MetroScape

I’ll be home (alone) for Christmas

What’s it to ya~!

Alternate traditions have always been a part of gay Christmas (whether the straight family at home was aware of it or not). Eventually there is either a G=SHA (gay-straight holiday alliance) between old family traditions and new inclusive ones that feature same-sex couples at family functions for starters- then the holiday mixed nuts of all stripes~

~Anyway when you find yourself a onesie again, under whatever circumstance, relatives and friends express concern that you might be brooding, soused & ready to take the long swim, if you are alone on major holidays. Well that is much appreciated, I guess, you wonder why it doesn’t occur to people that being alone in a group at say, holiday feasts, makes you feel worse. Togetherness isn’t the answer to everything. Besides, home alone on a holiday in the city really can be magical~

~When xmas falls on a Sunday, this is a city alive with such serenity and urban calm. There is no traffic. I can seek out new architecture on my bicycle, craning in pan and scan. I’ve been discovering new old buildings in this city for 30 years and it continues to teach me where and who (thank you gayborhood) I am~

~First there is always WRTI & fab programming of holiday music with Basie, Ellington, Ella, Louis, Nat, Eartha & Giraldi; Bob Perkins always has something new from the old days. Then there is YouTube for guilty favorites- this year- scenes from Valley of the Dolls & selected celeb Christmas camp starting with Bing & Bowie~

{Mostly you miss the old gang on the return from home holiday bar crawl, course most of all your missing partner & drinking, dancing, and the possiblitily of sex under the tree, last dance at Equus~ then a nightcap at Roscos on Spruce~}

~No regrets, c’est la vie. But if you are lucky enough to live in Philadelphia when xmas falls on a Sunday – alone can be bliss~

~these sugarplums dancing as I stroll through Rittenhouse with, finally, a tree befitting the center of town for Christmas and a Menorah sculpture for Hanukka and the lights in the trees for everybody, including the blue deco lazars atop Liberty Place~ 

~as I tool through town to catch the French silent film hit The Artist at the Ritz Five for the 2:40, with a pocketful of dark choc Godiva balls (thanks Liz!)& my heart on the sleeve of my 20s ratty hounds-tooth overcoat. I’m pretty sure I was the only one there alone, but I felt so much part of the crowd.  Let’s see, even though I saw Chaplin at the old TLA when they showed movies, this is the first silent I’ve ever seen on the big screen, so it was a transcendent experience.  More about that in a separate piece… well it had FACES as Norma Desmond would say-  the star Jean Dujardin, a cross between John Gilbert, Gene Kelly & Fred Neblo (of silent Zorro fame). Berenice Bejo luminous in Adianesque noveau.  Not only was there a Jack terrier and a big dance finish~ the music, entranced. This is not stylized cinema, but a work of cinema art. I wept.  

~Biked down to Penn’s Landing and tapdanced a bit on the causeway perch over the Delaware, at sunset with the skyline cut with a pink burnished and mauve sky.  Back through town able to ride without stopping for 12 blocks without a car in sight and such gorgeous silence.  and even the bars aren’t open until tonight, but detox boy will have to be content on being drunk on the Artist.

Merry Christmas Jack,
see you at the movies
or in a dream
~ t’amo darling j’taime ~

Ballet

 

 

Pennsylvania Ballet
The Nutcracker
Academy of Music, Dec. 11 

Pennsylvania Ballet opened their celebrated production of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker in Ottawa, Canada this year and are now back home for a three week run in the Academy of Music, with rotating lead casts.

Even with the tour warm-up, the Sunday matinee performance in the Academy had a subdued, rote air for much of Act I. After all, Mr. B’s long Christmas party scene is pantomime-heavy and through Balanchine, has lineage that dates back to the Imperial Russian Ballet, which can look dusty.

All of the gestural work with relatives and guests can get wheezy without sharp character embellishments, and the mice war with the toy cadets needs to be sharpened, if not retooled.

But livening things up were the junior corps girls, who really dug in with charm and excitement. And former principal William DeGregory appeared as a very animated Herr Drosselmeier, who wielded his cape and a wand a la Liberace.

Leah Hirsch and Phoebe Gavula as Harlequin and Columbine held to razor-like doll moves. Alexander Peters as the soldier, dancing to Tchaikovsky’s dark drill, was all bolt and technical fire.

Act I’s erratic quality was completely jettisoned by the Waltz of the Snowflakes; these ladies had glittering carriage and supple precision in their point work, especially when serenaded by the silvery voices of the Philadelphia Boys Choir from the gilt Academy box.

Act II is all about the dancing. The full flow that had been missing was now very much onstage. At the center, there was a great performance by Amy Aldridge as the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier Zachary Hench. Except for minor corrections en balance, their chemistry and sublime technique pretty much nailed one of Balanchine’s most demanding pas de deux.

Sparking things up was William DeGregory as a very animated as Drosselmeier, who wields his cape and a wand a la Liberace.Advertisement
Aldridge kept floating diamond-hard pirouette runs and her adagio turns were a dream. Hench, a most attentive partner, executed steel-centered grand pirouettes and unfussy jetes.

Among the hightlights of those Balanchine jewel box divertissements: Riolama Lorenzo burning the floor without even trying as Coffee, the harem seductress with finger chimes- How many ways can you say sultry and luminous?

James Ihde and Rachel Maher were the strong leads for the tarantella Chocolates dance. Brooke Moore looked tentative in her Waltz of the Flowers, pitching out of a couple of turns, but recovered on her second entrance along with ensemble of flowers, locked in with Balanchine’s showgirl classicism.

Peters, who just became an apprentice this year, was back leading the Candy Cane Brigade with plum hoop jumps for the Russian Dance presto. The Shepherdesses held tight, rhythmic patterns framing the gorgeous pacing of lead Holly Lynn Fusco and Jermel Johnson nailed those signature tea dance jumps with mile-high aerial splits.

Among the child leads, Mary Lee Deddens kept her dancing fleet while reflecting the evening’s wonder in her eyes even as the smitten Christian Lavallie stole her heart as her valiant prince.

And the party girls from Act I were back as the gliding Angels orchestra and The Polichinelles, who appear out from under the sails of Mother Gingerbread. These lovies showed tight unison work and airy jumps. Needless to say, it takes a lot to upstage this yuletide Dragzilla.

The orchestra played textbook Tchaikovsky, although that could have spiked a little more in key moments. And again this year Luigi Mazzocchi’s fine violin solo just bathed the opera house

from ‘Gyroscopes’

The Physics of Cobalt

somewhere in the 20s
astronomers started to know that
expansion of the universe was speeding up,
Cassandra half heard it on NPR or
a rerun of The Cosmos
she remembered this fact
as she put the note to
Mercury under her cobalt blue pyramid
tried to sleep.
The dream vortex
has her remembering to
keep thinking about it as a
a profound enigma
or colors of a racid pool
or intellectual burlesque
then she recalls a snatch
of dialogue
that snagged her mind unformed
but with the knowledge
that dark energy
is revealed in the 1995 volumne
of 450 other stars
She asks Mercury to deliver
the letter to Edwin Hubble on his
regular route
?Was he in fact carrying the communique about the 250,000 observable galaxies like ours?
there is no mystery they say with
their eyes at the same time
Night is over
Cassandra starts another note to Mercury
with the droll line
Course we don’t have the atmospherics charts
Part of my–
–she thinks that she
Work is about this–
Push the plans for the universe as a hole
Physics and the math push farther and reach back
with supple math
Does your mother know that our existence is more miniscule
She knows our minds go on to discover she still gets us the meals and releases us daily
even when she haunts
She knows how our brain works
in its revolutions
the days of dim return
unannounced she braces us to the
bluish way of
Delusions that are quantum
ordering dark energy
expanding, she forgets to think
beyond infinite promises of doomed light imploding

Jazz life

Composer-pianist Taeko Kunishima’s Late Autumn starts with her stream of jazz consciousness style. It instantly feels both musically liberated and firmly rooted in multi-era reverence. Then the seven-minute scorcher Return To Life. Inside of its retro-progressive ascensions, shakuhachi virtuoso Clive Bell evokes a Japanese classicism which then vanishes, jarring the imagination. Sean Corby’s trumpet and flugelhorn slash through like a comet, tempered by Bell’s flute. This culminates to a thrilling, primal statement. The atmospherics are a fine example of Kunishima’s style, mixing eras with sublime naturalism. She has a concrete points of musical view and isn’t afraid to carve out unexpected territory.

The Waves has a swirling percussive drive by way of Bell’s flute, which conjures a reflexive, cathartic jazz pool, then shifting as Corby’s horn crashes in like a tidal wave. Kimie has an afterhours feel, and lifts the harrowing mood with Kunishima’s meandering before being sent aloft by Bell’s firebird flute and Corby’s runaway horn.

Later, the elegiac Dusk featuring Bell’s shakuhachi, has its musical roots in antiquity, as Kunishima’s strums the piano wires and Moylan essays lush sonorities, next to the bassist’s bone-dry bowing, for arresting contrasts. There is a haunting and haunted serenity in the after burns.

The finale is the title track’s plaintive and elegant vocal by Rio Roberts; great interplay of Kunishima’s lyricism around her whispering vocals leaves hope that this is a teaser for a full session next time around.