Medici treasures: ivory sculptures (some wafer thin as the fronds and flower petals they depict), amber carvings, lapis lazuli, a ship intricately carved from rock crystal. Upstairs are some of the gems that might have gone in the ebony cabinet--cameos, intaglios, ang "galanteries," whimsical objects like dragonflies, spiders, gondolas, etc., made of precious stones.
In the Palatine Gallery, I really wished for a guide, human or audio, to walk me through, but there was neither. The museum has largely been left in the style of a stately home's private art gallery, paintings hung three or more high, in rooms decorated with fine wallpaper, plaster, furniture, and sometimes painted ceilings. They're gorgeous, these rooms, but the art is not arranged chronologically or by school, and there are no helpful placards telling you about the works, just tags with the title and artist's name--and sometimes not even that. So, if you go, I recommend that you go with a guide or else give yourself lots of time so that you can flip through the guidebook as you go. Oh, and there aren't many places to sit and stare, so you might want to go early in the day, when your feet are fresh.
Anyway, there's art aplenty to see, more than 500 paintings, mostly Renaissance works, and then there are 14 rooms constituting the former Royal Apartments, occupied in the 18th and 19th centuries by the last of the Medici and then the Savoys. As you can see in the photos, the rooms are baroque in style, designed by Cortona, who finished only three himself--Mars, Jupiter, and Venus, named after planets in honor of Galileo--before he left Florence in 1647. However, the style influenced Le Brun when he designed the planet salons for the Louis XIV's rooms at Versailles.
In the Palatine, pass through the statue gallery and stick to the left to reach the gods and goddesses' rooms, first Venus and Apollo, then Mars, a spectacular room hung with paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck, Titian, Veronese, and Tintorerello.
In Jupiter--once the throne room--is perhaps my favorite work of the museum, Raphael's La Velata (1516), a painting that makes exquisite detail (look at the folds and sheen of the sleeves) look like sublime simplicity. The blush-cheeked young woman appears as serene as a madonna. Art historians haven't definitively determined who the model was, but she may have been Raphael's mistress, portrayed in his La Fornarina, which would make the paintings an interesting pair: the demure virgin and the sultry, nude lover.
From the same year is Raphael's Madonna and Child with John the Baptist, a tondo (round painting) in the Saturn room. Wandering through multiple Renaissance museums, you can grow weary of madonnas, but this one caught my eye with its tenderness--the artist must have had a real mother and child as models.
Next in the Iliad room, and opposite in mood, is Artemesia Gentileschi's Judith and Her Maidservant (1613-14), which is all drama, from the severed head of Holofernes in the foreground, to the close-cropped, dynamic pose of the women, to the contrast of shadow and fire light. This dynamism is typical of her paintings, and of her life, which had no shortage of drama. The daughter of a well-known painter, she was raped by her art tutor, then subjected to a long and humiliating trial, her testimony tried under torture. Remarkably, she went on practicing art, and in an age when women artists were rare, she was a great success: the first woman accepted into the Academy of Drawing, friendly with fellow artists, with the Medici, and with Galileo, with whom she corresponded.
One of her artist friends was Cristofano Allori, whose Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1620) shows Gentileschi's influence. While Gentileschi's paintings show female subjects and their violent settings frankly and physically--Judith has sturdy forearms, sleeves rolled up like a butcher--Allori's Judith looks like a noblewoman who has found herself out of context. She's elaborately dressed, seeming too refined to wield a sword, but nevertheless stares boldly out. In London you can see another version of this painting in Buckingham Palace--ironically, this head of Holofernes was owned by Charles I, before he himself was beheaded in 1649. What's curious is that the king chose Allori's version rather then Gentileschi's, because she and her father were at Charles's court in England before the civil war, from 1638.
Allori's Judith is in the Education of Jupiter room, where I also admired Caravaggio's Sleeping Cupid (1608), who looks anything but divine. The guidebook says the painting was modeled on a dead child.
And that, my feet said, was enough museum trekking for one day. There was plenty at the Pitti I didn't see: the costume museum, the carriage museum, the modern art gallery. But again, that's why there's a next trip, right?
From playwright Alan Bennett's diaries in Writing Home:
Gore Vidal is being interviewed on Start the Week along with Richard (Watership Down) Adams. Adams is asked what he thought of Vidal's new novel about Lincoln. "I thought it was meretricious." "Really?" says Gore. "Well, meretricious and a happy new year." That's the way to do it.
Reader, I believe I have a new response for holiday well-wishers.
It's the end of the summer, when the white accessories go back in the closet, the kids return to school, and the grown-up entertainment comes out in a torrent, from new TV shows to Oscar-contending movies to literature. I've always found this trend a bit silly: despite umpteen media features on "beach reads," does the average dedicated book buyer really change their reading habits completely for three months of the year? For that matter, how many people are actually reading at the beach? Personally, I'm doing well to hit the Pacific twice a year, and I'd prefer to have the quality entertainment better distributed throughout the seasons.
Still, it's hard to complain about fine books, even when they come in a glut. The Chronicle recently ran a story on some of the titles arriving this fall, and below are my picks from that list, as well as some other books I'll be looking out for. Now, if we could just get Lorrie Moore to publish a new one....
Andrea Barrett, The Air We Breathe, October 1. One of my favorite authors revisits some of the characters in Ship Fever. I expect you won't need to know the previous book to enjoy this one, but if you haven't read her works yet, why not get a head start? All her stories and novels are fabulous.
Amy Bloom, Away, out now. Bloom is successful in two professions, psychotherapy and literature, undoubtedly because her insight serves her well in both.
Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road, October 30. In the spirit of Victorian serial novels, Chabon wrote Gentlemen for the New York Times. Now those of us who don't subscribe can see the result, which, given that it's Michael Chabon, is pretty much guaranteed to be fantastically imaginative and elegantly written.
Stephen Colbert, I Am America (and So Can You!), October 9. As a lifelong enemy of Grape Nuts, I can't wait to read his attack on Kashi.
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, out now. Literati have been watching Diaz expectantly for 11 years now, since his book of stories, Drown, came out. Already I'm seeing reviews extolling his literary adventurousness and embrace of all the brows from low to high.
Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke, out now. Years ago, Johnson blew me away with a slender volume of stories called Jesus' Son, featuring a protagonist so messed up we know him only as Fuckhead. It's been nearly a decade since his last novel, though we lucky folk in the Bay Area have been able to see his demented, delightful work as playwright in residence at Campo Santo. Tree of Smoke is a Vietnam epic, and I'd bet on Johnson being the right author to capture the chaos, brutality, and disorientation of that war.
Philip Roth, Exit Ghost, October 1. Allegedly, this is the last Zuckerman novel...meaning this belated reader may have time to catch up with the saga.
Michael Ruhlman, The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef's Craft for Every Kitchen, November 6. I've been devouring Ruhlman's chef trilogy this summer, not to mention his blog. This brief volume looks to be the Strunk and White of food writing, and I expect it will be a useful reference for food lovers, whether they're cooking or just reading about it.
Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, October 16. Sacks always delivers fascinating tales of neurological anomalies, and in this volume he focuses on how music affects us.
George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone, out now. Saunders is my kind of weirdo; his absurdist stories are equally befuddling and funny and a fine palate cleanser in a steady diet of literary fiction. (Of course, his Neanderthal story in Pastoralia had the unfortunate side-effect of inspiring the Geico cavemen, but we can't hold that against him.) He's also a respected writer of nonfiction, and that's what Megaphone is, a collection of his essays.
Alice Sebold, The Almost Moon, October. Her last novel, The Lovely Bones, was a sensation with critics and crowd alike, so the pressure is on for her sophomore effort.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, October 16. Acclaimed translators Pevear and Volokhonsky have turned their talents to Tolstoy's magnum opus (emphasis on the magnum) about Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia. Now, see, wouldn't reading this have been a good summer project?
(Vacation day seven.) Where are the cats of Florence? After a couple days in town, I realized that I hadn't seen a single pet, no dogs in the parks, no cats in windows or courtyards, no budgies on balconies. Well, on my last day, I finally found the felines of Florence, at least a half dozen sunning themselves in the Boboli Gardens--tasteful cats, these, living like lords.
Proceeding up the stairs from the amphitheater, the first plateau houses the Forcone Basin, with a statue of Neptune at center. It's a 16th century statue but was placed here as part of 18th century renovations.
Continuing up, there's a fine view backwards down the line, basin to amphitheater to the palace itself.
Over the back wall, there's a fine view of gray-green olive trees and, in the distance, San Miniato basilica.
The statue at center is Theseus and Helena, and in the corners are Michelangelo's slaves--hard to believe, but those precious sculptures were housed in this cave before they were moved to their current, safer spot in the Accademia, next to David. Above the statues, you can see mythological paintings, which rise to the top of the dome.
Last, I passed a little square where this vulgar but amusing Bacchus reigns, his polyhedral gut and genitalia dangling on a tortoise that must be glad of its hard shell. That was the end of my garden tour, though I'd seen maybe a third of the grounds and could easily have spent the rest of the day roaming.
Next: Inside the Pitti Palace museums.
