“Whipped Cream”

Welcome back! I enjoyed some summer vacation for the Fourth of July weekend so the posts were a bit thin (or, uh, nonexistent), but now I can share the highlight of my long weekend. In addition to making a cherry pie, gardening, and going out to the beach on far Rockaway, I attended the ballet at Lincoln Center for the final performance of “Whipped Cream” a ballet by Richard Strauss! My erstwhile roommate, whom I miss greatly (despite her many misinformed ideas regarding empirical knowledge), arranged the outing. The ballet was enchantingly whimsical and beautifully danced, and the Strauss music was like a delicious classical confection in itself, but the highlight (for me) was the costume and set design by “pop-surrealist” painter Mark Ryden. There were huge sinister heads, weird meat stores, animatronic bees, and a giant dancing snow yak! Hooray!

The plot of “Whipped Cream” is oddly similar to my favorite TV show “Adventure Time” (or maybe I should say that the other way around since the ballet arrived first by about 90 years) in that large swaths of both productions are dominated by the affairs of sentient candies and confections. The dance begins with a group of children going to the candy shop for a special treat after their first communion. The boy protagonist eats too much whipped cream and becomes ill. What follows is a fantastical montage of dancing candies, sweets, and beverages (of varying stimulating and intoxicating natures) and travel in and out of hospital wards and fabulous realms of pure unbridled flavor.

The ballet was created in the mid nineteen twenties by Richard Strauss and was regarded at the time as a symptom of the fatuous extravagance of the twenties. A NY Times blurb I am reading says:

Strauss planned his ballet — “Schlagobers” in the original — as the biggest of several projects hoped to restore the fortunes of the Vienna State Ballet after the Hapsburg Empire collapsed; it was part of a decades-long fascination with dance on his part. Mr. Ratmansky has made welcome tweaks to the original story. (Strauss included, as part of the original plot for Act II, a failed revolution by the candy proletariat, with Jewish matzos throwing Communist pamphlets. This aspect was denounced by some as anti-Semitic at the time of the 1924 premiere and swiftly adjusted.) But Mr. Ratmansky’s response to this music doesn’t feel diplomatic; it feels energetically impish.

Our seats were literally the last row in the house. Which gave me a great view of the entire stage, orchestra, and audience (you will recall from my Marsyas Theater, that I am interested by different sorts of stages). I drew the main stage at Lincoln Center for you here (immediately above). Additionally, I created my own whimsical surreal ballet design on the train ride over (which wasn’t so far from how the production looked.) I don’t know how to critique or even describe ballet properly so I will say that the choreography and costumes were enthralling and moved the viewer to a different and wholly fantastical dream world. Additionally, the main dancer Daniil Simkin, somehow seemed exactly like a naughty hungry little boy, until the most important dance passages, when he seemed like a professional athlete or possibly a super being. There were some moments where he really appeared to fly above the stage in defiance of physics. Although I acknowledge that this is a cliché of ballet, the effect was quite different in person—like watching Mariano Rivera throw fastballs on TV (where most things are all digital or animated anyway), versus going out to Yankees stadium to see him throw a ball faster than I have ever seen anyone throw something.

Also there were three dancing liquor bottles (who were the comic relief) and Mademoiselle Chartreuse, was quite enchanting. Now not only do I want to go back to the ballet, I want to work with a composer to craft a magnificent and tragic fish ballet about the oceans today! Has anyone seen Richard Strauss around lately? Well, anyway, in a nod to our self-indulgent era, here is a picture of me in my opera clothes before the production. It’s nice to go out sometimes!

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Turbo

It’s movie time here at Ferrebeekeeper! Tonight we are reviewing the DreamWorks animated children’s film “Turbo” which concerns Theo, a humble snail who lives in a garden in the San Fernando Valley. Despite the fact that snails are renowned for being slow and cautious, Theo dreams of blazing speed and obsessively follows Indy Car racing (particularly idolizing the French Canadian champion, Guy Gagné, whose legendary racing prowess is matched by an oversized personality).

 

I like gardening better than car racing so some of this was lost on me

The humdrum reality of Theo’s slow-paced life as a lowly “worker” in a vegetable garden seems to preclude him from following his dreams of speedway glory…but after he is cast out of snail society he undergoes a fateful magical (?) transformation and is reborn as Turbo, a supercharged snail capable of blazing speed. Will Turbo be able to find a way into the human world of high speed car racing? Can he make it to Indianapolis and compete in the big race? Could he even maybe win? People who have ever seen a children’s movie may somehow anticipate the answers to these burning questions (and guess that the French Canadian Gagné is less likable than he first seems), but I will try not to spoil the movie for the one person who is somehow both reader of my blog and looking forward to watching a children’s movie which came out last July.

 

(Dreamworks)

In fact devoted readers may be somewhat surprised to find this blog reviewing a children’s movie–or indeed any movie—since the cinematic art has barely been featured here at all; yet Ferrebeekeeper is deeply concerned with mollusks, and Theo/Turbo is unique in being the mollusk hero of a major Hollywood motion picture (and a spinoff television show on Netflix). Additionally, although I found the movie to be a typical work of rags-to-riches whimsy for children, I enjoyed its message about the narrow and chancy ladders to fame and riches which exist for the little guy. Turbo finds a Chicano taco-shop worker who helps the snail find social media fame (which in turn allows him to pursue further ambitions). The crazy world of internet celebrity is the real turbo-boost which elevates the tiny abject creature to the rarified realms of status and importance. It seems significant that when Theo transforms to Turbo he is shown bouncing through the terrifying and incomprehensible labyrinth of a high tech machine he does not understand at all.

Stereotypes? In an animated movie? Nah…

The movie is most touching when it features the sundry immigrant shopkeepers who inhabit a run down strip mall where they dream simply of having customers. The filmmakers add some colorful urban Angelino snails (tricked out with customized shells) to give the movie some hip-hop “cred”, but it is obviously a movie about trying to compete in a world where the real contenders are playing in a vastly different league. The only aspect of mollusk existence which seemed true to life was the ever-present fear of being crushed or gobbled up (since Turbo and his snail friends are continuously and realistically threatened with being smashed by monopolistic giants and high speed machines).

Aaaaagh!

I love animated movies and so I am giving Turbo a (very generous) rating of 3.5 shells out of a possible 5. Although the movie was colorful, well animated, and fun, it was much less involved with the bizarre and amazing world of mollusks than it might have been. It was almost as though the snail was a whimsical stand-in for omnipresent economic concerns about globalization. Also the 3D stuff did not work at all. Hollywood, stop featuring 3D! It is a horrible horrible feature which everyone hates!