Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 84

January 29th, 2012

OBSCENE CRITIC, OBSCENE ACADEMIC

Phil Kennicott, Washington Post critic of Stein

The Stein controversy was picked up by Scene4 Magazine, the international magazine for arts and media, in a special issue on Obscenity: What Is Obscenity and What’s Not? An excellent article by the poet and Stein librettist Karren Alenier, “The Obscene Critic,” takes up the notorious Stein attack by the Washington Post, which I also commented on in a previous blog post. (The above caricature of the critic is by artist Gisela Züchner-Mogall.)
Alenier brings home the perversity of this particular Stein review — which inspired me to add the larger context to this public expression of “hatred” for Stein in a comment to Alenier’s article: http://www.scene4.com/readersblog/
I have written extensively about the personal and historical complexities of Stein’s survival in Nazi-occupied France. (See my analysis in the Los Angles Review of Books, in the Women’s Media Center as well as in my blog) Now it’s time to unmask the principal canon in the present “wars” against Stein: Barbara Will’s study Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (2011). Without the adademic seal of approval of this manipulative book, I argue, we would not have the extent of viciousness in today’s Stein controversy.
Before I enter my argument in this post, a brief introduction to the topic.

 

Obscene: 1.Offensive to accepted standards of decency or modesty. 2.Inciting lustful feelings; lewd. 3. Repulsive; disgusting. (Free Dictionary)

The joy of making Stein the butt of jokes and ridicule started the very moment she started, a good hundred years ago. We must assume Stein embodied so many offenses to “common decency” that she triggered a response in kind: 1) lewd -repulsed 2), disgusted- offended, and 3) morally outraged. Targets for the punches mostly were literally her belly, the body of the lesbian, the imposing dyke with the big self-esteem; and the Jewish self-declared “genius” whose writing was sheer “nonsense.”

Examples from the past: Stein was “a huge squat mountain on a distant border of the literary kingdom” (Time Magazine, 1933). French critic Marcel Brion described her writing as “a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length… all fat, without nerve.” A “sausage, by-the-yard-variety“ according to Wyndham Lewis. She was “a clinical case in megalomania” (Tristan Tzara) and “her lack of modesty (made) her stubborn, as a caryatid would be had it eaten the house is was intended to support.” (Djuna Barnes). All this is repeated and summed up at present in comments by writer colleagues: for Cynthia Ozick, Stein’s most famous line, “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” is the “chant of a copycat Cubist” and “all that is left of Gertrude Stein.” (New York Times Magazine, 1996) Ex-feminist Elaine Showalter goes straight below the belt: “Stein seems more and more like the Empress Who Had No Clothes—a shocking sight to behold in every respect.” (A Jury of her Peers, 2009).

Stein’s present renaissance has triggered another old hat of hostility: questions about her survival in the French country-side during the Nazi-Occupation of France. As seasoned Stein expert Catharine R. Stimpson noted last November in her keynote address to the 2nd Annual Feminist Art History Conference in D.C.: “Stein’s detractors have been able to combine the standard attacks with a denunciation of her support of Vichy and Pétain.”

And now my Comment to the article in Scene4:

Karren Alenier’s article on the Washington Post’s obscene review of Gertrude Stein and the exhibition Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C. brilliantly analyzes one particular case of openly declared “hatred” for Stein. This sort of hatred has followed Stein from the moment she began to publish, in the early twentieth century, but it is worth noting the context that gave rise to this “indecent exposure” in a serious newspaper like the Washington Post. Stein’s present renaissance with two epochal traveling exhibitions has brought out people like critic Phil Kennicott who, as Alenier reminds us, assigns himself, a “seat in the corner with the Stein haters that include ‘the worst sort of critics—anti-Semites, misogynists, homophobes and philistines.’”

It is worth noticing that Stein’s old enemies found new fodder and an academic seal of approval for their attacks in Barbara Will’s book, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ and the Vichy Dilemma (2011). The inflammatory book fed into the Stein controversy that was triggered by the exhibition Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, linked to the question how Stein and Toklas had managed to survive in Nazi-occupied France. Will’s speculations about the “true Stein” and her alleged “collaboration” with a fascist friend and fascist regime unleashed a cultural hysteria, a sort of license to kill that took over the media and blogosphere. I have no doubt that this cultural atmosphere provided the justification for the Washington Post to publish the infamous article.

Will camouflages the fact that her book is in fact about Bernard Faÿ, an intellectual friend of Steins’s from the twenties, a once respected historian and author who during the war became a Gestapo informer and persecutor of the Freemasons in France. Hardly anybody today would care about Bernard Faÿ and his twisted fate as a condemned collaborator who was ultimately pardoned by French President Mitterand. Gertrude Stein is being used to create a story that pretends to be sensationalist news when the facts and allegations have already been published and rehashed numerous times, most recently by Janet Malcolm in Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007).

I refer readers interested in the personal and political complexities of Stein’s survival to my analysis “Gertrude Stein a ‘Collaborator’, a ‘Nazi’?” published in the Los Angles Review of Books, in the Women’s Media Center as well as in my blog. Here I can only give one telling example of the perverse distortions propagated by this book that serves as the big canon in the latest wars against Stein: Will’s way of setting up Stein as a Hitler fan.

The academic professor tries to make use of the famous quote that every article nowadays repeats, wherein Stein suggests awarding Hitler the Nobel Peace Price, in 1934. (New York Times Magazine,Gertrude Stein Views Life and Politics’) “‘I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize,’ she says, ‘because he is removing all elements of contest and struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.’”

The more objective commentators in the course of Stein research and biographical writing have recognized the irony – the Jewish humor with which Stein hands Hitler the price for his mockery of “peace.” Her irony is reinforced by many other anti-German, anti-Hitler and anti-Nazi comments one could quote from Stein’s work. Will, however, does not quote them. She doesn’t mention that a moment later in the same interview Stein says, “Building a Chinese wall is always bad. Protection, paternalism and suppression of natural activity and competition lead to dullness and stagnation. It is true in politics, in literature, in art. Everything in life needs constant stimulation. It needs activity, new blood.” In 1939, in Paris France, Stein equates Hitler’s “peace” with death for the arts and death for the country: “The characteristic art product of a country is the pulse of the country, France did produce better hats and fashions than ever these last two years and is therefore very alive and Germany’s music and musicians have been dead and gone these last two years and so Germany is dead well we will see, it is so, of course as all these things are necessarily true.” (Paris France, 1939).

Will isn’t stupid; she can’t quite get around Stein’s Jewish humor regarding the Nobel Peace Price for Hitler, but she nevertheless finds a way. She muses: “Stein probably wanted her audience to respond in both ways…” She claims there is “a strong element of conviction and intentionality in such pronouncements, as though (Stein) requires – indeed demands – that her words be taken literally.” She eradicates Stein’s Jewish humor by arguing, “her political ‘pontifications’ are not clearly ironic but apparently deeply felt.” (all quotes page 71-72).

Are we to take this sort of language – “probably wanted,” “as though she requires, indeed demands,” “apparently” — as clean, academic scholarship? To my reading eyes, this language is an obvious attempt to manipulate the reader .

Will rehashes another Hitler story, this one reported as hear-say by editor/publisher Jay Lansing. In 1934, Lansing heard Stein say that Hitler and Napoleon were both “great men.” For Will, this unquestioningly gives the other Hitler comment a sinister “deeper meaning”. Again, she won’t accord Stein the benefit of a doubt. Was this another flagrant irony that was missed? Was Stein perhaps referring to the fact that both Napoleon and Hitler were in fact small, demented men and that most of the so-called “great men” of our history (from Alexander the Great onward), idolized by the masses, shared the megalomania that led to mass murder in their conquerors’ wars? It goes almost without saying that Will would ignore quotes like this one: “There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing. “ (Everybody’s Autobiography, 1936)

Will insists on finding a dirty under-belly in Stein at every turn. Three years before WWII, Stein commented in a letter to her friend W.G. Rogers: “…disguise it to yourself as you will the majority does want a dictator, it is natural that a majority if it has come to be made up of enormous numbers do, a big mass likes to be shoved as a whole because it feels it moves and they cannot possibly feel that they move themselves as little masses can, there you are, like it or not there we are. “(W.G. Rogers, When This you See Remember Me) This very realistic assessment, again with ironic-sarcastic undertones, is seen by Barbara Will as “chilling,” a proof that Stein “firmly distances herself “ from democracy: “Stein argues for the power, and, arguably, the rightness of authoritarian leadership.” (Will, p. 97.)

This sort of biased intimation is found throughout the book — a book that has not yet been unmasked in its hostile, dishonest intentions. Will’s earlier academic work, Gertrude Stein: Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius” (2000) provided valid, useful, even enthusiastic Stein research. But since then, the author has “probably, as though, apparently” suffered a conversion experience.

She can be added to the detractors mentioned by Alenier’s article and take her “seat in the corner with the Stein haters that include ‘the worst sort of critics—anti-Semites, misogynists, homophobes and philistines.’” If we still wonder about the true intention of these attacks, these wars against Stein, I suggest going to the root of the word obscene:

obscenitas, is latin derived from either ob-scaena, meaning against the scene of a stage (off-stage);

or it might be derived from obs-caenum — of mud or filth (Origins, the Etymological Dictionary by Eric Partridge).

The intention, I argue, is to blast Stein off the stage and out of her sunny spotlight by besmirching her image in the exact fashion we can trace back to the origins of the term obscenity.

 

 

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 82

December 9th, 2011

Words, funny words and funny funny pictures and Paris in a new picture book!

"Once there were two amusing American ladies..."

It begins:
“Once there were two amusing American ladies, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. They lived in a mighty marvelous apartment in Paris…, ” and goes on to describe a Thanksgiving visit by two naughty American boys, which is based on a real story. It’s now the story of a book for children of ALL ages, by Hans Gallas, illustrated by Tom Hachtman: Gertrude and Alice and Fritz and Tom. One of the boys is/was author Fritz Peters (Boyhood with Gurdjeff), the other is his brother Tom. “We are always the same age inside,” to quote Gertrude Stein.

I had announced the marvelous book already last May, in my Post # 65, and now there is the there there in all its funny words and funny pictures, in time for Hannukah, Solstice, X-mas and the New Year, which will of course be another year of Gertrude Stein. You can order the book directly from the author’s colorful, enticing book page, at www.gertrudeandalice.com, or at Amazon.

Guess what Fritz and Tom discover at 27, rue de Fleurus? “It looks like a museum! I hate museums, everything in a museum is musty and moldy.” The story takes up from there and takes the boys, guess where? To the Louvre!
An interesting detail: no dogs in the picture. The visit happened before Gertrude and Alice got Basket the poodle and Pépé the chihuahua.
To see Basket in his wooly war-time coat, open another new book, the handy little calendar book Everyday Dogs: A Perpetual Calendar for Birthdays & Other Notable Dates by Mary Scott and Susan Snyder (Heyday, Berkeley, $14.95). It says, “What do Gertrude Stein, John Muir, Jack London, Queen Victoria, and your next-door neighbor all have in common? Dogs.” They failed to mention yours truly and Hans Gallas as well. “Woof! A dog fancier’s delight — ideal for birthdays and yearly events.” But they quote Gertrude. Voilà.
Now don’t forget to enter Gertie’s Aquarian birthday into the book: Feb. 3.

Händel’s XERXES at San Francisco Opera

December 5th, 2011

San Francisco Opera may have already reached the zenith of this season (most reviewers thought so) with Händel’s one and only “comic” opera Xerxes from 1738 – a serious composition with slight comedy touches. Like so many baroque operas, Xerxes deals with kings and courtiers, power and passion, in an exotic, allegorical way. The anonymous libretto tells about the Persian king with very few historical references. What is important here is that Xerxes obsesses over his brother’s sweetheart and thinks he will be preferable to her because he is the king. Even a king with the eponym “The Great” sometimes has to learn the humbling lessons of humanity. The rest of the story follows the pattern of A loves B who loves C who is coveted by D, and ends with  B marrying C while A must marry E whom he doesn’t love but who loves him. There is a juicy role for a servant of the aristocracy, and you can see Mozart’s Figaro and Don Giovanni and Rossini’s Barber come right out of this Händel with its amusing libretto and inspired music.

Read on at: http://www.scene4.com/1211/renatestendhal1211.html

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 81

November 28th, 2011

Vive la France!

“I cannot write too much upon how necessary it is to be completely conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free. And so France is and was.” (Paris France)
It is true, Stein was politically conservative, even at times reactionary, and this is part of the paradox of Gertrude Stein. The language revolutionary came from a proudly bourgeois, assimilated Jewish family with a great admiration for Washington and Grant. Clearly Stein felt you had to be rooted in solid ground in order to go out to the edge and not fall down. I never paid much attention to this wide-spread modernist paradox; it seemed irrelevant next to Stein’s monumental oeuvre of some 600 titles containing lots of poetry and little or no politics. I paid attention to the fact that from 1943 onward, Stein rooted for the Resistance, and to the fact that she had always expressed her profound dislike of Germany and Hitler, “There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing. “ (Everybody’s Autobiography, 1936), and she had made brilliant statements about the difference between Germany and France: “The characteristic art product of a country is the pulse of the country, France did produce better hats and fashions than ever these last two years and is therefore very alive and Germany’s music and musicians have been dead and gone these last two years and so Germany is dead well we will see, it is so, of course as all these things are necessarily true.” (Paris France, 1939)

How could anyone loving France not want to stay in France, I asked myself, even (and maybe especially) when France was in grave danger? Just last September, when I was in Paris and spent a good week at the Loire, it was a shock to be reminded how wonderful France, life in France, really is. No matter that I had lived in Paris for almost 20 years and visited often, I had forgotten! Here, around San Francisco where you get the best food in America, the best coffee, best croissants, French cheeses and wines, I almost believed that the “Global Village” had succeded and obliterated the need to travel to France.
But then there I was, and there was the real thing again, and I can tell you there is nothing like it. Nothing you eat here tastes anything like a baguette, a croissant, a round of goat cheese, a glass of Loire wine, a fresh walnut from the Dordogne, big as a lime, tastes over there. You have to go half around the world to realize that French coffee, excellent in even the smallest bistro anywhere in the countryside, is a world apart. That French butter has almost nothing in common with what we can buy here as “European-style” butter. I could go on…
This and the beauty of the old villages, the way the sandstone catches the light throughout the day – I kept wondering and wondering how anyone could question Stein’s decision. She had grown up on 10 acres of Californian land, a tomboy, with goats and chicken and apple trees, and in her French village, where she and Alice spent every summer, she was rooted like an old tree by the time the war arrived. She loved her country neighbors, and they told her to stay: they would care for her and Alice. They would protect them.
The suspicious questioning of how Stein and Toklas were able to survive the war as Jews reveals a considerable ignorance of the conditions in Vichy and Occupied France and a troubled confusion of France with Germany. In Germany, half of the German Jews were trapped after 1938, and almost every one of them was murdered. In France, three quarters of the Jewish population survived in the same way Stein and Toklas did, with the help of friends and neighbors, and often even with the help of French officials who quietly ignored German orders. Not that it was easy or safe. Any day, they could have been denounced. Should they flee to near-by Switzerland – without legal papers, as they were advised – into the complete unknown? Without being able to take their beloved dogs?
In 1939, they had made a mad dash to Paris to take a few things back to their country house, among them just two paintings from their vast collection: Picasso’s portrait of Stein and the Cézanne’s Portrait of Mme Cézanne. They didn’t find their passports, but they found the pedigree papers for Basket, their big poodle. This turned out to be a blessing as the Germans — with their racial obsessions — accorded special food rates to pure-bred dogs. No, they wouldn’t leave their dogs behind for a questionable safety for themselves. They would hold out and muddle through, all of them together, with their peasant neighbors and friends, a vegetable garden, with Alice’s kitchen artistry and Gertrude’s Black Market skills. Five years is a long time of deprivation. At some point, when all of France was occupied and all ties to America were cut, they had no source of money for an entire 6 months. Again, a friend and neighbor helped them out. But they ended up having to sell and “eat the Cézanne.” They had no heating and the language revolutionary who used to claim, “It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much doing nothing,” would cut wood all day, walk miles and miles for an egg or a bit of flour, and weed her garden.

The two elderly Americans (even Alice turned 65 during the war) were not noticed by the Germans – only Basket was. He was admired – which reminds me: A new little calendar book has come out: Everyday Dogs: A Perpetual Calendar for Birthdays & Other Notable Dates, from Heyday Books in Berkeley. Of course, there is Gertrude, late in her life, holding a very furry Basket on her lap. You will see it by turning to the third week of January 2012.

Paris with Pina, Salome and Claude

November 10th, 2011

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Report about the new film by Wim Wenders, Pina, the opening of the Paris Opera with Salome by Richard Strauss, and a gender-bending artist from the time of Gertrude Stein, Claude Cahun, at the Jeu de Paume, : http://www.scene4.com/1111/renatestendhal1111.html

“Just for fun I sat down in my habitual café and started counting. It’s what I always do when I first arrive in Paris: I buy the Officiel or Pariscope, take a café table at the window of Le Rostand, right across the Luxembourg Gardens, and get an overview over the fashions and cultural programs of the moment. 322 films this week, not including the special-topic “festivals” (roughly 35). Almost 100 theater plays. The usual. The opera season was to open with Salome the next day. The sirens of the present time were wearing tights in a half-loose, sexy way that let the fabric bundle up around the ankles and slip down to very high heels. …” Read the rest of this entry »

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 79

October 30th, 2011

Giant Gertrude Stein Ridiculed By Little Male

If you want to see a fresh example of how a great woman author is being diminished by a male critic, with no holds barred, go to the Washington Post and read:

Review of Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, by Phil Kennicott (Sunday Arts)

You won’t easily forget the experience.

What is the occasion? The Stein exhibition from SF, Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, just opened at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C. Everybody who is anybody is celebrating the event, talking about the present Stein renaissance (the other seminal exhibition, The Steins Collect, has moved to the Paris Grand Palais and will soon open in NY), except those who feel somehow excluded from the excitement because they harbor a deep, old resentment against Stein. Read the rest of this entry »

Gertrude Stein’s Opera FOUR SAINTS IN THREE ACTS in San Francisco

October 1st, 2011


The San Francisco Chronicle called it “a little silly and naïve,” and was it? Four Saints was supposed to be a highlight of the two landmark shows on Gertrude Stein – Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories and The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde (both discussed in these pages). In a nine-week run the exhibitions attracted over 400,000 visitors. (Only Chagall drew more people in the history of SFMOMA, I was told.) A whole flurry of lectures, classes, panels, performances marked the “Summer of Stein,” and the new production of Stein’s first operatic collaboration with American composer Virgil Thomson, premiered in 1934, was eagerly awaited.
Read the review at http://www.scene4.com/1011/renatestendhal1011.html

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 77

September 21st, 2011

27, rue de Fleurus September 2011

Usually the glass door only allows a glance into the far-away courtyard, well locked away by a modern door code – not like in my old Paris days, when all you had to do was push the door button and sneak past the concierge.
But magically, a Monsieur distingué came out just at that moment and politely held the door open for us. It was once again a strange feeling of moving through time, more so than ever, having just looked at all the photographs of rue de Fleurus in the SF exhibitions. The covered passage Stein and Toklas had built in order to get from their apartment to the atelier unempeded by the Paris weather, had been changed by later inhabitants, making it difficult to recognize the corner. But interestingly, the name on a discreet door bell today is still a Jewish name. (More photos on my Facebook page…)

Later that day, at the café restaurant Ma Bourgogne, at Place de Vosges, Kim and I met with Elizabeth Lennard, artist of film and video installtions, whose new documentary “The Stein Family, the Making of Modern Art” will play at the Grand Palais during the Paris run of The Steins Collect, starting in October, as I already mentioned in my last post. It will be distributed in the U.S. by Microcinema International (http://www.microcinema.com). If you are like me you are already missing The Steins Collect, the onslaught of modernism shown at SFMOMA. And if you can’t catch it again in Paris (I can’t either), Lennard’s DVD will bring it all back.
Have a look as some of her images and très avant-garde plays on film: http://elizabethlennard.com/Elizabeth_Lennard.html
Elizabeth and two other friends, filmmaker Emmy Scharlatt and painter Sonja Hopf, pointed us to a “must see” exhibition at the Jeu de Paume: photographs be Claude Cahun, another revolutionary modernist like Stein, although twenty years younger.


Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) was perhaps the first performance artist/photographer of modern times, a forerunner of gender-bending body and peformance artists like Cindy Sherman in the seventies. Sherman (in the French Wikipedia) is still regarded as a “pioneer” of post-modern photography. We had no idea how late Sherman was, in fact!
What Stein did in writing, using all the possibilities of the Enlish language to circumvent gender and dissimulate her disadvantages of being a woman, Cahun did in her obsessive mise en scènes for her own camera. Her self-portraits subvert gender at every turn, presenting her as man, woman and everything in between and beyond. Like Stein, she does it with wit and irony, sometimes making fun of gender roles (comically posing as a body-builder), sometimes turning herself into romantic-erotic metamorphoses of princes or pirates in her very own 1001 Nights, and most often she seems deadly serious. She not only cut her hair short (Stein did it in 1926) but shaved it off completely. Her pale look (in a dark undershirt with bound breasts) leaves her as indistinct as an alien, an insect, or the marble “Sleeping Muse” by Brancusi.
Like Stein, Cahun had the unconditional support of a female life-companion, artist Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe), her stepsister with whom she had fallen in love at age fifteen. The two artists, with their male or male-sounding names, worked together on their photographs (sometimes double portraits) in the twenties; then Cahun, who also published her writing, joined the Surrealists and started working with photomontages and collages. Like Stein and Toklas, Cahun and Moore lived together their entire life, but these two apparently did it as artistic equals, without any apparent role division.
One other difference: Cahun and Moore were politicized and actively provoqued and sabotaged the Nazi occupiers on the island Jersey, where they had stayed during the war. Their brazen acts of resistance, trying to inspire German soldiers and military personnel to desert, got them a prison and execution sentence by the Gestapo. While Gertrude and Alice were “liberated” by the Allies, Claude and Marcel were saved from execution – to their frank regret — just in the nick of time.
It remains to be seen if French people draw parallels and distinctions between these remarkable avant-gardists, Stein and Cahun, and their life-companions.
More about Paris France to come, when I am less land-locked in the French provinces, at the Loire, with no DSL connection (another, more tedious trip backwards in time). Stay tuned.

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 76

September 10th, 2011

SFMOMA window display

“Gertrude Stein gone gone is gone,” to paraphrase the American press. Is it really true that she is gone? Stein had become a San Francisco neighbor, someone to say hello to across the street, back and forth between SFMOMA and CJM with a stop at Peets in between. Suddenly to have lost her presence, Gertie all packed up and shipped to DC, seems unreal. The long Summer of Stein being over, I was able to take my nostalgia to Paris for a few days. Did it help?
I keep thinking of moments that stand out for me in this Summer of Stein. There was the complaint often heard, the question often asked when I gave a talk or salon: how did Stein and Toklas survive the war? How come the Contemporary Jewish Museum hardly mentioned it? How come Seeing Gertrude Stein didn’t look at this Jewish question par excellence? The controversy brewing over Stein’s being protected by a Vichy collaborator even exploded in a panel discussion where I had to come to her defense against wild accusation of Nazi sympathies by local author Fred Rosenbaum. I maintain there is a flew of misunderstandings, and that the new book on the topic, Barbara Will’s “Unlikely Collaboration” is heavily tendentious and tries to grind an axe against Stein (like Janet Malcolm in her vicious Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, and other authors before her). But that deserves a post on its own, stay tuned.
On a more charming note, at my North Beach Gallery Canessa salon, an audience member told the story of visiting the site of Nathalie Barney’s parallel salon to Stein’s, and getting her caretaker, Berthe, to show her around long before Paris Was A Woman filmmaker Greta Schiller arrived with her crew. I imagine this audience member had stepped into an ancient limo at the strike of midnight that day…
Another member reported she used to have Stein’s quote “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” on her bedroom wall already as a child, and her father told her there was nothing special about it — anyone could have made that up. Ah well, but nobody did, did they? Not even Shakespeare with his “rose by any other name.” Google counts some 1, 221 rose poems in Western literature, and they are long and they are short, but only one of them recreates the rose as the modernist and post-modernist rose of our time.
What also stands out for me, no matter how much you know and have read about Stein: there is always another treasure trove to discover. Did you know that in the last 15 years some 30 academic studies have been published on Stein — and 70 dissertations written on her? One of them, Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theater by Sarah Bay-Cheng, reminded me that there are some 70 plays written by the author! Just in time, on my Paris visit, I met artist/performer/filmmaker Elizabeth Lennard who has done many of these plays and even plans to produce one at the end of the Paris run of The Steins Collect at the Grand Palais: a play with 500 characters! Who but Stein could have come up with such an idea? How is Lennard going to solve that little casting hurdle? Employ the audience!

Photos Louise Kollenbaum

In Stein’s Operas and Plays you can see for yourself, and you can also read up on Four Saints in Three Acts as you won’t have understood more than a few words in the Yerba Buena performance of the “opera installation,” sung without supertitles and lacking the kind of direction that would have let you in on the fun and wit of it. The veritable Stein opera, as I said in my last post, happened next door to The Steins Collect, at SFMOMA, in David Clearbout’s video piece, “The American Room” which had all the radical modernist qualities Stein would have called “peaceful and exciting.”
I confess that my nostalgia made me rent the old hippy movie I Love You, Alice B. Toklas with Peter Sellers as a stiff who needs some hash brownies to get a life. Very sweet and silly and just right to console one after having seen Midnight in Paris a few times too many.
And finally, the good-bye in San Francsico was sweetened for me by learning that museum gift stores do sell books: all together nearly 1000 copies of Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures flew off the shelves, straight into the Summer of Stein…

 

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 75

September 1st, 2011

LAST CHANCE STEIN, LAST CHANCE DAVID CLAERBOUT
Put on your running shoes and take a bag of patience: lines will be HUGE this weekend – the last days before Seeing Gertrude Stein and The Steins Collect close in SF (See my previous posts). These are the biggest shows ever at both museums (only Chagall beat out the Steins in SFMOMA’s history). Some 400,000 visitors, I heard from the administration. A record. The right time for a new look at modernism — modernism incarnate in Gertrude, Gertie, Gert. You’ll have to run far after Sept. 6 to still catch them: the next stop for Seeing Gertude Stein is Washington, DC — from Oct. 14 to Jan. 22, 2012 at the National Portrait Gallery (perfect place for a portrait of Stein). The Grand Palais in Paris is next for The Steins Collect, but if you can’t run across the Atlantic (no Jesus, anyone?) there’s New York! The Metropolitan Museum of Art will pick it up in February.
If you’ve missed Stein’s opera, Four Saints in Three Acts (with a good dozen saints and four acts), don’t despair. It wasn’t up to snap; it wasn’t exciting like Stein ought to be. The true modern excitement happened right next door, on the same floor at SFMOMA — the video installation called David Claerbout: The Architecture of Narrative. Clearbout works in a Steinian spirit of narrative, architectural narrative, unhinging the media of video and photography and, at the same time, he, too, warps the experience of time in the most fascinating asthetic ways. I sat, mesmerized, through the 24 minutes of “The American Room” (2009-2010), a piece that shows a singer’s recital in an intimate concert room at a place like the White House, surrounded by security guards, security cameras, and American flags. You can read an inspiring article by Kenneth Baker to get a glimpse: Claerbout uses ideas, formal principles and even language (he is “caressing” images) the way Stein used them. I will have to go back for a second look to write more about it before it closes on Sept. 6 as well.

Original vest worn by Gertrude, possibly created by Alice


If you miss all of it, you can still partake in Fashion à la Stein. My friend Shana Penn of the Taube Foundation recently pointed me to a French clothes boutique, Lilith, on Fillmore that carries a line of Stein-inspired gilets and hats and cuffs and other fabulous design inventions for girls who are boys and bois and girls and girls à la Alice. http://www.sanfranciscodress.com/records/page/850/lilith.html — have a look. It’s more expensive than the museums and catalogues, but looking doesn’t cost a penny!
Lilith is fun and will make you want to go right back to Paris, or at least to Midnight in Paris at a cinema near you.

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done # 74

August 27th, 2011


Stein’s Opera Four Saints in Three Acts
It had to happen. A let-down after the high excitement of the landmark Stein exhibitions. (Although there must have been others duds in the myriads of lectures, panels, and even performances surrounding the shows.) But a performance of Stein’s famous 1934 opera was supposed to be a high point. Expectations ran high. Through the SFMOMA grapevine I had heard rumors that the largely uninspired music by Virgil Thomson would get a blast of refreshment: the modern composer Luciano Chessa, the performance group An Ensemble Parallèle, and even a video and drag performer from New York, Kalup Linzy, would take the dinosaur in hand and breathe new life into it. Read the rest of this entry »

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 73

August 9th, 2011

SLUTTING IN SF: GERTRUDE STEIN ON SLUTWALK?

READY FOR SLUTWALK? (cartoon by Tom Hachtman)

San Francisco had its first SlutWalk last Saturday, and was Gertrude Stein along for the ride?
Good question. Controversial question, as most questions are regarding Stein.
Now that the avant-garde has collectively declared “Gertrude Stein is Twitter”, would she have been amused by the “deets” posted online? By “No means no yes means yes wherever we go however we dress”? One thing is for sure, she would have had the right outfits already in 1908, those sexy body wraps and curderoy robes held together by only one pin – one delicate, moveable pin for the moveable feast.

My friend, cartoonist Tom Hachtman, even ventured out where no man had gone before. We have to admit, however, that Stein was not very interested in the cause of women. She was fully emancipated quite on her own, way ahead of the Victorian minions around her. She had her own cause and she was winning it, hands down, coming out as the most famous and most influential of all modernist writers in America. Yes, even “coming out” as much as that was possible before the term was invented. Therefore, when she died in 1946, she might not have felt the need to join in the seventies when feminists rediscovered her “genius” and marched through Paris to “Take Back the Night.”
Now, had it been “Midnight” – as in “Midnight in Paris” – who knows?
What, we may wonder, would she have done with the word SLUT? She had already slyly played with the word “gay,” writing A Long Gay Book (in addition to her many lesbian odes). She would no doubt have been highly amused by the new usages of “queer.” Both gay and queer have overtones and undertones of meaning that allow Steinian word play. But does SLUT?
At least she would have created a new noun (she loved using nouns and repeating them, which she called “caressing”) for those who walk on SlutWalks. A Twitter word like “Slutter,” to start with. Let’s paraphrase her “Completed Portrait of Picasso” with its “shutters shut” – and we don’t have far to walk:
“Slutters slut and open, so do queens. Slutters slut and slutters and so slutters slut and slutters and so, and so slutters. And so slutters slut and so slutters slut and so slutters and so. And so slutters slut and so and also. And also and so and so and also.”
There you have it. Unless you think Stein would have been on the opposite side of the controversy, turning a foxy eye at our present “raunch culture” of women’s and girl’s (un)dress, staying at her desk at home, mumbling under her breath something about “internalized abuse of Girls Gone Wild,” or “pornification of protest.” And rolling her eyes, writing a sequel to her long, long poem “Patriarchal Poetry,” something like “Patriarchal Sluttery”?

 

Francesca Zambello’s “American Ring” at San Francisco Opera

August 4th, 2011

Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen, directed by Francesca Zambello, has been completed and shown in Bayreuth style in three cycles at SF Opera. Read the complete review athttp://www.scene4.com/0811/renatestendhal0811.html

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 72

August 4th, 2011

The “Summer of Stein” in San Francisco coincided with the “Summer of the Ring.” Gertrude Stein and Richard Wagner are certainly odd bed-fellows and yet, there they were, one of them at the museums with two epochal shows(see my previous posts), the other at the opera house with the sixth-ever complete Cycle of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen at San Francisco Opera, heating up the atmosphere with equal excitement. Read the rest of this entry »

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 71

July 23rd, 2011

Fresh off the press of cartoonist Tom Hachtman

Lesbians holding hands a No-no at “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories”

 

Two hand-holding women were forced out of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco by a zealous guard. In San Francisco! Where did this dinosaur of a guy come from? Some Texas or Arizona hinterlands? The scandal made press headlines, created a big public outcry, and today a hand-holding action at the museum proves in modern-day color what we have always known about Gertrude Stein: Even a hundred years later, Stein is always good for a controversy. She is still too avant-garde for some and many Americans. Read the rest of this entry »

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde

July 4th, 2011


The second major Stein exhibition, at SFMOMA, is bringing the “Summer of Stein” into full swing:
see at Scene4′s July issue “Visions” — http://scene4.com
(After the opening of the title page, wait for the word CONTENTS to appear below, and click)

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 70

July 1st, 2011


So What ARE They Wearing for Gertrude Stein?

San Francisco Chronicle’s Leah Garchik reported in the Datebook the other day a comment overheard at a birthday party: “She doesn’t know Gertrude Stein! What kind of a lesbian is she?” I replied to Leah, “And we have to ask: What was she wearing?” Leah wrote back that she was going to the museum and “do some people watching, to see what they’re wearing for Gertrude!” The obvious thing to do.
I am waiting for Leah’s verdict. But meanwhile, I can report that San Franciscans are fashion literates. Read the rest of this entry »

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 68

May 26th, 2011

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Several people had tears in their eyes, myself included, walking in a trance through the vast rooms of SFMOMA, in the stream of some 600 people who had gathered at the Donors’ opening party and walk-through. “The Steins Collect” is not just a major San Francisco art exhibition, it’s the most ambitious exhibition SFMOMA has ever shown, as director Neil Benazra proudly announced. In one word: it is huge, both in mass and in importance. The very hour when modernism was born, a good century ago, has never been so densely packed and complete in one space. This overwhelmingly broad, bold collection goes back to one American family in Paris. Among the most famous “Americans in Paris,” the Stein siblings were the first to recognize the new era, the revolution in art, and bought, supported and connected the artists through their celebrated salons. Read the rest of this entry »

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 66

May 16th, 2011


Yes they did it. They pulled it off. The Contemporary Jewish Museum, arm in arm with the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery in DC (where the show will go from San Francisco) made it happen: the long-awaited exhibition Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, the first-ever attempt to portray Stein in an exhibition, is a marvel of a show.
A dozen years in the making, the exhibition is as “peaceful and exciting” as Gertrude could have wished for. Everybody – scholarly Steinians, would-be-Steinians, “Gertrude Stein who?”-Steinians, youngsters, hipsters and the rest can and will and must enjoy the portrait of the genius who has enlightened, puzzled and troubled our world for a good 100 years. Read the rest of this entry »

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 65

May 9th, 2011


San Francisco In the Spring With Gertrude Stein
Soon the museum gates will open and entire families will stroll into “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories” and “The Steins Collect”. What will the kids make of the fat lady who doesn’t sing?
Do they need help? Looking at the books out there, it is maybe the parents who need help. Or maybe not. There aren’t many helpers. Adult witticism and playful attempts to approach Stein don’t always fly with kids who are easily bored with teachers and well-meaning preachers of art or avant-garde. They sniff out in an instant if someone is talking down to them. Read the rest of this entry »

April 2nd, 2011


Richard Wagner happened to be at the world premiere of Giselle, in Paris, 1841. He didn’t care for the Wilis, he reported in the Dresdner Abendzeitung on July 6, 1841, “the brides-to-be who die with unfulfilled longings for love and ascend from their graves at midnight to force the men who approach them to dance themselves to death.” The legend had been introduced by the German poet Heinrich Heine in a text called “Elementary Spirits” (1837), describing the Wilis as elf-like, beautiful women in their wedding dresses, with snow-white faces, who “cannot be quiet in their graves; in their dead hearts, dead feet, remains the desire for dancing which they could not satisfy in their lifetime.” Filled with ”secret lust and promise, these dead bacchantes are irresistible.”

Read on at http://www.scene4.com/0411/renatestendhal0411.html

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 62

March 24th, 2011

“Don’t Think You Can’t Be Senile At 22″ 

This week’s New Yorker reports on “Glenn Ligon: AMERICA” at the Whitney, the retrospective of an important African-American artist who made use of the “negro sunshine” Stein coined in her early novella “Melanctha” (see my previous post). The author of the review, Peter Schlejdahl, has this to say about it: “Stein was being fondly indulgent of black folks, in an old vein of white cluelessness.” It’s a striking formulation. Is it true? Was she clueless? Was she clueless as a fairly young person and less clueless later? Is there an irony at play,  highlighted in Ligon’s post-modern, post-irony neon “advertisement”? Could “negro sunshine” be the same Steinian irony that is often subtle and hard to detect, as I pointed out in her statement that “Hitler should have received the Nobel Peace Prize”?

To add a shadow of a doubt to the “old vein of white cluelessness”, here are some things Stein had to say (two decades later) about immigration:

“Building a Chinese wall is always bad. Protection, paternalism and suppression of natural activity and competition lead to dullness and stagnation. It is true in politics, in literature, in art. Everything in life needs constant stimulation. It needs activity, new blood. To the young people who, wanting to become writers, ask me for advice, I always say, ‘Don’t think it isn’t possible to be senile at 22.’ It is even very difficult to keep from becoming senile in youth. It is hard to keep one’s self open and receptive to stimulation. Doing what other people tell you and being protected form this and from that is not so good, is not stimulating. You must face life ands truggle. Satisfaction comes from overcoming opposition and sometimes from enduring things that are not supposed to be good for one.

“That is the reason why I do not approve of the stringent immigration laws in America today. We need the stimulation of new blood. It is best to favor healthy competition. (…) The French may not like the competition of foreigners, but they let them in. They accept the challenge and derive the stimulus. I am surprised that there is not more discussion of immigration in the United States than there is.We have got rid of prohibition restrictions, and it seems to me the next thing we should do is to relax the severity of immigration restrictions.” (Excerpt from a New York Times interview by Lansing Warren, 1934)

Philanthropy Notes

March 10th, 2011

Beholding a book like Lin Arison’s Feast for the Senses: A Musical Odyssey in Umbria (Chronicle Books) brings to mind the Renaissance: A Medici prince, let’s say, with a vision and a train of musicians moves from castle to castle, feast to feast, meeting and inviting along artists and artisans, recording the journey in paintings, with scribes standing by to take note and serve the prince to assemble his proud Book of Hours.

In the modern version, author and philantropist Lin Arison of Miami journeys to Umbria (between Tuscany and Rome) with San Francisco’s famous conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, his partner Joshua Robinson, and several of the young musical talents of the New World Symphony — the orchestral academy which Lin Arison and her late husband Ted Arison co-founded with Tilson Thomas in 1986. The journey, Read the rest of this entry »

Black Swan Debate

February 23rd, 2011

The Oscars will bring back the question: how brilliant is Black Swan? I have enjoyed opining, as you may have read right here. I found the dark fairy-tale brilliant indeed. You can also find it at http://www.scene4.com/0211/renatestendhal0211.html.

But I would like to add a very different opinion by author and She Writer Mylène Dressler posted on Scene4 Magazine– very worth reading:
“I enjoyed the review by Renate Stendhal, though have a different take on Black Swan. I walked away also being reminded of Cronenberg, but more of Aronofsky’s other films–he has a penchant for characters inclined toward self-mutilation. Read the rest of this entry »

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 60

February 3rd, 2011

A sketch by Tom Hachtman

Aquarie Gertrude comes up for another spin around the virtual sun of birthdays this very day today. And a great birthday it is. 2011 is promising a big comeback for Stein — in the California of her youth, of all places. San Francisco is preparing the unusual festivities: two major exhibitions focused on Stein. Read the rest of this entry »

Swans of a Feather

February 2nd, 2011

BLACK SWAN, the brilliant controversial movie by Darren Aronofsky, reviewed with contradictory interpretations as the cover story of Scene4.

Direct link to my review: http://www.scene4.com/0211/renatestendhal0211.html

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 58

January 14th, 2011

If you missed Paris the Luminous Years on PBS and (and missed the snow falling live on Gertrude’s Montparnasse in my last Stein post), there is a there there to console you: Paris Was A Woman, the charming (if not always accurate) documentary by Greta Schiller. It is now available on Netflix.

There is no better way to get a good look at Stein through the movies. Yes, the icon of modernism in front of a home movie camera! Read the rest of this entry »

“A Brief But Quirky History of Art” in Scene4 Magazine

January 3rd, 2011

Special issue of Scene4, with a quirky review of San Francisco opera’s brilliant MAKROPULOS CASE with Karita Mattila and a video excerpt:

http://www.scene4.com/0111/renatestendhal0111.html

My Gertrude Stein blog has a new home online:

January 1st, 2011

http://www.quotinggertrudestein.wordpress.com

Here you will see the entire blog, from day one: “Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 1″.

If you catch it before January 7th, you will see live snow falling on Gertrude’s Montparnasse…

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 57

December 27th, 2010

Gertrude Stein in “Paris the Luminous Years” on PBS

A question to end the first decade of the second millenium: What do Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Janet Flanner, Nathalie Barney, Hemingway, Myrna Loy, Margaret Anderson, Stravinsky, Chagall, Jean Rys, Braque, Sylvia Beach, James Joyce, Kay Boyle, Jane Heap, Ezra Pound, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Sarah Bernhardt, Apollinaire, Diego Rivera, Djuna Barnes, Max Jacob, Isidora Duncan have in common?

They all gathered in Paris between the first and third decade of the 20th century, the place where “everybody who was anybody” had to be. France, according to Stein, was “that other country that you need to be free in the other country not the country where you really belong…” Read the rest of this entry »

Wagner’s “Ring” Cycle Starting At the Met

December 4th, 2010

Review of part I, Rheingold — a cover story of Scene4 Magazine: “The Ring Machine”

http://www.scene4.com

http://www.scene4.com/1210/renatestendhal1210.html

Not Exactly Paradise

November 2nd, 2010

My review of San Francisco Opera’s Werther by Massenet compares the production with a classic: Peter Weigl’s film version of the opera with the great Brigitte Fassbaender and equally powerful Peter Dvorsky from 1986. Don’t miss the film clip at the end!

http://www.scene4.com/1110/renatestendhal1110.html

The Latest Lesbian Issue of TRIVIA

November 2nd, 2010

It may be the last. Editor Lise Weil is stepping down after her monumental commitment to the magazine that has been vanguard as much as a feminist classic. The last two issues on lesbian identity — from the seventies to now — are a breath of fresh air in our back-lash-polluted culture. I am lucky to be part of this last grand departure with an excerpt from the novel I just finished. Read the rest of this entry »

Invitation to a Brain-Jogging Salon

October 13th, 2010

For all everyone who didn’t happen upon my blog post a while ago: “Can a Writer’s Life Experience Earn a University Degree?” It’s important to me to share this knowledge. Why? Because it’s so important to the women who went into this program or are going through it right now: see She Writer Rosy Aronson (below), one of several UIL students (myself included) whose PhD dissertation became a published book.
Now, if you are in the SF Bay Area, I would like to invite you to a Salon afternoon at the beautiful Montclair Women’s Cultural Arts Club — Sunday Oct. 24, at 2 pm. The club is putting out the following invitation:
“Nurture your Mind. You’ve Earned a degree for your Life Experience. Now there is a way to validate that truth. Come to a Sunday afternoon Salon with UIL provost and reknowned writer Renate Stendhal, Ph.D., Sunday, October 24, at 2pm. Mingle, chat and enjoy healthy treats while you hear about the University of Integrative Learning. This university without walls wants you to tell your own story right at your own computer in your own home, with guidance and support. Learn how to honor and extract your unique experience from the context of your own lifelong learning and end up with a university degree to show for it. Free with advance reservation; $5 at the door.”
Montclair Women’s Cultural Arts Club, 1650 Mountain Blvd,.Oakland, CA. 94611 www.montclairartsclub.com Tel. 510-339-1832 Read the rest of this entry »

Cuban Ballet, a book by Octavio Roca

October 1st, 2010

True stories about the Grand Dame and tyrant of Cuban Ballet, Alicia Alonso, the company, and its famous exiles, among them the ballerina sisters Lorena and Lorna Feijoo.

http://www.scene4.com/1010/renatestendhal1010.html

Testimonies of Renate’s UIL Students

September 30th, 2010

Testimony of UIL Students

“I approached the UIL advanced degree program with that I thought was a healthy disrespect for conventional academia. At 62, with a successful career under my belt, I did not feel it was necessary to spend years studying dead men’s theories. What I could not have predicted was how embedded my need for conventional authoritative validation would be. I spent two semesters desgining a thesis that was framed by others’ ideas and opinions. UIL’s first gift to me, transmitted directly by my provost, Renate Stendhal, was that my experience was sufficient source material for my thesis and dissertation work. What she reiterated in a hundered different ways was that I didn’t need to go to the library, my LIFE was the library. I could not have had a more responsive and meticulous provost than Renate Stendhal. I had hoped she would hold me to as high a standard as I hold for myself, and was sometimes breathless at her exactitude. She is the effortless embodiment of UIL’s educational philosophy”. Margaret (Margie) Adam, Ph.D., integrative counselor, Berkeley. Read the rest of this entry »

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 55

September 24th, 2010

On our pilgrimage to the sites of Stein’s “mystery” novel, the impression of sadness, the all-pervasive dread of French country life deepened at the Hotel Pernollet. (Here, as the center of the world, on a postcard from the 80s.) Situated in the little town Belley, some 4 miles from Bilignin, the five-generation hotel had its heighday around 1930. Gertrude and Alice discovered it in the Guide des Gourmets and took to it. It did not matter that the owner, Mr. Pernollet, at first took Gertrude for a gypsy (with her flowing skirts and naked feet in sandals) and saw Alice as her maid. The gypsy and her maid had a good laugh about it. Read the rest of this entry »

Santa Fe Opera Season

September 4th, 2010

Read all about this summer’s season and a brilliant new version of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann: http://www.scene4.com/0910/renatestendhal0910.html

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 54

September 4th, 2010

Our sleuthing began 75 km east of Lyon on an empty country road, between rabbit cages and sad bistros. Whereas nowadays a plaque guides the pilgrims in the village of Bilignin, back then, when I translated Stein’s mystery story, you had to be a good detective to find the house behind its forbidding walls. We found ourselves “at the edge of radical uncertainty,” having to knock at the gate. It so happened that the same family who had owned and rented the house to Gertrude Stein from 1929 to 1943, was still living there. The doors magically opened to us. Read the rest of this entry »

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 53

August 27th, 2010

Translating Stein’s murder mystery Blood on the Dining-Room Floor was very much a case of transleaping. I had to leap into a language, German, that gives every noun, article and personal pronoun one of three possible genders: feminine, masculine, neuter. There is no genderless equivalent in German. So what was I to do with Stein’s “everybody”? Read the rest of this entry »

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 52

August 16th, 2010

After the marker of 5O Stein blogs — talking about Stein’s one and only writing block –- did I contract one myself? No, for me, too, writing went on, on another page. Finishing a novel, writing about opera. Stein was writing her detective story during that ominous summer in 1933, when success caught up with her. She was troubled by questions of identity (“I am I because my little dog knows me.”) Some part of her seemed unreachable, dead. It must have been soothing to mirror her inner troubles outside, in the provincial life around her. Lots of shady things right then are happening in her village and the nearby little town Belley with its proud hotel – adultery, betrayal, feuds over money. Read the rest of this entry »

A “Walküre” for the 21st Century

August 1st, 2010

Every now and then there is a new reason to fall in love with San Francisco. This time it’s the advancing project of a new San Francisco Opera Ring cycle. After the first part, Wagner’s “prologue” Das Rheingold in 2008, now the curtain went up on part two, Die Walküre, one of the three 4½ to 5-hour mammoths of the cycle that are to follow next summer when the entire Ring des Nibelungen will be performed in Bayreuth fashion, one whole cycle per week. Read more about the new “All-American” Ring directed by Francesca Zambello at

http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/jul-2008/html/renatestendhal0708.html

“Tanzträume” – a film about Pina Bausch’s “Kontakthof” danced by teenagers

July 2nd, 2010

A last filmed legacy of the great Pina Bausch shows her at work while she was still alive: Tanzträume: Jugendliche tanzen Kontakthof von Pina Bausch is based on Pina’s reprised masterpiece Kontakthof (Contact Zone) from 1978, this time danced by teenagers with no previous training in ballet or modern dance. The documentary by Anne Linsel and her camera man Rainer Hoffmann opened last March in Germany, after receiving enthusiastic reactions and rave reviews at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. The Yerba Buena Center of the Arts in San Francisco proudly offered a small series of older, well-known films on Pina Bausch in May, with the US premiere of Tanzträume as its peek.

Read the article and see an excerpt from the film at http://www.scene4.com/0710/renatestendhal0710.html

Read the rest of this entry »

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein# 48

June 20th, 2010
Writing lessons from Gertrude Stein.
Gleaning through my field of ALA (American Literature Association) notes, I found exciting snippets from a Stein panel that still hums through my mind. “Why Is Gertrude Stein So Important?” was the panel, dominated by two brilliant authors and academics, writer Marjorie Perloff (Stanford) and poet/writer Joan Retallack (Bard College), and what an inspiring question it was. Here, in Steinese non-sequitors, a few findings: Read the rest of this entry »

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 47

June 4th, 2010

“Why is Gertrude Stein So Important?” was the title of one panel at the American Literature Association last weekend, with an entire day of panels on Stein. I was invited to talk about her murder mystery “Blood on the Dining-Room Floor” which I had translated into German (“keine keiner. Ein Kriminalroman). You might be surprised — and Stein herself would have been surprised — that this was her maiden voyage into the ivory tour of the ALA. Yes, for the first time, Stein was “important” enough to get all those panels at the ALA. Read the rest of this entry »

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 46

May 28th, 2010

The Story of the Safety Pin. Gertrude was the guest of honor at the Diane Middlebrook Salon in San Francisco, this past Sunday, May 23rd, and what a ball she had! Another heroine pioneer of her time, Amelia Earhardt, shared the spotlight — together with her biographer, Susan Wels. The two revolutionaries were impressed by the elegance of this gathering, hosted by She Writer Marilyn Yalom.”Books and food, food and books — both excellent things,” Gertrude cheerfully quoted herself as she beheld the luscious chocolate cake, the big bowl of cherries, Sancerre wine and many other delicacies served to enliven the conversation. Read the rest of this entry »

A Book Like No Other: Linda Ellia’s “Notre Combat” (Our Struggle)

May 2nd, 2010

Read about the book exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco: French artist Linda Ellia shows “Notre Combat” (Our Struggle) — 450 pages of Hitler’s Mein Kampf deconstructed and reconstructed by artists and gathered into a new book. http://www.scene4.com/0510/renatestendhal0510.html

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 40

April 8th, 2010

Gertrude has had a meeting with the Zeitgeist. I had just posted # 39, the attempt of Proust, Joyce and Pound to Twitter (quite in vain, of course) whereas Stein revealed herself as the naturally born Twitterwit: “Toasted Susie is my icecream”. The same day, a message came flying by from Berlin and London: “”Why Twitter is Gertrude Stein in 2010″. Lo and behold. Read the rest of this entry »

Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 39

April 8th, 2010

What it would be like if Proust, Pound, Joyce and Stein had to be “authorpreneurs” and polish their FaceBook Fan pages and emit daily tweets?
Are there other writers who are sometimes overcome, as I am, by the merry absurdity of our post-modern writers’ lives?
Think about it. And then let’s boldly go where none of them has gone before!
Here’s James Joyce on Twitter:
“Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual int” Oops, he got cut off. Just when it got interesting.
How about Ezra Pound?
“It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let t” Darn, he got cut off too. Poor Pound. The best part went missing.
Should we even bother with Marcel Proust (for whom an entire page was often not enough to fit one sentence)? Okay Proust, give it a try:
“The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them” Yeah, that was predictable. Sorry, Proust. Try again.
Hi Gertrude Stein: how about a tweet today? (Could she do it? Would she do it? Gertie the perfect Twitterwit?)
“Toasted Susie is my icecream.”
Sure enough. A one-liner, the sexy sort. Why do something if it can be done.

San Francisco Ballet’s “The Little Mermaid”

April 3rd, 2010

Review at http://www.scene4.com/0410/renatestendhal0410.html

Happy birthday, Gertie!

February 8th, 2010

My blog continues at http://www.shewrites.com/profiles/blog/list?user=1fxhrwbaix6wi

She is turning 136 this year in her very own ageless way.
And here is the mythical birth as told in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas:
“Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. As I am an ardent californian and as she spent her youth there I have often begged her to be born in California but she has always remained firmly born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. Read the rest of this entry »

Fire and Ice: The Formidable new Carmen at the Met

February 2nd, 2010

Elina Garanca and Roberto Alagna in a new Met production, simulcast live in HD

http://www.scene4.com/0210/renatestendhal0210.html

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Suzanne Farrell Ballet at Cal Performances

December 1st, 2009

Read my report at: http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/dec-2009/1209/renatestendhal1209.html

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Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein # 15

November 20th, 2009

Rose tattoo109A rose is a rose by any other name… When I researched Stein photographs and texts for my photobiography I happened upon the man who created this amazing rose tattoo — an homage to Gertrude Stein. He turned out to be not only a tattoo artist but a writer, had worked with Kinsey on his sexual studies, and… been an intimate friend of Gertrude and Alice. Read the rest of this entry »

Gertrude Stein Blog: follow the link!

November 3rd, 2009

I am  relaunching my photobiography of Gertrude Stein with a blog on She Writes: “Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein”:

http://www.shewrites.com/profiles/blogs/why-do-something-if-it-can-be

“Who was Gertrude Stein? The social and artistic dominatrix of the lost generation? The literary founder of modernism? The sensual companion of Alice B. Toklas? A ‘dictator of art’ or an ‘infant prodigy’? Stein, whose freedom with the written word ‘liberated language from the nineteenth century,’ remains a heroine hard to grasp.
Now Renate Stendhal’s Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures (Algonquin) takes a good look at the slippery genius. After an astonishing, playful essay, the book opens into a revelatory combination of quotes, clips, and 360 photos of Stein and her wildly brilliant circle. The subtle minimalism of Stein’s cool face, repeating page to page like her own rhythmic sentences, brings a nuanced embodiment to our imcomplete sense of her. From a serious, chin-in-air profile of ‘Gertie’ at age three to a chin-in-hands portrait taken at age seventy-two, the woman is ‘a rose is a rose is a rose.’” ELLE Magazine


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Luc Bondy vs Zefirelli At The Met

November 2nd, 2009

Was the great Karita Mattila miscast in the role of Tosca?

Read the review  http://www.scene4.com/1109/renatestendhal-r1109.html

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Report from a Trip Home: A Discovery in Germany

November 1st, 2009

Stumbling Stones

Article at http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/nov-2009/1109/renatestendhal-i1109.html

Portrait of Sculptor Louise Bourgeois

September 1st, 2009

My portrait of the provocative artist has appeared in print, in the Arts and Culture section of Four Seasons Magazine, Issue 3, 2009, titled ”Spider Woman”.

http://magazine.fourseasons.com/articles/global/interest/arts_culture/spider_woman/My background article, “Influential 20th-Century Sculptors,” can be read at:

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Click on “Read more” to see the whole article on Louise Bourgeois.

Four Seasons Magazine is now presented on YouTube :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5z9sv1KG5k

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Homage to the late Pina Bausch

September 1st, 2009

My memories of the great creator of dance theater in Germany go back to my school days. I saw her still dancing in “The Green Table” by Kurt Joos. My article refers back to the first time Pina and the Wuppertaler Tanztheater appeared in California and created “Nur Du/ Only You”.

link: http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/sep-2009/0909/renatestendhal0909.html

2 photos by Gert Weigelt

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Culture Witness: Brave New Met

August 14th, 2009

Review of the beautiful Anna in Verdi’s “La Traviata” (staged by Marta Domingo)  at http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/aug-2009/html/renatestendhal0809.html. Is Anna Netrebko the new ultimate Violetta Verdy?

Article linkAnna Netrebko as Violetta Verdy, San Francisco Opera

Anna Netrebko as Violetta Verdy, San Francisco Opera

August 14th, 2009

At the Women’s Memorial Labyrinth (Wiesbaden, May 2006)Labyrinth Memorial Stone of artist Meret Oppenheim

Member of She Writes

August 1st, 2009

I am part of an exciting new site — www.shewrites.com — where women writers gather and exchange ideas, news, skills. I joined a number of discussion groups, created a new one: “Diary to Memoir to Fiction”, and started my first blog (see under Gertrude Stein, “Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein”, November 2009).

http://shewrites.com

Culture Witness: Change at the Helm of Cal Performances

June 1st, 2009

Full Interview with Robert Cole who retires from his spectacular stewardship of over 20 years.

http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/jul-2009/html/renatestendhal0709.html

Robert Cole, conductor for Mark Morris and The Hard Nut, at Cal Performances

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Culture Witness: Brave New Met: Brilliance and Kitsch

June 1st, 2009

June 1, 2009

Review “Brave New Met: Brilliance and Kitsch”

Two Divas, Anna Netrebko and Renée Fleming — worlds apart.

Direct link: http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/jun-2009/html/renatestendhal0609.htm

Lucia and the Specter (Production Mary Zimmerman

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Essential to Life: Robert Cole’s 23 Years at Cal Performances

May 1st, 2009

Essential to Life: Robert Cole reflects on 23 years at the helm of Cal Performances

Article in California Magazine, May-June Link: http://alumni.berkeley.edu/news/california-magazine/may-june-2009-go-bare/essential-life

Robert Cole and his wife Susan Muscarella at Zellerbach Hall

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Culture Witness: Swan Lake/ Swan Rock in SF

April 1st, 2009

Review of San Francisco Ballet’s new “Swan Lake” with Cuban superstar Lorena Feijoo.

Article Link: http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/apr-2009/html/renatestendhal-b0409.html

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Lorena Feijoo rehearsing Swan Lake with choreographer Helgi Tomasson

Culture Witness: Diva Scale

April 1st, 2009

“Much Ado About Diva Scale: San Francisco Ballet’s New Season” www.scene4.com

http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/apr-2009/html/renatestendhal-a0409.html

Lorena Feijoo and Quinn Wharton in “Ibsen’s House”

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Culture Witness: Opera and Popcorn

November 1st, 2008

“Opera and Popcorn” — the new HD Live at the Met simulcast operas at a cinema near you.

Review of the spectacular “Salome” of Karita Mattila

Link: http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/nov-2008/html/renatestendhal1108.html

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The Cuban Ballet Revolution and Its Stars — Lorena Feijoo and Jose Manuel Carreno

September 1st, 2008

“What Would We Do Without Them? The Cuban Dance Revolution and its  Stars Lorena Feijoo and Jose Manuel Carreño.”

A portrait of two of the major ballet dancers trained in Cuba and now starring in the West, in the online magazine The World & I, Sept. 1, 2008.

Link: http://www.worldandi.com

Culture Witness: Frida Kahlo at SF MOMA

August 1st, 2008

A great retrospective with many photographs of Frida

Link: http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/jul-2008/html/renatestendhal0708.html

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Culture Witness: Shen Wei Dance Arts

July 1st, 2008

Puzzles and Wonders: Sacre du Printemps and Near the Terrace, at Cal Performances

Link:http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/may-2007/html/infocus.html

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Cuban Ballerina Sisters Lorena and Lorna Feijoo

July 1st, 2008

I talked to both ballet stars and wrote their portrait. The cover story in Four Seasons Magazine, Issue 2, 2008, can only be read in print.

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Paris – Plus Ça Change

May 1st, 2008

May 2008  –  Springtime in Paris: Cafés and Arts

Link: http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/may-2008/html/renatestendhal0508.html

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Culture Witness: Pina Bausch in Berkeley Again

December 1st, 2007

Review of her piece Ten Chi, created in Japan:

http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/dec-2007/html/renatestendhal1207.htmlBausch04cr

Commonwealth Club, San Francisco

October 3rd, 2007

“Gertrude and Alice – The Centennial of a Controversial Relationship”. Renate Stendhal interviewed by Cynthia Lee Katona, author of Book Savvy, a handbook for students and lovers of literature.

The Mechanics’ Institute, San Francisco

September 9th, 2007

Charmed Circle Tea Readings GERTRUDE AND ALICE: 100 YEARS, 100 ROSES, celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Gertrude Stein meeting Alice B. Toklas.

Charmed Circle performance at Gertrude’s salon…  charmed-circle-sept9-20072

Dallas Museum of Art,

August 2nd, 2007

“The Société Anonyme Modernism for America”. Panel discussion “Icons of Collecting : Powerful Women and Modern Art” (Katherine Dreier, Hilla von Rebay and Gertrude Stein.)

Paintings

Der Rosenkavalier at San Francisco Opera, May 2007

August 1st, 2007

Boy Played by Girl Dresses Up as Girl to Get Girl

Link:http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/aug-2007/html/renatestendhal0807.html

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James C. Hormel Gay & Lesbian Center – San Francisco Public Library

July 7th, 2007

“Did Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Have Sex? A Celebration of 100 Years of An Unusual Relationship”

Vu and Déjà Vu: William Forsythe with “Artifact Suite”

April 1st, 2007

“Artifact Suite” and “Three Atmospheric Studies” at Cal Performances, Berkeley

http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/apr-2007/html/renatestendhal0407.html

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Betty’s List Book Club

March 21st, 2007

Presentation on Gertrude Stein at the Cafe Duboce Park, San Francisco.

Shamanic Swan Lake by Matthew Bourne

May 23rd, 2006

The revolutionary all-male Swan Lake from England, revisited.

http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/may-2006/html/stendhalmay06.html

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Women’s Memorial Labyrinth

May 14th, 2006

Wiesbaden, Germany. Sponsoring and setting a memorial stone for Gertrude Stein, inscripted “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”  Links:

http://www.frauen-gedenk-labyrinth.de/

Labyrinth in front of the Frankfurt Opera

The Labyrinth of 2000 Women

May 6th, 2006

Report from the 20-year anniversary of the Women’s Memorial Labyrinth. The Celebratory Congress for the History of Eminent Women took place in Wiesbaden. I dedicated a memorial stone for Gertrude Stein and performed, together with Maj Skadegaard, the 25-year anniversary of our Multimedia Show “In the Beginning…of the End”.

http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/jul-2006/html/stendhaljul06.html

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Book Tour in Germany

May 1st, 2006

With the German edition of True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationships: Die Farben der Lust: Sex in lesbischen Liebesbeziehungen (Krug & Schadenberg, Berlin). See Book Page.

Jeanne Stark-Iochmans: Timeless Clarity

March 1st, 2006

Portrait of the Belgian pianist, cover story

Link: http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/mar-2006/html

Kent  Nagano, Olivier  Messiaen, Jeanne  Stark-Iochmans,  Yvonne Loriod

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Out at the Library

July 26th, 2005

Panel on “Lesbian Publishers. A Historical Perspective and A Current View” with Carol Seajay, Barbara Grier, Frederique Delacoste, Joan Pinkvoss and Renate Stendhal. Eureka Valley/ Harvey Milk Memorial Branch Library, July 26, 2005.

Ballet and Sex: Joan Acocella Lectures in Berkeley

April 1st, 2005

Reflections on the (not so hidden) erotic subtext of ballet.

http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/apr-2005/html/stendhalapr05.html

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“Bad Education” by Pedro Almodóvar

February 1st, 2005

Reflections in two parts:

Part I: Mala Educación

http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/feb-2005/html/stendhalfeb05.html

Part II: Embracing the Crocodile: Second Thoughts about “Bad Education”

http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/mar-2005/html/stendhalmar05.html

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Nutcracker: Mark Morris versus Matthew Bourne

January 1st, 2005

From the “Hard Nut” to a sugary “Nutcracker”

http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/jan-2005/html/stendhaljan05.html

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Culture Witness: Robert Wilson’s Black Rider

October 1st, 2004

Marianne Faithful as the Devil in Wilson’s  Black Rider, in tour in San Francisco

Link:http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/oct-2004/html/stendhal-wilsonoct2004.html

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