imomus | Your past is our future

Your past is our future

On March 13th, 1935, Bertolt Brecht travelled from Copenhagen (where he was hiding from the Nazis) to Moscow. Between March 23rd and 28th Mei Lanfang, a Beijing Opera dan (an actor specialised in feminine roles), was playing a series of shows at the Moscow Concert Hall, singing, acting and dancing representations of well-known beauties: "the righteous, quick-witted, and rebellious Zhao Yanrong, the miserable and self-pitying court lady Yang Yuhuan, the kind-hearted, constant and self-sacrificing Yu Ji". Brecht was transformed by what he saw, and, thanks to the impact of his acting on Brecht's thinking about theatre, Lanfang changed Western theatre.

"In the physically grubby Moscow theaters of the twenties and early thirties," writes John Fuegi in Brecht and Company, "Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, and Tairov rubbed shoulders with Mei la-Fan from China, Piscator, Gordon Craig from England, French writer André Malraux, and a host of Americans including Joseph Losey, Hallie Flanagan, Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Stella Adler -- all visibly dazzled by what they saw and heard." On this trip Brecht also met film director Eisenstein -- master of epic non-naturalism and what Brecht would later call the "quotable gesture" -- and the literary critic Viktor Shklovsky, who framed the concept of ostranenia, or making-strange. These encounters, made in the still-progressive Soviet Union, would prove crucial turning points not just for Brecht but for art in the West. It was the moment when two collective cultures (communism and traditional Chinese culture) impacted on Western individualism -- apparently the final state of human history, the convergent outcome of all modernity -- and became its future.

To give you a brief, silent impression of what this decisive encounter must have been like, here's the film Eisenstein shot of Lanfang in 1935:

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And here's a much later film of Lanfang playing a female role in Peony Pavilion, in colour and with sound:

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What struck Brecht is probably also what strikes us today: the undisguised artifice of the acting. It's not just that this is a man playing a woman, or that the vocal mannerisms sound so strange to our ears. It's not just the fact that Mei Lanfang could become a woman whether or not he was transformed by elaborate makeup and costumes, just by changing his movements. There were also different theatrical conventions to absorb -- the fact that instead of getting swept towards identification, tears, catharsis, sorrow and pity (as Aristotle put it), the audience at the Beijing Opera will interrupt even the saddest moments to shout the actor's name and remind everyone that it's a performance, or that the whole house stays lit (rather than plunging "some in darkness, the others light", as Brecht put it in The Threepenny Opera), or that Beijing Opera, like kabuki, consists not of unified plots building to a climax, but a series of episodes which can be chopped up and presented on their own.

Above all, there was the absence of the fourth wall illusion, the actors' constant awareness of the audience, the audience's awareness of the play, visible stagehands, the communication of emotion through the structure of movement, the domination of convention over innovation and collectivity over individuality.

When Brecht got back to Europe he combined the revelations he'd experienced watching Lanfang with ideas of estrangment he'd gleaned from Shklovsky. He wrote an essay entitled "Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst”; Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting. Published in the winter of 1936 in the London review Life and Letters, it was the first appearance of the famous Brechtian "alienation effect", and it came out of the “strangeness” (Befremdung) Brecht felt as he watched Lanfang in Moscow.

Of course, it's always possible that what was "defamiliarization" for Brecht was very familiar indeed to the Chinese. "Was it ethnocentric for Brecht to assume that the feeling of strangeness he experienced watching Mei Lanfang was intended by Mei?" asks Douglas Robinson in The Spatiotemporal Dialectic of Estrangement. "Can one talk about the Verfremsdungeffkt at all without generalizing from audience response to artist intention, or from artist intention to audience response?"

Brecht was certainly using the Chinese theatre as a stick to beat lazy Western actors and audiences with -- and therefore being "ethnocentric" in the way the Zen cooking in the film How to Cook Your Life is; like chef Edward Espe Brown, Brecht had work to do tackling the ills of the West, and Chinese theatre -- seen through the refracting prism of Russian Formalism -- was a useful alternative world.

"Only those familiar with - or who have in mind - the typical, superficial creations of Western actors," Brecht wrote, "who create their characters from lots of tiny nervous traits of little significance, more or less private in origin and devoid of any typical quality, will find it impossible to imagine that modifications in gestures can inspire fundamental innovations in the process of creating a character. The Chinese show not only the behaviour of people, but also the behaviour of the actors. They show how the actors, in their manner, perform the gestures of the people. For the actors translate the language of daily life into their own language. Watching a Chinese actor, one sees no fewer than three people simultaneously: one presenting and two being presented."

But, as Georges Banu points out, the Lanfang performance was only the flashpoint for formalist-realist arguments the West -- and Russia -- were already debating. Brecht later said that "the new German theatre developed the technique of distanciation in complete independence, without submitting in the least to the influence of Asian dramatic art". Meanwhile, in Moscow the progressive theatrical audience secretly saw Lanfang's style as a triumph for the formalist ideas of the early Soviet Union and a defeat for the socialist realism school already beginning to win favour under Stalin.

"Mei Lanfang arrived with his opera troupe in Moscow in March, 1935, at a critical moment for Soviet art and theater," writes Haun Saussy in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture review, "the beginnings of the imposition of an orthodoxy of "socialist realism" and the condemnation of such avant-garde movements as Formalism and Futurism. The reactions of the Soviet theater intelligentsia to Mei's performances, recorded at the time, show that their interpretation of Chinese theater made of it a covert means of defending such Formalist ideas as "defamiliarization" and the autonomy of art. Bertolt Brecht's theory of the "alienation-effect" in performance, developed at this moment, draws on both Mei's example and the Formalist precedent."

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"The Russian interpretation of Mei as a Formalist artist--or at least as Formalism's happiest example--pairs strangely with the critique of classical Chinese theater in China some two decades before Mei's voyage to Moscow. That critique had condemned the classical theater as a relic of an earlier stage of literary evolution. Classical theater was branded as being, among other sins, "formalist," that is, of failing to imitate prosaic reality as a proper modern genre of art should. The very techniques that so impressed Russian audiences by their non-representational modernity had been ridiculed by Chinese modernists for their failure to resemble real life."

Saussy concludes that we need to define what we mean by "modernity" -- a question that comes up often here on Click Opera too, especially when the West's avant garde has more in common with other cultures' antiquity than their modernity. The idea that the future of the West might be the past of the East still freaks us out as much as it excited Brecht back in 1935 in Moscow.

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But Momus, your relativism and your progressivism are hopelessly at odds here: if it's not okay to say that some cultures are "ahead" of others, how can you possibly say that Brecht turned China's past into the West's future?

I mean, I understand why you want to refute the idea of a universal cultural convergence towards Westernisation-as-modernity, individualism-as-modernity, and so on. It's pretty ironic that Hollywood has more in common with Stalin's aesthetics than Brecht's! We need Lanfang now as much as we did in 1935. But is it just the fact that Brecht's aesthetics have largely failed (just as communism has largely failed, no matter how necessary inequality still makes it), and the fact that you love paradox so much, that makes you break your own rules and say that one culture might be "ahead" of another in the sense that the West's future might be the East's past?

When it comes to allowing the underdog things you don't allow the top dog, you're a sneaky old bugger!

The fine arts (in the Western tradition, post-Renaissance) have always been about innovation, and innovation (in the West) always already comes from the outside, from the abject Other.

The question now is where is the outside when Capitalism is so proficient at appropriating everything ancient, foreign, outside, abject, other, or present?

Also, you are in agreement with a very Western notion of finding and aligning yourself with the outside and with the Other, in order to move past the droll and destructive hegemony of larger culture. I do it too, but it is a Western tradition, and one I'm not sure how to circumvent (or even if I want to circumvent) and one I don't see you acknowledging.

BTW, off topic, but I've been talking to all my Japanese friends and they all agree that they don't have a word for 'flirting.' Of course, once the concept and definition is described, they admit that they do it, but that there is no word for it. Could you ask your friends and find out if they agree?

Hisae seems to agree that there's no one word for flirting in Japanese:

"In Japanese it's very difficult to translate. You could use katakana "flirto" (ie the English word), but I don't think a lot of people would understand. Maybe some young people would know. There was a film called Flirt by Hal Hartley, that was just translated by "Flirto". When I use the idea in Japanese to Japanese people, that's the word I would use."

"I don't think Japanese would use in one word, they would have to describe. It would depend on context. And it's different for women and for men. For a man flirting with a woman... it depends on the context. If you just want to describe "This person is very flirtatious", you have to use a different description for each person. If you are flirtatious and if another man is flirtatious, I'd have to use a different phrase for each of you."

"Some words you could use: loving women could be onnazuki or onnattarashi. For men, that would be otokozuki or otokottarashi. Or maybe even yarichin (for men) or yariman (for women). That's more like a playa, literally it means "to do" and "chin" for o chimpo (penis). So it means promiscuous."

"Perhaps the best one is ichaicha suru or ichasuku, which means something very similar to "flirt"."

where is the outside when Capitalism is so proficient at appropriating everything ancient, foreign, outside, abject, other, or present?

I think this legendary ability of capitalism to appropriate everything outside itself is vastly overstated. Capitalism is a Midas --everything it touches turns to gold, and therefore all it touches, in the end, is gold. Or, as McLuhan said, the medium is the message: by the time capitalism becomes the medium for something, its message is... capitalism.

Doesn't freak me out. Obviously there are some aspects of the history of Eastern countries that are highly desirable, but if we're looking at the best parts of those cultures, such as the Beijing Opera, then that's exacly where I want us to be heading in the future. Doesn't freak me out at all.

I meant 'highly undesirable', but either way.

The funny thing is that Stanislavski and Lee Strasberg were there in Moscow in 1935 too, and saw Lanfang too, and yet drew completely different conclusions about acting from the experience. The Method School which now dominates Hollywood might have pleased Stalin (as long as there was ideological method in the Method madness), but it would have pleased those guys more. Poor Brecht and Eisenstein continue to influence only a small minority. But it may be that they'll prevail, for three reasons:

1. China will dominate the world soon, perhaps.
2. People will get bored with realism.
3. "Realism" will become so mannered and traditional that it will no longer resemble real life at all.
4. The future is so long that everything will occur in it.
5. The future imagined by the avant garde is always only ever "now". To say it's "then" -- in the real future -- is just a figure of speech. So nobody is really saying the West's future is the East's past.
6. When it comes to culture, what "prevails" is often what loses in the rest of culture (just as what exports is often reviled in the homeland it's supposed to represent). Therefore, "prevailing" happens only in the masochistic early Christian sense of "we'll make them kill us, and gain power through guilt... we'll win by losing".

Oops, that's six reasons! When I promise three reasons I always think of six. That's because I'm a collectivist!

This is obviously a cue for a version of the Spanish Inquisition sketch.

No one expexts the Iranian inquisition! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EMmUAFy4jE)

How synchronous - a Primal Scream (rugged individualism) clip was linked in the related videos list.

Have to say you're right. I wasn't expecting that.

I'm surprised realism has lasted this long. I remember Thomas Ligotti saying in an interview that most people want a reading experience very much like a film, where they can forget that they're reading, and don't want to be reminded of the presence of the author at any point. This seems to be true (certainly in English-speaking countries), but I find it hard to sympathise with such a view for very long. I think realism (which has nothing to do with the realism of life as it's experienced, anyway) may also be behind the (I think) misguided fascination with large budgets in film-making, and the concomitent derision immediately poured on anything with a small budget, in which the fact of the illusion of cinema has not been wiped entirely away, so that viewers are obliged to co-operate by using their imaginations.

I was talking to someone recently who said that great art is art where you "can't see the strings". But I do want to see the strings. I suppose 'showing the strings' may sometimes be an excuse for poor craftsmanship or something, but in many ways I find art more permeable if not shrink-wrapped in the lie that it's not a lie. If that makes sense.

Some general thoughts on why realism isn't realistic: I think there's a bit in one of Dennis Potter's plays (Lipstick on Your Collar perhaps) where one of the characters is deriding musicals because 'life's not like that', the world doesn't just suddenly burst into song, but the person he's talking to says something like, "But can't you sometimes hear the world bursting into song in your head?"

That's why I find Six Feet Under (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CewNhrRhOtM&feature=related) to be one of the most realistic television series ever made - because it shows the interiority of the characters at the same time as the the soap opera exteriority. Not that that's a good example of Brechtian, (or Bactrian)...

But if a person responds to art, I don't see how it can be criticised as 'unrealistic' anyway, as if there's nothing real about that response.

I like number four. All things begin and end in eternity.

That wasn't an especially representative clip from Six Feet Under, but I can't find any that really illustrate what I meant.

We get into some "borrowed kettle (http://www.versobooks.com/books/tuvwxyz/xyz-titles/zizek_iraq.shtml)" type reasoning when we justify non-realism as a kind of realism!

Yes, perhaps. I suppose, to simplify what I was saying, the important thing to any work of art for me, naturally, is my response. I don't find myself responding to intended realism as if it is actually more realistic much of the time. That kind of response doesn't seem to depend on the kind of factors that some might suppose it should - photographic attention to detail, documentary approach and so on. Well, not to say that these are irrelevant, but there are many other factors that also come into play.

In the end, I don't really care whether something is called realistic or not, as long as I find myself responding to it, but it is irritating when a particular kind of realism is put forward as the only viable way to make art.

I'm a theatre graduate student specializing in Asian forms of performance (specialty is Kyogen, Bali, Noh, and Butoh), so I feel I can speak with some confidence.

I think that the West has always assumed that everything there is to be imagined and performed, has been already. When Brecht or Artaud encountered Asian forms of theatre, it blew their minds.

In the present time, I think we in the West still feel, especially in this day of technology and YouTube, that nothing radically new can be seen. Of course, this is untrue. We need to look harder, and be more creative.

Another interesting West / East difference is with butoh dance. When Westerners watch good butoh, they tend to be moved by the acute sense of authenticity in the performer, be it grotesque butoh or the more elegant variety. Therefore, when Westerners actually go study butoh in Japan, they are usually blown away and initially repelled by the extremely strict kata, or set movement patterns that go hand in hand with the more abstract psychological work. The point being that many Westerners witness butoh as "self-actualization," while Japanese students see it more as a strict body / mind technique that is ultimately performance oriented. Neither attitude is "correct," and Butoh has become passé anyway, but the attitude difference is most notable on the stage.

Antonin Artaud was famously influenced in his thought by Balinese Dance Theatre, being influenced enough to write:

"What is curious about these gestures...these dances of animated manikins, is this: that through the labyrinth of their gestures, attitudes, and sudden cries, though the gyrations and and turns which leave no portion of the stage space unutilized, the sense of a new physical language, based upon signs and no longer words, is liberated."
(and so forth)

Jinju ("Chinese Opera") is interesting in that in that before the 20th century, much of the acting style was seen as "realism" and not nearly as codified as Noh or Kabuki (although taught disciple to disciple, and therefore gradually hardened).

Thanks for that!

Hisae and I were watching a DVD of a kabuki play last night, Fujimusume Yasuna Sagimusume, and I asked her whether its sounds and acting struck her as strange. Not strange at all, she said; she'd been brought up seeing this stuff often on TV. I told her that the first time I heard these vocal whoops and glides and woodblock taps, I thought it was the weirdest thing I'd ever heard.

Although we were looking at the same thing, projected up there on the wall, it was really a totally different experience for each of us. Because, although it's got more familiar to me over the years, kabuki is always going to feel strange, and that's always going to be one of the reasons I like it.

Next time you're in Tokyo or Osaka, please go see some Taishu Engeki (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE1DA143CF936A25752C1A961948260), what some call contemporary Kabuki.

Oh, I've seen that stuff. Hisae's family house in Osaka is near Shinsekai, where they have a 500 yen pop kabuki house next to a porn cinema!

I don't know how long this program has been on air but it is no wonder that children in Japan don't feel the sounds that accompany Noh or Kabuki strange.
I love the way they use these traditional sources to teach language.

I love butoh. A few friends have studied it, and a few friends are serious about it.

It's seems to me that Butoh, Bali, Noh and Kyogen are now frimly entrenched in the Western "avant-garde," even if they're not totally assimilated and incorporated. But what have you seen that's new?

I think one of the great things about the internet is finding people to point to things and say, "this is new," or "this is different." It's one of the things I like about Momus, actually.

BTW, I was bummed that I missed the recent Taishu Engeki performance. I've missed a bunch of stuff like that lately.

I was very impressed by the Wooster Group's kabuki-ization of The Emperor Jones. Just the way they collided that with blackface, which would otherwise have been very provocative.

Agreed!

I don't really think butoh should become passe, but I think it might go the direction of Dadaism, Futurism, and those other movements.

I think any performance that can attain the level of intensity that marks Hijikata or Maro Akaji's work, should be our aspiration, butoh or not. The weakest part about much butoh nowadays is the lack of body training and control, and the pervasive "authentic movement" (http://www.authenticmovement-usa.com/) with body paint on.

I think Shen Wei Dance Arts (shenweidancearts.org/) has to be one of the more exiting companies in contemporary performance. Something about theatre that respects that we don't have the attention spans of a hyperactive puppy.

Balinese theatre, Noh, Kyogen, and Butoh might be pretty familiar to most Western theatre artists, but I think the lessons about body training are lost on most Western trained actors. Maybe this explains the popularity of the Suzuki Training (http://www.csusm.edu/theater/suzuki.html).

I don't know anything about Lanfang but I am fascinated by this naturalist/anti-naturalist dialectic that has been at the heart of narrative and representation in the West since the Enlightenment and the birth of the novel.

I'm not sure about positing 1935 as the turning point in the Soviet Union from progressive modernistic artistic culture to socialist realism. Surely socialist realism had already triumphed several years before. By then, Eisenstein might have been a hero in the West but he was roundly criticised at home and forced to make public self-criticisms as early as the late 20s.

Yes, I think you're right about that -- the tide had been turning for a few years already. Brecht had to tread carefully -- as he always did. Treading carefully through ideological minefields, in fact, became his speciality, whether it was in East Germany or Hollywood.

China's future is Guatemala's past.

One question that fascinates me and which I feel this discussion provokes, concerns the occasions when "The East" gazes at "The West".

Are there any similar or equivalent feelings of "exoticism" and "strangeness" in equivalent examples of Western life, when viewed through Eastern eyes?

Do certain Eastern eyes view, say, morris dancing with strange feelings of awe and exoticism?

How does the allure of The West compare with the allure of The East?

I've just asked Kyoka and Hisae, and they say that when they were young anywhere outside Japan was exotic, but now it has to be somewhere like Turkey or Greece to feel really different. Germany or Britain is semi-domestic (especially if you're in a ramen bar reading a magazine about sumo, as we are now).

is the japanese magazines situation that tragic in berlin ??
i think jean snow was talking about selling magazines on his site, maybe you could be middleman and get at least the ramen shop(s) to order some and help jean with the sales too.

Well, let me put it this way, I got terribly excited when I saw there was a copy of Paper Sky in Cocolo Ramen tonight. Then I looked at the date: 2003. So yes, it is that tragic. And what I've noticed is that Japanese businesses here -- Smart Deli, Cocolo, Goko, Sasaya -- just want one or two Japanese mags lying around for decoration. They don't care if they're five years out of date, and they don't expect regular customers to expect them to be renewed.

They did have the March 2008 edition of IDEA in ProQM, though. Great if you have €38 to spare.

road trip + white widow + mysteriopus podcast = psuedo-nibbana

iluvumomu

1. If kabuki is officially 'not strange', then a Chuck Norris film becomes 'very strange'.
2. Therefore Chuck Norris DVDs must feature in the 'arthouse' section of a Beijing rental store.
3. If the East represents a future model the West has to adopt, culture could be required to follow suit.
4. In the future, tourists will flock to abandoned trailers full of Chuck Norris DVDs and declare them heritage parks and shrines of otherness. "People were so resilient then, to fantasise their aggression without consequences!"
5. Breakaway groups of hipsters will hate the 'suddenly the unicorn appeared' school of imaginative thought, while the populace becomes too Lanfang feminine to build hospitals and repair roads.
6. In the May 2968 riots, Norris-chan students will take to crumbling streets in protest, chanting "Rambo Not Rimbaud", while a kabuki police force hide behind fans, too shy to arrest anyone.

I like this -- you should post more, whoever you are!

myopicmomu
ah dor ay momu

toward the sea.
The brown and green Nile rolls slowly
Like the Niagara’s welling descent.
Tractors stood on the green banks of the Loire
Near where it joined the Cher.
The St. Lawrence prods among the black stones
And mud. But the Arno is all stones.
Wind ruffles the Hudson’s
Surface. The Irawaddy is overflowing.
But the yellowish, gray Tiber
is contained within steep banks. The Isar
Flows too fast to swim in in, the Jordan’s water
Courses over the flat land. The Allegheny and its boats
Were dark blue. The Moskowa is
Gray boats. The Amstel flows slowly.

-sahfaller

ashes to ashbery
momustomomus
weknowmajorTom Omus
co mom us
co i tus

don't mean to rain on the proverbial parade, but Brecht had already dabbled in much of what you're talking about in the early thirties (see for instance Die Massnahme, which will be playing in Berlin soon) and, depending on how you read Mann ist Mann, even as early as 28 (and again depending on how you read Baal, even earlier). Though it's correct that a lot of the Verfremdungseffekt had Eastern roots (either Russian or Japanese or Chinese; and remember, East of Brecht), we also have to understand the intellectual and cultural climate of the day and admit that it was a bit of a fad during the twenties to take stuff from 'the Orientals' (see Artaud's obsession with Balinese dancing and Picasso straight up stealing folk art; or even in music it was happening much earlier blah blah blah). I haven't spent time in non-western cultures so I can't speak from first hand experience -I can't say whether Asia is more advanced or not, whatever that's even supposed to mean. But it seems to me that with every project if one wants to negate one's contemporaneous environment, one will normally be at a bit of a loss as to where the project should take off from -after all, we are formed and shaped by our experiences, nothing is created in a void. thus, one looks at other cultures and other persons with ideas. brecht would do this quite blatantly with the threepenny opera (which was actually translated by one of his collaborators and not him, thus suggesting one of Brecht's most famous works was actually plagiarized! something we're seeing a lot right now in the art scene with reënactments etc etc). i think you find such cross-pollination in the West and then even in places like Turkey -read Orhan Pamuk's "Istanbul" for instance or much of the writing from Dostoevsky. Maybe you'll still want to call that the West. I think Orhan Pamuk would hedge away from this one and "Istanbul" is a testament to that.
Sorry for the pedantic attitude but I spent a lot of time doing research on Brecht and anyway, it's a strange happenstance that you wrote about Brecht on the very day, well, anyway...
I don't think it's bad one way or another. I quite like it when things work in a symbiotic relationship. The only thing that's annoying -and I'm a victim of this too- is the (western?) obsession that things have to be new and fresh and and and. There's plenty to learn anywhere you look. Even your navel.

-Shane (Nathan's roommate, who is soon coming back to Berlin and should you wish, will be going to see die Massnahme at the beginning of April...)

Brecht (like me, ha!) was an orientalist from a very early age. For instance, a lot of his early poems and songs are adaptations of Waley's collection of Chinese poetry. And of course there'd been a big wave of orientalism in the 1890s, affecting Toulouse Lautrec, Valloton, Debussy, the Yellowbook people, Yeats, and countless others. But this Lanfang show is a nicely isolated crossover point between Asia and European theatre, and Brecht's enduring influence -- his founding of a whole new school of aesthetics, based partly on Asian theatre -- makes it an interesting place to go.

The whole "Brecht as plagiarist" meme is so boring. It's John Fuegi's big narrative in "Brecht and Company", and John Carey picked up on it too. The kind of people who see dialectical thinking as "hypocrisy" tend also to see collective writing as "plagiarism". They also tend to have a very different political stance from Brecht. They're all about individualism and property. They use Brecht's collectivism / theft as a stick to beat him with, but just end up sounding petty and, well, bourgeois. But I don't mind it being bracketed with appropriationism and reenactments and sampling and so on, although it's a bit anachronistic.

Seeing Die Massnahme with Nathan would be good!

collective writing is fine and even a great thing as long as you give credit where credit is due. and he often didn't. that was my point.

i have no problem with his working methods but only how he chose to represent them and himself. i think his whole collective technique was amazing, but why did he often shy away from admitting he worked collectively -only willing to admit this when it would get him out of trouble? Why use a bourgeois edifice -i.e. the great author in charge of it all- if he wanted to critique it (there are ways to get around this commentary, I know)? you even see this in the massnahme. only his name and eisler's grace the page but clearly he was working with other people on it. Again: why not give credit where credit is due? Maybe that's petty and bourgeois of me. Maybe he was using his name as some collective name but I doubt that -see some of his poems when he was in L.A. for instance. But it seems that if this is his/your argument I wonder why he would then ban plays that weren't done in the way he (and very clearly, only he wanted this) wanted them to be done? That is, where did the collective spirit go? Why can't we learn from Brecht the way Brecht did from others? This smells of ego if you ask me and for all of Brecht's soapboxing, you find a lot of egotism in his letters -and the poem in L.A. where he's pissed that no one knows his name, that no one knows who he, Bertolt Brecht!, is.
I'm just wary of the ideas we have of intellectuals and the historical reality. It makes me nervous when people start saying what such and such stood for when, well, it didn't always work out that neatly or clearly; there are examples, but why bother. There are a lot of contradictions and that's fine, we're all very complicated.
I think Heiner Müller captured a lot of the problems with Brecht much like Hume did with Berkeley. Wanting to believe but no longer able to. It's like that Simpsons episode when Lisa goes on the date with Ralph and then Bart watches the tape saying 'you can actually see the moment when his heart breaks...'

I think too it's an interesting place to go, but it seemed to me you were misrepresenting what happened: that this event changed him over to the ways of 'Oriental.' I quote: "Brecht was transformed by what he saw, and, thanks to the impact of his acting on Brecht's thinking about theatre, Lanfang changed Western theatre." Or again: "When Brecht got back to Europe he combined the revelations he'd experienced watching Lanfang with ideas of estrangment he'd gleaned from Shklovsky."
Now that there seems to be anachronistic.
Later the post changes it's point of view. I was just bringing this to the fore. Again, apologize for being pedantic.

I think we basically agree but I could be wrong.

I will now disappear and leave you to yours.
i'll be at the april 4th showing. nathan will be out of the country still. maybe i'll see you there

When I speak to you
Coldly and impersonally
Using the driest words
(I seemingly fail to recognise you
In your particular nature and difficulty)

I speak to you merely
Like reality itself
(Sober, not to be bribed by your particular nature
Tired of your difficulty)
Which in my view you seem not to recognise

So why didn't Brecht sign this poem "Reality"? Perhaps because "Brecht" is a more modest signature than "Reality".

"This jumble [a corner in suburban Los Angeles] is both comic and tragic at the same time. It subsumes any shred of ego that an architect might be said to possess. It would be a joke to claim that all of this could be identified as design. It would also be a crime against the authorship of society as a whole, because this authorship, in all of its moods and variations, is bound to remain anonymous."

Heinz Emigholz, Schindler's Houses

funny, no mention of yeats, fellanosa or even pound's interest in asian theatre here.

yes, the future of the west is the past of the east. and the future of the east
is the past of the west (industrialization, pollution, etc).

I did actually mention Yeats in the comments, if you scroll up!

sorry, couldn't be arsed to read all the comments. was talking about the original post.

there's a rapper from Houston named Magno, or Magnificent for long.
He's very clever with a simile.
Y'all should do a joint.

Also-- chopped & screwed remixes are the HOTTEST THING.
why not have some of your hits "screwed" by Mike "5,000" Watts?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Your past is our future

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Nihongo de asobo

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May 2968

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magno