Kronos and Matmos

I went to see the Kronos Quartet perform last night at the Yerba Buena center. While it does little good to be negative, I didn't enjoy the show and left (over two and a long half hours later) angry with Kronos and their special guest Matmos, a pair of sweet suited men I grew to love when they were rubbing each other's backs to make noise for a Bjork concert.

In brief, the Kronos concert was plagued by sameness: one group of songs characterized by devilish, horse-hair-breaking, near-pitchless virtuosity, and another group of songs too folksy for me, reminding me of Celine Dion (or Celtic music) accompanied by the minimalist, repetitive undercurrent of Philip Glass but without his emotional power. Almost all of the music was built out of electronic layers, and I grew tired of watching the layers grow and then waiting as they would be peeled so the song could end where it had begun . . .

Matmos greatest sin was a video that was too easy and too ugly to presented as large as it was. A drain captured by a shaky camera, the tiniest amounts of soapy water swirling down, then back up. And then leaves shaking in a chunky slow motion. And then a series of screens revolving one on top of the other to make dark moving patterns. And then the drain again, for which a few people chuckled in strange delight.

* * *

In other places, San Francisco is being very strange lately. I recently learned that my best friend from middle school, and a very influential but distant force in my life, now lives about four blocks from my house.

And two days ago I clicked on a Craigslist ad titled "Cello lessons" (on a whim, but also because I am looking for a cellist) and found it was from a girl I'd gotten to known at a six-week music camp over a dozen years ago.

And yesterday, as I was walking to the library and then the video store to pick up Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto, a strangely familiar face crossed the street toward me and the stopped. Was this face from the grocery store, from Redwood City, from Georgia? "Are you Paul? . . . We went to college together."

Weekend Bujones

I didn't adventure much this weekend. The two DVDs of Fernando Bujones came in, so I watched him dance in Sleeping Beauty and tried to imagine what the ballet was like a hundred years ago. Bujones is dead; I did not tell you. It happened weeks before I heard about it, and only a few months after I discovered him.

I also watched a documentary about Merce Cunningham, who is still dancing. Most of his works did not speak to me, but I felt in them an honest innovation that I could not sense in Paul Taylor. When I read that Merce and John Cage had been lovers, it occurred to me how many modern American composers (Barber, Cage, Copland, Corigliano, Rorem; do you know more?) are gay. Bless their hearts.

I'm excited that Bay Area National Dance Week begins this weekend. A huge insert in a local paper listed dozens of events ranging from outdoor concerts to opern rehearsals to dance lessons, all free and all throughout the week.

I Was in Minnesota

When you're deciding whether I deserve life in prison or the death sentence, please pay no attention to the sounds and images of other people's crimes.

Plaint and dance

In my job, that place I go for eight hours each weekday (except for those four weeks of holiday and vacation), I—let us say—edit materials related to the arts. I ended up doing this by voicing my interests ("I play piano") and by undergoing a few tests of my editing ability. I also arrived at a time when there was a hole that needed to be plugged by me or someone like me.

The person responsible for evaluating my abilities asked for my resume. She may have read it. She asked, "What exactly are your qualifications?" I summarized my resume. Bachelor's. German. Anthropology. Accompanist, two years. Went back to get bachelor's in music. Decided against. Went back to get master's in English. Decided against.

Then I tried to summarize myself: "I am an arts-oriented guy; I always have been. Right now I'm mostly an amateur pianist. I meet weekly with a violinist friend, and we've put together a couple casual recitals for friends." (You can see I was desperate also to explain myself to myself.)

She came alive: "Oh," she said. "That sounds nice—like a nice contrast to this." She gestured around her office and then became cool stone again. (That moment inspired me to write a short story about a businesswoman who did not like what she had become.)

"It is nice," I said. "I'll probably post a note about the next recital here, though I've been a little reluctant to invite coworkers . . . because . . ." Well, I figured that work might have a different way of enjoying or evaluating my performance: "Yes, I see Mozart on your resume, but what exactly are your qualifications for Beethoven?"

Just the other day I was meeting with two other supervisors. I was dissatisfied, and they rightly promoted me from yellow belt to orange belt. This was necessary because I had learned and been using several advanced holds and moves, but it came not without hesitation: "But I'm just wondering—just for clarity—what exactly are your qualifications?" I hesitated, knowing I had already answered this question on paper for all and in person to another supervisor who should have conveyed the information. My pause allowed the next question, spat without venom but with some privilege: "Are you self-taught?"

I tried again to explain. The looked at me with deaf, blinking eyes. They did not hear the thing they were waiting for. They were—disappointed. I was desperate to say, to them, to myself, who I was, what I was doing there; afraid to say the truth: I do not believe in what you do; what I will do tonight, in just a few hours, is more important:

* * *

I went to see the Paul Taylor Dance Company. My impression of Taylor was that he is a late (that is, still living) modern choreographer who connected with many great artists of the twentieth century—Balanchine and Graham among them—but came to late to change the world or chose for the most part to work within the innovations of his predecessors.

The first piece, Spring Rounds, was created in 2005. The music is Richard Strauss in a good mood: his Divertimento based on pieces by Couperin. The dance begins with the cliche mimes of spring: men leaning shoulder to shoulder with their arms crossed and heads cocked like sailors looking cool and virile in a new port, women flitting by and giggling. The piece was pleasant—dance for dance's sake. I reflected on why there were so many old people around me. I don't mean old as in wrinkled; I mean old as in dressed in the clothes of grown-ups and wearing the makeup of grown-ups.

In a tired, gruff voice, the old man next to me: "Did you eat lunch today?"

His old wife, irritated, nasal: "I had an avocado!"

The next dance, Dust, was created in 1977 and is set to Francis Poulenc's Concert champetre, a maniacal work for harpsichord and orchestra. Poulenc's harmonies are nearly always twisted. And when his macabre chords come in rapid rhythms and tempos, they become comic but retain some devilish aspect.

A knotted rope hangs rotting from a diseased sky. Here there is a pile of bodies; here, here, and here a deformed mass of bones and broken skin under ratty black blankets. The bodies awake and parade their chancres and deformed limbs in a manic delirium of death.

In front of me, a young man with skin stretched over the bones of his face told his friend that his birthday was next Friday. "The big two-oh," he said, rolling his eyes, "no longer a teen." He talked to his friend's mother about his ballet classes, complained about the negligence of the dance master, Claudio, who does not know the names of the upper-level students but stands behind glass pointing at the ones he approves.

The final dance was Esplanade, set to several often played Bach pieces, including the E major concerto that all violinist must learn. Like Spring Rounds, there was little new and little that went beyond the gestures of spring, except a melancholy slow movement ending with the dancers crawling in a slow spiral and an aggressively joyous movement in which the dancers repeatedly ran onto the stage in downhill tumbles or jumped into home-base slides that sounded dangerously like skidding flesh.

It was a nice evening; not a nice day. I was happy for this small introduction to Paul Taylor. There are no or few geniuses—only the press of a million people reformulating a question that will never quite be asked, and the applause of a million more who do not demand an answer.