Plus ça change ....?

Remember, in the 1990s, when the crack about the disintegrating Soviet Union was that it was "Burkina Faso with nukes"?

The Feb. 2 issue of the Financial Times had an opinion piece by J. Robinson West, Putin's policies threaten global oil supplies, with the following: "There may be large oil reserves in Russia but without massive investment and management skills, it will not flow. In spite of the hype about Russia, more oil industry investment has flowed to west Africa. The risks in Russia were already large and have mushroomed. The impact of the Yukos affair could be enormous. Russian production, now the world's second largest, could slide, not surge, and with it the Russian economy and prestige."

The good old Soviet habit of wasting resources and substracting, instead of adding, value, seems to have survived.

a page torn from an old commonplace book

... a man may feel as if he had come to pieces, and at the same time is standing in the road inspecting the parts, and wondering what sort of machine it will make if he can put it together again. — T. S. Eliot

(I don't know German, but I know great translation of poems when I see it. This, of Rilke's last poem, is from Wolfgang Lippmann's "Rilke: A Life"):

Now come, ultimate essence I avow,
desperate pain that tears my body's flesh...
In your ferocity my earthly gentleness will
turn to hellish fury. Pure and entire,
I mounted suffering's chaotic pyre
free of all future and sure that for this heart,
with all its treasures muted, future cannot be bought.
Is it still I who burns unrecognized and caught?
I can no longer reach for memories.
Oh life, oh life: to be without such blaze.
But I am burning. No one knows my face.

To must of us the movements of the soul are so mysterious that we seize upon events to make them explicable.— Scenes from Provincial Life

Carelessly disposed along the tops of the low bookcases was a mass of ancient pottery—shapes subtle, free, and flowing; shapes angular, abstract, and austere; brilliant glazes, delicate crackles; textures that flattered the sense of touch through the sense of sight. — Michael Innes

(And another tidbit from Innes, who knew how to pack a punchline:)

Without direct word spoken, it had to come to the audience that Hamlet recognized of a sudden that Ophelia's presence was part of a plot. From that moment he would be speaking to her—savagely—with the skin of his mind.

NYCB February 4, 2005

Cygnette attended the ballet last night. Fanfare by Robbins, a short Wheedon, Balanchine's Orpheus, and Robbins' Four Seasons make for one long and peculiarly shaped evening.

Since Nilas Martins, as Orpheus, had the acting range and stylistic understanding of David Boreanaz, Cygnette could have more pleasantly spent act II drinking heavily in the foyer.

Both Fanfare and Four Seasons are all-out, big company pieces. Fanfare started out looking a bit raggedy. The dancers were not to blame: they are tired, fighting injuries, and under-rehearsed, probably. They may be missing a misunderstood, but necessary, process for works such as these: a person to yell them into shape. Robbins used to do it. Makarova still does it, for her productions. Is she available?

Cygnette is not sure what she thinks of Christopher Wheedon, yet. Within Friday's program, his Liturgy looked *wrong,* because hermetic. There were no echoes, no allusions, no references to anything outside of the two figures doing incredibly clever and difficult partnering together.

Balanchine's work processes all sorts of other arts, music first of all, into the dance. With Robbins, you see him processing the Balanchine vocabulary, and the company style, as well as Broadway and "showbiz" into his dance. The "Summer" section of Four Seasons echoes Mediterranean dance steps in just a couple of bars, but you get the allusion immediately. Even Orpheus (undone by the unsuitability of its music) has the Lost Souls looking like a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life.

But Wheeldon's work (yes, Cygnette has only seen Liturgy and what she likes to call "Vee Ay Ay Ay") is affectless, uninterested in banging up against the creative world that's out there. Pity, that, since he has talent.

Or is this what post-modern ballet is all about?