Our intentional theatre

In the way one can only really enjoy an apple from the cart by stealing it - not by degrading the acquisition with a buck, I would evidence my wonder by citing (emphasis added) without permission, a review of EXIT THE KING by Hilton Als from the New Yorker, the review so close to perfection that I feel I have been waiting years and years for his expression:

“Exit the King” takes place, first and foremost, in a kind of jumpy, excited intellectual space—the theatre of its author’s imagination. Written by the Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco (1909-94) in 1962, the piece emerges from its author’s belief in what he called “imaginative truth” in theatre; that is, a disavowal of “everyday reality.” Whereas Samuel Beckett, another chief proponent of the theatre of the absurd, tried to describe meaninglessness, Ionesco aimed to deflate power for power’s sake, to expose men’s intellectual and emotional greed.

Brilliantly directed by Neil Armfield, “Exit the King” introduces us to the major players as they stride across the stage, waving at the audience, as if greeting the paparazzi. After fulfilling their public duty to be adored, they retreat into their home, where we catch glimpses of the characters beneath their calcified public masks. There is no pretense to naturalism. Armfield wants us to know, straight off, that the play that Ionesco wrote—lovingly and well translated for this production by Armfield and Rush—is as much about performance as anything else. Ionesco once said that plays were not literature; he meant his to be, in a sense, springboards for the actors’ imaginations. The actors here, kicking aside their too long trains on a tapestry-strung stage (the thoughtful set and costumes, by Dale Ferguson, use dark hues and deep reds that bring to mind Julian Schnabel’s paintings), inhabit the space as though they were simultaneously inside and outside it. They love Ionesco’s language, but they know that the Master didn’t want constrictive realistic readings of it. So they perform little pirouettes around his concrete poetry. Rush and Ambrose are especially astonishing at this. While Ionesco’s plays have a tendency to overdescribe the action as it’s happening, Ambrose and Rush convey the absurdity of talking this way, in such hyper-theatricalized speech. They’re interested in exposing the rigor behind the presentation, and in deflating the ridiculous notion that we ever present a true self to the world. Still, they make the audience comfortable with this entirely unexpected Broadway fare.
Part of the pleasure of watching the show is marvelling that it made it to Broadway at all. But placing this delicate world of ideas alongside the musicals and canned dramas of the boulevard is exactly the kind of thing that Ionesco loved to do: upset our traditional notions of theatre and remind us of the difficult and joyful process of suspending disbelief. The joke for Ionesco, Armfield, and the actors is that they know their world is artificial. What’s real is their attempt to convince us otherwise."

Music: Two

Brenda Kahn. Epiphany in Brooklyn was released in 1992, a glimpse of dawn before first light, and occupying the spaces between and among the fortresses of insipidity - those out there trying to make albums, trying to make music, trying to make songs.
As against which, she stands foursquare 'gainst gales, and lays upon your placesetting the wholly aloof cat. That this gift was heavened and feathered before us seventeen years ago will suggest how rare are the benefices of the good intentionalities.

and you find that your life is a frustrated vision
of Gauguins, Rodins and excellent diction
mint juleps and needles don't add up to wisdom
you've cracked you've gone mad
it makes me so sad
that I like you better than most of the men
I've had

Movie watching within the beneficent form of intentionality

Those of us gathered here, by invitation, at the Tokyo Bar in Montreal (aterraced) will have come to agree that the ideal way to watch a movie is at home, in the dark, severed from the sensate universe (that is to say, not in a barnful of crude masticators and slothy respirators). DOWN BY LAW (Jim Jarmusch) will stand for us, as the paragon of cinematic accomplishment, on the order of "King Lear" or the work of Philip Whalen, because it is a movie; it does not aspire to be a movie, as, shall we say, do all others. All the others, from Griffith to Renoir to Kubrick. We will presume that the root of Modern evil is intentionality --- that is to say, the widest measure of intentionality that is equivalent to suborning, usury, vanity, poaching, and the more well-known perfidies; (we will not speak to the evils that have persisted since pre-history). But the golden temple on the hill and the sun's lance coming to rest at the precise spot aesthetically, are also expressions of that rarer form of intentionality, the one that is still, and peaceful, and slow, and officially transubstantiating, though it shares its name and skin with its creepier form. By one name are known our equanimity and our bedlam. Ulysses is guided home to Ithaca by the truer lighthouses, and by such afternoons as driving or bicycling half-lost along the many roads of upstate New York, among its ravines and hills and lakes and green copses, or by watching a movie in which disarray is quelled by companionship, by the shaking off the bonds of reduction, by an open cookfire, and for one of the fellows, the utterest of deliquescences into the warmest den of love.

Michael Pitt advances American film

Ham-headed marketeers titled Alice Denham's wonderful book disgracefully, but did not altogether obscure a wise remark she makes about the three male foundations of movies in America: Brando (brilliant) was stagy, while Dean (brilliant) and Clift (brilliant) played the character. Michael Pitt cradles a role in his hands and heart, then pours over it essences of Pitt, so that the acting craft is not quite the character and not the actor, but the character trying to conform itself to the contours of Michael Pitt. This vector of energy from the screenwriter's character to the actor reduces to almost nothing the bleak and crippling spectre of intentionality that has so plagued the colossal crusaders' march of American moviemaking.
(And isn't it just like the University of Toronto to take Alice seriously?)