BAFFLE ME
Achtung, Baby
I was confused, I got a headache, it was wonderful
This will be fun. I was promised “an evening of avant-garde chanson” and as the kids say, I was here for it. I settled into my seat, purring.
Like all good New Yorkers, I feel obligated to attend art that is pretentious, solipsistic, abstruse, off-putting, rage-filled and condescending. Then, having consumed said work, we can either champion it and claim we saw it months before anyone else did. Or, we dismiss it savagely because it wasn’t pretentious, solipsistic, abstruse, off-putting, rage-filled and condescending enough. Such is our raison d’etre and if you don’t like it, well, that’s a huge part of our agenda, too.
Tonight’s offering seemed perfect — dangle the adjective “avant-garde” at me and I pounce. Will a goth elf in a pleather onesie spray me with a fire extinguisher? Will 90 minutes of gratuitous nudity include my own? Will the theater fill up with bubbles? God, I hoped so.
I didn’t know what was about to happen and I love that feeling.
The show was titled “Amour Fou” (Crazy Love in Anglais), and was described in the program this way.
“Through the electrifying sound fields of Chanson, Oriental and Experimental, the songs and lyrics depict the weirdness of lust and love, and include social issues such as equality, freedom, individuality, racism and sexism. In exploring these sensitive topics, the artists find themselves simultaneously defending, judging, and executing. The perspectives are full of humor, melancholy, criticism and irony.”
They had me at “weirdness of lust.”
Three toothsome European women in their 30s took the stage — a pianist/singer, an actress, and a visual artist. Each wore a white blazer and gave off an air of polished confidence that suggested they could and should run for Congress. Scratch “Goth elves” off my list.
Here is what happened: Scharmien Zandi (brunette) played a huge black Bösendorfer grand piano and sang her own songs. Actress Sarah Scherer (brunette) sat in a side chair and read from love letters culled from anonymous regular folks. Stephanie Meisel (blonde), armed with a Macbook, generated AI “machine learning” images based on those words, which were projected onto a screen for all of us to see. Interesting, yes, but any hopes for nudity and bubble disco quickly rode for the border.
Impressions:
— Scharmien Zandi’s playing and singing was full-throated and earnest in a three-drinks-into-Friday-Night-at-the-piano-bar kind of way. That said, I was promised avant-garde chanson and to my mind, that involves something like whacking a radiator grill with a hockey stick. Hardly this. Regrettably, Zandi’s attempts at blues mama growls came off like Sarah Silverman channeling Etta James.
— If the music wasn’t remotely avant-garde, the AI images were appealingly weird. Pondering the themes of love’s many twists and turns, Stephanie Meisl and her AI program chose to spit out a series of images you might find on the YA/Fantasy rack at Barnes & Noble. Sad-eyed beautiful teens brooded meaningfully under gauzy yellow art nouveau moons. Then later, sad-eyed beautiful teens brooded meaningfully amongst dystopian techno-wreckage. It convinced me that the coming revolution in artificial intelligence will be led by 16-year-old girls. And I am here for it.
__The avant-garde-iest moment of the evening happened during a boogie- woogie number, wherein actress Sarah Scherer positioned herself behind her chair and then, as the song built to a climax, she started, um, moaning. Loudly. Ladies and gentlemen, “amour fou!” Then, a confetti cannon went off with a BOOM!!! and sprinkled the crowd with bits of purple and gold paper. Some of it fell in my hair. I don’t know about the rest of the audience, but it was good for me.
— Speaking of, the elegant Sarah Scherer, who bears a resemblance to Jan. 6 Committee star Cassidy Hutchinson, read the love letters in trained empathetic tones.
Perhaps her performance would have been more compelling to me had she been speaking in English. And not in German. Which she was.
Speaking in German. For 90 minutes.
No one mentioned this little detail in the English-language program notes and I apparently failed to grasp the significance of the performance taking place at the Austrian Culture Forum. Scheisse!
Call me biased, but not even the mellifluous voice of Sarah Scherer could make the German language sound like anything but the instructions for an expensive food processor.
Like a dumb one-language American, I sat there and tried to figure out all the love talk purely through inflection and volume. Here’s what I heard.
Hans electrified my soul like a mathematically-consistent theorem.
Gretchen, my fingers on your skin improved my workload efficiency 14.1% in the third quarter and 16.3% in the fourth. Projections for the next fiscal year are so promising that a vertical middle-management promotion, and a transfer to the Dusseldorf home office, now seem not just possible, but inevitable. You are the currywurst to my crinkle-cut fries.
Expecting their first child, Klaus and Annika drove their understated luxury sedan down the autobahn of life, confident the government would subsidize up to three years of joint parental leave.
— Midway through the performance, the AI program conked out. I don’t know what happened. Maybe it was tired of generating images about love letters in German. Not avant-garde enough, I expect.
**
Amour Fou to Betsy Denson and Stephanie Wilson for editing.
The T. Kent Jones omnibus never closes. Free Parking!
Click the skull. Join the party.
