Speaking of Weimar

This version still holds up for me as I've been transferring my beloved 1976 LP to MP3, remembering when I saw it live and had a big crush on Raul Julia that went back to his Sesame Street and Two Gentlemen of Verona days. And in his hand, Nine wasn't that bad.


And speaking of Gisela May, here she is in 1981, eight years before the Berlin Wall fell in the DDR (a.k.a. East Germany) proving that the DDR wasn't all drab Stalinesque folk songs. At least her chorus boys were wearing red.

Winter Light, Winter Dark

There is something about early February that can always be tricky, especially if you live in northern California. We don't have a real winter here, but we have the rainy season. It doesn't get cold here (some idiots here call 45 degrees "cold"). But it gets wet, and we are deprived of my favorite type of light -- winter light.

The light in winter is so precious and stingy. I despise sunny, summer days, and I usually can't stand having direct sun on my skin -- except in winter. It is so delicate and precarious, hopeful and faint.

Winter Light is the title of one my favorite Bergman movies in which villagers question their faith in the nuclear age. I've been watching a lot of Bergman this winter -- currently on Wild Strawberries. It doesn't depress me, especially in the winter. Winter Light is also the title of one of my favorite Linda Ronstadt albums. While I will concede it's not her greatest, I think it's her most under-rated work. It's all about the warmth of home on a cold night, a beacon in the snow, to my mind at least.

Besides watching the Kurt Gerron bio-doc Prisoner in Paradise (dark, sad, fatalistic) I've been listening to a lot of Brecht and Weill. I became entranced by Brecht and Weill around age four when my pre-school played an instrumental version of the tunes from Die Dreigroschenoper. These two figured heavy in my life before Peter, Paul & Mary or the Beatles and still play a larger role. Brecht and Weill are perfect tunes for mid-winter nights, like a defiant cold fist in the face of adversity.

I have been transferring some of my favorite Deutsche Grammophon LPs of Weill and Brecht, especially those with Gisela May. Ah, Gisela May! No one holds a candle to Lenya's Weill recordings except for May.

There seems to be so much sadness and uncertainty in February -- from J.D. Salinger dying to those Teabaggers meeting in Nashville, like Weimar vermin trolling through the grave of Reagan to yank shreds of his rotting brain from his crypt in Simi Valley. All that talk of reviving Jim Crow literacy requirements and denying voting privileges to all non-English speakers and "celebrating" Reagan's 99th birthday. Watch out folks, are you ready to stomach a Reagan centennial next year that will culminate in 2012 right on target with the cataclysmic Mayan calendar? There was recently a move in the Bay Area to rename Mount Diablo to Mount Reagan. Wouldn't that be redundant? If it's called Mount Diablo, isn't it already named after Reagan?

But let's not dwell too much on the dark. Only a little over 1,100 cretins attended that teabag gig. Spring is around the corner. And there is plenty more Brecht and Weill to lift one's spirit

Was It Just the Haze of the 1990s?

Things left in the mind that we remember as being shining and glorious ultimately seem to be vaguely out of reach and haunting, even if they were really grimy, unpleasant inconveniences back in the day. When I wove through the snowy streets of SOHO to the film office where I worked in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I sometimes tried to imagine which alley off Greene Street was where my great-grandfather Rosenbaum was murdered in early 1889 before a mysterious stranger took his widow and 11 children to the Oklahoma land run a few months later, giving her and the children his Anglo-Saxon name, Biggs.

But I would soon be pulled away from those musings to purchase my "light coffee" in the sacred We Are Happy to Serve You cup pushed towards me by the surly Russian deli worker who clearly took no pleasure in serving me.

I liked arriving at the film office before the others, but much to my chagrin I would find my coworker Laura who grew up in the Bronx and often shared stories of the year she spent with her Cajun husband in Baton Rogue. That year scarred her, she assured me. We could argue about many a topic, but one morning I made the mistake of telling her about having enjoyed a couple of years earlier seeing the Brazilian film Opera do Malandro, Chico Buarque's take on the Brecht-Weill classic Die Dreigrossenoper. She railed at me, as a fellow Jew and lover of Weimar culture. How could I praise this sacrilege and insult to this masterpiece that procariously managed to emerge just before the influx of the Third Reich?

Even our precious coworkers had no idea what we were arguing about and with such passion. And for years I've been trying to find a copy of the film, even on VHS, to see if my impressions now 20 years in the past were ill-advised. The clips below -- from the 1985 film and a recent staging in Rio -- suggest that I was not that off base. I have a couple of feelers out to capture this obscure epic, the most expensive Brazlian film ever made at the year of its release. If I was able to find Skidoo, surely this one will return to me as well.

Dagmar's Deutsche Miserie

The weather in San Francisco has been horrific this weekend. After an almost too cool few days early in the week, we've had nearly 80 degree temperatures the past two days, making it miserable to be outside but requiring frequent trips into the heat to water plants that aren't accustomed to such horrible temperatures.

That's forced me to be inside much of the weekend but a good chance to complete Lenya Legacy DVD. Those interested in getting a copy can let me know. It's essentially a compilation of (mainly) Brecht/Weill songs introduced by Lotte Lenya and a rare, short documentary on her life and legacy. Mina Mazzini, Hildegard Knef, Nina Simone and Gisela May are all on hand, singing in a variety of languages.

The real joy of this, however, was discovering this very rare clip of Dagmar Krause singing "Surabaya Johnny". I only wish that it were in German, but she's no less dramatic in English. It reminds me why I think no one is better qualified to carry the torch of Lenya and Weill.

Little Dagmar came close to destroying at least a couple of my past relationships as I relentlessly played and played her definitive 1986 release Supply & Demand in which she sang the well known tunes of Brecht/Weill and the much lesser known but even more fascinating songs of Brecht/Eisler, the latter composed during their exile in Hollywood. Brecht and Weill were often praised for their sweet/sour or yin/yang combination, but Brecht and Eisler were more yang/yang, both ardent Communists and a much more intense, didactic experience.

And no one is better equipped to sing tunes like "Deutsche Miserie" and "The Lilly of Hell" than little Dagmar, the pint-sized red head sometimes called "The Voice of Armageddon". Hey, I'd take her over Mariah Carey any day.

I've also been listening to a good number of Dagmar's 1970s tunes with the pop band Slapp Happy, a German group that released mainly English language tunes.

Have Yourself a Very Weimar Weinachten

Am I the only one that caught the airing of the Rise and Fall of Mahagonny last night? Having long given up on any innovation coming from PBS, I do give a tip of the fedora to them for airing it at the peak of the gooey holiday specials. It was no surprise that Audra McDonald was brilliant and brought heart to a cartoon role, but at times she reminded me of Condi Rice -- a woman who whores herself to an evil empire in order to feed herself.=. Brecht's epic theater seems increasingly shrill and arch with the passage of time, but who can fault this production for melding together references to the Third Reich and Las Vegas. Mahagonny has long been a metaphor for many American boomtowns -- LA itself, Houston, Silicon Valley -- and echoes Kafka's Amerika.

This was a perfect finale to a year that brought us superb reissues of both Berlin Alexanderplatz and Threepenny Opera. I am humming Mortitat as I write this. "Violated...in her slumbers/Mackie, how much did you charge?"