Mixing it Up

Now that the school year has begun, it’s time for mixers. Not the kind that some use to make cheap margaritas, but mixers that bring together people, ideas, exchanges of information, and in the case of our college mixers, iced or hot tea. Despite our budget woes, there is much to celebrate this year, so I’ll give you a quick rundown of some of the social events of the past ten days.

First there was a reception on October 6 to honor the recipients of the Outstanding Professor Awards. This year’s President's Distinguished Professor, Dr. Roberto Cantú, is joint faculty shared by the Department of English and the Chicano Studies Department. Both are proud to share in Professor Cantú's accolade. Arts and Letters is also proud of the Department of Art’s, Dr. Manuel Aguilar Moreno, who received an Outstanding Professor Award. Last year’s President’s professor, Dr. Domnita Dumitrescu, was our host for the afternoon.

On October 8 we really mixed it up. At noon there was a gathering of international students as well as staff from the Office of International Programs, Cross Cultural Center, Associated Students and others who support international programs. I chatted with Professor Sachiko Matsunaga, Chair of Modern Languages and Literatures, who enjoys recruiting students for language classes and cultural events. Later that afternoon we had a welcome event for our first year freshmen in the courtyard of the Music Building. Professor Rebecca Davis, who teaches Fashion in the Department of Art as well as one of our sections of Arts & Letters 101, was there to greet some of her students. Our Associate Dean, Dr. Bryant Alexander and I were pleased to see so many freshmen turn out for pizza and conversation on a beautiful afternoon. I was a bit chagrined to learn that some of our first time freshmen still don’t enroll in a course related to their chosen major during their first quarter and I hope we can correct that in the near future.

On a different note, the LA Philharmonic had quite a mixed plate on Saturday night, the opening of my season ticket. The debut piece featuring Chinese mouth organ was challenging for the harmonically inclined but I could imagine a striking modern dance set to the varying music of composer Unsuk Chin. Two things about the evening were exceptionally fun. First, I enjoyed watching Dudamel bounce and fly during his extra-energetic performance. Frankly, I worry about whiplash, although I’d encourage him to cash through selling workout tapes, “Batonicize with Dudamel!” Second, I talked to a couple of ushers when I overheard that one was a Cal State LA student and the other, a Los Angeles Community College student, was considering transferring to us. During intermission I conducted an impromptu counseling session with the potential transfer student.

Many of the new tenure-track faculty in Arts and Letters came to mix chez moi this past Sunday on a beautiful afternoon in Pasadena. Several came with spouses or partners and one even brought three delightful children. On fall faculty day it was striking to hear how many faculty had overlapping interdisciplinary interests and, as I had hoped, it appeared that some of our new faculty members were forming intellectual and social alliances that might last for some time.

Today, October 12^th-- Another mixer! Our very engaged and competent Associated Students representatives Kristine and Ana organized and hosted an open forum for students at the Music Building patio, our College back yard. Dr. Suzanne Regan and Dr. Matsunaga (who also attended the freshmen mixer) got to meet students studying in their departments. While it was grey and gloomy, the much expected rain had not yet hit and we had a good turnout of students, including a small contingent of new MA students in Theatre.

This week will end with one more mixer, a small party to welcome our first exchange students from Korea University. I’m very excited to meet our three KU students, coming in exchange for the students we are sending to Korea University each summer as part of our Strategic Language Initiative in Korean. Also, we’ll be welcoming the U.S. President of the Korean University Alumni Association.

More mixers are in your future. Come. See. And be stirred by another Arts and Letters mixer.

University Professors Underpaid, by Terry L. Allison

From the Pasadena Star News: http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/ci_13447415

Through a Scrim Darkly

How often do you wake up in the morning and say to yourself, “I better hurry and get ready for the opera?” Well, when Wagner’s monumental nearly five-hour Siegfried is on the bill, you’d better get your daily ablutions out of the way early enough to enter the temple of music, properly cleansed with mind and senses awake. A double espresso also might help, especially when said Siegfried is an afternoon performance, 1-6 p.m. on an Indian summer day in Los Angeles. Sadly, I observed one person collapsing from heat outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

The third in the cycle of LA Opera’s gloomy Achim Freyer production of Der Ring des Niebelungen, this Siegfried doesn’t make it easier to stay awake on a hot day—the backdrop is pitch black for most of the opera and a dark scrim shades the audience’s perspective throughout. One neighboring spectator, alert and laughing at Graham Clark’s “Mime” in the first act, was asnooze by the third.

Siegfried is as chat driven as the rest of the Ring Cycle but Freyer seems to want to distance us doubly from any action, making it all darkly cerebral. The Director/Designer literally takes the blue fluorescent light sword “Notung” from the hero’s hand, giving it to a brown body suited cipher who otherwise, in butoh style, crosses and recrosses the stage throughout the entirety of the production. (In the third act, with the similarly suited Norns suspended overhead, I finally wondered whether their grounded, pacing brethren also were Norns endlessly weaving?) Freyer seems to want to deconstruct action to get to some deeper IDEA but I would venture that during the five hours we have plenty of time to reflect without the production’s insistence that we must STOP and THINK. The ugly costuming is crudely symbolic, underlining Siegfried = “Man,” Brünnhilde =“Woman,” Erda =“Mother,” etc., and Siegfried’s transition from blue to red action hero (don’t ask) was rather clumsily handled. I’m all for new interpretations of standard works; for example, after one too many cherry blossom fests I loved Robert Wilson’s minimalist Madame Butterfly. This Ring just seems over thought and messy, with Siegfried frantically trying to undo his guide wires and the butoh Norns tearing Velcro-attached black ribbons from the floor to reveal a painted light spiral.

Luckily for the audience, a sizable number of whom booed Team Freyer, the singing was mostly very strong. Clark was clearly the crowd favorite and rightfully so, an evil yet comic Mime, with delightful wheezes and snickers as well as convincing, character-driven gesticulation. Vitalij Kowaljow (bass) was a forceful, deep Wanderer/Wotan, and the brief appearances of Oleg Bryjak (as Alberich) and Eric Halfvarson (Fafner) proved equally compelling. Stacy Tappan was a delightfully chirpy Woodbird. Jill Grove, whom I found the weakest of last season’s cast of Das Rheingold was in much better voice as this opera’s Erda, though hampered somewhat by a giant Cher/Diana Ross wig as was Linda Watson’s Brünnhilde. While not the most powerful Wagnerian, Watson approached the ringing metallic quality that the role demands. Still, she and John Treleaven’s Siegfried could have blended better in their ecstatic finale, their timing—and presumed partnership—was definitely off.

And finally to our Siegfried. While of a certain age, Treleaven pranced convincingly as a naïve young hero in a Halloween hero costume. He acted through his Joker make-up, raising the brows and curling the carved lips convincingly. After Act One I said to my friend, upon his first Siegfried, “You can hear how demanding this role is, but isn’t he doing well?” By Act Three the test of the voice was a bit more apparent as Treleaven for brief moments barked and gasped only to recover for some more forceful singing. All in the (long) day of an international Heldentenor and a clue why there are so few left.

The opera orchestra under James Conlon’s conducting was also significantly and deservedly cheered. Musically, this was a strong Siegfried, an A-. Dramatically, a B for effort and C- for execution. But I’m a tough grader so you’ll want to go and bring your own scorecard.

Terry’s Top Ten List of To Do's (or Not To Do's) on Furlough Fridays

Terry’s Top Ten List of To Dos (or Not to Dos) on Furlough Fridays

Trying to make the best of a bad situation, your Dancing Dean has come up with his top list of things to do on his unpaid furlough. He can’t be Dean these Fridays but he sure can dance!

1. Take an extra long walk through my neighborhood looking for haiku inspirations.
2. See if I can make this Friday a non-gas consumption day. If not, try to get to a beach or a park as part of my day.
3. Invite a friend to dinner and cook for a change.
4. Don’t shave!
5. Send out another op-ed promoting universal health care, higher education, or humanities.
6. Chat with a neighbor I would rarely see otherwise, send a card to Mom & Dad, or do both.
7. Catch up on Facebook.
8. Rewind highlights from last night’s Project Runway.
9. Sit down, concentrate, and read a book and/or work on a long delayed research project.
10. Watch Ellen and dance along with her.

After a full day of such fulfilling tasks sleepy Saturday is sure to follow.

Shakespeare, et alia

During three of the past five summers I spent a week at the Santa Fe Opera, watching the dramatic, distant lightning backlight the stage and enjoying some wonderful productions of La Somnabula (with Nathalie Dessaye), Tea: a Mirror of Soul (composer Tan Dun), and last year’s beautiful Billy Budd and Le nozze di Figaro. This year’s main attraction was La Dessaye in Traviata but having heard an excellent La Traviata at LA Opera this spring I decided to skip Santa Fe and its tempting art galleries to join the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. Although I was attacked by hornets and fell in Lithia Park, I still had a splendid time.



















Apparently I had not been in Ashland since 1993 when I saw wonderful productions of Lips Together, Teeth Apart, The White Devil, A Flea in Her Ear, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and Richard III. Where had the time gone? Mostly in Europe, I figured, as I traversed the Atlantic a good 15 times in the 90’s and 2000’s. So to catch up, this year’s goal was eight plays in eight days, and I just fell (literally) short.

I had an inspiring journey to Ashland, flying into Oakland where longtime friend, Gary K, picked me up and whisked me northwards. Our first stop: the California Maritime Academy. Why? You may well ask. The Maritime Academy was the last stage of my CSU pilgrimage; I now have visited each of the 23 campuses in our system! Next, on to Redding! Why (again), you might ask? We stopped to view the Calatrava designed footbridge, a contemporary architectural triumph, a taut harp strung for our pleasure.

Once in Ashland, we immediately set out to see plays but Henry VIII was an inauspicious beginning. While Vilma Silva was a strong Catherine of Aragon and delivered a powerful, impassioned defense of her wifely devotion, the play is one of Shakespeare’s weakest. Henry comes across as a vapid lightweight with barely sinister overtones. The second day we saw a quite timely Depression era story, Clifford Odets’ Paradise Lost, followed by a delightful new production of Don Quixote. On subsequent days and evenings we enjoyed convincing productions of All’s Well that Ends Well and Servant of Two Masters in the New Theatre (anxiously awaiting a patron’s name). We were unfortunate witnesses to a noisy, shouted Macbeth wherein for the very first time I heard an audience laugh, YES, LAUGH, at Macbeth’s “She should have died hereafter. There would have been time for such a word.” Luckily, we previously had enjoyed Bill Cain’s new play, Equivocation, which invokes “the Scottish play” while addressing contemporary anxieties about freedom of artistic expression, state-sponsored torture, and religious strife. Especially within the context of a “Shakespeare festival,” Equivocation touched nerves, stroked the egos of knowing Shakespearian connoisseurs, and left probing, unanswered questions; in short, a decent evening at the Theatre.


And speaking of connoisseurs, we also found time one afternoon to see Julie and Julia, a cinematic sonnet to Julia Child in which I reveled. While I have seen very few programs from her television series, I learned to cook by reading From Julia Child’s Kitchen. I never deboned a duck or baked one in puff pastry, but I did learn to make that puff pastry, and gateaux, mousse, and other gourmandises thanks to Chef Child. Bon appétit!











After a few weeks of work apparently my taste for drama had not been whetted, nor my taste for fresh air. This past weekend I fled the smoke and Station/Morris fires, heading down to San Diego for a long weekend at the Old Globe and catching up with old friends and familiar places. After a pilgrimage to Bread & Cie and Peet’s Coffee on University Avenue, I met Karen K for dinner at a French bistro in downtown San Diego. Then, off to The Mystery of Irma Vep, Charles Ludlam’s play that ran most of the time I lived in NYC in the mid-80’s but that I never saw there. (Way back then, I did enjoy his Ridiculous Theatre Company’s production of Galas: A Modern Tragedy, naturally starring Ludlum himself.) Irma cuisinarts a variety of genres to create a satisfying comic shake with flavors that cinema, theatre, and comic fans will enjoy identifying. Karen and I wanted to recommend, then were vexed to learn that Sept 7 was its final showing. Then to a Coriolanus with a hulk-like hero dripping in bloody sweat. How had I missed this play? And how could Shakespeare, once again, remain so topical in a tragic state tragedy in which everyone is wrong? Finally, a delicious Twelfth Night set in the 50’s on the Italian Riviera. Yes, it worked, exceedingly well, and the Viola (Dana Green) as well as the Feste/Fool (James Newcomb) worth the drive to San D! I met up with other dear friends during the weekend, whom shall remain to you mysterious, and then buzzed home early to beat the traffic to enjoy lunch and dinner in my own back yard, smoke and ash free. Somehow I squeezed in the end of Melanie Oudin’s match and ascension to the quarterfinals of the US Open as well as Federer’s balletic leap into that selfsame round.


Sometimes, amid smoke, ash, and furlough Fridays, life can be grand and we can be so lucky!
















Photo of Oregon Shakespeare Festival available under GNUFDL1.2.

Suddenly, It's Summer

Unfortunately, my home office has a magnificent view today. Giant clouds like peachy brown cotton candy roil a placid sky and swell like sudden thunderheads. These billows grow to fantastic heights and move so quickly in one direction then another, it’s like watching one of the those fast motion science films from elementary school about how storms form and dissipate. Some of the ridges look like rims of volcano calderas with neat rows of white smoke down slope then sudden leaps of giant flames along the ridge. I look past and above a street lined with hundred foot palms, extending the impression that I’m actually on the Big Island. Instead, I’m watching the Angeles National Forest burn.

Yesterday (a non-furlough Friday) from the Music Building where I work, I could see across the San Gabriel Valley to the smoking hills but even then one could see occasional leaps of flame. Here in Pasadena I’m that much closer and sometimes on a mountain peak I’d swear the flames shoot two hundred feet high. We hit at least 104 degrees yesterday and the Morris fire to the east, not visible from my window, was blowing smoke our way, drizzling ash. Today the air is clearer and the smoke clouds appear to blow west or north so I can see more clearly where the fires are creeping. Just now I spot two orange flame towers on either slope of a ridge and hope they’ll meet and die for lack of fuel but then other ridges below and above suddenly glow.

I’m sad that I’ve never been up Highway 2 on the Angeles Crest Highway to look down on the valley where I live. It seems odd that I could have skipped that ritual but perhaps stranger still that in my three years in the Los Angeles region I’ve only been twice to the beach, both times this summer after I finally decided that I could have a little vacation without leaving town. Until these past few days, I was thoroughly enjoying our unusually cool summer, sitting in my lightly watered garden and enjoying the evening cool. Now I’m raspy from ash and having a little cabin fever wondering when the smoke will clear. I shirked my civic duty plan to attend a pro-universal health care rally this afternoon, too hot, and instead e-mailed my congressman.

Writing this blog I was sorely tempted to draw analogies or formulate metaphors. For example, how like us all to sit in impotent fascination, huddling in air conditioned comfort as California burns before our eyes. But why belabor the obvious?

Until next time, then, I’m dancing on the hot coals of our sudden summer and watching these false and glorious clouds as the sun begins to set.

Two Misses and a Hat Hit

As my beloved California self mutilates and summer strikes its first vicious blows naturally my thoughts turn to the world of entertainment. What better remedy for a bout of budget blues than a musical, a film, and…a musical?! Perhaps it’s mood, maybe it was bad choices, or then again it could be things used to be much, much better in the past because so far my summer has not been sizzling with hits.

Let’s start with Spamalot. I received a sudden call, “Would I like to go to opening night?” Well, ye-ess! And who else did I spy walking in to the theatre? Billy Crystal, Ed Begley Jr., the ubiquitous Joanne Worley and even Eric Idle. Unfortunately the star sightings were the highlight of my evening. Comedy, as someone once noted, is all about timing and this whole production seemed off. Or maybe it’s that jokes about body gas and poking fun at the French (who strangely had Scottish accents) no longer make my grade.


One very hot Sunday I tried to calm the aftershocks of Spamalot by seeking culture of a higher brow, the new Stephen Frears film, Cheri, based on two novels of French author, Colette. Of course Colette actually was the Jacqueline Susann of her time, churning out potboilers and what passed for soft pornography at the time. Since the sixties they have matured into literary classics. But what a dreadful film! Frears achieved the worst performances ever from Michelle Pfeiffer and Kathy Bates, the stiffest delivery and most clichéd expressions imaginable. The choppy editing and a voice over framing device ruined the occasionally intriguing beauty of the landscapes and interiors. I suppose the film was educational—how not to convert a novel.


This evening, however, I had some slight reprieve from the summer blahs, attending Regina Taylor’s Crowns at the Pasadena Playhouse. This very musical although not quite “a musical” play features African American women and their relationship with their hats, usually their church hats. Sure, it was yet another recent play in which characters tangentially interact while facing the audience and telling their histories. Still, some moments of dialogue and soliloquy were moving while a pleasing array of spirituals took me back to childhood choir practice. The play also reminded me of my own grandmother’s hats and hat boxes, costume jewelry, and her fox stole and alligator purse, both featuring mouth clamped on tail.


Three weeks back from Seoul and somewhat adjusted to the mixed plate of LA arts, I once again hit the summer trail. It’s on to Fresno and CSU Summer Arts where I’m certain to be aesthetically refreshed if bodily wilted. Will I be cool enough to dance?