PETER L. STEIN
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Woody Allen's Fictional San Francisco

8/29/2013

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Why are there more working-class white characters in Woody Allen’s new movie than in the entire 415 area code?

And why do they all sound like they’re from Queens?



Like many San Franciscans, I was titillated last year when Woody Allen announced he would be returning—after an absence of more than 40 years—to shoot a new film in my hometown, his first local shoot since “Play it Again, Sam” in 1972. We had been feeling ignored.

In the intervening four decades he had positioned his cameras along virtually every block of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, not to mention iconic scenes filmed in Los Angeles and even whole movies set in London, Paris, Rome and Barcelona. What are we, chopped liver? Sure, we might have been good enough for the early silly comedies (the father of a high school friend of mine had a bit part in “Take the Money and Run,” to his eternal fame, see right), but it seems we were not sophisticated enough for Woody’s mature classics. To think we didn’t even rate for any of those middling, workmanlike films he was churning out in the 90’s…ouch.
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Woody Allen and Diane Keaton on location at the old SFO Airport in "Play it Again, Sam," 1972.
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Henry Leff and Ethel Sokolow, San Franciscans, in "Take the Money and Run," 1969.
But with “Blue Jasmine,” the prodigal Jewish son redeemed himself among local cinephiles. The weeks he was shooting last summer in the Bay Area ushered in a daily game of “Where’s Woody?” with rumored sightings of the famously reclusive director recorded in the local papers, along with online speculation about the nature of each scene (“a fancy party in Belvedere!” “a marital squabble in the Mission District!”); guesses on each actor’s role (“Bobby Canavale plays a car mechanic!”); and breathless reports from friends who scored precious slots as background players (a.k.a. “extras,” for those new to the glamour of the cinema).

PictureCate Blanchett in "Blue Jasmine"
So I attended the film eagerly to see how our city fares, encouraged by early word about Cate Blanchett’s performance. The latter is a complete knockout. As many of you will know by now, she plays a cross between Ruth Madoff and Blanche DuBois, creating a Xanax-popping, Chanel-jacketed, semi-delusional socialite, tightrope-walking on the edge of nervous collapse. Blanchett is amazing, and her character, Jasmine French, is as sharply observed a female role to emerge from Woody’s keyboard as any in “Hannah…” “Vicky…” or “Annie Hall.”


PictureBobby Canavale in "Blue Jasmine"
And there’s the rub. The full-blooded believability of Jasmine and her privileged world—including all the scenes in Manhattan and the Hamptons—is what makes it so frustrating to observe the cardboard inauthencity of most of the important “San Francisco” characters that Woody has peppered throughout the film. Who are these people? Bobby Canavale, Andrew Dice Clay, Louis C.K…. never has San Francisco looked and sounded more like Queens. It’s as if Woody—and his usually impeccable casting director Juliet Taylor—plucked garden variety working-class characters from his stock repertoire and pasted them into a Bay Area setting without any sense of their actually belonging there, or giving them any backstory that made sense out of their living in the Mission (Canavale), the Outer Sunset (Clay), or Marin County (C.K.). As Jasmine’s struggling working-class sister,  “slumming it” at 14th and South Van Ness, Sally Hawkins fares a bit better, perhaps because she has the skills to transform her native English accent into something you’d actually hear in the Mission (note to Woody, though: that neighborhood has for years been a hotbed of rising rents, hipsters and Googleistas).

But more jarring than the accents, the San Francisco these characters inhabit includes virtually no Asians, no Latinos, and no gay people—at least none with any lines. It’s all white working class (a minority population in the 415 if there ever was one), and not an especially Bay Area version of that sub-group to boot. In one scene, Canavale’s buddies hang out watching boxing and eating pizza; how hard would it have been to get them to lose their Joisy accents and scarf some burritos during a 49er game…or better yet, a Raiders game?
So while I was delighted to see some odd corners of my city show up in a new Woody Allen movie, I left feeling that we hadn’t really been understood very well. It was a tourist’s-eye view of our town, written by someone using a slightly out-of-date guidebook and a very out-of-touch social map. Maybe the absence of 40 years took its toll on Woody the writer. I am not certain he could conjure up an authentic sense of a city he hadn’t really seen since Nixon was in office. Even “Play It Again, Sam” wasn’t exactly a documentary, but he got away with a nostalgic view of the city since his main character was (literally) haunted by a noir-era Bogart.
To be fair, Allen often gives us highly romanticized versions of his locales, from Gershwiny Manhattan to accordion-soaked Paris. But in “Blue Jasmine,” the disparity between the spot-on depiction of Jasmine’s high-end New York and the off-target imitation of down-market San Francisco (an oxymoron in itself) left me feeling queasy. It seems last year’s visitation from Woody wasn’t really a location shoot after all; San Francisco was, in the dubious tradition of Hollywood studio pictures, just another backdrop.

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"Blue Jasmine" characters play tourists in San Francisco. Except three of them are supposed to live there.
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Into the Void... (with James Turrell at the Guggenheim)

8/26/2013

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Traditionalists are often aghast when contemporary artists attempt to intervene into and transform iconic places—even temporarily. As a teenager, I remember the outcry in the Bay Area when the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude proposed to erect their “Running Fence”—a 25-mile long shimmering strand of veils that rippled across the Sonoma hills to the sea, and stood for only two weeks. People scoffed at the wasteful effort, ridiculing the artists’ attempt to comment on, let alone improve, what nature had, in its glory, already made perfect. And yet whenever I meander through the grassy coastal hills near Bodega Bay, the image of that fence remains vivid. The transformation of the landscape seems to have had a potent afterlife in my unconscious: I round a corner, wondering if I might still glimpse it; lines of white sheep scattered across the hills bring to mind the desultory rambling of that fence; and actual wooden fences seem stolid and heavy in comparison to the linen veil that lasted only a fortnight. The work permanently shifted how I see the landscape. And that of course was the point—a shift in perception.

I was reminded of this last week on a visit to Manhattan, when I stopped by the Guggenheim Museum: another iconic place, temporarily transformed in a way that I think will be hard to shake. James Turrell, an artist I especially like who works with light and volume, has taken as his canvas the legendary spiraling rotunda that constitutes the interior of Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1959 building. You’ve got to have some serious chutzpah (or substitute your foreign-sounding noun of choice…cojones? hubris?) to fiddle around with Wright’s legendary spherical volume, with its gently rising rampways that culminate in a spider-web dome window.
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Wright's Guggenheim rotunda
And yet Turrell has created something magnificent inside Wright’s space that obliterates the memory of it even while paying homage to it. Walking into the rotunda, one enters not a rounded architectural volume, but an enormous light chamber. Looking up, one sees not the spherical solidity of a building atrium, but a numinous void…a series of concentric ellipses, slowly shifting in hue, now gray, now rose, now indigo, but always receding in intensity toward a glowing white center. There is no sound track (other than the constant, and sometimes annoying, burble of visitors); and since the second week of the installation, padded mats have been tossed onto the floor to accommodate the inevitable impulse to gaze, supine, into the void.
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As I stared, transfixed, into the light-space, I found myself disoriented—was this really the Guggenheim rotunda, now misshapen into an oval? Was I actually staring up into five stories of space, or was this somehow a flat surface, a screen with projected colors that told some kind of abstract narrative? And I realized that this disorientation was precisely the idea of Turrell’s work—it made you take a step away, even if unconsciously, from the known, rationally perceived world into a more ambiguous, unsettling, mysterious place.
Some have carped about the installation—offended by the excess of a gold-plated institution throwing a lot of money at a brand-name artist. Others find the whole idea an exercise in gilding the lily. The Guggenheim rotunda is already a masterwork of light and volume, so why make it another such space? But as I keep turning my thoughts back to that glowing elliptical teleidoscope, I realize that, as with the Sonoma hills, I will likely never be able to experience the Guggenheim in the same way again…the memory of those ellipses will always be vibrating at the fringes of my perception. And that alone makes this artwork a phenomenal achievement.

(Do you have a favorite—or failed—example of an artistic transformation?  I. M. Pei’s Louvre pyramid? Something by Andy Goldsworthy? Feel free to add your own memory, comment or experience below!)   

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In conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri

8/11/2013

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Peter L. Stein & Jhumpa Lahiri in Santa Fe, 2009. Photo: Don J, Usner
Jhumpa Lahiri has made a well-deserved name for herself (and snagged a Pulitzer Prize) with her two collections of short stories, which are among the more sublime prose offerings of the last 20 years. Her most recent collection, Unaccustomed Earth, featured a set of interlocking stories in the second half that inched ever closer to being a novella rather than an independent trio of stories. So I am thrilled, but not surprised, that her forthcoming publication, The Lowland, is a full-fledged novel, her first since The Namesake, which many will remember from its film version. As with her previous work, The Lowland examines the lives and yearnings of families divided between India and the U.S.; her storytelling is at once intimate and powerful. The new novel has already been included in the long list for this year’s Booker Prize in the U.K. [Update Sept. 10: it's now one of six shortlist finalists!]

I first met Jhumpa in 2008 when I interviewed her in a public event at the San Jose Museum of Art. We quickly found that we shared an ongoing love (and erstwhile scholarly pursuit) of Renaissance English drama. She pursued it big-time, as a graduate student, I merely as a college undergraduate. But we bonded over Jacobean masques; and so it was that I have now interviewed her over the past few years in numerous locales (the black-and-white photo is in Santa Fe), and I will happily sit down with her again on October 11 in San Francisco’s refurbished Nourse Auditorium for City Arts & Lectures. The event benefits the education programs at 826 Valencia. I am looking forward to our continuing conversation, which we get to conduct with a bunch of other people listening in. Maybe you’ll join us?
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Swept Away to Pinter's No Man's Land

8/7/2013

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A funny, haunting, and at times mysterious vaudeville is on view at Berkeley Rep for the next few weeks, performed with remarkable subtlety by Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. Harold Pinter’s 1974 play No Man’s Land is a strange, rueful but always entertaining match of wills between two aging writers—the mischievous and needy poet Spooner (McKellen) and the patrician but vulnerable Hirst (Stewart)—who have recently met in a pub but who perhaps know each other already. Their encounter over the course of a night and a day’s conversations is a masterfully choreographed do-si-do of wit and despair.   

I was not previously familiar with this Pinter play, but the current production, directed by Sean Mathias, completely disarmed me. Though set entirely in a drawing room, watching it is like entering a farcical dream-space that is tinged with something dreadful just beyond the shadows. Nothing really happens, but everything seems at stake.

The two Sirs—titans of the screen though they may be—are enormously enjoyable to watch and listen to in vivo (ably seconded by Billy Crudup and Shuler Hensley as Hirst's man-servants/ bodyguards), since the play’s dialogue is delicious and musical, and their plummy, Shakespeare-trained voices and exquisitely nuanced physical choices can be savored in the intimacy of the Roda Theatre. (In the preview performance I attended, even McKellen's occasional first-act slip-ups--calling for prompts with a subtly inserted "Yes" rather than the usually disruptive "Line?"--served to remind me of the high-wire thrill of watching artists performing in the moment.) The production is here for just a few weeks, en route to Broadway where the cast will perform it in repertory with Waiting for Godot.

I came home and immediately found that the original National Theatre (London) production with the legendary John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube. Watching it didn’t diminish my appreciation for the current production at all, and in fact made me marvel at how fresh and mysterious the play continues to be nearly 40 years later. Catch it if you can.


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